Next time you run into some GPL code and you get pissed off that you can't use it, think of the heaps and heaps of proprietary code that you're not allowed to use either and ask yourself why you're okay with that when you're not okay with the GPL.
I'm okay with useful but GPL licensed OSS code, same way I'm perfectly fine with private people flying to space as mere tourists. I'm disappointed, or "pissed off" in your language, that I can't go myself in foreseeable future, even though I'd sure want to, just not enough to make it my single goal in life (like I will not make it my goal to use only FSF-approved licenses and reject work which doesn't allow them to be used). Yet I'd never even dream of thinking these other people should not go (or use GPL), if they want to.
If somebody's own code needs to link against a proprietary library they've licensed, for instance, then they can't GPL their own code. Or, in a company, a developer might want to use some GPL code, but the company does not want to make the their code GPL too. In both cases, BSD license would allow the open source code to be used, and probably LGPL would allow it too, but not full GPL. Wether this is good or bad, is subjective.
When developing proprietary software for a client, I've often wished some software had BSD style license, so I could just take the code and use it in a proprietary solution
And if you did, and you found a bug, would you report it? Would you provide a useful test case? Would you provide a patch? If you needed to add a new feature, would you push it upstream?
Unless I am somehow specifically prevented from doing it, then yes. It'd be insane to maintain a private fork. And if for some reason I'd be forced to not to, I'd still get everything I can to upstream. I've done some patching private changes to a new version of proprietary library sources. It's no fun the first time, and it's even less fun, when the next version comes and you'll do it again.
Though, it doesn't make any difference if the code is GPL or BSD in above scenario. Even if it's GPL, just putting the code available with minimum effort, there's about zero chance, that any changes in my version would actually make it upstream. More likely, nobody would even look at them, ever. So in most practical cases, this is not a GPL vs. BSD issue at all, it's about same effort to get it accepted upstream. This is also why BSD works even in selfish ecosystem, there's a strong economic incentive to get others to maintain your code for you, for free.
I'll never understand why people whine so much that they have the inability to sell work they didn't do themselves without at a nominal restriction. I don't think this is a problem, just a feature of the license.
That's not why they whine. They whine, because of inability to sell their own creation without giving everybody else access and rights to sell it too, if they mix GPL code in it. They whine, because the author of GPL code often puts them in a "my way or highway" situation license-wise, with no room to negotiate a different arrangement. I think it's very much in human nature to want resist that kind of brute-force attitude, and some people resist by whining. If they were dealing with a business, they might complain that your terms are unacceptable, we'll not do business with you, and it wouldn't even sound like whining, so I'd actually be careful about labelling it as whining when it's about GPL.
So it clearly is just people who have a different world view to yours.
That's an interesting way of saying "people who would take my work and disregard my goals while distributing it". I choose GPL for a reason...
Not that I question your choice of license, it's my preferred choice too, but it's important to realize, that when using GPL license, you're also denying use of your source code to those, who would gladly give back, but are unable to make their own code GPL.
Using GPL code of others is a bit of a hassle if everything you do is not GPL. Also the value of releasing GPL version of proprietary software is questionable, as you don't then automatically (without a copyright assignment mechanism, which is also a big hassle for everybody) get access to GPL improvements made by others for your proprietary version, ie. you gave them your software, but they might not be willing to give back to your proprietary version, which is what enables you to develop the GPL version in the first place.
This all makes BSD style license much more practical than GPL. It just avoids a lot of hassle for everybody, on the premise that defending against "exploiters" is not worth making extra trouble for anybody else.
I'll never understand this argument. You want people to write code that anyone can use and strip away the users rights (that is, take the code, change it, and make it proprietary, so people can't even see the new code, let alone make modifications to it, yet you don't want people to write code that people who modify it and redistribute it have to give back.
If it helps, why not use GPLed code the same way you'd use proprietary software. That is, download it, use it, and pretend that you don't have the right to distribute it at all.
My point is this: If you're okay with a license that's permissive enough to allow people to use it to make proprietary software, then you're probably also fine with proprietary software. If that's the case, what's your problem with a license that gives you more rights than proprietary software? It doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't help, when people pretend they don't understand the issue. Let's say there's a piece of GPL code you'd want to use, instead of rolling your own. Now only way to use that piece is to make your entire software GPL, usually there's no other way to do it if the piece of GPL software has more than one copyright holder, and even if there's just one copyright holder, getting a permission to use it with different license would be hours and hours of hassle, especially if copyright holder lives in a different country. Generally this makes the GPL code unusable, unless you can make your own code GPL too, and that's it. Now it's of course 100% fine, if the developer of the GPL code really wants this, if he really wants to make his code unusable unless the user is willing and able to make their code GPL too. But saying this is not restrictive is just patently false.
BSD-style license avoids this restrictiveness of GPL. The price for original coder is, that their code can be just taken and closed away, with just a trace of BSD copyright notice left visible. The reward for the the original coder is, their code might gain users which would have rejected it if it was GPL, and some of those users will give back, even if all don't.
And then LGPL offers a nice middle ground, it's a license I personally like a lot, for library-type code.
I'm sure you're just trolling, but there's no single definition of "software freedom".
When developing proprietary software for a client, I've often wished some software had BSD style license, so I could just take the code and use it in a proprietary solution, even if that kinda feels like stealing, just taking somebody's work, even when they explicitly grant permission to do so. BSD license is for just letting others use your code, with almost no restrictions, also allowing what some would call exploiting your code.
For my own code, I always choose either GPL for LGPL, simply because my gut feeling is, that the "price" GPL/LGPL puts on code is fair, and anybody who thinks it's not can damn well not use the code then. Just as I have not used GPL code of others as part of my work, when my client has felt the "price" is unacceptable (though often it would have been very much ok or even benefical for the use case of my client).
But GPL is very much about the whole GPL ecosystem. Pieces of BSD-style licensed software work pretty well as part of GPL ecosystem, as can be seen by the multitude of such software, but a fully BSD-based ecosystem would simply not work. If it did, then Linux would not have pushed *BSD operating systems to the side lines, where hardly anybody cares about them.
Death is not a flight, it's not a trip, it's not a journey, it is the obliteration of you where you cease to exist the moment your brain cells have died.
Maybe. That's your belief, at least. I for one have hard time believing, that this "me" who is thinking about writing this, about self-conciousnes, is just a lump of atoms interacting electromagnetically. There's no "me" in that, it'd be just a glorified computer program, and I don't see a "me" like I feel I am rising from just that.
Therefore I'm inclined to believe, there's gotta be something more, something we don't know about.
Of course that "something more" could still gradually emerge as brain grows and then just vanish when the brain ceases to work. Observing effects of certain chemicals and drugs, as well as cases of brain damage, certainly proves that critical parts of that "me" and its memories etc depend on physical structure and chemical workings of the brain. But again, that does not necessarily tell anything about this "something more" or what happens to it if it remains after the brain is destroyed.
So, all I can say is, I believe there's something about true consciousnes we don't know anything about. But, not really knowing anything about it, it's hard to even speculate what this means in practice.
Our sun is too small to form a supernova. It will, however, turn into a red giant and engulf what was once known as Earth.
Oh, not necessarily. Sun will lose a lot of mass, which will expand Earths orbit, so Earth may well be spared that fate. In that case earth will just be scorched, sufrace glasified. By that time plate tectonics may have ceased, in which case once Sun turns into white dwarf, Earth will slowly cool into a frigid glass ball, with core temperature slowly decreasing as radioactive decay slows down over aeons, while the starts of combined Milky Way - Andromeda slowly blink out one by one...
Now let's get our act together, so something derived from us will remain to observe that!
yes, I hate the belief in god. its a weakness, it causes fights and violence due to the us-vs-them syndrome. its more of a means to separate us than to bind us.
mental illness is mental illness. being in fashion does not excuse the fact that its harmful and is a flaw that should be fixed.
Religion is not mental illness, it's a normative behavioural pattern of human species. Also, without religion to promote literacy and help maintain organized society in times when just not dying of hunger was the number one concern for majority of people, we'd still live in leaf huts in jungles. Without religion to help organize people and keep them in line, there wouldn't ever have been a civilization able to develop science and technology.
Sure, all religions may be fairy tales for adults, and like practically everything we have ever come up with, they can be used for great evil. Still, you have so much to thank religion for in your current life, that hating it sounds like a mental illness to me. You'd be better of thinking religion to be like alcohol, nicotine, drugs, emotion evoking entertainment... Just because overdoing it can ruin and even kill you and your family, and enable "evil" people to gain power, doesn't make the thing itself worth hating, especially when it's so bred into human behaviour by evolutionary pressure over thousands of generations.
If they can get the word out about their needs, they stand a very good chance of receiving enough in donations to not only pay their medical expenses, but also pay off their mortgage and retire comfortably.
So, are you saying that's the state of American health care? If you have friends/relatives who'll beg for public support after you get hospitalized in a tragedy which gets enough publicity, then lucky you, the generous American public will help you! But if these conditions aren't met, poor you... Really?
Well, it certainly looks likely, that future of Nokia and to lesser degree future of MS mobile ambitions lies in WP8. They're committed, there's no turning back, there's no time to bring anything else to the table. It may be a hopeless future, but we don't know that.
A lot will depend on how current WP7 phones get treated with software updates. Especially if they don't get full WP8 update, then preventing fragmentation some other way will be critical. That will create or destroy a lot of customer loyality.
For what it's worth, for "average consumer" who can live with MSN Messenger and Facebook chats, and who wants a product instead of a gadget, I'd recommend WP7 over Android (even ICS) any day. iPhone, not enough experience to comment, but price can be a deciding factor there, and at least for me "breaks if dropped on stone floor" is a deal breaker with iPhone.
If you read what I wrote again, you notice I said it is pretty ok. But many things in it suck, starting from browser UI and browser's tendency to crash often (the built-in browser works around this by restarting, so user might not even notice, but it makes alternative browsers unusable). Text input is something important, that could use a lot of polish too (writing this with WP7 browser, so acutely aware of the problems with that...). The list goes on. Small, fixable things, yet they're not fixed, thank you very much MS.
Yeah, but it could allow you to capitalize on the royalties and settlements like a true patent troll.
Patent trolling requires bogus patents, and is based on it being cheaper to pay up, than to challenge the bogus patent with risk of losing. I didn't check, but it's more than likely that these patents are actually results of genuine research, actual innovations, just the stuff patents are supposed to protect.
Too bad Nokia's products suck so bad that they don't have any customers left to "pay up".
Latest incarnation of Symbian did definitely not suck (and they're still available and supported). N9 is one of a kind, the only current real phone which can use "Linux software" as it is commonly understood. Lumia line... well... it's not Nokia's fault MS still can't make a mobile OS, even when they have tried for so many years. Despite this, they're pretty ok actually, having used one for a few months.
But the future of Nokia, as well as future of MS mobile ambitions, lies in WP8. If they manage to fix even half of the WP7's problems, it'll make great phones, even if it's "MS inside".
The tiles are fine, as a concept. It's just that WP7(.5) implementation leaves a bit to be desired. First of all, it'd need half-sized tiles as an option, these are just too wastefully big, when they're simple shortcuts. Seconds, there should be at least two tiled "homescreens", for those among us, who like to think of things in categories, and would like to group their tiles (like, people tiles, informative live tiles, app/web shortcut tiles). Third, they should be more themeable, such as having a fucking regular color picker for choosing theme colors, support for translucency and background images, being able to theme individual tiles for visual grouping purposes.
These all are simple things, which would not hamper simplicity of use if properly implemented, nor make organizing tiles any more difficult.
But, for the average user, who doesn't spend hours tweaking their home screens to be just right, I think tiles are pretty great as is.
Also, I don't think we can actually calculate the stability of even the simplest elements, because the quantum mechanical equations describing atomic nucleus are just way too freaking complex. So, anything we haven't actually measured is just extrapolation from existing data.
So, from scientific perspective, science fiction is pretty free to add many different kinds of "unobtainium", it doesn't need much to make it scientifically plausible.
It had hardware mixing of 4 8-bit channels, fed by DMA. Since the CPU didn't really do anything much, I think it's fair to call that hardware-accelerated audio. I mean, just compare to playing same audio files with PC+Sound Blaster. PC players had code for doing computationally intensive stuff, which on Amiga was done by hardware. Non-CPU hardware doing computationally intensive stuff is hardware acceleration.
And coming at it from the other side, would MS let Apple take 30% from every sale?
To say that other way, would MS take 70% of retail price of a sale that would not have otherwise happened? Hell yes, I don't think that would be a problem for MS. No sales channel is free, and I think retailer cut generally (not sure about software sales) is pretty commonly around that 30% anyway.
Would Apple allow the iDevice Office version access MS online services?
Presuambly yes, since you can already get OneNote for iPad and iPhone, both of which sync to Skydrive.
Neil
I was thinking of a case like using or editing online Excel workbook with macros. Excel workbook can essentially be an application in itself, and proper Office app will need to be able to run this kind of "applications".
UI stutter isn't flash problem, but long app start time, or app UI having nothing to display yet because hasn't loaded yet certainly can be a flash issue. Relatively slow flash might actually reduce cases of UI stutter, since CPU isn't so busy processing data...;)
Apple has never intended there to be a walled garden for web apps. Only for native apps.
Well, fully functional and implemented HTML5 standard, combined with good HTML5 tools, will make dedicated web service apps less useful, to the point of them becoming irrelevant. Why develop and maintain an app for 3+ mobile platforms, if you can make a single touch-optimized web interface which will work equally well on any mobile device with minimal platfrom-dependent tweaking?
That'll hurt Apple's app store revenue. Apple will fight that. Wether they fight it with dirty "monopolistic" practices like "extend&extinguish" standards, or just by marketing and trying to create an experience HTML5 can't match, or something in between, like trying to stall HTML5 standardization of certain future technologies while applying the same technologies heavily on iOS native apps, that remains to be seen.
Would Apple allow the iDevice Office version access MS online services? Unless they've changed pretty recently, I'm under impression that anything like that is a big no-no with Apple, apps which even hint at having that kind of functionality simply rejected.
I have no idea what you're talking about there. It's common place for apps to work with online services.
I meant the combination of allowing scripting and allowing online data, apart from using Apple-provided HTML engine.
(And I'm sure Apple has spent some effort trying to figure out how to meaningfully support HTML5 without actually allowing HTML5 online applications from outside it's "garden walls", but I'm pretty sure they haven't found a way, or have they?)
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Next time you run into some GPL code and you get pissed off that you can't use it, think of the heaps and heaps of proprietary code that you're not allowed to use either and ask yourself why you're okay with that when you're not okay with the GPL.
I'm okay with useful but GPL licensed OSS code, same way I'm perfectly fine with private people flying to space as mere tourists. I'm disappointed, or "pissed off" in your language, that I can't go myself in foreseeable future, even though I'd sure want to, just not enough to make it my single goal in life (like I will not make it my goal to use only FSF-approved licenses and reject work which doesn't allow them to be used). Yet I'd never even dream of thinking these other people should not go (or use GPL), if they want to.
Do you get it now?
IMO rootkit needs to be able to hide itself, which is pretty much impossible without root access. Otherwise it's just a trojan with a backdoor.
If somebody's own code needs to link against a proprietary library they've licensed, for instance, then they can't GPL their own code. Or, in a company, a developer might want to use some GPL code, but the company does not want to make the their code GPL too. In both cases, BSD license would allow the open source code to be used, and probably LGPL would allow it too, but not full GPL. Wether this is good or bad, is subjective.
When developing proprietary software for a client, I've often wished some software had BSD style license, so I could just take the code and use it in a proprietary solution
And if you did, and you found a bug, would you report it? Would you provide a useful test case? Would you provide a patch? If you needed to add a new feature, would you push it upstream?
Unless I am somehow specifically prevented from doing it, then yes. It'd be insane to maintain a private fork. And if for some reason I'd be forced to not to, I'd still get everything I can to upstream. I've done some patching private changes to a new version of proprietary library sources. It's no fun the first time, and it's even less fun, when the next version comes and you'll do it again.
Though, it doesn't make any difference if the code is GPL or BSD in above scenario. Even if it's GPL, just putting the code available with minimum effort, there's about zero chance, that any changes in my version would actually make it upstream. More likely, nobody would even look at them, ever. So in most practical cases, this is not a GPL vs. BSD issue at all, it's about same effort to get it accepted upstream. This is also why BSD works even in selfish ecosystem, there's a strong economic incentive to get others to maintain your code for you, for free.
I'll never understand why people whine so much that they have the inability to sell work they didn't do themselves without at a nominal restriction. I don't think this is a problem, just a feature of the license.
That's not why they whine. They whine, because of inability to sell their own creation without giving everybody else access and rights to sell it too, if they mix GPL code in it. They whine, because the author of GPL code often puts them in a "my way or highway" situation license-wise, with no room to negotiate a different arrangement. I think it's very much in human nature to want resist that kind of brute-force attitude, and some people resist by whining. If they were dealing with a business, they might complain that your terms are unacceptable, we'll not do business with you, and it wouldn't even sound like whining, so I'd actually be careful about labelling it as whining when it's about GPL.
So it clearly is just people who have a different world view to yours.
That's an interesting way of saying "people who would take my work and disregard my goals while distributing it". I choose GPL for a reason...
Not that I question your choice of license, it's my preferred choice too, but it's important to realize, that when using GPL license, you're also denying use of your source code to those, who would gladly give back, but are unable to make their own code GPL.
Using GPL code of others is a bit of a hassle if everything you do is not GPL. Also the value of releasing GPL version of proprietary software is questionable, as you don't then automatically (without a copyright assignment mechanism, which is also a big hassle for everybody) get access to GPL improvements made by others for your proprietary version, ie. you gave them your software, but they might not be willing to give back to your proprietary version, which is what enables you to develop the GPL version in the first place.
This all makes BSD style license much more practical than GPL. It just avoids a lot of hassle for everybody, on the premise that defending against "exploiters" is not worth making extra trouble for anybody else.
GPL is too restrictive.
I'll never understand this argument. You want people to write code that anyone can use and strip away the users rights (that is, take the code, change it, and make it proprietary, so people can't even see the new code, let alone make modifications to it, yet you don't want people to write code that people who modify it and redistribute it have to give back.
If it helps, why not use GPLed code the same way you'd use proprietary software. That is, download it, use it, and pretend that you don't have the right to distribute it at all.
My point is this: If you're okay with a license that's permissive enough to allow people to use it to make proprietary software, then you're probably also fine with proprietary software. If that's the case, what's your problem with a license that gives you more rights than proprietary software? It doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't help, when people pretend they don't understand the issue. Let's say there's a piece of GPL code you'd want to use, instead of rolling your own. Now only way to use that piece is to make your entire software GPL, usually there's no other way to do it if the piece of GPL software has more than one copyright holder, and even if there's just one copyright holder, getting a permission to use it with different license would be hours and hours of hassle, especially if copyright holder lives in a different country. Generally this makes the GPL code unusable, unless you can make your own code GPL too, and that's it. Now it's of course 100% fine, if the developer of the GPL code really wants this, if he really wants to make his code unusable unless the user is willing and able to make their code GPL too. But saying this is not restrictive is just patently false.
BSD-style license avoids this restrictiveness of GPL. The price for original coder is, that their code can be just taken and closed away, with just a trace of BSD copyright notice left visible. The reward for the the original coder is, their code might gain users which would have rejected it if it was GPL, and some of those users will give back, even if all don't.
And then LGPL offers a nice middle ground, it's a license I personally like a lot, for library-type code.
I'm sure you're just trolling, but there's no single definition of "software freedom".
When developing proprietary software for a client, I've often wished some software had BSD style license, so I could just take the code and use it in a proprietary solution, even if that kinda feels like stealing, just taking somebody's work, even when they explicitly grant permission to do so. BSD license is for just letting others use your code, with almost no restrictions, also allowing what some would call exploiting your code.
For my own code, I always choose either GPL for LGPL, simply because my gut feeling is, that the "price" GPL/LGPL puts on code is fair, and anybody who thinks it's not can damn well not use the code then. Just as I have not used GPL code of others as part of my work, when my client has felt the "price" is unacceptable (though often it would have been very much ok or even benefical for the use case of my client).
But GPL is very much about the whole GPL ecosystem. Pieces of BSD-style licensed software work pretty well as part of GPL ecosystem, as can be seen by the multitude of such software, but a fully BSD-based ecosystem would simply not work. If it did, then Linux would not have pushed *BSD operating systems to the side lines, where hardly anybody cares about them.
Death is not a flight, it's not a trip, it's not a journey, it is the obliteration of you where you cease to exist the moment your brain cells have died.
Maybe. That's your belief, at least. I for one have hard time believing, that this "me" who is thinking about writing this, about self-conciousnes, is just a lump of atoms interacting electromagnetically. There's no "me" in that, it'd be just a glorified computer program, and I don't see a "me" like I feel I am rising from just that.
Therefore I'm inclined to believe, there's gotta be something more, something we don't know about.
Of course that "something more" could still gradually emerge as brain grows and then just vanish when the brain ceases to work. Observing effects of certain chemicals and drugs, as well as cases of brain damage, certainly proves that critical parts of that "me" and its memories etc depend on physical structure and chemical workings of the brain. But again, that does not necessarily tell anything about this "something more" or what happens to it if it remains after the brain is destroyed.
So, all I can say is, I believe there's something about true consciousnes we don't know anything about. But, not really knowing anything about it, it's hard to even speculate what this means in practice.
Our sun is too small to form a supernova. It will, however, turn into a red giant and engulf what was once known as Earth.
Oh, not necessarily. Sun will lose a lot of mass, which will expand Earths orbit, so Earth may well be spared that fate. In that case earth will just be scorched, sufrace glasified. By that time plate tectonics may have ceased, in which case once Sun turns into white dwarf, Earth will slowly cool into a frigid glass ball, with core temperature slowly decreasing as radioactive decay slows down over aeons, while the starts of combined Milky Way - Andromeda slowly blink out one by one...
Now let's get our act together, so something derived from us will remain to observe that!
if you want to get into it, lets go!
yes, I hate the belief in god. its a weakness, it causes fights and violence due to the us-vs-them syndrome. its more of a means to separate us than to bind us.
mental illness is mental illness. being in fashion does not excuse the fact that its harmful and is a flaw that should be fixed.
Religion is not mental illness, it's a normative behavioural pattern of human species. Also, without religion to promote literacy and help maintain organized society in times when just not dying of hunger was the number one concern for majority of people, we'd still live in leaf huts in jungles. Without religion to help organize people and keep them in line, there wouldn't ever have been a civilization able to develop science and technology.
Sure, all religions may be fairy tales for adults, and like practically everything we have ever come up with, they can be used for great evil. Still, you have so much to thank religion for in your current life, that hating it sounds like a mental illness to me. You'd be better of thinking religion to be like alcohol, nicotine, drugs, emotion evoking entertainment... Just because overdoing it can ruin and even kill you and your family, and enable "evil" people to gain power, doesn't make the thing itself worth hating, especially when it's so bred into human behaviour by evolutionary pressure over thousands of generations.
If they can get the word out about their needs, they stand a very good chance of receiving enough in donations to not only pay their medical expenses, but also pay off their mortgage and retire comfortably.
So, are you saying that's the state of American health care? If you have friends/relatives who'll beg for public support after you get hospitalized in a tragedy which gets enough publicity, then lucky you, the generous American public will help you! But if these conditions aren't met, poor you... Really?
Well, it certainly looks likely, that future of Nokia and to lesser degree future of MS mobile ambitions lies in WP8. They're committed, there's no turning back, there's no time to bring anything else to the table. It may be a hopeless future, but we don't know that.
A lot will depend on how current WP7 phones get treated with software updates. Especially if they don't get full WP8 update, then preventing fragmentation some other way will be critical. That will create or destroy a lot of customer loyality.
For what it's worth, for "average consumer" who can live with MSN Messenger and Facebook chats, and who wants a product instead of a gadget, I'd recommend WP7 over Android (even ICS) any day. iPhone, not enough experience to comment, but price can be a deciding factor there, and at least for me "breaks if dropped on stone floor" is a deal breaker with iPhone.
If you read what I wrote again, you notice I said it is pretty ok. But many things in it suck, starting from browser UI and browser's tendency to crash often (the built-in browser works around this by restarting, so user might not even notice, but it makes alternative browsers unusable). Text input is something important, that could use a lot of polish too (writing this with WP7 browser, so acutely aware of the problems with that...). The list goes on. Small, fixable things, yet they're not fixed, thank you very much MS.
Yeah, but it could allow you to capitalize on the royalties and settlements like a true patent troll.
Patent trolling requires bogus patents, and is based on it being cheaper to pay up, than to challenge the bogus patent with risk of losing. I didn't check, but it's more than likely that these patents are actually results of genuine research, actual innovations, just the stuff patents are supposed to protect.
Too bad Nokia's products suck so bad that they don't have any customers left to "pay up".
Latest incarnation of Symbian did definitely not suck (and they're still available and supported). N9 is one of a kind, the only current real phone which can use "Linux software" as it is commonly understood. Lumia line... well... it's not Nokia's fault MS still can't make a mobile OS, even when they have tried for so many years. Despite this, they're pretty ok actually, having used one for a few months.
But the future of Nokia, as well as future of MS mobile ambitions, lies in WP8. If they manage to fix even half of the WP7's problems, it'll make great phones, even if it's "MS inside".
The tiles are fine, as a concept. It's just that WP7(.5) implementation leaves a bit to be desired. First of all, it'd need half-sized tiles as an option, these are just too wastefully big, when they're simple shortcuts. Seconds, there should be at least two tiled "homescreens", for those among us, who like to think of things in categories, and would like to group their tiles (like, people tiles, informative live tiles, app/web shortcut tiles). Third, they should be more themeable, such as having a fucking regular color picker for choosing theme colors, support for translucency and background images, being able to theme individual tiles for visual grouping purposes.
These all are simple things, which would not hamper simplicity of use if properly implemented, nor make organizing tiles any more difficult.
But, for the average user, who doesn't spend hours tweaking their home screens to be just right, I think tiles are pretty great as is.
Wrong. Look up stuff like strange matter and island of stability.
Also, I don't think we can actually calculate the stability of even the simplest elements, because the quantum mechanical equations describing atomic nucleus are just way too freaking complex. So, anything we haven't actually measured is just extrapolation from existing data.
So, from scientific perspective, science fiction is pretty free to add many different kinds of "unobtainium", it doesn't need much to make it scientifically plausible.
It had hardware mixing of 4 8-bit channels, fed by DMA. Since the CPU didn't really do anything much, I think it's fair to call that hardware-accelerated audio. I mean, just compare to playing same audio files with PC+Sound Blaster. PC players had code for doing computationally intensive stuff, which on Amiga was done by hardware. Non-CPU hardware doing computationally intensive stuff is hardware acceleration.
Would Apple allow apps with such scripting support on it's app store?
Yea, they are pretty cool with it now.
Codea: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171?mt=8
The Lua programming language with OpenGL and input sensors support, for writing and running programs on the iPad.
It has a very nice touch UI IDE, and of course a compiler.
A few years ago, who would have ever thought it possible!
Looks rather interesting... I'll have to try to get somebody with an iPad to get it, and then try it out... Before Apple decides to curb-stomp it ;)
And coming at it from the other side, would MS let Apple take 30% from every sale?
To say that other way, would MS take 70% of retail price of a sale that would not have otherwise happened? Hell yes, I don't think that would be a problem for MS. No sales channel is free, and I think retailer cut generally (not sure about software sales) is pretty commonly around that 30% anyway.
Would Apple allow the iDevice Office version access MS online services?
Presuambly yes, since you can already get OneNote for iPad and iPhone, both of which sync to Skydrive.
Neil
I was thinking of a case like using or editing online Excel workbook with macros. Excel workbook can essentially be an application in itself, and proper Office app will need to be able to run this kind of "applications".
UI stutter isn't flash problem, but long app start time, or app UI having nothing to display yet because hasn't loaded yet certainly can be a flash issue. Relatively slow flash might actually reduce cases of UI stutter, since CPU isn't so busy processing data... ;)
Apple has never intended there to be a walled garden for web apps. Only for native apps.
Well, fully functional and implemented HTML5 standard, combined with good HTML5 tools, will make dedicated web service apps less useful, to the point of them becoming irrelevant. Why develop and maintain an app for 3+ mobile platforms, if you can make a single touch-optimized web interface which will work equally well on any mobile device with minimal platfrom-dependent tweaking?
That'll hurt Apple's app store revenue. Apple will fight that. Wether they fight it with dirty "monopolistic" practices like "extend&extinguish" standards, or just by marketing and trying to create an experience HTML5 can't match, or something in between, like trying to stall HTML5 standardization of certain future technologies while applying the same technologies heavily on iOS native apps, that remains to be seen.
Would Apple allow the iDevice Office version access MS online services? Unless they've changed pretty recently, I'm under impression that anything like that is a big no-no with Apple, apps which even hint at having that kind of functionality simply rejected.
I have no idea what you're talking about there. It's common place for apps to work with online services.
I meant the combination of allowing scripting and allowing online data, apart from using Apple-provided HTML engine.
(And I'm sure Apple has spent some effort trying to figure out how to meaningfully support HTML5 without actually allowing HTML5 online applications from outside it's "garden walls", but I'm pretty sure they haven't found a way, or have they?)