I live in Shenzhen and bought one of these 400RMB tablets( went for the upgraded 1GB version) just a few days ago on a whim. Many of my friends and coworkers have too. Most importantly, despite the price, we will NEVER buy one again either. Here is way. 1) No manufacturer support for bug-fixes or upgrades. Your stuck with ICS or whatever buggy version comes with your device 2) Brittle low resolution glass displays. Mine is already cracked from floating around in my backpack, despite the screen protector and case that came with it. 3) Terribly slow 1-4GB of FLASH. It took an hour to transfer 2GB of MP3s 4) Slow, unreliable, unresponsive capacitive touch screens. Scrolling worked OK, but I dreaded having to type on the virtual keyboard. 5) Abysmal build quality. Misaligned buttons. Screen bulging on 1 side. Cheap, plastic, feel. 6) Terrible battery life. My tab could last about 1 hours playing 3D games, 2 browsing the web. I am still rocking an iPhone 3GS and it is superior to that POS in every way. When I return to the states, I plan to buy a Nexus 7 or Kindle HD. The $55 I wasted on my China special would of been much better spent on upgrading one of those.
All google is saying is that if you don't want to play by their rules, they won't give you support. Fork it, and you're on your own. Seems fair to me and they're not "going after anyone".
That's a terrible analogy. Trying to power a low end smartphone with Firefox, is more like trying to modify submarine to fly.
HTML and JavaScript were never designed for this purpose and it shows. After the browser wars, JavaScript has proven to be bloated and resource intensive. 100x slower then native apps. This is a stupid idea and doomed to fail.
I came here to say exactly this. The problem with Android is that most apps are running in an VM wasting valuable CPU cycles. Linux runs great on the 700 MHz raspberry PI, fire up firefox and the thing slows to a crawl. Now load up a JavaScript app and go grab a coffee. Let's face it. JavaScript is great for what it does, but is a terrible environment when speed is critical. It wasn't designed for this purpose and no matter how much they optimize it, it will never compete with native apps.
To achieve it's goal, what Mozilla should be doing is taking Android and stripping out all the laggy dalvik apps and replacing them with Native Apps NDK apps. Remove some kruff to make the GUI fully hardware accelerated, and now you'd have an attractive solution for low end smartphones.
Love it! Our leader's message blocked by a DCMA takedown, reminds me of a quote: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." -Abraham Lincoln
Agreed. Something has to be done. Censorship and wrongful take downs are just one aspect of the many problems with our copyright laws. My biggest issue with them is that they prevent young artists from remixing anything from their generation. This needs to be fixed by repealing the DCMA and reforming these draconian copyright laws.
Before Disney, copyright granted authors protection for 28 years. I’m fine with that. The problem is it’s pushing 100 years now. This stifles our culture and innovation.
For example, Star Wars was released in 1978, so it should have gone into the public domain by 2005. With existing laws, George Lucas retains exclusive rights to butcher the SW universe until 2072!!!! 95 YEARS! Imagine what new aspiring authors could do with his work, instead of the sterile Jar Jar crap that Lucas served us, recently? Thank you, copyright.
Do you think your favorite authors would not have created their material, if it was not protected for 70 years after their death? The copyright system is designed make companies, like Disney and RIAA, rich at the expense of our freedom.
The irony is Disney made its fortune by ripping off the great works of others. Walt Disney was a master of this. At its origins, Mickey Mouse was a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr. And almost all of their great work since then has continued this tradition of copying. Just to name a few: Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Jungle Book, Sleep Hollow, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid,
With the RIAA, SOPA and Courtney Love’s excellent essay on how they screw over artists should give you an idea of how this industry works. http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
My 32GB iPhone 3GS has been maxed out for the past year with songs and apps. After I replaced the battery, lack of storage is the only reason to upgrade. Sorry Nokia and Apple, my next phone is going to have MicroSD slot. Android looks like it's going to be the only option.
it's more about how IE and Chrome don't support DATA uri's. the article is stupid. that's what the article really is about, if it supports data uri's or not.
WRONG! From the PDF: "In Google Chrome in particular, a control for unsafe redirection is im- plemented, disabling the user direct access to a data URI if that URI is the target of a redirection, such as from a URL shortening service."
"Internet Explorer has a limit to data URIs," Google Chrome and IE have implemented security features to prevent this form of attack.
I have no problem with a living author reaping the benefits of writing a bestseller for his entire natural life, and his descendants for another 14 after that.
Copyright does this and much, much more. And that's also the root of the problem. Before Disney, copyright granted authors protection for 28 years. I’m fine with that. The problem is now it’s pushing 100 years. This stifles our culture and innovation.
For example, Star Wars was released in 1978, so it should have gone into the public domain by 2005. With existing laws, George Lucas retains exclusive rights to butcher the SW universe until 2072!!!!! 95 YEARS! Imagine what new aspiring authors could do with his work, instead of the sterile Jar Jar crap that Lucas served us, recently? Thank you, copyright.
Are you telling me your favorite authors would not have created their works, if it was not protected for 70 years after their death?!? The copyright system is designed make companies, like Disney and RIAA, rich at the expense of our freedom.
The irony is Disney made its fortune by ripping off the great works of others. Walt Disney was a master of this. At its origins, Mickey Mouse was a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr. And almost all of their great work since then has continued this tradition of copying. Just to name a few: Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Jungle Book, Sleep Hollow, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid,
With the RIAA, SOPA and Courtney Love’s excellent essay on how they screw over artists should give you an idea of how this industry works. http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
Young artists need the freedom to remake and remix. The current laws prevent them from using anything from their generation. This is wrong and needs to be fixed.
I was so excited when I heard about this focus on memory leakage. But I've been on the 15 beta releases and it leaks worse than 13x.
It does not matter that I close all but one window/tab. After 24 hours of light browsing, it is pushing 1.5 GB and can rarely run for more than 48 hours. So what is the support path? How does this get fixed?
First of all, if you're running on the Beta Channel, you shouldn't be asking how to submit bugs or complaining about them. But if you must, just google "firefox memshrink and bug report". There's a ton of information. I filled one out a few weeks ago for an HTML5 game. They were responsive and addressed the issue quickly.
Why are they asking for money on kickstart, when they could save a ton just by switching from helium to hydrogen weather balloons? Sure they have to take some extra precautions because it's flammable (NOT explosive, google it) , but the cost saving will more that make up for it. In addition they are helping to preserve a precious resource necessary for things like MRIs.
Yes, exactly! The high memory usage comes from firebug. If you really have so little memory, then you'll be much better off running 2 separate instances of Firefox. In both my own testing and Tom's latest browser Firefox turn out on top with the lowest memory footprint. http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/memoryusage3wbgp11,0101-343668-0-2-3-1-png-.html
Seriously 60 or 70 is enough for me. My grandpa is 90, but so many problems to deal with. He's the man, but by 70, just stick a fork in me and call it a day. He's lived a hard life, orphan in the depression, fighter pilot in WW2, and still going strong. Me, I've had it good, but I don't see the point in fighting. Don't want to deal with all the pain and suffering at the end. Just a nice quite sleep, when I'm done contributing to this world.....
They are working on a very similar concept in Australia. http://www.hover-bike.com/index.html I love the concept, but I agree. the stability problem needs to to be fixed with computers and gyros, not human balance. And when someone does finally nail it, it's going to be one hell of a toy!
For anyone that wants to try ReactOS out, I highly recommend the ARWINSS fork, which is a new Win32 subsystem for ReactOS that reuses as much Wine code as possible. The ARWINSS architecture implements APIs exposed via USER32 and GDI32 libraries and is based upon Wine source-code. In my testing the stability and compatibility was much better then the official release. You can find it here:
I'm also in China. The video stream was choppy, but other the the usual suspects like youtube, I did not notice any NASA/JPL sites blocked by the GFW. One thing I have noticed, if you use a high quality VPN, foreign sites have lower latency and less packet loss. I assume this is because the GFW has some pass through mechanism for encrypted traffic that it cannot analyze. My VPN is free Amazon EC2 Ubuntu PPTP server that I setup myself.
I used the Google CC translation feature in youtube to translate the subtitles to Chinese, so my girlfriend would watch with me. How awesome is it that I just watched a video of 1 ton rover landing on Mars streamed over the Internet with machine generated and translated subtitles? I'm so happy to live in this day and age. Congratulations NASA, JPL, and Google!
“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.”
Carl Sagan,
Congratulations NASA and JPL! I hope you continue to inspire us all to dare mighty things!
As an expat living in repressed China, this news makes me happy to be a free American.
" He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither." -Benjamin Franklin
How many people do you know that have died from Terrorists? For me, NONE. But Cancer, Stupidity, Obesity, MANY. As an expat, the real threat I see to our freedom is the ignorant throwing away our freedom that our founding fathers died for, because they are scared of the terrorist buggy-man! Stop living in fear and start thinking!
Some people just like to say the US is 'behind', no matter what the issue or facts are.
If you are going to quote, quote properly, they said "will be ahead", not "are". And you obviously cannot read the summary properly either, because it states that:
" They won't be building more older Generation II reactors" ie China slowing nuclear build out!
"The Chinese will be ahead of the US!"
(in an alternate article)
China increasing nuclear buildout!
"They are increasing the deployment of newer, safer, more advanced Generation III reactors" ie "The Chinese will ahead of the US!"
As an American, who has traveled back and forth between US and China for the past 6 years. I can tell you can be rest assured that China is not yet ahead of the US. However, China is rapidly gaining on the US technologically. Their government does not get bogged down in short term issues. They set 20 year goals and stick to them. And while they have their own problems, this relentless consistency has led them from a backwards 3rd world nation to a manufacturing super power that rivals the US.
American had better get it together soon, or China will be ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Shenzhen and bought one of these 400RMB tablets( went for the upgraded 1GB version) just a few days ago on a whim. Many of my friends and coworkers have too. Most importantly, despite the price, we will NEVER buy one again either. Here is way.
1) No manufacturer support for bug-fixes or upgrades. Your stuck with ICS or whatever buggy version comes with your device
2) Brittle low resolution glass displays. Mine is already cracked from floating around in my backpack, despite the screen protector and case that came with it.
3) Terribly slow 1-4GB of FLASH. It took an hour to transfer 2GB of MP3s
4) Slow, unreliable, unresponsive capacitive touch screens. Scrolling worked OK, but I dreaded having to type on the virtual keyboard.
5) Abysmal build quality. Misaligned buttons. Screen bulging on 1 side. Cheap, plastic, feel.
6) Terrible battery life. My tab could last about 1 hours playing 3D games, 2 browsing the web.
I am still rocking an iPhone 3GS and it is superior to that POS in every way. When I return to the states, I plan to buy a Nexus 7 or Kindle HD. The $55 I wasted on my China special would of been much better spent on upgrading one of those.
All google is saying is that if you don't want to play by their rules, they won't give you support. Fork it, and you're on your own. Seems fair to me and they're not "going after anyone".
That's a terrible analogy. Trying to power a low end smartphone with Firefox, is more like trying to modify submarine to fly.
HTML and JavaScript were never designed for this purpose and it shows. After the browser wars, JavaScript has proven to be bloated and resource intensive. 100x slower then native apps. This is a stupid idea and doomed to fail.
I came here to say exactly this. The problem with Android is that most apps are running in an VM wasting valuable CPU cycles. Linux runs great on the 700 MHz raspberry PI, fire up firefox and the thing slows to a crawl. Now load up a JavaScript app and go grab a coffee. Let's face it. JavaScript is great for what it does, but is a terrible environment when speed is critical. It wasn't designed for this purpose and no matter how much they optimize it, it will never compete with native apps.
To achieve it's goal, what Mozilla should be doing is taking Android and stripping out all the laggy dalvik apps and replacing them with Native Apps NDK apps. Remove some kruff to make the GUI fully hardware accelerated, and now you'd have an attractive solution for low end smartphones.
Love it! Our leader's message blocked by a DCMA takedown, reminds me of a quote:
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln
Agreed. Something has to be done. Censorship and wrongful take downs are just one aspect of the many problems with our copyright laws. My biggest issue with them is that they prevent young artists from remixing anything from their generation. This needs to be fixed by repealing the DCMA and reforming these draconian copyright laws.
Before Disney, copyright granted authors protection for 28 years. I’m fine with that. The problem is it’s pushing 100 years now. This stifles our culture and innovation.
For example, Star Wars was released in 1978, so it should have gone into the public domain by 2005. With existing laws, George Lucas retains exclusive rights to butcher the SW universe until 2072!!!! 95 YEARS! Imagine what new aspiring authors could do with his work, instead of the sterile Jar Jar crap that Lucas served us, recently? Thank you, copyright.
Do you think your favorite authors would not have created their material, if it was not protected for 70 years after their death? The copyright system is designed make companies, like Disney and RIAA, rich at the expense of our freedom.
The irony is Disney made its fortune by ripping off the great works of others. Walt Disney was a master of this. At its origins, Mickey Mouse was a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr. And almost all of their great work since then has continued this tradition of copying. Just to name a few: Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Jungle Book, Sleep Hollow, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid,
With the RIAA, SOPA and Courtney Love’s excellent essay on how they screw over artists should give you an idea of how this industry works. http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
If you want to know more, Kirby Ferguson's series "Everything is a Remix" at
http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
is a great watch!
My 32GB iPhone 3GS has been maxed out for the past year with songs and apps. After I replaced the battery, lack of storage is the only reason to upgrade. Sorry Nokia and Apple, my next phone is going to have MicroSD slot. Android looks like it's going to be the only option.
it's more about how IE and Chrome don't support DATA uri's. the article is stupid. that's what the article really is about, if it supports data uri's or not.
WRONG! From the PDF:
"In Google Chrome in particular, a control for unsafe redirection is im-
plemented, disabling the user direct access to a data URI if that URI is
the target of a redirection, such as from a URL shortening service."
"Internet Explorer has a limit to data URIs,"
Google Chrome and IE have implemented security features to prevent this form of attack.
I have no problem with a living author reaping the benefits of writing a bestseller for his entire natural life, and his descendants for another 14 after that.
Copyright does this and much, much more. And that's also the root of the problem. Before Disney, copyright granted authors protection for 28 years. I’m fine with that. The problem is now it’s pushing 100 years. This stifles our culture and innovation.
For example, Star Wars was released in 1978, so it should have gone into the public domain by 2005. With existing laws, George Lucas retains exclusive rights to butcher the SW universe until 2072!!!!! 95 YEARS! Imagine what new aspiring authors could do with his work, instead of the sterile Jar Jar crap that Lucas served us, recently? Thank you, copyright.
Are you telling me your favorite authors would not have created their works, if it was not protected for 70 years after their death?!? The copyright system is designed make companies, like Disney and RIAA, rich at the expense of our freedom.
The irony is Disney made its fortune by ripping off the great works of others. Walt Disney was a master of this. At its origins, Mickey Mouse was a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr. And almost all of their great work since then has continued this tradition of copying. Just to name a few: Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Jungle Book, Sleep Hollow, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid,
With the RIAA, SOPA and Courtney Love’s excellent essay on how they screw over artists should give you an idea of how this industry works. http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
Young artists need the freedom to remake and remix. The current laws prevent them from using anything from their generation. This is wrong and needs to be fixed.
Finally, Larry Lessig explains the problems with CC much more eloquently then I can at this TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html
I was so excited when I heard about this focus on memory leakage. But I've been on the 15 beta releases and it leaks worse than 13x.
It does not matter that I close all but one window/tab. After 24 hours of light browsing, it is pushing 1.5 GB and can rarely run for more than 48 hours. So what is the support path? How does this get fixed?
First of all, if you're running on the Beta Channel, you shouldn't be asking how to submit bugs or complaining about them. But if you must, just google "firefox memshrink and bug report". There's a ton of information. I filled one out a few weeks ago for an HTML5 game. They were responsive and addressed the issue quickly.
Why are they asking for money on kickstart, when they could save a ton just by switching from helium to hydrogen weather balloons? Sure they have to take some extra precautions because it's flammable (NOT explosive, google it) , but the cost saving will more that make up for it. In addition they are helping to preserve a precious resource necessary for things like MRIs.
Yes, exactly! The high memory usage comes from firebug. If you really have so little memory, then you'll be much better off running 2 separate instances of Firefox. In both my own testing and Tom's latest browser Firefox turn out on top with the lowest memory footprint.
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/memoryusage3wbgp11,0101-343668-0-2-3-1-png-.html
Best 40 tab - Firefox 794 MB
Worst 40 tab - Chrome 1449 MB
Chrome used almost twice the memory as Firefox.
+1
Seriously 60 or 70 is enough for me. My grandpa is 90, but so many problems to deal with. He's the man, but by 70, just stick a fork in me and call it a day. He's lived a hard life, orphan in the depression, fighter pilot in WW2, and still going strong. Me, I've had it good, but I don't see the point in fighting. Don't want to deal with all the pain and suffering at the end. Just a nice quite sleep, when I'm done contributing to this world.....
This guy did a personal MS re-branding exercise a few months ago. His combination of rhomboids looks much more modern and appealing to me.
http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-microsoft.html
The new 4 colored squares in a square doesn't do it for me.
They are working on a very similar concept in Australia.
http://www.hover-bike.com/index.html
I love the concept, but I agree. the stability problem needs to to be fixed with computers and gyros, not human balance. And when someone does finally nail it, it's going to be one hell of a toy!
For anyone that wants to try ReactOS out, I highly recommend the ARWINSS fork, which is a new Win32 subsystem for ReactOS that reuses as much Wine code as possible. The ARWINSS architecture implements APIs exposed via USER32 and GDI32 libraries and is based upon Wine source-code. In my testing the stability and compatibility was much better then the official release. You can find it here:
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Arwinss
I'm also in China. The video stream was choppy, but other the the usual suspects like youtube, I did not notice any NASA/JPL sites blocked by the GFW. One thing I have noticed, if you use a high quality VPN, foreign sites have lower latency and less packet loss. I assume this is because the GFW has some pass through mechanism for encrypted traffic that it cannot analyze. My VPN is free Amazon EC2 Ubuntu PPTP server that I setup myself.
I used the Google CC translation feature in youtube to translate the subtitles to Chinese, so my girlfriend would watch with me. How awesome is it that I just watched a video of 1 ton rover landing on Mars streamed over the Internet with machine generated and translated subtitles? I'm so happy to live in this day and age. Congratulations NASA, JPL, and Google!
“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.”
Carl Sagan,
Congratulations NASA and JPL! I hope you continue to inspire us all to dare mighty things!
As an expat living in repressed China, this news makes me happy to be a free American. " He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither." -Benjamin Franklin How many people do you know that have died from Terrorists? For me, NONE. But Cancer, Stupidity, Obesity, MANY. As an expat, the real threat I see to our freedom is the ignorant throwing away our freedom that our founding fathers died for, because they are scared of the terrorist buggy-man! Stop living in fear and start thinking!
Some people just like to say the US is 'behind', no matter what the issue or facts are.
If you are going to quote, quote properly, they said "will be ahead", not "are". And you obviously cannot read the summary properly either, because it states that: " They won't be building more older Generation II reactors" ie China slowing nuclear build out! "The Chinese will be ahead of the US!" (in an alternate article) China increasing nuclear buildout! "They are increasing the deployment of newer, safer, more advanced Generation III reactors" ie "The Chinese will ahead of the US!" As an American, who has traveled back and forth between US and China for the past 6 years. I can tell you can be rest assured that China is not yet ahead of the US. However, China is rapidly gaining on the US technologically. Their government does not get bogged down in short term issues. They set 20 year goals and stick to them. And while they have their own problems, this relentless consistency has led them from a backwards 3rd world nation to a manufacturing super power that rivals the US. American had better get it together soon, or China will be ahead.
You can read the full text of "A New Kind of Science" online for free at http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html
agreed. I hate how these useless sites come up when I'm looking for computer hardware reviews