My S2 fits in my pockets much better than my old N70 did. It's a bigger phone but twice as thin. That makes a difference and to my surprise it's much easies to carry around (btw, they weight the same). The iPhone 4S looks like a little brick compared to the S2, weights more and doesn't fit as well in pockets. The iPhone 5 is the phone Apple should have made one year ago. They didn't because they realized that they could sell anything they threw to consumers and din't have to try too hard to compete, but they're finally catching up on specs. I'm glad they did and that they skimmed that one extra mm or two. It's not the thinnest smartphone on the market but it almost is and hopefully the other manufacturers will find ways to make their phones thinner.
My S2 battery's lasts one day, even a full weekend if I only check my mail a few times, browse only a little, and keep the WiFi and 3G off when I don't need them. They sell bigger batteries for people that use it as a computer all the time or make phone calls all the day and there are extended battery cases for the iPhone too.
This is an S3 scoring 2283 on GeekBench. It seems they have only one data point for the iPhone 5 (here, but more will follow) vs many datapoints for the S3 (here). Note that there are two versions of the S3 (1.4 and 1.8 GHz) plus a lot of variability in each version. The slower 1.4 GHz S3 scores 950, the faster one 2,059. The 1.8 GHz version ranges between 1,233 and 2,283. I really don't know what could make all of that difference within the same version, maybe other apps running in parallel with the benchmark? We'll see if there is similar variance for the iPhone 5. The iPhone 4S ranged from 455 to 851.
Where the iPhone 5 bests the Galaxy is in the performances of the memory. The custom CPU makes the difference. The S3 compensates with the extra cores.
Pretty small:-) but after this decision the market share for x86-compatible Android tablets will be the same in 2013. What I said to be huge is the total Android market. Almost no share of the pie for Intel. If they're doing it they're convinced that it can be good for them but I bet ARM&Co are happy too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy E = 1/2 * M * V^2
Mass is constant but 100*100 is 1.77 times larger that 75*75. The car safety systems do their best to absorb that extra energy in a crash but it has to go somewhere before the car stops, sometimes into the flesh and bones of the driver and of the passengers by the means of anything that collided with the car or gets lose inside of it (even seats, wheels and the engine).
I live in Italy. The highway speed limit here is 130 km/h (81 mph), 90 km/h (56 mph) on normal roads and 50 km/h (31 mph) inside the cities, with some 30 km/h areas. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate (OECD data) there are 8.7 road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year and 12 per 100,000 motor vehicles. The corresponding figures for the U.S.A. are 12.3 and 15. That's 41% and 25% more respectively. It hints that speed limits don't necessarily have a direct correlation with deaths. Cars, road conditions and (most important of all) driver behavior make the difference. Keep your eyes on the road is the first recommendation I can't think about (btw, there are 1.47 mobile phones per person in Italy vs 1.039 in the USA - found on wikipedia - so it's not texting or calling that accounts for the difference - many people do that while driving here). That said, I welcome raising speed limits a little: it's good for Americans that will get home earlier and good for European tourists that won't fall asleep driving on straight roads at 55 mph anymore:-)
I agree it's stupid, in more than one way. A scrollbar's size hints about the size of the whole list and about the position I'm into it. Being able to see that hint only by touching and moving the list is bad. It should be always visible. Hopefully Apple will force Android to fix this conceptual bug. Thanks!
My netbook is an eeepc 901, the 20 GB SSD Linux edition. I upgraded it to 2 GB and to eeebuntu first and Ubuntu 12.04 when it was clear that the Aurora project was going nowhere (I checked right now, still no news). It's definitely slower than my T7200 laptop, it always was. Maybe Ubuntu is not the right OS for it but I needed some first hand experience with Unity before deciding it won't make it on my laptop because of the global menu, launcher, etc (lenses would be ok, hud maybe).
With eebuntu it was bearable as an emergency development environment when I have to travel light (but I was logging on tmpfs). Ubuntu is still a new relatively new install so I don't know how it performs.
Please let me insist:-) Browsers are the best example: despite all the JavaScript added to every site (sometimes a dozen of scripts from a dozen of different sites) the JS interpreters of every browser got so much faster after the introduction of Chrome's V8 that they compensate the increase in complexity. That's why those sites can afford stuffing all that JavaScript in their pages and keep being usable and used. I know that I should back this sentiment with figures but it's early in the morning here (still yawning) and I feel that I can't be much wrong given that I keep browsing the modern web on this 6 years old laptop (HP nc8430) and pages load up quickly. Furthermore I see how slow a Firefox 3.6 runs in a WinXP VM on this computer compared to a FF 13 in another WinXP VM.
In the other windows I'm developing a Ruby on Rails application: I did that job 6 years ago and I'm still doing it on the same laptop. The complexity increased but the environment got faster and compensated it. Was it the interpreter, the database or the framework? Hard to tell here.
What could spell the demise of my laptop is memory. I maxed it up at 4 GB and still I can't open more than a couple of VMs. Not that I need to do it often but sometimes I need a server VM and a Windows VM to test with IE. I'm lucky that in most cases I can do without the server VM because servers are usually Linux and I develop on Linux, but in some cases I need a software environment that I can't easily replicate. I remember starting to take care of a very old application with compatibility issues with modern releases of Java and MySQL: I had to download a Debian 4 from the Debian archive. Eventually I'll need more than 4 GB and a new computer. Hopefully laptop screens will get larger again by then if the retina Mac will put pressure on PC manufacturers.
If you're still doing the work you were doing three years ago, chances are that all your software got faster (example: browsers are) and your old computer is better now that it was out of the box. My almost 6 years old linux laptop is faster now than it was in 2006: faster browsers, faster application servers, faster file system. I doubled the RAM and swapped an 80 GB disk for a 500 GB one. Luckily I could service it myself. That said, I know that I could buy a faster laptop nowadays but probably with a worse screen: I got a 1680x1050 16:10 one, much better than the 1600x900 ones that are considered top notch in the PC world today. So I'll stick to my old one until it will be no more adequate for my job or it falls apart. And just in case one's wondering about it, an OSX machine is not an option for me (very bad GUI IMHO so maybe I'm not at home in this thread).
I look at the home screens of my Galaxy S2 where I place the icons of the apps I use most. I see some stock Android/Samsung apps plus K-9 Mail (OSS), Cool Reader (OSS), Jota Text Editor (OSS), KeePass (OSS) and other 15 closed source apps. Among them I use regularly Dolphin HD and il Meteo, Chrome sometimes, the others less often. I use the four OSS apps very often but not as much as Dolphin HD.
So based on my limited experience open source is doing well enough on Android, but I remember using only open source programs on Windows years ago, before switching to Linux. Mobile is apparently more closed than desktop but let's give it some time to grow. Windows applications were much more closed in the '90s before people started rewriting them as OSS. Then we got the web, which is basically a frontend to closed sourced backends. Mobile starts from there: most mobile apps are fat clients to remote services and in many cases there is little incentive to open source them.
So I think that there will eventually be more general purpose open source mobile applications but we'll also have many more closed source apps than we have on the desktop.
What became of auto repairers? Want to repair a *your favorite brand here* car? Buy the tools from *your favorite brand here*, that is the hardware and software you need to interface the car electronics.
This has always been true for software developers but sometimes only on very loose terms: want to develop a desktop application for Windows? Get a Windows licence from Microsoft but buy the hardware from any manufacturer. It was car like at the time of mainframes and it got car like again a few years ago: want to develop for the iPhone? Buy a software/hardware combo from Apple, that's called a Mac.
A few years from now you might also have to buy a computer from Microsoft to develop for Windows and we'll see what happens to Android. Only web developers will be likely to always be free to choose their tools but I bet there will be a MS+Apple push towards the marginalization of the web because that will help their business.
300 M desktop users don't necessarily translate in 300 M mobile users. I use FF on the desktop (I'm typing this with FF 13 or whatever it is now) but FF on Android is the worst mobile browser I tried, even it's last version. It's nowhere close to Dolphin HD or Chrome in terms of accuracy of rendering pages, convenience of zooming in and out, font handling. Examples: the white on green titles on/. have a silly slanted font, as if it couldn't find the right one, which all the other browser can. Nested comments here are displayed with an incredibly small font. That's on a 4.0.3 Galaxy S2, never rooted, always applied Samsung's OTA updates. At this point I'd be wary of using a FF based phone but I concede that sooner or later they'll grok small screens. I'd bet on later.
[astonished] Maybe the first time I really agree with him [astonished]
Books, pencils, notebooks (the paper ones), calculators and many other tools (chairs and desks?) certainly changed educations and tablets will do the same but none of them is as important as the teacher and the student. That's the core of education, the other things are just tools that help students and teacher, and in some cases just make some other people rich.
I didn't know owncloud, I'll look into it, thanks. There are still use cases for a USB stick. Moving GBs of files over Dropbox on a 3G connection with a capped data plan is not only slow but it won't even end. It might take long even over wifi. Sometimes I use the USB host connector of my Android phone to read/write from a USB stick, usually large video files.
instance_methods returns an array. select iterates on it calling a code block on every element. If the block returns true it adds the element to the array it will return at the end of the loop. |var| is how the element is passed to the block. Blocks can span over multiple lines, it's usual to wrap them inside a do..end but { } still work.
String.instance_methods.select {|m| m =~/sub/}} is the perlish alternative.
I didn't match "last" as in the article because Ruby's String has no methods with "last" in their name.
I looked at KDE many years ago, maybe still the 3.x days or the early 4.x ones. I compared screenshots and videos of KDE and Gnome 2 and liked more Gnome. Maybe KDE looked too much like Windows, which I was coming from and not really appreciated too much.
I don't like some of the features of Gnome and I tweaked it a little. For example I removed the top panel and merged part of it with the bottom one and recently moved to minimize, close buttons back to the right (I removed the maximize one, I'm double clicking on the title, a much easier target). My dislike for top panels (and global menus!) extends to OSX, Gnome 3 and Unity. Guess what, I'll switch to MATE as soon as I find time to upgrade my pc to 12.04 straight from 11.04 (I'm giving it time to mature).
I'm using 12.04 with Unity on my eeepc and that's ok, because I'm always using full screen windows. However the top panel wastes pixels sometimes because it's impossible to hide it and not every program adapts to it. Then there is the launcher which augmented by the HUD is maybe on par with the old good applications menu but on a small screen is much less convenient than the old eeebuntu full screen launcher.
A common cultural background for all students (so they can live well together) should be one of the goals of the pre-university school system. If it doesn't it's a big failure. When you're 18 it's late.
I agree with most of what you wrote but the part about Unity and touchscreens. I installed 12.04 on my netbook and I can tell that Unity without a keyboard is unusable. Without a keyboard the lenses and the HUD are useless. Only the left side launcher can work on a pure touchscreen device but that gives access to only a small number of programs. On the other side, you can access all the installed apps with your finger on any touchscreen phone/tablet. I'm just curious to see how Canonical will tweak Unity to make it work on TVs and tablets. They'll add an Android/iPhone like launcher?
BTW, I think I'll go with MATE after updating my 11.04 primary laptop. I didn't update to 11.10 because I was waiting for a more robust version of MATE and maybe of Cinammon but time has come.
I recon it's the same the other way around though.
It is. I used Windows from 1995 to 2008, Win95 and WinXP. Then I switched to Ubuntu. When I have to use Win7 on somebody else's PC I realize I'm not as effective as I was with WinXP because many things have changed and I'm not familiar with them. When I have to use a Mac (rarely) sometimes I just don't know how to do some basic things and I have to ask or wander at random among windows and menus. The only easy interface is the one you know well. If you're a novice and don't know anything, every OS is difficult.
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My S2 fits in my pockets much better than my old N70 did. It's a bigger phone but twice as thin. That makes a difference and to my surprise it's much easies to carry around (btw, they weight the same). The iPhone 4S looks like a little brick compared to the S2, weights more and doesn't fit as well in pockets. The iPhone 5 is the phone Apple should have made one year ago. They didn't because they realized that they could sell anything they threw to consumers and din't have to try too hard to compete, but they're finally catching up on specs. I'm glad they did and that they skimmed that one extra mm or two. It's not the thinnest smartphone on the market but it almost is and hopefully the other manufacturers will find ways to make their phones thinner.
My S2 battery's lasts one day, even a full weekend if I only check my mail a few times, browse only a little, and keep the WiFi and 3G off when I don't need them. They sell bigger batteries for people that use it as a computer all the time or make phone calls all the day and there are extended battery cases for the iPhone too.
This is an S3 scoring 2283 on GeekBench. It seems they have only one data point for the iPhone 5 (here, but more will follow) vs many datapoints for the S3 (here). Note that there are two versions of the S3 (1.4 and 1.8 GHz) plus a lot of variability in each version. The slower 1.4 GHz S3 scores 950, the faster one 2,059. The 1.8 GHz version ranges between 1,233 and 2,283. I really don't know what could make all of that difference within the same version, maybe other apps running in parallel with the benchmark? We'll see if there is similar variance for the iPhone 5. The iPhone 4S ranged from 455 to 851.
Where the iPhone 5 bests the Galaxy is in the performances of the memory. The custom CPU makes the difference. The S3 compensates with the extra cores.
Pretty small :-) but after this decision the market share for x86-compatible Android tablets will be the same in 2013. What I said to be huge is the total Android market. Almost no share of the pie for Intel. If they're doing it they're convinced that it can be good for them but I bet ARM&Co are happy too.
I hope so (for them) because "it can't run Linux" means "no Android devices with our chip". That's a huge market to leave to the competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy E = 1/2 * M * V^2
Mass is constant but 100*100 is 1.77 times larger that 75*75. The car safety systems do their best to absorb that extra energy in a crash but it has to go somewhere before the car stops, sometimes into the flesh and bones of the driver and of the passengers by the means of anything that collided with the car or gets lose inside of it (even seats, wheels and the engine).
I live in Italy. The highway speed limit here is 130 km/h (81 mph), 90 km/h (56 mph) on normal roads and 50 km/h (31 mph) inside the cities, with some 30 km/h areas. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate (OECD data) there are 8.7 road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year and 12 per 100,000 motor vehicles. The corresponding figures for the U.S.A. are 12.3 and 15. That's 41% and 25% more respectively. It hints that speed limits don't necessarily have a direct correlation with deaths. Cars, road conditions and (most important of all) driver behavior make the difference. Keep your eyes on the road is the first recommendation I can't think about (btw, there are 1.47 mobile phones per person in Italy vs 1.039 in the USA - found on wikipedia - so it's not texting or calling that accounts for the difference - many people do that while driving here). That said, I welcome raising speed limits a little: it's good for Americans that will get home earlier and good for European tourists that won't fall asleep driving on straight roads at 55 mph anymore :-)
The Kindle Fire 1" could fit in an eye. Prior art against Google glasses!
I agree it's stupid, in more than one way. A scrollbar's size hints about the size of the whole list and about the position I'm into it. Being able to see that hint only by touching and moving the list is bad. It should be always visible. Hopefully Apple will force Android to fix this conceptual bug. Thanks!
My netbook is an eeepc 901, the 20 GB SSD Linux edition. I upgraded it to 2 GB and to eeebuntu first and Ubuntu 12.04 when it was clear that the Aurora project was going nowhere (I checked right now, still no news). It's definitely slower than my T7200 laptop, it always was. Maybe Ubuntu is not the right OS for it but I needed some first hand experience with Unity before deciding it won't make it on my laptop because of the global menu, launcher, etc (lenses would be ok, hud maybe).
With eebuntu it was bearable as an emergency development environment when I have to travel light (but I was logging on tmpfs). Ubuntu is still a new relatively new install so I don't know how it performs.
Please let me insist :-) Browsers are the best example: despite all the JavaScript added to every site (sometimes a dozen of scripts from a dozen of different sites) the JS interpreters of every browser got so much faster after the introduction of Chrome's V8 that they compensate the increase in complexity. That's why those sites can afford stuffing all that JavaScript in their pages and keep being usable and used. I know that I should back this sentiment with figures but it's early in the morning here (still yawning) and I feel that I can't be much wrong given that I keep browsing the modern web on this 6 years old laptop (HP nc8430) and pages load up quickly. Furthermore I see how slow a Firefox 3.6 runs in a WinXP VM on this computer compared to a FF 13 in another WinXP VM.
In the other windows I'm developing a Ruby on Rails application: I did that job 6 years ago and I'm still doing it on the same laptop. The complexity increased but the environment got faster and compensated it. Was it the interpreter, the database or the framework? Hard to tell here.
What could spell the demise of my laptop is memory. I maxed it up at 4 GB and still I can't open more than a couple of VMs. Not that I need to do it often but sometimes I need a server VM and a Windows VM to test with IE. I'm lucky that in most cases I can do without the server VM because servers are usually Linux and I develop on Linux, but in some cases I need a software environment that I can't easily replicate. I remember starting to take care of a very old application with compatibility issues with modern releases of Java and MySQL: I had to download a Debian 4 from the Debian archive. Eventually I'll need more than 4 GB and a new computer. Hopefully laptop screens will get larger again by then if the retina Mac will put pressure on PC manufacturers.
If you're still doing the work you were doing three years ago, chances are that all your software got faster (example: browsers are) and your old computer is better now that it was out of the box. My almost 6 years old linux laptop is faster now than it was in 2006: faster browsers, faster application servers, faster file system. I doubled the RAM and swapped an 80 GB disk for a 500 GB one. Luckily I could service it myself. That said, I know that I could buy a faster laptop nowadays but probably with a worse screen: I got a 1680x1050 16:10 one, much better than the 1600x900 ones that are considered top notch in the PC world today. So I'll stick to my old one until it will be no more adequate for my job or it falls apart. And just in case one's wondering about it, an OSX machine is not an option for me (very bad GUI IMHO so maybe I'm not at home in this thread).
I look at the home screens of my Galaxy S2 where I place the icons of the apps I use most. I see some stock Android/Samsung apps plus K-9 Mail (OSS), Cool Reader (OSS), Jota Text Editor (OSS), KeePass (OSS) and other 15 closed source apps. Among them I use regularly Dolphin HD and il Meteo, Chrome sometimes, the others less often. I use the four OSS apps very often but not as much as Dolphin HD.
So based on my limited experience open source is doing well enough on Android, but I remember using only open source programs on Windows years ago, before switching to Linux. Mobile is apparently more closed than desktop but let's give it some time to grow. Windows applications were much more closed in the '90s before people started rewriting them as OSS. Then we got the web, which is basically a frontend to closed sourced backends. Mobile starts from there: most mobile apps are fat clients to remote services and in many cases there is little incentive to open source them.
So I think that there will eventually be more general purpose open source mobile applications but we'll also have many more closed source apps than we have on the desktop.
What became of auto repairers? Want to repair a *your favorite brand here* car? Buy the tools from *your favorite brand here*, that is the hardware and software you need to interface the car electronics.
This has always been true for software developers but sometimes only on very loose terms: want to develop a desktop application for Windows? Get a Windows licence from Microsoft but buy the hardware from any manufacturer. It was car like at the time of mainframes and it got car like again a few years ago: want to develop for the iPhone? Buy a software/hardware combo from Apple, that's called a Mac.
A few years from now you might also have to buy a computer from Microsoft to develop for Windows and we'll see what happens to Android. Only web developers will be likely to always be free to choose their tools but I bet there will be a MS+Apple push towards the marginalization of the web because that will help their business.
Linux could be the kernel for most of their chips because of Android, unless/until Win8 tablets and phone will really storm the market.
My bad: it was "serif font" (it looks like a Times), I don't know where "slanted" came from. A bug :-)
Thank you for the hint about the Webkit only markup. That will be hard for Mozilla to overcome.
300 M desktop users don't necessarily translate in 300 M mobile users. I use FF on the desktop (I'm typing this with FF 13 or whatever it is now) but FF on Android is the worst mobile browser I tried, even it's last version. It's nowhere close to Dolphin HD or Chrome in terms of accuracy of rendering pages, convenience of zooming in and out, font handling. Examples: the white on green titles on /. have a silly slanted font, as if it couldn't find the right one, which all the other browser can. Nested comments here are displayed with an incredibly small font. That's on a 4.0.3 Galaxy S2, never rooted, always applied Samsung's OTA updates. At this point I'd be wary of using a FF based phone but I concede that sooner or later they'll grok small screens. I'd bet on later.
[astonished] Maybe the first time I really agree with him [astonished]
Books, pencils, notebooks (the paper ones), calculators and many other tools (chairs and desks?) certainly changed educations and tablets will do the same but none of them is as important as the teacher and the student. That's the core of education, the other things are just tools that help students and teacher, and in some cases just make some other people rich.
I didn't know owncloud, I'll look into it, thanks. There are still use cases for a USB stick. Moving GBs of files over Dropbox on a 3G connection with a capped data plan is not only slow but it won't even end. It might take long even over wifi. Sometimes I use the USB host connector of my Android phone to read/write from a USB stick, usually large video files.
Does that work?
> "".methods[/sub/]
TypeError: can't convert Regexp into Integer
I tried it with 1.9.3 and 1.8.7. Array's rdocs don't list a [] method with a regexp argument.
More compact but people without a *nix background won't understand it without looking at the docs. Anyway I think I'll start using it :-)
There isn't. But this is how to do it in Ruby
String.instance_methods.select {|m| m.match("sub")}
=> ["sub", "gsub!", "gsub", "sub!"]
instance_methods returns an array. select iterates on it calling a code block on every element. If the block returns true it adds the element to the array it will return at the end of the loop. |var| is how the element is passed to the block. Blocks can span over multiple lines, it's usual to wrap them inside a do..end but { } still work.
String.instance_methods.select {|m| m =~ /sub/}} is the perlish alternative.
I didn't match "last" as in the article because Ruby's String has no methods with "last" in their name.
I looked at KDE many years ago, maybe still the 3.x days or the early 4.x ones. I compared screenshots and videos of KDE and Gnome 2 and liked more Gnome. Maybe KDE looked too much like Windows, which I was coming from and not really appreciated too much.
I don't like some of the features of Gnome and I tweaked it a little. For example I removed the top panel and merged part of it with the bottom one and recently moved to minimize, close buttons back to the right (I removed the maximize one, I'm double clicking on the title, a much easier target). My dislike for top panels (and global menus!) extends to OSX, Gnome 3 and Unity. Guess what, I'll switch to MATE as soon as I find time to upgrade my pc to 12.04 straight from 11.04 (I'm giving it time to mature).
I'm using 12.04 with Unity on my eeepc and that's ok, because I'm always using full screen windows. However the top panel wastes pixels sometimes because it's impossible to hide it and not every program adapts to it. Then there is the launcher which augmented by the HUD is maybe on par with the old good applications menu but on a small screen is much less convenient than the old eeebuntu full screen launcher.
A common cultural background for all students (so they can live well together) should be one of the goals of the pre-university school system. If it doesn't it's a big failure. When you're 18 it's late.
I agree with most of what you wrote but the part about Unity and touchscreens. I installed 12.04 on my netbook and I can tell that Unity without a keyboard is unusable. Without a keyboard the lenses and the HUD are useless. Only the left side launcher can work on a pure touchscreen device but that gives access to only a small number of programs. On the other side, you can access all the installed apps with your finger on any touchscreen phone/tablet. I'm just curious to see how Canonical will tweak Unity to make it work on TVs and tablets. They'll add an Android/iPhone like launcher?
BTW, I think I'll go with MATE after updating my 11.04 primary laptop. I didn't update to 11.10 because I was waiting for a more robust version of MATE and maybe of Cinammon but time has come.
I recon it's the same the other way around though.
It is. I used Windows from 1995 to 2008, Win95 and WinXP. Then I switched to Ubuntu. When I have to use Win7 on somebody else's PC I realize I'm not as effective as I was with WinXP because many things have changed and I'm not familiar with them. When I have to use a Mac (rarely) sometimes I just don't know how to do some basic things and I have to ask or wander at random among windows and menus. The only easy interface is the one you know well. If you're a novice and don't know anything, every OS is difficult.