I think many people scroll using mouse wheels or a two finger swipe on a touchpad. Those movements happen in the same direction the page scrolls to so they mitigate the cognitive problem associated with scrollbars and they did so since a long time, especially the mouse wheels. Actually I never noticed the problem (but thanks to you and stewbecca to pointing it out) and scrollbars are a nice way to appreciate the size of a document and where we are into it. I'm happy my OS keeps showing them. Guess what I have to do in the web browser of my Android phone to check how big a web page is and where am I? I have to scroll it a little to make the scrollbar appear. That's a fair tradeoff on a tiny screen (actually a 4.2" one) but IMHO it would be bad on a 15" one.
Mod parent up, even if it's an AC. You need some Windows VMs to test with IE browsers if you develop for the web. You might say Apple's waiting for Windows 8 for ARM but I bet there will still be a number of WinXP and Win7 users around by then (luckily Vista is dieing out quickly than IE6.)
Furthermore, does anybody knows if virtualization for ARM is as good as virtualization for Intel? Will people be able to run an ARM version of Win8 on an ARM Mac as well as they're running an Intel Windows on an Intel Mac?
Anyway, I can see Apple selling mid and low end Macs with an ARM processor and high end Macs with an Intel one. It will introduce more diversity in their environment than they had in the last few years but I'm sure they can handle it.
Objective-C is not an Apple proprietary technology and Google could have used it. I bet it belongs to those one hundred alternatives Google evaluated and discarded for some reasons. I'd like to know why but I'm happy they didn't chose it because it looks so bad with all those square brackets (disclaimer: it's a purely subjective and aesthetic opinion of no technological value). On the other hand, I agree that they've looked for trouble with the way they used Java in their OS, and XML is even worse that Objective-C.
If you embed 1,000 of these milliWatt antennas in the floor of your house you get 1 W. With a large house you might even be able to get enough energy to power something or charge a battery. You don't degrade signal quality for anybody if you live at the first floor. Governments could even support this method of harvesting wasted energy, especially if the decide to tax it;-)
I wonder what's the power used by a typical radio/TV station. We can't collectively collect more than they collectively emit.
The PIN unlocks the SIM not the phone (I have experience only of European phones) and SIMs can be configured by users not to use PINs. My Android phone can even start up without a SIM and access the Internet over WiFi. So the PIN is not available to the phone all the time. Actually, I expect that the SIM does not disclose the PIN to the phone at all but I didn't check that.
This is my anecdoctical experience: I've been using a 160 GB 3.5" hd for daily backups since about 2005. I switch it on in the morning, run the backup script, which also pulls some data from some servers and switch it off at the end of the script. It usually stays on for less than an hour. The only thing that failed was the power switch. Luckily I could replace it.
I know what happened. The Patent Office read the abstract, couldn't understand a single word (me too), concluded that must be some great and complex invention and granted the patent without any further investigation. They're collecting the fee anyway and not paying damages if the patent gets invalidated later on, so why bother?
The patent is not about phones. The Claim #1 is about "A computer-based system for detecting structures in data and performing actions on detected structures". Apple was not designing phones back in 1996.
Did they also fix webcam support? Sites like ustream don't work because flash keeps supporting an old video for linux standard and not the new one, which is years old.
The point is that nobody should tell you or me what we must do. There are some security best practices but if you know what you're doing (and it seems you do), you evaluated the tradeoffs and you can do whatever you want. Actually your setup looks pretty useful even if I don't trust the security of anything wireless, not even at my home. Cables are great things:)
When I was still using Windows as a desktop client I liked the way Putty gave me a quite good ssh experience. It's worse than openssh but it was the best one you could get on Windows. I'm still recommending it to people that work on Windows. It's much easier for them that using Cygwin or migrating to Linux as I did.
G+ doesn't have apps yet but creating fake accounts on facebook is quite normal to test your apps without sending notices to the walls of all your friends or getting your friends's data into somebody's database (maybe your customer, maybe someone else). Fake accounts enforce the separation between what you do at work and the rest of your life. Either Google let's developers create them or writing and testing apps will get unpleasant.
I read books almost only on my phone (4“display) and that made me appreciate both the convenience of linking and constant availability of my library and the occasional discomfort of not being able to see enough content. E-readers are larger than my phone but some paper books are larger than any e-reader. We'll see what happens.
PS: I'm another ruby coder:-)
Textbooks (and books in general) evolved to the current set of form factors. We can think of them as some local maxima of the convenience vs effectiveness vs weight (vs other factors) tradeoff function. A digital reader changes something (weight, batteries, readability of the screen vs paper, etc) but the size of the page is still important especially if you have lots of pictures to show, which is common in textbooks. It will be a challenge for everybody to match in a few years (even counting the past) what's the results of thousand of years of research and adaptation to industry and customers needs. And don't forget the ease and immediacy of annotating a paper book with a pencil and reading those notes afterward. On the other side I think of how many times I wanted to grep a university textbook (didn't know of grep before then, I'm that old).
My take is that starting with the iTunes/iPod combo Apple attracted the people that were more willing to pay for digital goods. Most of those good customers are gravitating around Apple's products now. Google and other companies might be able to steal some of them to their business but it will take time and a lot of skill.
Regardless of my assumption being right or wrong, I believe that making money out of apps (even iOS ones) is not any easier than making money in any other business. What I do is look for a company that needs an Android or iOS app (or both) to complement their commercial strategy and develop an app for them. That's been a well respected way of making money in the IT industry for ages and still works. I don't say that it's a risk less strategy (it isn't) but it's very different from building your own product and selling it to people. You know exactly how many money you make (maybe you don't know how much work you have to put into it) and you trade that safety for the (small) chance of getting very rich by building an app that makes history.
Point taken. There is way to sort apps by popularity but it's not easy to understand what it means: it's not the number of downloads, it's not the rating. Is it what's been hot in the last N days? If it were, by which definition of hotness? Oddly (as we're speaking of Google) looking for something in the market is more a matter of discovery (browsing the "also viewed" and "also installed" lists) than one of search. I even enjoy that but it's a little time consuming.
If I may add a complaint, I'd like to see Google forcing developers to explain what's the purpose of every single permission the app needs. What we have now is a sometimes scary list of what an app can do to your phone and to your personal data but no clue about whether we should trust the developer or not (my default is NO). As a reference, check Pandora's permissions list and check what people are saying about it in the user reviews.
I'm using the same computer since the end of 2006 (an Intel T7200 CPU) and it's getting faster and faster.
The browsers I use are faster (FF4 is faster than FF3, FF5 looks as fast as FF4), the operating system is faster (I'm on Linux since 2009 coming from XP, I used to have a boot-to-Firefox time of 5 minutes, I get there in 1 minute now), the filesystem is noticeably faster (the ext3 to ext4 switch). Even the software I use to work is faster than it used to be (Java, OpenOffice, Ruby, PostgreSQL among the others).
So, it's the constant upgrading of the software that spares us from having to buy a new computer every 2 years. On the other side, I see my friends that only need Word and Excel buing new Core i5 or i7 Windows PCs because they say their old machines (newer than mine) are getting too slow. Maybe it's a matter of picking up the right software stack but, trust me, FF4 beats FF3 in every single feature.
By the way, I also hate perpetual and mandatory usability experiments. I didn't appreciate some of Mozilla's UI decisions but luckily I managed to make it look almost as its predecessor. I'm going to have a harder time with Ubuntu's mandatory experiments. I'll probably switch to another desktop (xfce?).
How about a/. poll about the reasons for why Opera keeps having a very low user percentage after 15 years or development? Firefox and Chrome came from nowhere and succeeded, Opera has a small loyal user base and doesn't get any more than that. What I can remember about all those years of using Opera as a browser for compatibility tests is a lot of little details done in very peculiar and non standard ways that made the browser a little annoying to use. I've got a feeling that most of those issues have been fixed but still... look at that red Menu (I've got a blue desktop theme) and that O in my status bar which no other browser dares to touch.
Ok, that's it. Don't bash me too much for these ramblings.
I downloaded FF 5.0 from the mozilla site because I'm on Ubuntu 10.10 and there were still no repository with the new version. I unpacked it, run it and every plugin was working. I realized my addons should be working only when I read these posts on/.
Actually I'm quite surprised than nothing broke down. I've got the usual stuff, Firebug, Adblock, Web Developer, Stylish, Live HTTP Header, No Script, Greasemonkey and a few others. I checked the install.rdf files an none of them has maxVersion at 5.0 so they shouldn't be running.
How that's different from an update from the last version of FF 3.6 to FF 4.0? If they've been testing that one for 3 months they were ready to install it when FF 4.0.1 obsoleted it. What should they do? Install 4.0 and start testing 4.0.1. If the IT department guys know what they are doing, they know that the update from 4.0.1 to 5.0 is more like the update to 4.0.2. If they don't know what they're doing, they should be fired.
Anyway you can't test for 3 months every single update of a web browser. Even IE gets patched more often than that. Security patches should go in production as soon as possible.
And cars kill even more people than coal. A thing that cars and coal don't do is forcing you to evacuate tens of thousand of people and make a vast area inhabitable for centuries. Suppose the Belgians have to do with their Tihange power plant what the Japanese had to do at Fukushima, that is evacuate everybody in a 20 km radius from the site. Say good bye to Liege. A 30 km radius? Goodbye to Brussels. IMHO that's too big a risk.
You will shell $3500 if that's the only way to develop the iOS applications your customers order from you (I mean, you develop for a company that sells or gives away those apps on the store). It's like car repairers: they must buy expensive tools from the manufacturers or get out of business. By the way, this is a scenario that might become real for any piece of hardware looking like a current desktop or laptop computer: as more people will migrate to tablets and phones the economies of scale for making larger devices will disappear and they'll become more expensive.
You won't spend $3500 if all you need is develop any other kind of program or just read the email and browse facebook. You'll buy a Windows PC or install Linux on your Mac when the last version of OSX goes out of support.
Slashdot Mirror
You can put the access point 3 meters above ground (about 10 feet?) or even on the ceiling if you are the owner of the hall.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/05/09/european-samsung-galaxy-s2-source-code-released-download-it-now/
I think many people scroll using mouse wheels or a two finger swipe on a touchpad. Those movements happen in the same direction the page scrolls to so they mitigate the cognitive problem associated with scrollbars and they did so since a long time, especially the mouse wheels. Actually I never noticed the problem (but thanks to you and stewbecca to pointing it out) and scrollbars are a nice way to appreciate the size of a document and where we are into it. I'm happy my OS keeps showing them. Guess what I have to do in the web browser of my Android phone to check how big a web page is and where am I? I have to scroll it a little to make the scrollbar appear. That's a fair tradeoff on a tiny screen (actually a 4.2" one) but IMHO it would be bad on a 15" one.
Mod parent up, even if it's an AC. You need some Windows VMs to test with IE browsers if you develop for the web. You might say Apple's waiting for Windows 8 for ARM but I bet there will still be a number of WinXP and Win7 users around by then (luckily Vista is dieing out quickly than IE6.)
Furthermore, does anybody knows if virtualization for ARM is as good as virtualization for Intel? Will people be able to run an ARM version of Win8 on an ARM Mac as well as they're running an Intel Windows on an Intel Mac?
Anyway, I can see Apple selling mid and low end Macs with an ARM processor and high end Macs with an Intel one. It will introduce more diversity in their environment than they had in the last few years but I'm sure they can handle it.
Objective-C is not an Apple proprietary technology and Google could have used it. I bet it belongs to those one hundred alternatives Google evaluated and discarded for some reasons. I'd like to know why but I'm happy they didn't chose it because it looks so bad with all those square brackets (disclaimer: it's a purely subjective and aesthetic opinion of no technological value). On the other hand, I agree that they've looked for trouble with the way they used Java in their OS, and XML is even worse that Objective-C.
If you embed 1,000 of these milliWatt antennas in the floor of your house you get 1 W. With a large house you might even be able to get enough energy to power something or charge a battery. You don't degrade signal quality for anybody if you live at the first floor. Governments could even support this method of harvesting wasted energy, especially if the decide to tax it ;-)
I wonder what's the power used by a typical radio/TV station. We can't collectively collect more than they collectively emit.
The PIN unlocks the SIM not the phone (I have experience only of European phones) and SIMs can be configured by users not to use PINs. My Android phone can even start up without a SIM and access the Internet over WiFi. So the PIN is not available to the phone all the time. Actually, I expect that the SIM does not disclose the PIN to the phone at all but I didn't check that.
This is my anecdoctical experience: I've been using a 160 GB 3.5" hd for daily backups since about 2005. I switch it on in the morning, run the backup script, which also pulls some data from some servers and switch it off at the end of the script. It usually stays on for less than an hour. The only thing that failed was the power switch. Luckily I could replace it.
I know what happened. The Patent Office read the abstract, couldn't understand a single word (me too), concluded that must be some great and complex invention and granted the patent without any further investigation. They're collecting the fee anyway and not paying damages if the patent gets invalidated later on, so why bother?
The patent is not about phones. The Claim #1 is about "A computer-based system for detecting structures in data and performing actions on detected structures". Apple was not designing phones back in 1996.
Did they also fix webcam support? Sites like ustream don't work because flash keeps supporting an old video for linux standard and not the new one, which is years old.
The point is that nobody should tell you or me what we must do. There are some security best practices but if you know what you're doing (and it seems you do), you evaluated the tradeoffs and you can do whatever you want. Actually your setup looks pretty useful even if I don't trust the security of anything wireless, not even at my home. Cables are great things :)
When I was still using Windows as a desktop client I liked the way Putty gave me a quite good ssh experience. It's worse than openssh but it was the best one you could get on Windows. I'm still recommending it to people that work on Windows. It's much easier for them that using Cygwin or migrating to Linux as I did.
G+ doesn't have apps yet but creating fake accounts on facebook is quite normal to test your apps without sending notices to the walls of all your friends or getting your friends's data into somebody's database (maybe your customer, maybe someone else). Fake accounts enforce the separation between what you do at work and the rest of your life. Either Google let's developers create them or writing and testing apps will get unpleasant.
There is also the LG Optimus 3D but I don't know if it's available in your country.
I read books almost only on my phone (4“display) and that made me appreciate both the convenience of linking and constant availability of my library and the occasional discomfort of not being able to see enough content. E-readers are larger than my phone but some paper books are larger than any e-reader. We'll see what happens. PS: I'm another ruby coder:-)
Textbooks (and books in general) evolved to the current set of form factors. We can think of them as some local maxima of the convenience vs effectiveness vs weight (vs other factors) tradeoff function. A digital reader changes something (weight, batteries, readability of the screen vs paper, etc) but the size of the page is still important especially if you have lots of pictures to show, which is common in textbooks. It will be a challenge for everybody to match in a few years (even counting the past) what's the results of thousand of years of research and adaptation to industry and customers needs. And don't forget the ease and immediacy of annotating a paper book with a pencil and reading those notes afterward. On the other side I think of how many times I wanted to grep a university textbook (didn't know of grep before then, I'm that old).
My take is that starting with the iTunes/iPod combo Apple attracted the people that were more willing to pay for digital goods. Most of those good customers are gravitating around Apple's products now. Google and other companies might be able to steal some of them to their business but it will take time and a lot of skill.
Regardless of my assumption being right or wrong, I believe that making money out of apps (even iOS ones) is not any easier than making money in any other business. What I do is look for a company that needs an Android or iOS app (or both) to complement their commercial strategy and develop an app for them. That's been a well respected way of making money in the IT industry for ages and still works. I don't say that it's a risk less strategy (it isn't) but it's very different from building your own product and selling it to people. You know exactly how many money you make (maybe you don't know how much work you have to put into it) and you trade that safety for the (small) chance of getting very rich by building an app that makes history.
Point taken. There is way to sort apps by popularity but it's not easy to understand what it means: it's not the number of downloads, it's not the rating. Is it what's been hot in the last N days? If it were, by which definition of hotness? Oddly (as we're speaking of Google) looking for something in the market is more a matter of discovery (browsing the "also viewed" and "also installed" lists) than one of search. I even enjoy that but it's a little time consuming.
If I may add a complaint, I'd like to see Google forcing developers to explain what's the purpose of every single permission the app needs. What we have now is a sometimes scary list of what an app can do to your phone and to your personal data but no clue about whether we should trust the developer or not (my default is NO). As a reference, check Pandora's permissions list and check what people are saying about it in the user reviews.
I'm using the same computer since the end of 2006 (an Intel T7200 CPU) and it's getting faster and faster.
The browsers I use are faster (FF4 is faster than FF3, FF5 looks as fast as FF4), the operating system is faster (I'm on Linux since 2009 coming from XP, I used to have a boot-to-Firefox time of 5 minutes, I get there in 1 minute now), the filesystem is noticeably faster (the ext3 to ext4 switch). Even the software I use to work is faster than it used to be (Java, OpenOffice, Ruby, PostgreSQL among the others).
So, it's the constant upgrading of the software that spares us from having to buy a new computer every 2 years. On the other side, I see my friends that only need Word and Excel buing new Core i5 or i7 Windows PCs because they say their old machines (newer than mine) are getting too slow. Maybe it's a matter of picking up the right software stack but, trust me, FF4 beats FF3 in every single feature.
By the way, I also hate perpetual and mandatory usability experiments. I didn't appreciate some of Mozilla's UI decisions but luckily I managed to make it look almost as its predecessor. I'm going to have a harder time with Ubuntu's mandatory experiments. I'll probably switch to another desktop (xfce?).
How about a /. poll about the reasons for why Opera keeps having a very low user percentage after 15 years or development? Firefox and Chrome came from nowhere and succeeded, Opera has a small loyal user base and doesn't get any more than that. What I can remember about all those years of using Opera as a browser for compatibility tests is a lot of little details done in very peculiar and non standard ways that made the browser a little annoying to use. I've got a feeling that most of those issues have been fixed but still... look at that red Menu (I've got a blue desktop theme) and that O in my status bar which no other browser dares to touch.
Ok, that's it. Don't bash me too much for these ramblings.
I downloaded FF 5.0 from the mozilla site because I'm on Ubuntu 10.10 and there were still no repository with the new version. I unpacked it, run it and every plugin was working. I realized my addons should be working only when I read these posts on /.
Actually I'm quite surprised than nothing broke down. I've got the usual stuff, Firebug, Adblock, Web Developer, Stylish, Live HTTP Header, No Script, Greasemonkey and a few others. I checked the install.rdf files an none of them has maxVersion at 5.0 so they shouldn't be running.
How that's different from an update from the last version of FF 3.6 to FF 4.0? If they've been testing that one for 3 months they were ready to install it when FF 4.0.1 obsoleted it. What should they do? Install 4.0 and start testing 4.0.1. If the IT department guys know what they are doing, they know that the update from 4.0.1 to 5.0 is more like the update to 4.0.2. If they don't know what they're doing, they should be fired.
Anyway you can't test for 3 months every single update of a web browser. Even IE gets patched more often than that. Security patches should go in production as soon as possible.
And cars kill even more people than coal. A thing that cars and coal don't do is forcing you to evacuate tens of thousand of people and make a vast area inhabitable for centuries. Suppose the Belgians have to do with their Tihange power plant what the Japanese had to do at Fukushima, that is evacuate everybody in a 20 km radius from the site. Say good bye to Liege. A 30 km radius? Goodbye to Brussels. IMHO that's too big a risk.
You will shell $3500 if that's the only way to develop the iOS applications your customers order from you (I mean, you develop for a company that sells or gives away those apps on the store). It's like car repairers: they must buy expensive tools from the manufacturers or get out of business. By the way, this is a scenario that might become real for any piece of hardware looking like a current desktop or laptop computer: as more people will migrate to tablets and phones the economies of scale for making larger devices will disappear and they'll become more expensive.
You won't spend $3500 if all you need is develop any other kind of program or just read the email and browse facebook. You'll buy a Windows PC or install Linux on your Mac when the last version of OSX goes out of support.