There are no "jam-causing people", there are only "jam-reducing people", i.e., the GP. That's to say, they are the exception.
The mechanism which causes the "waves" is a direct result of normal human driving. The only way you'll get rid of a jam by letting others pass you, is if you wait long enough that the jam disappears on its own.
It's useless. One driver alone can't make a difference in the "wave" and there aren't enough "clued-in" drivers to get the critical mass needed. Even if there were enough drivers to break the wave on a given section of the road, how long do you think it'd take for the guys on the back to restart it? At a given concentration of cars on a stretch of road, the waves are self-forming and inevitable.
In the end, all you're doing is making the people behind you go even slower because the guys on the other lane see the empty space in front of your car and move in front of you.
That's why people get pissed off at you. It's not that they don't understand (some of us do), it's just that you're letting everyone else on the other lane get in front of us for no actual benefit.
Strange, I'm outside the US and I managed to get one here without jumping borders.
Also, they aren't more expensive, you just have to pay the full price up front (which I prefer anyways). In fact, if you bother to make some calculations, buying up front can actually save you quite a bit of money. Besides, I think some carriers in Europe offer the Nexus S with a contract.
Granted, even if it wasn't possible to get a Nexus phone where you live, there were other "sort-of-open" possibilities, namely the HTC devices at the time, which were easy to root and had a strong community of developers creating open roms for it.
But this guy went out and got the phone which had the most draconian block in the market, and it's not like that information was secret -- it was all over the geek news. Now he's complaining that he has a locked bootloader. Well, cry me a river.
My first experience with Linux was Mandrake, and I ran into dependency issues pretty quickly without knowing how to fix them. I hopped around a bit - even trying Gentoo stage 1
It's funny that you didn't have the technical expertise to fix dependency problems on Mandrake and went on to try Gentoo instead. I did the same, except with Red Hat instead of Madrake. That didn't last long (two days -- the time it took to compile Gentoo's UI and realize actually using it was going to be a battle):-)
I also ended up on Ubuntu, and fell in love with APT. This Unity deal might make me change distros, but if it happens, I'm pretty sure it'll be to another APT-based one.
Considering I bought it... oh, over a year ago when it was released, you contradict yourself.
When you bought the Droid X the Nexus One was already available. It might have been possible that the Nexus S was already rumoured (can't remember, or bother to check). Besides, it was already known that it was coming with a locked bootloader. Hell you bought the device with the most draconian bootloader lock at the time, and now you're complaining.
Did you read your link? End of 2011. I don't know how you could've missed it, it's in the title! (It's now early/middle 2011, you do know that, right?)
I have every damn right to be mad.
No you don't. I remember clearly the issue with the locked bootloader being all over the web before the device even hit the stores. At the time it was clear for anyone who spent more than 2 minutes researching that if you wanted an open device you'd either have to go with the Nexus One, or one of the popular HTC devices which somehow had a community of hackers around them.
BTW, if Google had a clue how to sell a phone through popular carrier channels to begin with instead of their stupid web-store experiment, I would have gotten one.
Ah, so now it's Google's fault... *eyeroll*
Face it, you made a bad decision one year ago, either because you didn't bother to inform yourself properly, or because you liked so much that particular phone that you thought it outweighed its faults.
Now you regret that decision, but can't face the fact that it's all on your shoulders. It is your prerogative to be an informed consumer -- it helps you and it helps everyone else.
Anyway, this isn't about you. You could be stuck with a 1995 Nokia for all I care. What pisses me off is that you basically validated Motorola's anti-consumer strategies and then come whining when they bite you in the ass.
And yes, it's clear to anyone that you're whining, and insulting me won't help your case.
Really? I haven't seen Google support a phone for more than 1.5 years to date. Right now they have issued three phones under their brand:
The original devices Google was selling were developer devices: they weren't targeted at consumers, so I don't think they carried the same support expectations. Oh, and by the way, there were two of them, which makes for a total of four Google phones to date. In any case, the hardware in those devices wouldn't have been able to run Android 2.x in any usable manner. Believe me, my first Android phone had pretty similar hardware to those developer devices and I tried Android 2.2 on it. Unusable.
That isn't exactly a stellar history. Granted, the N1 and NS may still get more updates in the future (or they may not - there are no promises, and Google seems to just stop updating phones and not really announce any kind of official EOL policy). Also - I couldn't find an official firmware release history / changelog for any of these phones so it is possible I missed some kind of a minor update. Corrections are welcome.
I agree that it's too early to tell whether the Nexus devices will be properly supported, but it's not really fair to bunch the Nexus phones together with the earlier developer devices. At least they've been doing a good job updating both Nexus up to now. Google specifically promised timely updates for those devices and with them being the main force behind Android, I expect them to make good on it.
In any case, even if support is dropped, the phone is completely unlocked, so at least it won't be immediately EOL'd.
You let me know which manufacturers are regularly pushing updates out to phones, and I'll give you a cookie, lol.
Any of the Nexus devices. Do I get a cookie now?
I don't blame android, but I sure as hell won't ever buy Motorola again.
Actually I blame you and everyone who I see complaining on forums. It was an acceptable thing to feel betrayed by the manufacturer one or two years ago when Android devices first started coming out and the promises of openness weren't fulfilled, but nowadays you'd really have to make almost no research before buying your smartphone in order to not know the situation with the updates.
If everyone who complains on the internet had instead made that research and gotten a Nexus device, they'd be selling like hotcakes, and a clear message would've already been sent to the manufacturers that people want open devices.
But as it stands, people who value openness only have one real choice, and we still have to put up with the whiners every time an Android story pops up.
I don't know about Symbian (or whatever OS you had running in your Nokia), but Android, and I believe iOS has an option to disable the data connection as soon as the phone begins roaming.
That checkbox is checked by default In Android, and if you try to uncheck it, a dialog box pops up explaining that you risk very high data rates while roaming.
While I agree with you on principle, I think in practice these types of programs bring a lot of grief.
I once visited the house of a friend who was having trouble connecting to the internet. Turned out ZoneAlarm (or a similar program) popped up a dialog asking if he wanted to block Windows networking (not by that name, but the library which controls it) and he said yes.
Of course there are ways around that. For example, the firewall program should've had networking whitelisted, but even then people will try and block all kinds of stuff and then complain it isn't working.
Because then you refuse to run when you can't connect to the network
Yes, but then the user at least has the chance to get suspicious. "Why does this solitaire game require network so badly that it won't even let me play a game?"
What you really need is to fake access to a very slow network connection, one that corrupts data too
That would result in the same problem. The rogue app would simply fail if it couldn't communicate properly with its server. For all solutions you can think off, there will be a check which will be possible to make from within the app.
I think the best way to do ensure security is to do it like old J2ME did it: every time an app needs to do something which is considered privileged, a message pops up to the user asking if he allows it, with a checkbox to allow it permanently for that app. Of course that's not foolproof, but it'd go a long way towards securing your smartphone.
Yes, that one. I find it confusing, and it's difficult to get a complete listing of your installed apps.
I can't test it anymore because I switched to standard Gnome, but it always took me a few clicks and a bit of hunting around to find the apps I was looking for (specifically, configuration).
Perhaps I missed something obvious, but my feeling was that Unity is confusing and not ready for general usage.
It's too bad, too. I like Gnome 2, but it's not perfect, and I don't really care for KDE. I was really (and I still am) hoping for a fresh take on the PC desktop, but I don't think this is there.
Exactly. I upgraded yesterday, and after a few hours of "giving it a fair chance" I just had to go back to Gnome.
Gnome may not be ideal, but Unity just feels unfinished. Who the hell thought it was a good idea not to have a decent easily accessible menu with all your applications?
I'm hoping that before the next version comes out, a "Gnome spin" will have been created. Unfortunately Gnome seems to be going in the same direction, and I'm not very fond of KDE.
No, you can't, for the simple reason that they don't have access to the source code. No amount of integration is going to fix the fact that flash sucks.
Besides, in Ubuntu 11.04 I got some "flash not found" errors and had to install the plugin separately. It might be that only Chrome has flash integrated and I'm using Chromium, or maybe the integration isn't working that well, but as far as I know, I'm currently using an external flash plugin.
I'm using the chromium-stable repository, so it should be the latest version.
In Ubuntu, if I load a page in the background with a flash animation on it, I get a weird semi-transparent/screen corruption on the top left corner of whatever page I'm looking at, until I open the tab which contains the flash animation. Then it all goes back to normal.
I've also had numerous instances of flash crashing every tab in the browser (but not the browser itself). I thought they'd found a way to sandbox the flash plugin, but apparently it's not perfect yet. This is Chromium, so it might differ from the Google version.
I still love the browser, and you can't really blame the Chrome guys for the buggy POS that is flash, but those bugs are a bit annoying, and they've been there for a while now.
Alternatively (and this was my original belief) I was saying that "I couldn't even get an interview yet Google are happy to fly my to Zurich, I've been working in one of the biggest global agencies for *very* large corporate customers who they're eager to please etc and I'm trusted with tricky projects for them. This is without my experience with Fortune 10 companies and SMEs. Wow, they must have some real rockstars if they won't even give me an hour."
So this is your big test of a team's design qualifications? Send your CV and if they don't get back, that means they suck?
There are a ton of reasons why they didn't want to interview you. Out of the top of my head, maybe they weren't looking for anyone, or maybe they looked at your work and decided that they wanted a different style, or maybe they thought you'd be too expensive for them, or maybe they *gasp* didn't like your work.
I said it before -- in your posts you're coming off as an arrogant designer with sour grapes. I totally understand if this isn't your intention, but that's how it sounds to me. Dropping names and how big companies are flying you around the world isn't helping much, either.
Yeah, sour grapes. It's gotta be (sheesh, didn't see that one coming Einstein).
Well, when you write "I couldn't even get an interview with them" it sounds like you're really saying "if they won't even interview me, then they surely don't know anything about UX design".
The experience on the team there really doesn't seem much to write home about, not when compared to the UX pros I've known and worked with.
How would you know what the team is like if you didn't even get so far as an interview with them?
Look, I've got nothing against you personally, and I'm not defending Unity. So far I've only seen a few screenshots of Unity, and while I'm curious to try it, I don't really know whether I'll like it or not. I was just taken back by your justification as to why you think Unity's no good.
That's ok, but at least warn the user when the app first starts that he won't be able to use it for anything.
But no, they chose to do that only after you've logged it, configured and activated their shitty one-click service (which can't be done from the app, so you have to go to your browser), and finally attempt to use the damn market.
I'm all for competition in the Android app market, but Amazon's attempt just left me with a bad taste since the very inception. I hope they're able to pick up their game, but I don't hold much hope.
We were having a alcohol-induced macho match to see who could eat one of the small dried chillies on the table. We didn't know what kind the chillies were, or how strong they would be, so me and 2 more friends took one chilli in our hands and counted to three.
One of the guys wussed out while me and the other ate our chillies. Relatively speaking they weren't that hot, but we're not used to spicy food, so we suffered quite a bit. In the midst of our struggling the 3rd guy threw his chilli back into the bowl and started laughing calling us idiots. In the midst of his laughter a few tears came out and he decided to clean them with his hand.
The same hand which he'd used to hold the chilli.
Yeah, great idea man. He was still lucky that it wasn't that bad. It only hurt for like an hour:-)
I don't think the Xoom is a "Nexus device". Granted the Xoom is the first device with Android 3.0, and it was what the Google engineers used to develop and test Honeycomb, but as far as I understand, it's being sold and supported exclusively by Motorola.
A Nexus device is built by a manufacturer, but the support is directly from Google. That means that software updates are coming from G directly.
First, they have stock Google software, not modified by phone manufacturer or operator (Google does include some 3rd party stuff there, such as Facebook and Amazon MP3, but it's part of their "experience").
Not in my Nexus S. There are zero third-party apps in the Nexus S (except for the Google ones, obviously). No Facebook or Twitter or anything. By the way, the Nexus S has a large Google logo on the back, and a small Samsung logo. When you turn it on, there's a large Google logo onscreen, and Samsung is nowhere to be seen. That's a very clear tell that the phone is Google's, with Samsung only having provided the hardware.
This means that your device will get updates much earlier than operator-controlled phones
That's what I'm still not sure about the Xoom or any of the other tablets. If you have to depend on Motorola for the Xoom updates, then it's already dead in the water (for me).
The way you know if something is a "Google experience device" is if it has a Google logo on it somewhere.
True, the Google logo means that it's a "Google experience device", but that doesn't mean what you think it means. The logo only means that you're getting the stock system (UI, apps, etc.), but it does not guarantee that you'll get updates on time (or at all), because you're dependent on the manufacturer for the updates.
Xoom does that, and has both advantages above. It's also effectively the reference device for Honeycomb
Reference device != supported by Google. As I said, there are rumours of a "Nexus tablet", and that's the one I'm waiting for.
I have one and I'm really happy with it. I did have to unlock the bootloader in order to reset the colour temperature change Google did with Android 2.3.3. The unlock was incredibly easy, and official (you get the intructions on how to do it when you try to flash the bootloader, and it's still locked).
From now on I'm sticking to the Nexus devices, until the vendors stop playing the cat-and-mouse lock games.
I'm now looking into getting an Android tablet. Rumours are that there will be a Nexus tablet, so I'll just wait for that one (no rush anyway, the tablets are still too expensive for my taste).
Doesn't replacing a working car waste more energy than just keeping it? There's of course a crossover point, but trying to "save the environment" by forcing everyone to buy new cars seems like a flawed policy.
It's not forcing your to buy anything. You can park outside the city and take the bus. If it becomes a problem, you might be able to make changes to your existing car to reduce your rating (I'm not an expert in cars, I have no idea if that's even possible).
What are you going to do if YOUR car is in the "red" category, but your job is in the city? You'd be screwed if you don't have enough spare cash sitting around.
I was talking about Germany. Public transportation inside cities is absolutely wonderful. Or take a bike with you on your car, there are bike paths everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
There are no "jam-causing people", there are only "jam-reducing people", i.e., the GP.
That's to say, they are the exception.
The mechanism which causes the "waves" is a direct result of normal human driving. The only way you'll get rid of a jam by letting others pass you, is if you wait long enough that the jam disappears on its own.
It's useless. One driver alone can't make a difference in the "wave" and there aren't enough "clued-in" drivers to get the critical mass needed.
Even if there were enough drivers to break the wave on a given section of the road, how long do you think it'd take for the guys on the back to restart it? At a given concentration of cars on a stretch of road, the waves are self-forming and inevitable.
In the end, all you're doing is making the people behind you go even slower because the guys on the other lane see the empty space in front of your car and move in front of you.
That's why people get pissed off at you. It's not that they don't understand (some of us do), it's just that you're letting everyone else on the other lane get in front of us for no actual benefit.
Of course he would've. Why use two o's when you can get the same sound from only one?
Minimalism, baby, that's so SJ.
Strange, I'm outside the US and I managed to get one here without jumping borders.
Also, they aren't more expensive, you just have to pay the full price up front (which I prefer anyways). In fact, if you bother to make some calculations, buying up front can actually save you quite a bit of money.
Besides, I think some carriers in Europe offer the Nexus S with a contract.
Granted, even if it wasn't possible to get a Nexus phone where you live, there were other "sort-of-open" possibilities, namely the HTC devices at the time, which were easy to root and had a strong community of developers creating open roms for it.
But this guy went out and got the phone which had the most draconian block in the market, and it's not like that information was secret -- it was all over the geek news.
Now he's complaining that he has a locked bootloader. Well, cry me a river.
My first experience with Linux was Mandrake, and I ran into dependency issues pretty quickly without knowing how to fix them. I hopped around a bit - even trying Gentoo stage 1
It's funny that you didn't have the technical expertise to fix dependency problems on Mandrake and went on to try Gentoo instead. :-)
I did the same, except with Red Hat instead of Madrake. That didn't last long (two days -- the time it took to compile Gentoo's UI and realize actually using it was going to be a battle)
I also ended up on Ubuntu, and fell in love with APT.
This Unity deal might make me change distros, but if it happens, I'm pretty sure it'll be to another APT-based one.
Considering I bought it... oh, over a year ago when it was released, you contradict yourself.
When you bought the Droid X the Nexus One was already available. It might have been possible that the Nexus S was already rumoured (can't remember, or bother to check).
Besides, it was already known that it was coming with a locked bootloader. Hell you bought the device with the most draconian bootloader lock at the time, and now you're complaining.
Besides, We were promised it would be an unlockable bootloader!
Did you read your link? End of 2011. I don't know how you could've missed it, it's in the title!
(It's now early/middle 2011, you do know that, right?)
I have every damn right to be mad.
No you don't. I remember clearly the issue with the locked bootloader being all over the web before the device even hit the stores. At the time it was clear for anyone who spent more than 2 minutes researching that if you wanted an open device you'd either have to go with the Nexus One, or one of the popular HTC devices which somehow had a community of hackers around them.
BTW, if Google had a clue how to sell a phone through popular carrier channels to begin with instead of their stupid web-store experiment, I would have gotten one.
Ah, so now it's Google's fault... *eyeroll*
Face it, you made a bad decision one year ago, either because you didn't bother to inform yourself properly, or because you liked so much that particular phone that you thought it outweighed its faults.
Now you regret that decision, but can't face the fact that it's all on your shoulders. It is your prerogative to be an informed consumer -- it helps you and it helps everyone else.
Anyway, this isn't about you. You could be stuck with a 1995 Nokia for all I care. What pisses me off is that you basically validated Motorola's anti-consumer strategies and then come whining when they bite you in the ass.
And yes, it's clear to anyone that you're whining, and insulting me won't help your case.
Really? I haven't seen Google support a phone for more than 1.5 years to date. Right now they have issued three phones under their brand:
The original devices Google was selling were developer devices: they weren't targeted at consumers, so I don't think they carried the same support expectations. Oh, and by the way, there were two of them, which makes for a total of four Google phones to date.
In any case, the hardware in those devices wouldn't have been able to run Android 2.x in any usable manner. Believe me, my first Android phone had pretty similar hardware to those developer devices and I tried Android 2.2 on it. Unusable.
That isn't exactly a stellar history. Granted, the N1 and NS may still get more updates in the future (or they may not - there are no promises, and Google seems to just stop updating phones and not really announce any kind of official EOL policy). Also - I couldn't find an official firmware release history / changelog for any of these phones so it is possible I missed some kind of a minor update. Corrections are welcome.
I agree that it's too early to tell whether the Nexus devices will be properly supported, but it's not really fair to bunch the Nexus phones together with the earlier developer devices.
At least they've been doing a good job updating both Nexus up to now. Google specifically promised timely updates for those devices and with them being the main force behind Android, I expect them to make good on it.
In any case, even if support is dropped, the phone is completely unlocked, so at least it won't be immediately EOL'd.
You let me know which manufacturers are regularly pushing updates out to phones, and I'll give you a cookie, lol.
Any of the Nexus devices. Do I get a cookie now?
I don't blame android, but I sure as hell won't ever buy Motorola again.
Actually I blame you and everyone who I see complaining on forums. It was an acceptable thing to feel betrayed by the manufacturer one or two years ago when Android devices first started coming out and the promises of openness weren't fulfilled, but nowadays you'd really have to make almost no research before buying your smartphone in order to not know the situation with the updates.
If everyone who complains on the internet had instead made that research and gotten a Nexus device, they'd be selling like hotcakes, and a clear message would've already been sent to the manufacturers that people want open devices.
But as it stands, people who value openness only have one real choice, and we still have to put up with the whiners every time an Android story pops up.
I don't know about Symbian (or whatever OS you had running in your Nokia), but Android, and I believe iOS has an option to disable the data connection as soon as the phone begins roaming.
That checkbox is checked by default In Android, and if you try to uncheck it, a dialog box pops up explaining that you risk very high data rates while roaming.
While I agree with you on principle, I think in practice these types of programs bring a lot of grief.
I once visited the house of a friend who was having trouble connecting to the internet. Turned out ZoneAlarm (or a similar program) popped up a dialog asking if he wanted to block Windows networking (not by that name, but the library which controls it) and he said yes.
Of course there are ways around that. For example, the firewall program should've had networking whitelisted, but even then people will try and block all kinds of stuff and then complain it isn't working.
Because then you refuse to run when you can't connect to the network
Yes, but then the user at least has the chance to get suspicious. "Why does this solitaire game require network so badly that it won't even let me play a game?"
What you really need is to fake access to a very slow network connection, one that corrupts data too
That would result in the same problem. The rogue app would simply fail if it couldn't communicate properly with its server.
For all solutions you can think off, there will be a check which will be possible to make from within the app.
I think the best way to do ensure security is to do it like old J2ME did it: every time an app needs to do something which is considered privileged, a message pops up to the user asking if he allows it, with a checkbox to allow it permanently for that app.
Of course that's not foolproof, but it'd go a long way towards securing your smartphone.
Yes, that one. I find it confusing, and it's difficult to get a complete listing of your installed apps.
I can't test it anymore because I switched to standard Gnome, but it always took me a few clicks and a bit of hunting around to find the apps I was looking for (specifically, configuration).
Perhaps I missed something obvious, but my feeling was that Unity is confusing and not ready for general usage.
It's too bad, too. I like Gnome 2, but it's not perfect, and I don't really care for KDE. I was really (and I still am) hoping for a fresh take on the PC desktop, but I don't think this is there.
Exactly. I upgraded yesterday, and after a few hours of "giving it a fair chance" I just had to go back to Gnome.
Gnome may not be ideal, but Unity just feels unfinished. Who the hell thought it was a good idea not to have a decent easily accessible menu with all your applications?
I'm hoping that before the next version comes out, a "Gnome spin" will have been created. Unfortunately Gnome seems to be going in the same direction, and I'm not very fond of KDE.
No, you can't, for the simple reason that they don't have access to the source code.
No amount of integration is going to fix the fact that flash sucks.
Besides, in Ubuntu 11.04 I got some "flash not found" errors and had to install the plugin separately. It might be that only Chrome has flash integrated and I'm using Chromium, or maybe the integration isn't working that well, but as far as I know, I'm currently using an external flash plugin.
I'm using the chromium-stable repository, so it should be the latest version.
In Ubuntu, if I load a page in the background with a flash animation on it, I get a weird semi-transparent/screen corruption on the top left corner of whatever page I'm looking at, until I open the tab which contains the flash animation.
Then it all goes back to normal.
I've also had numerous instances of flash crashing every tab in the browser (but not the browser itself). I thought they'd found a way to sandbox the flash plugin, but apparently it's not perfect yet.
This is Chromium, so it might differ from the Google version.
I still love the browser, and you can't really blame the Chrome guys for the buggy POS that is flash, but those bugs are a bit annoying, and they've been there for a while now.
Alternatively (and this was my original belief) I was saying that "I couldn't even get an interview yet Google are happy to fly my to Zurich, I've been working in one of the biggest global agencies for *very* large corporate customers who they're eager to please etc and I'm trusted with tricky projects for them. This is without my experience with Fortune 10 companies and SMEs. Wow, they must have some real rockstars if they won't even give me an hour."
So this is your big test of a team's design qualifications? Send your CV and if they don't get back, that means they suck?
There are a ton of reasons why they didn't want to interview you. Out of the top of my head, maybe they weren't looking for anyone, or maybe they looked at your work and decided that they wanted a different style, or maybe they thought you'd be too expensive for them, or maybe they *gasp* didn't like your work.
I said it before -- in your posts you're coming off as an arrogant designer with sour grapes. I totally understand if this isn't your intention, but that's how it sounds to me. Dropping names and how big companies are flying you around the world isn't helping much, either.
Yeah, sour grapes. It's gotta be (sheesh, didn't see that one coming Einstein).
Well, when you write "I couldn't even get an interview with them" it sounds like you're really saying "if they won't even interview me, then they surely don't know anything about UX design".
The experience on the team there really doesn't seem much to write home about, not when compared to the UX pros I've known and worked with.
How would you know what the team is like if you didn't even get so far as an interview with them?
Look, I've got nothing against you personally, and I'm not defending Unity. So far I've only seen a few screenshots of Unity, and while I'm curious to try it, I don't really know whether I'll like it or not.
I was just taken back by your justification as to why you think Unity's no good.
"They didn't hire me, so they suck"
Seriously?
That's ok, but at least warn the user when the app first starts that he won't be able to use it for anything.
But no, they chose to do that only after you've logged it, configured and activated their shitty one-click service (which can't be done from the app, so you have to go to your browser), and finally attempt to use the damn market.
I'm all for competition in the Android app market, but Amazon's attempt just left me with a bad taste since the very inception. I hope they're able to pick up their game, but I don't hold much hope.
We were having a alcohol-induced macho match to see who could eat one of the small dried chillies on the table.
We didn't know what kind the chillies were, or how strong they would be, so me and 2 more friends took one chilli in our hands and counted to three.
One of the guys wussed out while me and the other ate our chillies. Relatively speaking they weren't that hot, but we're not used to spicy food, so we suffered quite a bit.
In the midst of our struggling the 3rd guy threw his chilli back into the bowl and started laughing calling us idiots. In the midst of his laughter a few tears came out and he decided to clean them with his hand.
The same hand which he'd used to hold the chilli.
Yeah, great idea man. He was still lucky that it wasn't that bad. It only hurt for like an hour :-)
A "Nexus tablet" exists - it's Motorola Xoom
I don't think the Xoom is a "Nexus device".
Granted the Xoom is the first device with Android 3.0, and it was what the Google engineers used to develop and test Honeycomb, but as far as I understand, it's being sold and supported exclusively by Motorola.
A Nexus device is built by a manufacturer, but the support is directly from Google. That means that software updates are coming from G directly.
First, they have stock Google software, not modified by phone manufacturer or operator (Google does include some 3rd party stuff there, such as Facebook and Amazon MP3, but it's part of their "experience").
Not in my Nexus S. There are zero third-party apps in the Nexus S (except for the Google ones, obviously). No Facebook or Twitter or anything.
By the way, the Nexus S has a large Google logo on the back, and a small Samsung logo.
When you turn it on, there's a large Google logo onscreen, and Samsung is nowhere to be seen. That's a very clear tell that the phone is Google's, with Samsung only having provided the hardware.
This means that your device will get updates much earlier than operator-controlled phones
That's what I'm still not sure about the Xoom or any of the other tablets. If you have to depend on Motorola for the Xoom updates, then it's already dead in the water (for me).
The way you know if something is a "Google experience device" is if it has a Google logo on it somewhere.
True, the Google logo means that it's a "Google experience device", but that doesn't mean what you think it means.
The logo only means that you're getting the stock system (UI, apps, etc.), but it does not guarantee that you'll get updates on time (or at all), because you're dependent on the manufacturer for the updates.
Xoom does that, and has both advantages above. It's also effectively the reference device for Honeycomb
Reference device != supported by Google.
As I said, there are rumours of a "Nexus tablet", and that's the one I'm waiting for.
Have you looked at the Nexus S?
I have one and I'm really happy with it. I did have to unlock the bootloader in order to reset the colour temperature change Google did with Android 2.3.3.
The unlock was incredibly easy, and official (you get the intructions on how to do it when you try to flash the bootloader, and it's still locked).
From now on I'm sticking to the Nexus devices, until the vendors stop playing the cat-and-mouse lock games.
I'm now looking into getting an Android tablet. Rumours are that there will be a Nexus tablet, so I'll just wait for that one (no rush anyway, the tablets are still too expensive for my taste).
Man, you couldn't be more right.
Unfortunately the anti-nuclear lobby is milking the Fukushima problems for all they're worth, and it seems to be working quite well for them.
Oh well, another chance for China, Brazil and the other more practical nations to catch up.
I've been to China, and people do live there, so, no.
Perhaps you meant "away from *our* people" which wasn't what I said.
Doesn't replacing a working car waste more energy than just keeping it? There's of course a crossover point, but trying to "save the environment" by forcing everyone to buy new cars seems like a flawed policy.
It's not forcing your to buy anything. You can park outside the city and take the bus. If it becomes a problem, you might be able to make changes to your existing car to reduce your rating (I'm not an expert in cars, I have no idea if that's even possible).
What are you going to do if YOUR car is in the "red" category, but your job is in the city?
You'd be screwed if you don't have enough spare cash sitting around.
I was talking about Germany. Public transportation inside cities is absolutely wonderful.
Or take a bike with you on your car, there are bike paths everywhere.