How could it be an interstellar probe? The nearest star is over 4 light years away. Are they suggesting some civilization managed to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light? Laws of physics suggests "no". You haven't "seen anything like it before" because we have barely "seen" anything.
Wait, why do you think it is hard to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light? Even a constant acceleration of just 1g would get you to relativistic speeds during interstellar travel. In fact, if we put a significant part of our money/resources on it, the tech to visit a star 4ly away at a reasonable time-frame is within reach (e.g. nuclear pulse propulsion). But to actually have a serious chance of finding the right star system, AT THE RIGHT TIME to come upon an alien civilization would probably require us to visit at least a few hundred thousand stars (still nothing compared to just our own galaxy), so that would take pretty much "forever" (in human time scale terms) even at relativistic speeds (well, OK, Von Neumann probes would be faster, but still...). And this object wasn't even fast (0.008%c or something like that). There don't have to be aliens to explain interstellar objects just because we don't get to see them all the time. Just a rock passing by...
Of course it could always be a moon with an alien starbase propelled by a nuclear storage accident...
I doubt App Annie's numbers. Sure they have quite a few developers who have given them access to their data and so they have a basis to extrapolate, but even if their methods are not bad, at least the download numbers don't mean much. For example, I have a (not bad performing) free & no ads astronomy weather app on the Apple store and it normally gets really miserable download numbers in China (about 1-2 downloads a day), which could be attributed to it not having been translated to Chinese. However, at random days I will suddenly get download spikes. Usually it is something like 70 downloads in a day, with the previous and next day still at the usual 1-2. Last year, there was a spike of 4000 downloads in a single day! And I know it is not legitimate, because I did not see any spike in server access, it was like phantom downloads. I wrote to apple asking to remove the spike since it was bogus and completely screwed up my statistics, but of course they claimed installs cannot be faked, they were legitimate even if they led to zero activity. I searched, and found other people reporting similar spikes.
I have a paid app which is for astronomers/astrophotographers, that one gets 0.8% of my total revenue from China. I doubt translating it would get me anywhere close to that 40%, as I get almost 3 times the revenue from Japan and the Japanese are not known to be much better at English...
I am not saying China is not on the rise and on their way to catch up / surpass someday, but these numbers seem a bit suspect.
Solar is ideal for the Greek islands. They have been building wind-power generators on some (e.g. the Cyclades), however the peak energy usage on islands is exactly when the sun is shining hot. The battery requirements should not be that great, especially compared to other scenarios. I've had a solar roof on mainland Greece for several years now, which, at 10kW nominal (Renesola Virtus II hybrid) was predicted to produce 12-13 MWh/year due to its suboptimal E/W orientation, but it is generating over 14 MWh every year, and some islands are even more sunny from that mountainous area. For something geek-cool check out the bottom of this page to see how my solar roof "perceived" a partial solar eclipse;)
Seriously? On $1000 devices that cost them $300 to make? And I assume this is some sort of actual/essential technology, they are not seeking to license gestures or shapes, correct? And from a company that keeps 30% of developer earnings (a bit more, devs also pay currency conversion, I end up with closer 66% of revenue)? Apple never ceases to amaze me with their hypocrisy and audacity.
"the very human need" of seeing the wall behind the TV? The only case I could see this being true is if you somehow had a really ugly TV...? Another solution in search of a problem. We are waiting for rollable/foldable screens on mobile devices*. Give us that. It is nice to have a big screen with you to consume media, but a mobile device that doesn't fit your pocket is no good. Work on that, don't try to hide a perfectly fine TV. Unless the master plan is for buyers of this thing to fund R&D for foldable mobile phones? I'd be fine with that.
*Personally, I'd prefer a slide out full keyboard, which is feasible with current tech (my ancient N900 was doing it great), but it seems I won't be getting that hence I'll have to settle with the foldable screen which has a greater appeal...
When I get them for myself, or someone very close, I get them without OS and usually without an HD/SSD as well, but for others I recommend they get it as a grade A, fully installed system. When I get them without an OS installed they are usually significantly cheaper, but they are not really tested (you can't see problems easily by booting to BIOS) so I've had to get some replaced in the past - too much of a hassle for the kind of scenario we are discussing.
For the last few years, I've been buying refurbished Thinkpads for most of my friends and family. There are refurbishers (even on ebay) that will give you Thinkpad that was £2k - £3k say 3 years ago (top of the line then, with i7, SSD etc) for 1/5th - 1/10th that original price, even at like-new condition. They are the most solidly built laptops (the X220 I have for outdoor telescope usage is fine in frost, under rain etc) and their only disadvantage is the lack for discreet graphic cards, so I recommend them for everyone but gamers.
As long as AMD has a hard time competing, NVIDIA can sell their stuff at a premium and introduce "midrange" cards at non-midrange prices. Hopefully the next AMD generation will be a significant upgrade (especially at performance/watt where they are lagging the most).
This makes no sense, was this a phone call? If yes, what would linked in have to do with it, I mean, surely, you are not supposed to put your phone number up on Linked-in, why would you? When I switched my Linked in profile to job seeker I got contacted by a few recruiters, several of which were actually relevant and I found my new job in about a week. I'd say it is quite relevant in my field (software engineer), as companies prefer to use recruiters and recruiters prefer to use linked in. I don't do anything else with linked in, it is just like an online resume repository which recruiters use.
It is not astronomers, but media that do that. Even amateur astronomers like myself only use the term with some sort of quotes as it feels a bit cringy... For example check my (not bad if I may say so) "Supermoon" HD timelapse, where I have added the search terms "supermoon" and "blood moon" since that is what people use due to media, although a big chunk of eclipses are "supermoons" and it doesn't really make a big difference, while "blood moon" is also a cringy term as far as astronomers are concerned, but it describes a nice eclipse where the moon stays a deep red.
That said, if you get a deep red eclipsed moon, the best way to appreciate it is through binoculars.
Even my quite niche polar alignment app for astronomers/astrophotographers had a 50% increase in sales from Dec 23 to Jan 1. I guess people had time to take out telescopes and mess with their phones?
As I said in a recent thread, Apple slowing down their sales by taking away inexpensive options (iPhone SE - which BTW was also ideal for people who wanted a smaller device) and increasing prices to ridiculous levels is very short sighted as the app store revenue (which depends on market share) is their second largest source of income. Already it seems that their market share has dropped from 14-17% to about 11% (reports vary, that seems to be the reported average), which means they have started leaving significant app store money on the table. And as freemium etc games have shown, it is not that someone who avoids big lump sums (e.g. only $350 for a phone - IIRC the iPhone SE price) will not spend a whole lot in app store microtransactions...
This is not the first time utorrent has "adopted" crypto-coin tech. They are known to bundle Litecoin miners with their torrent client and install it covertly, something that has forced most self-respecting torrent communities to ban utorrent (at least versions after 2.2.1).
Shameless plug here, but if you have an iOS device (sorry, I've never tried android development) you might enjoy Xasteria's weather report for astronomers/astrophotographers, which has no registration, no tracking, no ads. I don't usually promote the service since it is kind of "niche", but maybe there are/. ers into that stuff. Otherwise, the web service 7Timer that it is based on, has non-astronomical predictions as well (based on NOAA data). I am donating the main server for that free service, so it also has no ads or tracking (well it uses a google Map API if you allow your browser to share your location, so Google knows where you are as usual).
Their sales start dropping and they simply start increasing prices to keep increasing profits. Their beyond-reason loyal fanbase enabled that for a while, but this is getting ridiculous, goes against any logic so could not possibly be sustained for long. They have to be careful - I mean their 30% cut on all content makes a big chunk of their revenue (second only to the aforementioned ridiculously marked-up iphones), not offering an affordable way to hook people into that revenue stream will have severe long-term consequences. Other companies would give away hardware at cost for the chance of hooking people into that 30% content revenue deal, but Apple is trying to sell $300 worth of hardware for over $1000 based only on their name and gimmick-level innovations, in the anti-capitalist notion of increasing income simply by increasing prices.
I was getting nervous scrolling down and not seeing it mentioned until the last moment... I've watched it 3 times so far. First by myself - started and couldn't stop. The other two times when I introduced similar-age friends to it (I am 39) and again they had to binge watch it after getting hooked from the first episode and I happily joined them. It is a great stand-alone series, but for anyone who liked the Karate Kid back in the day, there was nothing better on TV this year. They did almost everything right, it paid homage, copied exactly the right amount - nicely twisting some thing along the way, gave new perspective to the old story, while building new stuff. And William Zabka' performance is amazing.
And Mozilla seems to be helping out Chrome as well. I mean, give us a reason to use FF. For me, even though it was slower and buggier, the many unique and really useful extensions were enough value for me to use Firefox as my main browser. They took them away and I was left with no reason to keep it.
And it is sad that not even Microsoft can keep developing a separate technology, even though I've never used Edge personally. I know some people might say "a hidden div should not break your hardware acceleration", but it is another example making it obvious that Google is actively trying to screw other browsers. Even their more "benign" ways of telling you this and that feature on their sites only works with chrome is taking advantage of their dominant market share in ways I am not sure are legal. Well, we've known that for a while now and in general Google is at least as "evil" currently as Microsoft was at its peak and they are shaping the web the way they like (complete with their AMPs and all).
Just to set the record straight. The Nokia N9 was not "too little too late" and Stephen Elop's "burning platform" email was not some rational realization, but rather either the most blatant corporate assassination or greatest corporate blunder. Nokia did have some serious problems because they had 2 competing factions - the established Symbian group and the Maemo/Meego group. The competition was not doing good, especially for the Maemo side (caused many delays), but at least there was finally a plan that did not alienate app developers: Symbian devs could switch to QT apps, a framework also good for Maemo/Meego. When Stephen Elop took over, the first consumer Maemo/Meego phone was being prepared (its Maemo predecessor - the N900 was great for devs, pro users etc but not really a consumer phone). What he does, is he sends that notorious memo which alienates all loyal Nokia 3rd party app developers (Nokia still had a vibrant ecosystem) and then he buries Maemo/Meego by declaring a switch to Windoes Mobile. The reasoning he gave for switching away from Meego was that they would only be able to release one new Meego phone per year with the existing strategy, and he claimed that was not viable. Apart from doubting the fact they would not be able to develop more phones, I would like to ask the audience whether they know of another major company that would only release one smartphone per year (at least until recently) and how is that company doing currently? Elop's problem with his "plan" however was that the N9 with Meego was AMAZING. And since they were already ready for production he had to allow for an initial small run. What he did though, was make sure they were sold only in very minor (even 3rd world where possible) markets. Mine was an import from Romania. I gave it to my non-techie wife to play around with it. She said "wow, compared to your iPhone 4, this looks like it came from 2025". Not being VM based like Android, it was as fluid as the iPhone, but without the imposed limitations of iOS you could do anything on it. For geeks, apart from the native apps you also had a full linux machine, but for non-Geeks the OS interface was where it excelled - I don't like buttonless normally, but the N9 "swipe" interface was the right way to implement it, with very fast and easy switching between apps etc. Due to the very limited availability it got very few reviews in major press - but whoever reviewed it was very impressed. I had both an iOS, and Android and Meego at the time and the latter was clearly superior - if Nokia dedicated to it we would probably be enjoying much better smartphones right now. I know the saying "do not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity", but it does seem more likely that Elop went from Microsoft to Nokia with the plan to make it worthless so that Microsoft can buy it to do their Windows Mobile experiment, with himself returning victoriously. That's the only explanation for both not producing the N9 in quantity, and also doing that memo that burned bridges (alienating the most important people - developers) before there was any alternative. Anyway, I do hope Sailfish makes it, although I have not tried it so I don't know if the interface is as good as the N9 was with its "swipe" interface. But I consider both iOS and Android flawed for different reasons (I currently prefer Android on a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2) and hope we'll get another option at some point. And I don't mean how you can theoretically get a Sailfish phone now by jumping some hoops, but being able to actually get a flagship phone with the OS installed.
The Amiga is the best computer ever made, and I doubt anything else in the future will have such a massive leap forward from what's around at the time.
I am pretty sure just 2 years after the introduction of the Amiga, the 1987 Acorn Archimedes was already a more massive leap forward (4+ MIPS at 32bit for just £800). Sure, the Amiga was a leap in multimedia hardware when it came out and it is a shame it didn't come out with matching software and in the end didn't catch on more, but Amiga fans are very, very far off the mark with statements like "best computer ever made" etc...
I think the hardware is less of a problem than software / media. I tried the Oculus once. First thing they showed me was Google Earth. The fact that you got low quality textures that would then be visibly replaced by higher quality ones destroyed the experience for me. Then I was shown a game which seemed boring and with unimpressive graphics. I thought VR is not for me. Then I bought a $15 Xiaomi VR headset for my phone for taking cardboard photos since that seemed like a cool application - and indeed it is. With this dirt cheap device I finally came across awe inspiring VR content: the app Within, with my favorite content being the Muse Revolt VR video. Amazing. I guess it would look even better something more serious, but watching it I didn't really feel it was lacking, I was really enjoying it. And other people who try it are similarly impressed. So I'd say the content is the most important thing. And I don't just mean games.
Another example to show that apart from more talked about things like global climate change etc, the spam-prone email system is one of the great scourges of our time. I know every time this came up here people could not propose anything without getting that pre-compiled response that detailed everything that won't work, but surely the current situation can be abated. For example, we have things like SPF/DKIM which seem to help when used. How about starting a black list of mail servers that ignore them, to force them to change their policy? That's what I sort of do for one of my domains which has a catch all - spammers use it to randomly generate email addresses. I have SPF/DKIM so normally an email provider can easily see they are spam and not even process them. Instead, they try to deliver them find out a shitload of them are trying random inexistent addresses and send ME a failed delivery message (over 1000/day), even though it should be obvious I did not send them in the first place. But, it's just a couple of dozen mail servers (mostly Russian) that do that in my case, so these emails don't even make it to my spam folder nowadays.
Oh, and before I get "yeah, but at least they are trying what are YOU doing you sofa critic" I am not saying that they should not be trying, but at this point I think this particular approach this company is pursuing is giving very little ROI (investment in time and money), so they are probably not doing the right approach.
Am I the only one to find this quite unexciting? And I am not just talking about a 20km difference. I mean, we are essentially talking about something that an aircraft from 1959 could do (nobody called it a spacecraft), without even having to be released from a significant height - and it's been in development for over a decade. And we can't even compare it to other private "space" ventures because as we know the hard part about getting into earth orbit which is what the others are doing is not the height, but the speed (required for the orbit), which is at least a magnitude higher than this Virgin craft does, hence so much harder. I could see how an "edge of space" ride could be interesting tech, but it would have been "inspiring" if it had been delivered in the 00's. A 60 second powered flight in 2018 somehow seems "meh" to me. The "80km space" thing is just adding some insult;)
Slashdot Mirror
How could it be an interstellar probe? The nearest star is over 4 light years away. Are they suggesting some civilization managed to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light? Laws of physics suggests "no". You haven't "seen anything like it before" because we have barely "seen" anything.
Wait, why do you think it is hard to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light? Even a constant acceleration of just 1g would get you to relativistic speeds during interstellar travel. In fact, if we put a significant part of our money/resources on it, the tech to visit a star 4ly away at a reasonable time-frame is within reach (e.g. nuclear pulse propulsion). But to actually have a serious chance of finding the right star system, AT THE RIGHT TIME to come upon an alien civilization would probably require us to visit at least a few hundred thousand stars (still nothing compared to just our own galaxy), so that would take pretty much "forever" (in human time scale terms) even at relativistic speeds (well, OK, Von Neumann probes would be faster, but still...).
And this object wasn't even fast (0.008%c or something like that). There don't have to be aliens to explain interstellar objects just because we don't get to see them all the time. Just a rock passing by...
Of course it could always be a moon with an alien starbase propelled by a nuclear storage accident...
I doubt App Annie's numbers. Sure they have quite a few developers who have given them access to their data and so they have a basis to extrapolate, but even if their methods are not bad, at least the download numbers don't mean much. For example, I have a (not bad performing) free & no ads astronomy weather app on the Apple store and it normally gets really miserable download numbers in China (about 1-2 downloads a day), which could be attributed to it not having been translated to Chinese. However, at random days I will suddenly get download spikes. Usually it is something like 70 downloads in a day, with the previous and next day still at the usual 1-2. Last year, there was a spike of 4000 downloads in a single day! And I know it is not legitimate, because I did not see any spike in server access, it was like phantom downloads. I wrote to apple asking to remove the spike since it was bogus and completely screwed up my statistics, but of course they claimed installs cannot be faked, they were legitimate even if they led to zero activity. I searched, and found other people reporting similar spikes.
I have a paid app which is for astronomers/astrophotographers, that one gets 0.8% of my total revenue from China. I doubt translating it would get me anywhere close to that 40%, as I get almost 3 times the revenue from Japan and the Japanese are not known to be much better at English...
I am not saying China is not on the rise and on their way to catch up / surpass someday, but these numbers seem a bit suspect.
Solar is ideal for the Greek islands. They have been building wind-power generators on some (e.g. the Cyclades), however the peak energy usage on islands is exactly when the sun is shining hot. The battery requirements should not be that great, especially compared to other scenarios. ;)
I've had a solar roof on mainland Greece for several years now, which, at 10kW nominal (Renesola Virtus II hybrid) was predicted to produce 12-13 MWh/year due to its suboptimal E/W orientation, but it is generating over 14 MWh every year, and some islands are even more sunny from that mountainous area. For something geek-cool check out the bottom of this page to see how my solar roof "perceived" a partial solar eclipse
Seriously? On $1000 devices that cost them $300 to make? And I assume this is some sort of actual/essential technology, they are not seeking to license gestures or shapes, correct? And from a company that keeps 30% of developer earnings (a bit more, devs also pay currency conversion, I end up with closer 66% of revenue)?
Apple never ceases to amaze me with their hypocrisy and audacity.
"the very human need" of seeing the wall behind the TV? The only case I could see this being true is if you somehow had a really ugly TV...?
Another solution in search of a problem.
We are waiting for rollable/foldable screens on mobile devices*. Give us that. It is nice to have a big screen with you to consume media, but a mobile device that doesn't fit your pocket is no good. Work on that, don't try to hide a perfectly fine TV.
Unless the master plan is for buyers of this thing to fund R&D for foldable mobile phones? I'd be fine with that.
*Personally, I'd prefer a slide out full keyboard, which is feasible with current tech (my ancient N900 was doing it great), but it seems I won't be getting that hence I'll have to settle with the foldable screen which has a greater appeal...
When I get them for myself, or someone very close, I get them without OS and usually without an HD/SSD as well, but for others I recommend they get it as a grade A, fully installed system.
When I get them without an OS installed they are usually significantly cheaper, but they are not really tested (you can't see problems easily by booting to BIOS) so I've had to get some replaced in the past - too much of a hassle for the kind of scenario we are discussing.
For the last few years, I've been buying refurbished Thinkpads for most of my friends and family. There are refurbishers (even on ebay) that will give you Thinkpad that was £2k - £3k say 3 years ago (top of the line then, with i7, SSD etc) for 1/5th - 1/10th that original price, even at like-new condition. They are the most solidly built laptops (the X220 I have for outdoor telescope usage is fine in frost, under rain etc) and their only disadvantage is the lack for discreet graphic cards, so I recommend them for everyone but gamers.
As long as AMD has a hard time competing, NVIDIA can sell their stuff at a premium and introduce "midrange" cards at non-midrange prices.
Hopefully the next AMD generation will be a significant upgrade (especially at performance/watt where they are lagging the most).
This makes no sense, was this a phone call? If yes, what would linked in have to do with it, I mean, surely, you are not supposed to put your phone number up on Linked-in, why would you?
When I switched my Linked in profile to job seeker I got contacted by a few recruiters, several of which were actually relevant and I found my new job in about a week. I'd say it is quite relevant in my field (software engineer), as companies prefer to use recruiters and recruiters prefer to use linked in.
I don't do anything else with linked in, it is just like an online resume repository which recruiters use.
It is not astronomers, but media that do that. Even amateur astronomers like myself only use the term with some sort of quotes as it feels a bit cringy... For example check my (not bad if I may say so) "Supermoon" HD timelapse, where I have added the search terms "supermoon" and "blood moon" since that is what people use due to media, although a big chunk of eclipses are "supermoons" and it doesn't really make a big difference, while "blood moon" is also a cringy term as far as astronomers are concerned, but it describes a nice eclipse where the moon stays a deep red.
That said, if you get a deep red eclipsed moon, the best way to appreciate it is through binoculars.
Even my quite niche polar alignment app for astronomers/astrophotographers had a 50% increase in sales from Dec 23 to Jan 1. I guess people had time to take out telescopes and mess with their phones?
As I said in a recent thread, Apple slowing down their sales by taking away inexpensive options (iPhone SE - which BTW was also ideal for people who wanted a smaller device) and increasing prices to ridiculous levels is very short sighted as the app store revenue (which depends on market share) is their second largest source of income. Already it seems that their market share has dropped from 14-17% to about 11% (reports vary, that seems to be the reported average), which means they have started leaving significant app store money on the table. And as freemium etc games have shown, it is not that someone who avoids big lump sums (e.g. only $350 for a phone - IIRC the iPhone SE price) will not spend a whole lot in app store microtransactions...
Unlike slashdot, I actually got coverage for my OS project there years before my name ever appeared on slashdot.
Pro Tip: Not posting as AC would have probably helped...
Slashdot still gets around to publishing most OS news. Albeit a few days late and then on repeat ;)
This is not the first time utorrent has "adopted" crypto-coin tech. They are known to bundle Litecoin miners with their torrent client and install it covertly, something that has forced most self-respecting torrent communities to ban utorrent (at least versions after 2.2.1).
there a plenty of rocks you can photograph right here on this planet!
Some of them even manage to post on /. !
Shameless plug here, but if you have an iOS device (sorry, I've never tried android development) you might enjoy Xasteria's weather report for astronomers/astrophotographers, which has no registration, no tracking, no ads. I don't usually promote the service since it is kind of "niche", but maybe there are /. ers into that stuff. Otherwise, the web service 7Timer that it is based on, has non-astronomical predictions as well (based on NOAA data). I am donating the main server for that free service, so it also has no ads or tracking (well it uses a google Map API if you allow your browser to share your location, so Google knows where you are as usual).
Their sales start dropping and they simply start increasing prices to keep increasing profits. Their beyond-reason loyal fanbase enabled that for a while, but this is getting ridiculous, goes against any logic so could not possibly be sustained for long.
They have to be careful - I mean their 30% cut on all content makes a big chunk of their revenue (second only to the aforementioned ridiculously marked-up iphones), not offering an affordable way to hook people into that revenue stream will have severe long-term consequences. Other companies would give away hardware at cost for the chance of hooking people into that 30% content revenue deal, but Apple is trying to sell $300 worth of hardware for over $1000 based only on their name and gimmick-level innovations, in the anti-capitalist notion of increasing income simply by increasing prices.
I was getting nervous scrolling down and not seeing it mentioned until the last moment...
I've watched it 3 times so far. First by myself - started and couldn't stop. The other two times when I introduced similar-age friends to it (I am 39) and again they had to binge watch it after getting hooked from the first episode and I happily joined them.
It is a great stand-alone series, but for anyone who liked the Karate Kid back in the day, there was nothing better on TV this year. They did almost everything right, it paid homage, copied exactly the right amount - nicely twisting some thing along the way, gave new perspective to the old story, while building new stuff. And William Zabka' performance is amazing.
They are all top notch cameras.
I think their ranking refers to the rear cameras, not the top notch ones. Besides, I hate notches.
And Mozilla seems to be helping out Chrome as well. I mean, give us a reason to use FF. For me, even though it was slower and buggier, the many unique and really useful extensions were enough value for me to use Firefox as my main browser. They took them away and I was left with no reason to keep it.
And it is sad that not even Microsoft can keep developing a separate technology, even though I've never used Edge personally. I know some people might say "a hidden div should not break your hardware acceleration", but it is another example making it obvious that Google is actively trying to screw other browsers. Even their more "benign" ways of telling you this and that feature on their sites only works with chrome is taking advantage of their dominant market share in ways I am not sure are legal. Well, we've known that for a while now and in general Google is at least as "evil" currently as Microsoft was at its peak and they are shaping the web the way they like (complete with their AMPs and all).
Just to set the record straight. The Nokia N9 was not "too little too late" and Stephen Elop's "burning platform" email was not some rational realization, but rather either the most blatant corporate assassination or greatest corporate blunder.
Nokia did have some serious problems because they had 2 competing factions - the established Symbian group and the Maemo/Meego group. The competition was not doing good, especially for the Maemo side (caused many delays), but at least there was finally a plan that did not alienate app developers: Symbian devs could switch to QT apps, a framework also good for Maemo/Meego.
When Stephen Elop took over, the first consumer Maemo/Meego phone was being prepared (its Maemo predecessor - the N900 was great for devs, pro users etc but not really a consumer phone). What he does, is he sends that notorious memo which alienates all loyal Nokia 3rd party app developers (Nokia still had a vibrant ecosystem) and then he buries Maemo/Meego by declaring a switch to Windoes Mobile. The reasoning he gave for switching away from Meego was that they would only be able to release one new Meego phone per year with the existing strategy, and he claimed that was not viable. Apart from doubting the fact they would not be able to develop more phones, I would like to ask the audience whether they know of another major company that would only release one smartphone per year (at least until recently) and how is that company doing currently?
Elop's problem with his "plan" however was that the N9 with Meego was AMAZING. And since they were already ready for production he had to allow for an initial small run. What he did though, was make sure they were sold only in very minor (even 3rd world where possible) markets. Mine was an import from Romania. I gave it to my non-techie wife to play around with it. She said "wow, compared to your iPhone 4, this looks like it came from 2025". Not being VM based like Android, it was as fluid as the iPhone, but without the imposed limitations of iOS you could do anything on it. For geeks, apart from the native apps you also had a full linux machine, but for non-Geeks the OS interface was where it excelled - I don't like buttonless normally, but the N9 "swipe" interface was the right way to implement it, with very fast and easy switching between apps etc. Due to the very limited availability it got very few reviews in major press - but whoever reviewed it was very impressed.
I had both an iOS, and Android and Meego at the time and the latter was clearly superior - if Nokia dedicated to it we would probably be enjoying much better smartphones right now. I know the saying "do not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity", but it does seem more likely that Elop went from Microsoft to Nokia with the plan to make it worthless so that Microsoft can buy it to do their Windows Mobile experiment, with himself returning victoriously. That's the only explanation for both not producing the N9 in quantity, and also doing that memo that burned bridges (alienating the most important people - developers) before there was any alternative.
Anyway, I do hope Sailfish makes it, although I have not tried it so I don't know if the interface is as good as the N9 was with its "swipe" interface. But I consider both iOS and Android flawed for different reasons (I currently prefer Android on a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2) and hope we'll get another option at some point. And I don't mean how you can theoretically get a Sailfish phone now by jumping some hoops, but being able to actually get a flagship phone with the OS installed.
The Amiga is the best computer ever made, and I doubt anything else in the future will have such a massive leap forward from what's around at the time.
I am pretty sure just 2 years after the introduction of the Amiga, the 1987 Acorn Archimedes was already a more massive leap forward (4+ MIPS at 32bit for just £800).
Sure, the Amiga was a leap in multimedia hardware when it came out and it is a shame it didn't come out with matching software and in the end didn't catch on more, but Amiga fans are very, very far off the mark with statements like "best computer ever made" etc...
I think the hardware is less of a problem than software / media. I tried the Oculus once. First thing they showed me was Google Earth. The fact that you got low quality textures that would then be visibly replaced by higher quality ones destroyed the experience for me. Then I was shown a game which seemed boring and with unimpressive graphics. I thought VR is not for me.
Then I bought a $15 Xiaomi VR headset for my phone for taking cardboard photos since that seemed like a cool application - and indeed it is. With this dirt cheap device I finally came across awe inspiring VR content: the app Within, with my favorite content being the Muse Revolt VR video. Amazing. I guess it would look even better something more serious, but watching it I didn't really feel it was lacking, I was really enjoying it. And other people who try it are similarly impressed.
So I'd say the content is the most important thing. And I don't just mean games.
Another example to show that apart from more talked about things like global climate change etc, the spam-prone email system is one of the great scourges of our time. I know every time this came up here people could not propose anything without getting that pre-compiled response that detailed everything that won't work, but surely the current situation can be abated.
For example, we have things like SPF/DKIM which seem to help when used. How about starting a black list of mail servers that ignore them, to force them to change their policy? That's what I sort of do for one of my domains which has a catch all - spammers use it to randomly generate email addresses. I have SPF/DKIM so normally an email provider can easily see they are spam and not even process them. Instead, they try to deliver them find out a shitload of them are trying random inexistent addresses and send ME a failed delivery message (over 1000/day), even though it should be obvious I did not send them in the first place. But, it's just a couple of dozen mail servers (mostly Russian) that do that in my case, so these emails don't even make it to my spam folder nowadays.
Oh, and before I get "yeah, but at least they are trying what are YOU doing you sofa critic" I am not saying that they should not be trying, but at this point I think this particular approach this company is pursuing is giving very little ROI (investment in time and money), so they are probably not doing the right approach.
Am I the only one to find this quite unexciting? And I am not just talking about a 20km difference. I mean, we are essentially talking about something that an aircraft from 1959 could do (nobody called it a spacecraft), without even having to be released from a significant height - and it's been in development for over a decade. And we can't even compare it to other private "space" ventures because as we know the hard part about getting into earth orbit which is what the others are doing is not the height, but the speed (required for the orbit), which is at least a magnitude higher than this Virgin craft does, hence so much harder. ;)
I could see how an "edge of space" ride could be interesting tech, but it would have been "inspiring" if it had been delivered in the 00's. A 60 second powered flight in 2018 somehow seems "meh" to me. The "80km space" thing is just adding some insult