Symbian solved this problem about ten years ago. You can load as many 3rd party apps as memory will permit without any artificial restrictions. But oh yeah, it's 'obsolete'.
I recently played these 2 games and thoroughly enjoyed them. What surprised me was the level of gruesome carnage and foul language during gameplay. Even though it's an isometric view game with what appear to be handpainted backgrounds, there are cases where you score a critical hit on an opponent and their body gets shredded to pieces. And some of the thugs swear liberally (even if it's just text on the screen). Fortunately, this seems to have slipped under the radar of the mainstream media, even though both games came at the same time as Postal.
Buy an unlocked phone - the main reason Nokia hasn't succeeded in the US is that carriers have you all by the balls and no one does anything about it. Not a problem in the rest of the world.
Nokia's recent sepukku makes me sick to the core. Instead of continuing with the transition from Symbian to Meego, they gutted any sort of developer support for it by announcing the switch to WP7. For all the ignorant naysayers who called Symbian 'obsolete', it was just that it doesn't have a pretty UI. Jailbreaking was an alien concept on Symbian and Nokia - you never needed to worry about root access or anything because your phone was truly yours to install whatever you want.Name a jailbreak requiring feature on its American rivals and Symbian has had it unrestricted for 5 years and counting.
And to get rid of all that in favor of a half assed WP7...what the hell were they smoking? Was Nokia on the verge of bankruptcy, with Symbian sales plummeting? No,it was making money and would've had a good year or two more in the rest of the world, and a Symbian-Meego ecosystem was coming up. Ovi Store had about 4 million downloads a day and rising, Qt based apps were starting to show up. All of that is killed now, no developer would want to touch Symbian/Qt/Meego with a bargepole after this announcement.
They're not bankrupting themselves or starving in order to donate food/money, while giving them jobs necessarily entails the prospect of losing ones' own.
“Install” the astronomy app Planetarium, for example, and your browser is merely redirected to the Planetarium website. You can copy that URL and paste it into Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari and you get exactly the same experience. Google’s idea of “apps” are what we quaintly referred to in the good old days as “bookmarks”.
And at the end of the article:
Yes, Google does offer the opportunity to create “packaged apps”, with content that can be run when the browser’s offline, but trying to pass off bookmarks as “apps” is a little too close to snake oil for my liking.
He very clearly makes a distinction between offline web applications and bookmarks. I know this is Slashdot, but if you're going to RTFA, at least read the entire thing before commenting!
You're wrong. S40 is not Symbian, S60 is. Symbian is and always was a smartphone OS, with multitasking and power management (to name only 2 capabilities) from day one. S40 is a limited and stripped down dumbphone OS with Java support and no multitasking or native apps. So where Nokia is concerned, smartphone sales = Symbian OS sales.
Oh yes, they should just ditch a rock solid stable OS, the whole Meego and Qt effort, and join the bandwagon of dozens of manufacturers struggling to differentiate their offerings, while Google gets to decide strategy and features for the OS. Perfectly sane.
As for the iPods, remember very few MP3 players (or consumer electronic gadgets) are essentially open. You can't exactly customize them with your own apps, UI, etc.. It played MP3s (which isn''t really open as a standard) and AAC. The proprietary format Fairplay (AAC with DRM) was only if you bought iTunes music. This was exactly the same as WindowsPlayForSure model. Apple just made the MP3 player accessible to the masses
But they hobbled it with a proprietary cable where others used mini or microUSB, and insist on installing iTunes for connectivity, while others easily attach in USB mass storage mode and hence can work on any USB supported operating system (all of them). With any other MP3 player, you borrow a USB cable, attach it and transfer songs, and sharing them with others is also a no brainer. This hasn't affected their sales, but it ties in with Lo's argument about their doing things the proprietary way.
Something in my gut tells me without Jobs kick starting this market the way he did we would have been stuck with programs that wouldn't of even loaded, some nasty monochrome screen and a brutal 16MHz chip powering the whole thing.
Ahem. Ever hear of a little company called Nokia?
The N95 launched a year before the first iPhone, whose 4th iteration is still yet to catch up to its capabilities. And it's wouldn't have not wouldn't of. Then again, America was staring at the Moto RAZR for the 4 years before the iPhone with dribble leaking out of the side of its chin, so that might explain your 'gut feel'.
I know about the spat between the 2 companies, but this sounds highly farfetched. The patent lawsuit is to do with Apple infringing Nokia's GSM patents and Nokia infringing Apple's UI patents; video playback and codecs have nothing to do with it. Like I said, both platforms have sufficient support and alternatives in place already. At any rate, the current issue is over GPL vs. Apple's license incompatibility, that's all.
What has his working at Nokia got to do with anything, and where does Nokia fit into an Apple vs. VLC debate? There's no Symbian port of VLC, the latest Symbian OS natively supports a host of video codecs/formats and there are plenty of other 3rd party video players available for Symbian. So what exactly is the connection?
I've used Nokias exclusively for the last 6 years. S60 2nd edition allowed you to install any apps from anywhere, and there were quite a few trojans and other apps written for it, around 2004-05. S60 3rd edition made it harder to do so by requiring all apps to be signed by Symbian, and earlier they only gave out certificates to companies rather than individuals. Nevertheless, there were (are) ways to self sign an install package (a.SIS file) and then install it. Even then - the phone warns you that the application is not signed, so there's no way anything can silently install itself without user intervention. The second most common vector for exploits is the browser. No matter what short sighted US tech blogs may say - Symbian is the world's most widely used OS, with over 2 billion devices sold to date. How come we haven't yet seen a browser based exploit for the internal Webkit browser? A google search for 'Symbian 3rd edition malware' shows up hardly one or two examples - and reading the descriptions, they rely on social engineering to fool the user into getting installed.
The same rules apply as on desktop OSes - namely not to open/install unknown applications etc. What would be worrisome would be a browser exploit, where just visiting a link can compromise your phone, or some sort of silently installed malware. The former has yet to be proved and the latter can only happen through (all too common) user stupidity, so this leads me to conclude that Symbian at least is safe for the present. Also bear in mind that Nokia pushes out firmware updates much more regularly than other phone manufacturers; even upto 2 years after launch (the 5800 Xpressmusic is a case in point), so you can expect security fixes, if found, to be available faster. Sucks to be in the US with a carrier subsidized handset though.
You mean TCP/IP based multiplayer. You don't need an internet for that, even a local LAN will do. Quake/Unreal Tournament/Half Life/Counterstrike LAN parties were big in college back in the day. And since these games could be started in server mode, you could also look for one of the hundreds of independent hosted servers on the net if no one else was around. One of my classmates left a permanently running UT server on his high specced desktop, so that anyone on the college network could login and play.
The real reason is that each player requires their own copy of the game (as well as a console and subscription fee if it's a non PC game)
The advantage that consoles have over, say, PCs, is that you can play from your comfy sofa. The reason the sofa is considered the pinnacle of furniture technology is because there's room for other people on it.
Yet, here's Grand Theft Auto IV, boasting about its robust multiplayer, and if you think "multiplayer" means inviting the gang over to play, get drunk, laugh and high-five each other until the break of dawn, too bad. You can't do that. Want to play with friends, they must be kept at arm's length, faceless at the other end of a broadband connection. Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer is a world without hugs.
A little further down, the reason:
Sorry, you know damned well that technical limitations aren't the reason everyone is dropping split screen. Every previous generation had it, in times with much less powerful systems and few widescreen TVs. You're dropping it because four players on a split screen are playing off one $60 copy of the game. Four players playing online need four copies ($240).
For an extreme example of ineffectiveness, just look at Saudi Arabia/Iran, which impose the harshest punishments based on Sharia law. Despite the fact that stealing can get your hands chopped off, or that you can be beheaded for murder, it doesn't exactly kill the crime rate there and you still hear of the odd story of someone being punished for these crimes.
This sounds like the Army@Love comic series that satirizes the Iraq war. Soldiers are issued mobile phones to use in combat because of 'motivation and morale', and one of them coins the term 'joining the Hot Zone club' - which is doing the nasty while under enemy fire.
Windows devices can be managed using Active Directory. I don't know if there's a Mac equivalent way of managing several Macs centrally, but neither of them have this kind of restriction that Android device makers do - of having crap installed in ROM that you can't remove, or being dependent on the manufacturer for updates to outdated versions.
Slashdot Mirror
s/android and iphones/symbian and windows mobile 6.5/g
FTFY.
Symbian solved this problem about ten years ago. You can load as many 3rd party apps as memory will permit without any artificial restrictions. But oh yeah, it's 'obsolete'.
I recently played these 2 games and thoroughly enjoyed them. What surprised me was the level of gruesome carnage and foul language during gameplay. Even though it's an isometric view game with what appear to be handpainted backgrounds, there are cases where you score a critical hit on an opponent and their body gets shredded to pieces. And some of the thugs swear liberally (even if it's just text on the screen). Fortunately, this seems to have slipped under the radar of the mainstream media, even though both games came at the same time as Postal.
Since 2007, they've blocked access to non US listeners, citing license restrictions thanks to the RIAA. Hope this will change now.
N95 - launched 2006, last firmware update 2010. Happy?
N82 - launched 2008, ditto, 2010.
5800 XM - launched 2008, ditto 2010.
Compare with Android where different handset makers have it stuck with different levels of the OS and many are non upgradable.
Buy an unlocked phone - the main reason Nokia hasn't succeeded in the US is that carriers have you all by the balls and no one does anything about it. Not a problem in the rest of the world.
Nokia's recent sepukku makes me sick to the core. Instead of continuing with the transition from Symbian to Meego, they gutted any sort of developer support for it by announcing the switch to WP7.
For all the ignorant naysayers who called Symbian 'obsolete', it was just that it doesn't have a pretty UI. Jailbreaking was an alien concept on Symbian and Nokia - you never needed to worry about root access or anything because your phone was truly yours to install whatever you want.Name a jailbreak requiring feature on its American rivals and Symbian has had it unrestricted for 5 years and counting.
And to get rid of all that in favor of a half assed WP7...what the hell were they smoking? Was Nokia on the verge of bankruptcy, with Symbian sales plummeting? No,it was making money and would've had a good year or two more in the rest of the world, and a Symbian-Meego ecosystem was coming up. Ovi Store had about 4 million downloads a day and rising, Qt based apps were starting to show up. All of that is killed now, no developer would want to touch Symbian/Qt/Meego with a bargepole after this announcement.
They're not bankrupting themselves or starving in order to donate food/money, while giving them jobs necessarily entails the prospect of losing ones' own.
Did you even bother to read further?
“Install” the astronomy app Planetarium, for example, and your browser is merely redirected to the Planetarium website. You can copy that URL and paste it into Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari and you get exactly the same experience. Google’s idea of “apps” are what we quaintly referred to in the good old days as “bookmarks”.
And at the end of the article :
Yes, Google does offer the opportunity to create “packaged apps”, with content that can be run when the browser’s offline, but trying to pass off bookmarks as “apps” is a little too close to snake oil for my liking.
He very clearly makes a distinction between offline web applications and bookmarks. I know this is Slashdot, but if you're going to RTFA, at least read the entire thing before commenting!
You're wrong. S40 is not Symbian, S60 is. Symbian is and always was a smartphone OS, with multitasking and power management (to name only 2 capabilities) from day one. S40 is a limited and stripped down dumbphone OS with Java support and no multitasking or native apps. So where Nokia is concerned, smartphone sales = Symbian OS sales.
Oh yes, they should just ditch a rock solid stable OS, the whole Meego and Qt effort, and join the bandwagon of dozens of manufacturers struggling to differentiate their offerings, while Google gets to decide strategy and features for the OS. Perfectly sane.
As for the iPods, remember very few MP3 players (or consumer electronic gadgets) are essentially open. You can't exactly customize them with your own apps, UI, etc.. It played MP3s (which isn''t really open as a standard) and AAC. The proprietary format Fairplay (AAC with DRM) was only if you bought iTunes music. This was exactly the same as WindowsPlayForSure model. Apple just made the MP3 player accessible to the masses
But they hobbled it with a proprietary cable where others used mini or microUSB, and insist on installing iTunes for connectivity, while others easily attach in USB mass storage mode and hence can work on any USB supported operating system (all of them). With any other MP3 player, you borrow a USB cable, attach it and transfer songs, and sharing them with others is also a no brainer. This hasn't affected their sales, but it ties in with Lo's argument about their doing things the proprietary way.
Something in my gut tells me without Jobs kick starting this market the way he did we would have been stuck with programs that wouldn't of even loaded, some nasty monochrome screen and a brutal 16MHz chip powering the whole thing.
Ahem. Ever hear of a little company called Nokia?
The N95 launched a year before the first iPhone, whose 4th iteration is still yet to catch up to its capabilities. And it's wouldn't have not wouldn't of.
Then again, America was staring at the Moto RAZR for the 4 years before the iPhone with dribble leaking out of the side of its chin, so that might explain your 'gut feel'.
And what if you're asked to ID someone who's put up a cartoon or something other than their face?
I know about the spat between the 2 companies, but this sounds highly farfetched.
The patent lawsuit is to do with Apple infringing Nokia's GSM patents and Nokia infringing Apple's UI patents; video playback and codecs have nothing to do with it. Like I said, both platforms have sufficient support and alternatives in place already.
At any rate, the current issue is over GPL vs. Apple's license incompatibility, that's all.
What has his working at Nokia got to do with anything, and where does Nokia fit into an Apple vs. VLC debate?
There's no Symbian port of VLC, the latest Symbian OS natively supports a host of video codecs/formats and there are plenty of other 3rd party video players available for Symbian. So what exactly is
the connection?
Fring has had video calling support for Symbian/Android for over a year now.
How about a 'Don't Panic' sticker on top?
+1 informative I had forgotten that Mao and Stalin were just a bunch of ideologically based senseless murderer and that they were atheist
Also, both of them had moustaches :)
I've used Nokias exclusively for the last 6 years. S60 2nd edition allowed you to install any apps from anywhere, and there were quite a few trojans and other apps written for it, around 2004-05. .SIS file) and then install it.
S60 3rd edition made it harder to do so by requiring all apps to be signed by Symbian, and earlier they only gave out certificates to companies rather than individuals. Nevertheless, there were (are) ways to self sign an install package (a
Even then - the phone warns you that the application is not signed, so there's no way anything can silently install itself without user intervention.
The second most common vector for exploits is the browser. No matter what short sighted US tech blogs may say - Symbian is the world's most widely used OS, with over 2 billion devices sold to date. How come we haven't yet seen a browser based exploit for the internal Webkit browser?
A google search for 'Symbian 3rd edition malware' shows up hardly one or two examples - and reading the descriptions, they rely on social engineering to fool the user into getting installed.
The same rules apply as on desktop OSes - namely not to open/install unknown applications etc. What would be worrisome would be a browser exploit, where just visiting a link can compromise your phone, or some sort of silently installed malware. The former has yet to be proved and the latter can only happen through (all too common) user stupidity, so this leads me to conclude that Symbian at least is safe for the present.
Also bear in mind that Nokia pushes out firmware updates much more regularly than other phone manufacturers; even upto 2 years after launch (the 5800 Xpressmusic is a case in point), so you can expect security fixes, if found, to be available faster. Sucks to be in the US with a carrier subsidized handset though.
You mean TCP/IP based multiplayer. You don't need an internet for that, even a local LAN will do. Quake/Unreal Tournament/Half Life/Counterstrike LAN parties were big in college back in the day. And since these games could be started in server mode, you could also look for one of the hundreds of independent hosted servers on the net if no one else was around.
One of my classmates left a permanently running UT server on his high specced desktop, so that anyone on the college network could login and play.
The real reason is that each player requires their own copy of the game (as well as a console and subscription fee if it's a non PC game)
No. David Wong said it best:
The advantage that consoles have over, say, PCs, is that you can play from your comfy sofa. The reason the sofa is considered the pinnacle of furniture technology is because there's room for other people on it.
Yet, here's Grand Theft Auto IV, boasting about its robust multiplayer, and if you think "multiplayer" means inviting the gang over to play, get drunk, laugh and high-five each other until the break of dawn, too bad. You can't do that. Want to play with friends, they must be kept at arm's length, faceless at the other end of a broadband connection. Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer is a world without hugs.
A little further down, the reason:
Sorry, you know damned well that technical limitations aren't the reason everyone is dropping split screen. Every previous generation had it, in times with much less powerful systems and few widescreen TVs.
You're dropping it because four players on a split screen are playing off one $60 copy of the game. Four players playing online need four copies ($240).
For an extreme example of ineffectiveness, just look at Saudi Arabia/Iran, which impose the harshest punishments based on Sharia law. Despite the fact that stealing can get your hands chopped off, or that you can be beheaded for murder, it doesn't exactly kill the crime rate there and you still hear of the odd story of someone being punished for these crimes.
This sounds like the Army@Love comic series that satirizes the Iraq war. Soldiers are issued mobile phones to use in combat because of 'motivation and morale', and one of them coins the term 'joining the Hot Zone club' - which is doing the nasty while under enemy fire.
Windows devices can be managed using Active Directory. I don't know if there's a Mac equivalent way of managing several Macs centrally, but neither of them have this kind of restriction that Android device makers do - of having crap installed in ROM that you can't remove, or being dependent on the manufacturer for updates to outdated versions.