Every one of those feature is designed to prevent physical harm to the operator. No one is complaining that iPhones have electronics that prevent the batteries from over charging/discharging and catching fire.
Rooting an Android phone is the equivilent of jailbreaking an iOS phone. There is a more vibrant OS update community for Android than for iOS, but if you have a phone that needs to be rooted, that phone is not more free at the OS level. It is more free at the application level, but not at the OS level.
My Nexus one and Viewsonic gTablet both allowed me to replace the OS without 'rooting' the phone. Viewsonic even put links to XDA on their support page. Android does nothing to prevent you from having root access to your phone. Samsung, HTC, Motorolla, etc. lock the device. Google even help people with the replacement of their OS distribution.
Locking the owner of a device out of their own device is evil. It is evil whether it is Samsung, HTC, Motorolla, or, yes, Apple. Today, I can buy a Android device that allows me to completely replace the OS without breaking any of it's protections. I cannot do that with any iOS device
Yes, quitting your job to go back to school when you know that mom and dad will pay your mortgage if you come up short while you get the new career sorted out, is not the same thing as quitting your job to go back to school when you know that even in a best case scenario, you cannot make your mortgage if you do, so you WILL lose your home. And, if things don't go perfect, you children are going to go hungry.
If it isn't already running in an emulated environment (Java,.net, etc.) then it interacts with the hardware. This makes your statement so watered down that it becomes pointless.
What about if he is logging insurance claims? Or auditing safety training for his company? What if he is entering payroll information, or entering a food order at his restaurant? The idea that only the casual user who does a little browsing and text chatting have machines way over powered for their use is a myth. MOST uses of a computer require vastly lower resources than any CPU that is currently offered. High power machines, while fun, are now a niche.
Add on top of that, the emulation layer does not scale with increases in hardware speed. An emulation layer that would have taken 50% of the CPU resources 10 years ago, now takes 1%. If you swapped out peoples hard drive with an SSD at the same time you inserted the VM layer, most people would rave about the speed increase.
Any argument that could be used to argue against the VM would be equally valid against any of the other abstraction layers that are currently in use. If that last % of speed is that important, you shouldn't be running Windows/Linux/OSX at all. You should have every function in every application written to bang the metal of the hardware you are running on. A VM layer is just a driver for that last few bits of the PC that have not yet been virtualized as drivers. Basically the CPU and BIOS.
Say I've built a platformer for the PC. Its control method depends on left, right, climb, duck, jump, and fire keys. What's the best way to port that to a device with a flat touch screen?
in response to:
games built for desktops do not fare well on a touch-screen device.
You are failing the to comprehend the concept of subsets. All casual games are not platformers. Particularly platformers that rely on keys. Platform games that rely on key presses do not translate to touch screens well. They universally suck. The fact that platform games are generally casual games does not change that fact. That fact that not all casual games are button pressing platformers also does not change that fact.
I would agree. I would go so far as to say that other than a few niche uses, desktop systems are already at the 'performance isn't an issue' level, and mobile devices are only a few years off.
I have an iPhone. Yes. Start up and shut down are unfortuantly still necessary. Besides, we didn't shut the machine down because it HAD to be shut down. We shut it down because there was no good reason to use the electricity when it wasn't in use.
That is just a myth. I have done the 1 year old test. It is like the wife test, but with a one year old. I set up my son with his first computer a couple of months after he turned one. I installed Ubuntu, and gave him 20-25 minutes of instruction on how to use it, then let him go to town on the machine. Within the week, he was a functional user on the system using applications that he found interesting, and that I never showed him existed.
Now, I'm not saying my son isn't brilliant. He is my son after all, but if ANY 1 year old (even one who was bitten by a radioactive brain during a freak lab experiment, giving him superhuman intelligence) can handle running the system with no problem, claims that Linux is too hard are the equivalent of claim that you need to be institutionalized for you own safety.
The reason that the Year of the Linux Desktop is perpetually reset is because people are lazy, short sighted, and prone to mob mentality. People use windows primarily because that is what is pre-installed on 90% of the machines. They are not going to install Linux even if it is better (and that is debatable as of Windows 7) because not only are they lazy and it would take effort, but because they are short sighted in that they don't want to put in a little extra effort now to safe a lot of extra effort later.
Finally, put in the mob mentality, and you find that when they have a problem with Linux, the mob (90% of users) will point out how that is only a problem because they used Linux and that this is why Linux is unsuitable. Whereas if they have a problem on Windows, the mob will point out that 'everyone has this problem', so it is excusable because it is a problem with computers in general.
MS is letting us down by not making the VM the backward compatibility. At this stage of the game, we should be able to run any application all the way back to DOS 1.0 with complete backward compatibility on Windows 7.
It's more like you sang "Happy Birthday" to your kid at his party in a Chuck-E-Cheese. One of his guests learns the song during that illegal public performance, and teaches it to his brother who then proceeds to perform an illegal public performance of the same song at his friends Chuck-E-Cheese birthday party.
That's the nature of the computer industry form the beginning. It has never been about the best tech. It has been an ongoing drama with the players constantly waving guns at the lower half of their body. Until they pull the trigger, it is hard for us to see if they are going to hit their foot, an artery, or blow something off that will prevent them from producing the next generation.
That is "my shade of gray is better than your shade of gray" reasoning. Pick up a first gen iPhone today. It will be painful. Heck, I find iPhone 4s to be painful to use with their crappy keyboard. Yes, phones before the iPhone (first gen) were generally worse than the iPhone. Phones after the iPhone (first gen) were frequently better than the iPhone. Pick any point in time, and you will find the same pattern.
There are two things that would make someone declare the I phone to be the watershed device. 1) It has Apple's label on it. 2) It happened to hit their individual pain point threshold on an ever improving scale. The fact that group 1 was a very vocal group helped the uptake of the iPhone more than anything else.
The accessory market is the place that iPhones seriously kick Android's butt. Most accessories require that you pick which little piece of plastic you put in the cradle, and it is ready to go for any iPhone or iPod Touch. Android has the benefit of choice, but that choice makes accessories less prevelent. This could be fixed with NFC being used to initiate a bluetooth connection. Specify an inductive charger, and the different shapes for Android would become a moot point. Since that hasn't happened yet, Apple wins on the accessories front.
As for which phone to buy? That's easy. Go to your carrier and pick any phone that is priced from the middle up. It will be a great phone. If you want it to be as good or better than an Apple phone, just pick the device with the Nexus name on it.
I would think that the solution to future encryption would be one time pads. One time pads don't work for things like Wifi and credit cards because there is no good out of band way to load them on the client. With a drone, there is all sorts of maintenance that is going to be done at the time of launch. So, at launch time, a sufficiently huge set of one time pads are loaded into the drone, and copied to the control center. Using this method, you could decrypt the signal using a simple XOR, yet still maintain complete security. Even if the enemy gets their hands on one of the drones, there is no data on it to reverse engineer to break the code for any other drone.
As far as I know, there isn't even any known theoretical possibilities for breaking a properly used one time pad.
I have had an Android device for years now, and I can litterly count on no hands, the number of times I _NEEDED_ a smart phone at all. I can't count the number of times that it has made my life easier, or more enjoyable. The same with flash. It has made my life easier or more enjoyable.
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Every one of those feature is designed to prevent physical harm to the operator. No one is complaining that iPhones have electronics that prevent the batteries from over charging/discharging and catching fire.
Rooting an Android phone is the equivilent of jailbreaking an iOS phone. There is a more vibrant OS update community for Android than for iOS, but if you have a phone that needs to be rooted, that phone is not more free at the OS level. It is more free at the application level, but not at the OS level.
My Nexus one and Viewsonic gTablet both allowed me to replace the OS without 'rooting' the phone. Viewsonic even put links to XDA on their support page. Android does nothing to prevent you from having root access to your phone. Samsung, HTC, Motorolla, etc. lock the device. Google even help people with the replacement of their OS distribution.
Locking the owner of a device out of their own device is evil. It is evil whether it is Samsung, HTC, Motorolla, or, yes, Apple. Today, I can buy a Android device that allows me to completely replace the OS without breaking any of it's protections. I cannot do that with any iOS device
Yes, quitting your job to go back to school when you know that mom and dad will pay your mortgage if you come up short while you get the new career sorted out, is not the same thing as quitting your job to go back to school when you know that even in a best case scenario, you cannot make your mortgage if you do, so you WILL lose your home. And, if things don't go perfect, you children are going to go hungry.
Almost as crazy as trying to get into the browser market when IE owned 98% of the market share.
Funny. While I have met hundreds of android owners that want or need a smart phone, I have met exactly 0 that didn't.
If it isn't already running in an emulated environment (Java, .net, etc.) then it interacts with the hardware. This makes your statement so watered down that it becomes pointless.
What about if he is logging insurance claims? Or auditing safety training for his company? What if he is entering payroll information, or entering a food order at his restaurant? The idea that only the casual user who does a little browsing and text chatting have machines way over powered for their use is a myth. MOST uses of a computer require vastly lower resources than any CPU that is currently offered. High power machines, while fun, are now a niche.
Add on top of that, the emulation layer does not scale with increases in hardware speed. An emulation layer that would have taken 50% of the CPU resources 10 years ago, now takes 1%. If you swapped out peoples hard drive with an SSD at the same time you inserted the VM layer, most people would rave about the speed increase.
Any argument that could be used to argue against the VM would be equally valid against any of the other abstraction layers that are currently in use. If that last % of speed is that important, you shouldn't be running Windows/Linux/OSX at all. You should have every function in every application written to bang the metal of the hardware you are running on. A VM layer is just a driver for that last few bits of the PC that have not yet been virtualized as drivers. Basically the CPU and BIOS.
Say I've built a platformer for the PC. Its control method depends on left, right, climb, duck, jump, and fire keys. What's the best way to port that to a device with a flat touch screen?
in response to:
games built for desktops do not fare well on a touch-screen device. You are failing the to comprehend the concept of subsets. All casual games are not platformers. Particularly platformers that rely on keys. Platform games that rely on key presses do not translate to touch screens well. They universally suck. The fact that platform games are generally casual games does not change that fact. That fact that not all casual games are button pressing platformers also does not change that fact.
I would agree. I would go so far as to say that other than a few niche uses, desktop systems are already at the 'performance isn't an issue' level, and mobile devices are only a few years off.
Obviously your were impressed by #1.
Nobodies definitions are clasing. You are just hoping that if you say they do, that you wont be wrong anymore.
Given that greater than 90% of the devices that can install flash do, I would say, yes, I am.
I have an iPhone. Yes. Start up and shut down are unfortuantly still necessary. Besides, we didn't shut the machine down because it HAD to be shut down. We shut it down because there was no good reason to use the electricity when it wasn't in use.
That is just a myth. I have done the 1 year old test. It is like the wife test, but with a one year old. I set up my son with his first computer a couple of months after he turned one. I installed Ubuntu, and gave him 20-25 minutes of instruction on how to use it, then let him go to town on the machine. Within the week, he was a functional user on the system using applications that he found interesting, and that I never showed him existed.
Now, I'm not saying my son isn't brilliant. He is my son after all, but if ANY 1 year old (even one who was bitten by a radioactive brain during a freak lab experiment, giving him superhuman intelligence) can handle running the system with no problem, claims that Linux is too hard are the equivalent of claim that you need to be institutionalized for you own safety.
The reason that the Year of the Linux Desktop is perpetually reset is because people are lazy, short sighted, and prone to mob mentality. People use windows primarily because that is what is pre-installed on 90% of the machines. They are not going to install Linux even if it is better (and that is debatable as of Windows 7) because not only are they lazy and it would take effort, but because they are short sighted in that they don't want to put in a little extra effort now to safe a lot of extra effort later.
Finally, put in the mob mentality, and you find that when they have a problem with Linux, the mob (90% of users) will point out how that is only a problem because they used Linux and that this is why Linux is unsuitable. Whereas if they have a problem on Windows, the mob will point out that 'everyone has this problem', so it is excusable because it is a problem with computers in general.
MS is letting us down by not making the VM the backward compatibility. At this stage of the game, we should be able to run any application all the way back to DOS 1.0 with complete backward compatibility on Windows 7.
It's more like you sang "Happy Birthday" to your kid at his party in a Chuck-E-Cheese. One of his guests learns the song during that illegal public performance, and teaches it to his brother who then proceeds to perform an illegal public performance of the same song at his friends Chuck-E-Cheese birthday party.
That's the nature of the computer industry form the beginning. It has never been about the best tech. It has been an ongoing drama with the players constantly waving guns at the lower half of their body. Until they pull the trigger, it is hard for us to see if they are going to hit their foot, an artery, or blow something off that will prevent them from producing the next generation.
Both the Kindle Fire and Google's new Nexus tablet are $200.
That is "my shade of gray is better than your shade of gray" reasoning. Pick up a first gen iPhone today. It will be painful. Heck, I find iPhone 4s to be painful to use with their crappy keyboard. Yes, phones before the iPhone (first gen) were generally worse than the iPhone. Phones after the iPhone (first gen) were frequently better than the iPhone. Pick any point in time, and you will find the same pattern.
There are two things that would make someone declare the I phone to be the watershed device. 1) It has Apple's label on it. 2) It happened to hit their individual pain point threshold on an ever improving scale. The fact that group 1 was a very vocal group helped the uptake of the iPhone more than anything else.
The accessory market is the place that iPhones seriously kick Android's butt. Most accessories require that you pick which little piece of plastic you put in the cradle, and it is ready to go for any iPhone or iPod Touch. Android has the benefit of choice, but that choice makes accessories less prevelent. This could be fixed with NFC being used to initiate a bluetooth connection. Specify an inductive charger, and the different shapes for Android would become a moot point. Since that hasn't happened yet, Apple wins on the accessories front.
As for which phone to buy? That's easy. Go to your carrier and pick any phone that is priced from the middle up. It will be a great phone. If you want it to be as good or better than an Apple phone, just pick the device with the Nexus name on it.
Enough alike that I doubt an IP lawyer could tell the difference from across a courtroom.
I would think that the solution to future encryption would be one time pads. One time pads don't work for things like Wifi and credit cards because there is no good out of band way to load them on the client. With a drone, there is all sorts of maintenance that is going to be done at the time of launch. So, at launch time, a sufficiently huge set of one time pads are loaded into the drone, and copied to the control center. Using this method, you could decrypt the signal using a simple XOR, yet still maintain complete security. Even if the enemy gets their hands on one of the drones, there is no data on it to reverse engineer to break the code for any other drone.
As far as I know, there isn't even any known theoretical possibilities for breaking a properly used one time pad.
Yes. Declining in the same way that the use of Windows is declining.
I have had an Android device for years now, and I can litterly count on no hands, the number of times I _NEEDED_ a smart phone at all. I can't count the number of times that it has made my life easier, or more enjoyable. The same with flash. It has made my life easier or more enjoyable.