Besides. What would they have found along the freaking border? The alkalinity of Iranian soil? Maybe some killer samples of Iranian bark dust? Oh, I know. They could find "crucial information" that the Iranian government is poisoning waterways along the border to control the water supply. I see where that's going.
The US military or intelligence agencies have no need to send kids on suicide missions to gather "information" along the border. None. That's just stupid. They've got that border under satellite surveillance along with intel they gather from the Kurdish security forces that probably monitor the border as well. There's just no need to send kids to their probable deaths just to see if they can catch a glimpse of a military movement along the border or lack thereof. And there certainly isn't any reason to send them just to be arrested, because they aren't going to gather a whole lot of intel in an Iranian prison. They were probably drugged and blindfolded on the way there.
Do you have any proof they were, besides your own paranoia?
See, there's this thing called the law. Innocent until PROVEN guilty. That whole deal. "CIA written all over her" because she didn't act the way you expected her to act? What, you know that woman personally?
I've met government agents. They don't typically look like young, recent college grads. Most of them are in their thirties to forties, and the ones that hike along foreign borders typically look strikingly similar to the people who live within those borders. They typically don't wear t-shirts and jeans and scream at people in English. They grow beards. They get tans. They wear appropriate clothing to the situation. If they're hiring dumb kids to get caught by terrorists by painting Old Glory across their foreheads and wearing Birkenstocks, don't you think those kids would be just a little pissed off at the CIA when/if they're released? After all, that's a literal suicide mission, and I doubt those kids would have signed up for a suicide mission, getting engaged and all.
Then again, as with you, I have no proof of that, nor do I know those kids. So maybe we're both wrong. Or maybe one of us is right. But there's no way to know if you don't have proof, and you won't ever have proof either way. It's the CIA, idiot. What do you think?
You know why you get marked a troll? It's sad because you probably don't even intend it or know why you're being called a troll.
Did you read some of those posts above? Get your information from multiple sources. Not just ones that are spreading the same story around. See, when the economy is bad and pointing fingers won't get you anything anymore, politicians take a lovely wedge issue and run their assistants and cronies out to the talking head media shows to "put things out there". Those things get picked up, regurgitated, and passed around until everyone swears they're facts. You're part of that machine. None of this is really about racism, it's just a convenient wedge issue that happens to involve another nationality. It's about politics and winning in an election year. You didn't hear about this stuff so much last year...isn't that a little surprising? Nor did you hear about it the year before...and yet, that war has been going on for more than just this year.
Like how they use migrant workers to scare people who are scared for their jobs in a down economy, they picked a wedge issue that drives fear in the hearts of people like you and took a few minor incidents and transformed them through the media grapevine into an all out assault on your fellow US citizens. However, the numbers fly right in the face of that. There is more border security than EVER, right now, at the US/Mexican border. That's a fact that your tax dollars are paying for. There are several times more people getting deported the past 2 years...again, using your tax dollars...than there were the previous several years. That is also a fact. If you people were whining and shivering and scared about this stuff 6 years ago, you'd have credibility. But right now, you're just an unwitting tool of a political machine trying to get its people in positions of power so it can rip you off and give that money to their buddies in the industries that pay their bills, just like they did when they were in power. It's their job, and using you is a great way of saving themselves money they'd have to pay a staffer.
Without a proper understanding of how the concepts have changed, you cannot understand these languages and you'd never know where to begin.
First and foremost, pick up a book on object oriented development. Read it, draw diagrams, do some of the examples. Start with C++ and get the basics.
Second: Don't be afraid to write inefficient code (by your standards). Kids these days don't understand how things were in the 80's when 512 bytes of binary size could demand a near rewrite and massive refactoring. A lot of this stuff is virtualized, like.NET, Python, you name it. It's being run through an interpreter. It's the stuff we all turned our noses up at 30 years ago (around the time I first started getting into programming, anyway, in the very early 90's). These new languages almost force you to write inefficiently (by your standards). They take away the efficiency of pointer arithmetic, bcd, segmentation, and other tricks you could do to shrink your code down. Efficiency, these days, is how fast it runs, not how much memory it requires. Wrap your head around that concept because it's the most fun thing about modern development (unless you're really OCD about memory management, of course).
Now, jump into a language. I'd take C++. Most languages derive a lot of their concepts from it, and if you get solid with it, you can pick up most other languages fairly easily. Get a book on design patterns...it'll help prevent you from knotting your code up too badly when you jump into your first project if you can pick a pattern or two that fits what you want to do and implement them.
Last, mobile coding isn't what you'd think it would be. It's closer to web development these days than it is to desktop development. Maybe 10 years ago with Palm OS you would have been able to dive right in, as it was single tasking, segmented 64k memory model, and you could write everything in good ol' C. But since then, mobile platforms have gone all over the map with various ideas. Where you have basically Appleified C++ on iOS, you have non-standard java on Android,.NET C# or VB on WinMob, and either C++ or literally HTML+Javascript on webOS. Heck, even Blackberry OS is basically Java-oriented. My advice is to code out a hello world for whatever platform that strikes your fancy, and see which one is easiest for you to "get". Just because a platform is "hot" in the mobile space doesn't mean it'll stay around...I've been doing this stuff for over 10 years, and the only thing you can rely on in mobile is that whatever's big now will be on the downside soon enough. It's always been a big pitfight in mobile. Just pick the platform you like developing for the most and stick with it, maybe branch out if it's lucrative enough, but don't count on anything sticking around.
And, if you're too lazy to read the article, it's because his custom dev environment does not currently support Android. This might shock you, but Android kind of sucks. It's mainly only popular because it's not Microsoft and Google licenses it out to any crappy hardware manufacturer that will slap it on their device to save themselves a few bucks, whereas Palm does not currently license webOS nor does Apple license their iPhone OS. That also doesn't mean Android is all that good. Personally, I think hacking a Linux kernel all to hell and running a bunch of non-portable java smeg on top of a goofy jvm isn't all that impressive nor is it very forward thinking. But hey, it's up to Aaron whether he wants to bother with extending his environment to allow him to support several different revs of Android.
Aaron's a pretty good guy. He and I cut our teeth on PalmOS at roughly the same time, contributed a lot to the mailing list. He really has a passion for this stuff, so yeah, he'll probably do Android too just because he can.
"We're switching off Windows to Linux! We'll never be hax0r3d again!!!" "Hi fives!!!"
No one will ever try to hack Google again, now that they're fully protected by the holy blessed power of Linux! Forget actually securing your network or locking things down...all you have to do is change your operating system...it's just like changing your socks or underwear! You'll never smell bad again!
But seriously. Google hires smart people. I've known some of those guys. Why do they automatically think that throwing out their operating system is going to save them from the scary Red Chinese hackers? It's not. If someone wants your information, they'll find a way, and you can bet the Chinese can hack Linux or MacOS just as fast as they can hack Windows. These guys should know that, it's not even expert advice, it's common sense. If you take the time to secure your servers and enforce data encryption, use a secure VPN tunnel once in awhile, you're going to be as well off with any other OS provided your employees aren't merrily installing spyware and exposing their credentials and accounts. And there are ways to lock that down too if you're serious with any operating system. Ditching Windows is no silver bullet here because there is NO silver bullet concerning network security. Google's people are smart enough to know that, too.
So I'm betting this is more of an excuse to ditch Microsoft and enforce a corporate policy that will most likely wind up with Google mandating that their employees use their secret new Chrome OS instead. It helps because it publically sends a message that Microsoft is "bad" in the process...and considering that Windows is still the primary choice for business out there, it's good for Chrome OS.
Whoops, meant to say "when.NET CF for Windows CE was originally designed", not just Windows CE. It's a difference of about 5 or 6 years. 2 pint mugs of White Russians can do that to a guy.
It's how.NET CF's telephony API works. You call a function, send it a number as a parameter, and it dials it. As long as I can remember, that's pretty much been how you call that particular.NET CF function. At least, that's how it worked in 2005 with.NET CF 1.0. So basically, that particular hole has been there for probably about 5 years. Since most mobile phones run a slightly older than latest version of.NET CF, I'd imagine that quite a few phones would be vulnerable to that. That said, the main reason it doesn't prompt for verification is because a lot of big companies, carriers, major third party dev houses, etc. most likely demanded that they be able to "phone home" seamlessly and quietly for various reasons or they wouldn't support their platform.
I know, you're probably thinking "what reasons"? Well, from some of the vendors I've worked with, it ranges from location based information to cell phone recovery tracking to remote programming. None of it is absolutely necessary given current available technology and that you can do all that stuff over the data network, but when Windows CE was originally designed, data networks weren't quite as useful.
Apple wants to compete for as much non-PC market share as they possibly can. Handheld gaming is definitely in that ballpark.
However, Apple will need to actually build a gaming handheld, because the iPhone sucks to play games on. Multitouch is good for many things, but it's incredibly annoying for gaming. I hate obscuring the screen with my fingers when I'm playing something. Reading my eye movements is horribly disorienting. Tilting and shaking is moderately useful, but nothing beats a simple directional pad or joystick for gaming. Multitouch alone doesn't cut it, and most people don't want to carry around and hook up controllers to their phones. Even if they're using bluetooth. A good gaming handheld also needs reasonably good battery life, which the DS does have. A gaming handheld doesn't have to look good, it has to be very ergonomic. It can look as ugly as you want as long as it doesn't kill your fingers or wrists to use. Being able to purchase and download games off a store is probably the best advantage iPhone has in regards to gaming, but Nintendo could probably work that out fairly easily too. I've seen DS modders do some pretty crazy things with their DS...it seems to be a capable platform for supporting that functionality with a few tweaks. But the hard part is Nintendo changing their business model to get away from distributing games on cards to vendors and to a direct web download market. It's going to probably piss off a few vendors.
Seriously, who cares one way or the other? Tablets and netbooks aren't competing for the same niche. I couldn't care less about the Apple and MS fanboy back and forth between tablets and netbooks. They don't really compete for the same purposes. Realistically they could co-exist really well if the major players involved were a little more obsessed with making the customer happy than their shareholders.
Netbooks compete against laptops and desktops as a low cost, ultra-portable alternative. They're not very suitable for the things tablets are designed for, and tablets are not suitable for many of the things netbooks are designed for. The only product line the iPad could possibly put out of business is the Kindle and other e-readers. Maybe if PDAs were still around, they'd be competing in that market niche as well. But netbooks? No. Though a netbook with a detachable multitouch screen and proper online cloud support services (media store, cloud backup, etc.) might. But no, Jobs needed to start the whole brouhaha by thumping his chest about tablets being the end of netbooks.
I dropped 300 bucks for my netbook last year on a whim. I had a pretty burly laptop at the time...then the nVidia sli bug kicked in and fried my video cards. I had nothing else and I had another project come up, so I took my netbook in and used it for development (obviously hooked it up to a monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc.). Worked like a charm for me. And I do a lot of.NET development and SQL stuff, but that little Atom processor and the 2GB of RAM was plenty enough for my needs (and actually, I was able to catch a timing bug that I couldn't replicate on a higher end Win7 notebook, but I digress).
See, I can get actual WORK done on a netbook. I can do paperwork, make website edits, do a whole lot of other things without having to lug around (or pay for) a much more expensive high end laptop...and I don't see myself replacing that netbook with a bigger laptop anytime soon unless I'm stuck using higher end systems for a client. If I need to do something really high end, I use my desktop at home or whatever a client dumps on my desk for work purposes. Otherwise, the netbook is all I'd need...the only real reason I had my old laptop was for gaming, and I'm better off doing that on my desktop at home anyway.
The problem that a lot of folks have with understanding why tablets just aren't that much a threat to netbooks is that netbooks and tablets sate two different market segments. Tablets are fun, show-off things that you use to waste time (though just like netbooks, they really suck for gaming). But you can actually get work done on a netbook and a good one will cost you less, too. Sorry, tablet fans, but that's how it is. They may be super cool to you and you think that you paid 500 bucks for a great thing, but you know in your heart that you paid 500 bucks for a goof-off device.
The only thing any superpower nation can do to protect themselves is to retire from calling itself a "superpower". Any country that gets nationalistic and starts tossing its weight around as a superpower is certain to have plenty of nationalists from other countries focused on figuring out a way to knock that superpower off the top of the hill. China, you want to be called a superpower? Think it would feel good to have the world's hatred pointed squarely at you? Or is there another country that would like to be the target of the rage of every phallically-insecure ultranationalist thug in the world who wants to make himself feel bigger by blowing up your people?
As a citizen of the US who just wants to have a somewhat reasonably decent life, maybe do some good for his fellow man before he punches his ticket, anyone out there can have the ego boost that comes with being part of a superpower. I'd PAY you to take it. Oh, you don't want this? You don't want to be taxed out the wazoo so your country can fix up the economy of other countries even though your own economy is in the tank? Only to have those countries you build up decide to bite the hand that fed them? You'd rather pay your taxes for clean water, good schools, and roads instead of blowing it all on the biggest military budget in the world? You know, we don't really want this. Most of us would much rather just work hard, get something positive back from our government instead of the news that we're going to war again. With some other random country that we never imagined we'd have to go to war with because the corporations who own everything decreed that they were bad business partners. If you want this in your country, then hurry up and take it! I'm sure you'll love it. I'm sure it will make your weenies feel huge, right up to the point that some "terrorist" plants a few bombs in your office building.
Ignore all the pooh poohers here...cartridges are so much better than discs in so many ways (other than storage capacity, but with solid state, disks would be up against some very stiff competition...no pun intended).
For one, you can trust clumsy 6 year olds with them. They're way more resilient than discs. For another, solid state memory is getting so fast it's like playing your game right off your hard drive, instead of spinning a platter at a ridiculous speed (and all the heat and mechanical issues that go along with that).
Look, forget all the manufacturing "issues"...those complaints are just plain stupid. How did they make cartridge games in the old days, do you think? It's a manufacturing process and they actually flashed the software into the memory on the cartridge's board. The only 2 reasons I can think of that this wouldn't catch on is that the cost of manufacturing the memory vs. manufacturing a disk is too much that the ordinary person would opt to just download or buy the disk, or if people were dead set on backward compatibility with their current systems (which with gamers, isn't apparently the biggest deal...after all, you didn't see people sticking Atari 2400 cartridges into their Nintendo 64 systems nor do you see people trying to cram CDs into their old Super Nintendo systems...gamers will throw up their hands and upgrade their collection if the new systems are compelling enough).
No offense, but allow me to state a very simple reply to you and anyone else who dribbles on and on with nationalistic pride about things that ultimately don't matter as much as simply wanting to live where you grew up and your family and friends are:
It sucks everywhere. Remember that above everything else, and it will make you a better person to everyone else.
Yes, yes, yes, Christians have bad people too. We get it. But that's not what this is about. It's about knee-jerk reactions to the very limited depiction of a holy figure in a cartoon. A holy figure that most people have no idea what he looks like anyway, so we basically have to put his name with an arrow pointing at the figure to tell who it might be.
If you want this to slip into a "well, Christians have bad people too" thing, South Park makes Jesus Christ a recurring character all the time. The number of protests against those episodes have been relatively limited. No attempts by Christian assassins have been reported on the lives of either Matt Stone nor Trey Parker. The Scientologists pretty much had the biggest tiff against South Park, and even that was more of a huff than a "march in the streets burning things in effigy" thing.
We all know there are bad people in all religions. But the point of this is about humorous depiction, and all religions in the world have had their figures depicted humorously at times. But only one religion seems to put out a death sentence on anyone who does it to their major figure, even though almost no one even knows exactly what he looked like and generally has to be drawn as a crude stereotype with his name pointed at him for anyone to know. Which is also really sad, and I don't mean that in a mocking way, in a lot of ways.
I've used Avast for years as well...just remember to disable the Avast! sounds. You gotta love that creepy "Virus database has been updated" voice blasting out of your speakers at 4am.
WebOS isn't really as far off from iPhoneOS as you'd think, and it handles notifications and apps running in the background just fine. WebOS basically runs Safari as a fairly majorly integrated part of the UI on top of Linux, with a lot of custom stuff in the middle layer. The main reason why iPhoneOS doesn't do what WebOS or Android does is because iPhoneOS apps are written in screwball Objective C instead of being actual managed code running in a reasonably efficient virtual machine or interpreter of some sort (even if most apps...except for 3d games, of course...are basically web apps running in a tightly integrated browser). That makes it much tougher to actually deal with multiple apps running in the background in a usable way. They're allocating memory, hitting data sources, and doing other things without a substantial management layer to deal with them properly (like hibernating tasks, locking data sources, and other things that you can do to save power and have a multitasking UI).
Actually, if you have a halfways intelligent notification system, that's not a problem at all. My Palm Pre does all that multitasking, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by anything. We've got over 2k apps now for the Pre in about 8-9 months, and I've got a lot of apps running on my phone, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by any app. We get notifications that show up as a little icon on the bottom of the screen, so when the phone call is done, I tap it and deal with it then. Or, I can choose to deal with it during the call if I so choose. In fact, I frequently open up my email while in a call on my Pre, because people call me all the freaking time and ask me if I got that email they sent. Or my calendar. Once, I opened up solitaire during a long conference call and had the call on speaker.
Exactly. I have a vertical slider because I use my phone vertically about 90% more than I use it horizontally, and having to spin my phone just to send a text message annoys me. I also prefer a smaller keyboard because I know it shrinks the device profile and fits better in the pocket...I don't need a Blackberry keyboard, not at all. So when I type messages out on my Pre with a vertical slide out keyboard, I'm about as fast as anyone else...but when I hand my phone off to a BB person, they start cursing because they're used to moving their thumbs a further distance to reach keys and they make more typos. They have learned motions that they have to retrain themselves on. Inversely, I have a tougher time typing on those side slider keyboards because I'm used to shorter reaches with the thumbs.
After all, most people I know that buy new computers and don't like IE only start up IE in order to download another browser. All this version really does is take one step out of the process. People who aren't as computer literate would probably already have a preference for IE anyway and just stick with it out of fear of the unknown. I doubt a lot of grannies who have used IE for the past 6 years are getting their new computer, looking at the browser selection screen, and saying "hmm. Maybe I should give this one a try now". Besides...IE has always had less user share in Europe than elsewhere, partially as a result of paranoia towards the scary foreign corporation and partly because of warm cuddly feelings about using a browser developed by devs all over the world or one that is basically a European-built browser.
Guh, I worded that poorly. I mean to say the difference between Linux and the proprietary OS's is in Linux, there'll be a semi-public debate about fixing something, everywhere else, you get the corporate shills. Don't want to put the wrong message out there to a community that skews heavily towards Linux. Just so you know, so do I, but you got to have the facts straight about it. Linux gets updated a lot, and personally, I think that's a good thing.
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Besides. What would they have found along the freaking border? The alkalinity of Iranian soil? Maybe some killer samples of Iranian bark dust? Oh, I know. They could find "crucial information" that the Iranian government is poisoning waterways along the border to control the water supply. I see where that's going.
The US military or intelligence agencies have no need to send kids on suicide missions to gather "information" along the border. None. That's just stupid. They've got that border under satellite surveillance along with intel they gather from the Kurdish security forces that probably monitor the border as well. There's just no need to send kids to their probable deaths just to see if they can catch a glimpse of a military movement along the border or lack thereof. And there certainly isn't any reason to send them just to be arrested, because they aren't going to gather a whole lot of intel in an Iranian prison. They were probably drugged and blindfolded on the way there.
Do you have any proof they were, besides your own paranoia?
See, there's this thing called the law. Innocent until PROVEN guilty. That whole deal. "CIA written all over her" because she didn't act the way you expected her to act? What, you know that woman personally?
I've met government agents. They don't typically look like young, recent college grads. Most of them are in their thirties to forties, and the ones that hike along foreign borders typically look strikingly similar to the people who live within those borders. They typically don't wear t-shirts and jeans and scream at people in English. They grow beards. They get tans. They wear appropriate clothing to the situation. If they're hiring dumb kids to get caught by terrorists by painting Old Glory across their foreheads and wearing Birkenstocks, don't you think those kids would be just a little pissed off at the CIA when/if they're released? After all, that's a literal suicide mission, and I doubt those kids would have signed up for a suicide mission, getting engaged and all.
Then again, as with you, I have no proof of that, nor do I know those kids. So maybe we're both wrong. Or maybe one of us is right. But there's no way to know if you don't have proof, and you won't ever have proof either way. It's the CIA, idiot. What do you think?
It's tongue in cheek, but you guys didn't get it. If you're not out and about, it is implied that you must use a stationary desktop around the home.
There's nothing I love more than spelling a joke out to geeks who should understand a very venerable geek joke, I tell ya.
You know why you get marked a troll? It's sad because you probably don't even intend it or know why you're being called a troll.
Did you read some of those posts above? Get your information from multiple sources. Not just ones that are spreading the same story around. See, when the economy is bad and pointing fingers won't get you anything anymore, politicians take a lovely wedge issue and run their assistants and cronies out to the talking head media shows to "put things out there". Those things get picked up, regurgitated, and passed around until everyone swears they're facts. You're part of that machine. None of this is really about racism, it's just a convenient wedge issue that happens to involve another nationality. It's about politics and winning in an election year. You didn't hear about this stuff so much last year...isn't that a little surprising? Nor did you hear about it the year before...and yet, that war has been going on for more than just this year.
Like how they use migrant workers to scare people who are scared for their jobs in a down economy, they picked a wedge issue that drives fear in the hearts of people like you and took a few minor incidents and transformed them through the media grapevine into an all out assault on your fellow US citizens. However, the numbers fly right in the face of that. There is more border security than EVER, right now, at the US/Mexican border. That's a fact that your tax dollars are paying for. There are several times more people getting deported the past 2 years...again, using your tax dollars...than there were the previous several years. That is also a fact. If you people were whining and shivering and scared about this stuff 6 years ago, you'd have credibility. But right now, you're just an unwitting tool of a political machine trying to get its people in positions of power so it can rip you off and give that money to their buddies in the industries that pay their bills, just like they did when they were in power. It's their job, and using you is a great way of saving themselves money they'd have to pay a staffer.
Oh, come on. You completely missed the fact that most of the tech news was probably posted at Engadget a day or two before.
Without a proper understanding of how the concepts have changed, you cannot understand these languages and you'd never know where to begin.
.NET, Python, you name it. It's being run through an interpreter. It's the stuff we all turned our noses up at 30 years ago (around the time I first started getting into programming, anyway, in the very early 90's). These new languages almost force you to write inefficiently (by your standards). They take away the efficiency of pointer arithmetic, bcd, segmentation, and other tricks you could do to shrink your code down. Efficiency, these days, is how fast it runs, not how much memory it requires. Wrap your head around that concept because it's the most fun thing about modern development (unless you're really OCD about memory management, of course).
.NET C# or VB on WinMob, and either C++ or literally HTML+Javascript on webOS. Heck, even Blackberry OS is basically Java-oriented. My advice is to code out a hello world for whatever platform that strikes your fancy, and see which one is easiest for you to "get". Just because a platform is "hot" in the mobile space doesn't mean it'll stay around...I've been doing this stuff for over 10 years, and the only thing you can rely on in mobile is that whatever's big now will be on the downside soon enough. It's always been a big pitfight in mobile. Just pick the platform you like developing for the most and stick with it, maybe branch out if it's lucrative enough, but don't count on anything sticking around.
First and foremost, pick up a book on object oriented development. Read it, draw diagrams, do some of the examples. Start with C++ and get the basics.
Second: Don't be afraid to write inefficient code (by your standards). Kids these days don't understand how things were in the 80's when 512 bytes of binary size could demand a near rewrite and massive refactoring. A lot of this stuff is virtualized, like
Now, jump into a language. I'd take C++. Most languages derive a lot of their concepts from it, and if you get solid with it, you can pick up most other languages fairly easily. Get a book on design patterns...it'll help prevent you from knotting your code up too badly when you jump into your first project if you can pick a pattern or two that fits what you want to do and implement them.
Last, mobile coding isn't what you'd think it would be. It's closer to web development these days than it is to desktop development. Maybe 10 years ago with Palm OS you would have been able to dive right in, as it was single tasking, segmented 64k memory model, and you could write everything in good ol' C. But since then, mobile platforms have gone all over the map with various ideas. Where you have basically Appleified C++ on iOS, you have non-standard java on Android,
And, if you're too lazy to read the article, it's because his custom dev environment does not currently support Android. This might shock you, but Android kind of sucks. It's mainly only popular because it's not Microsoft and Google licenses it out to any crappy hardware manufacturer that will slap it on their device to save themselves a few bucks, whereas Palm does not currently license webOS nor does Apple license their iPhone OS. That also doesn't mean Android is all that good. Personally, I think hacking a Linux kernel all to hell and running a bunch of non-portable java smeg on top of a goofy jvm isn't all that impressive nor is it very forward thinking. But hey, it's up to Aaron whether he wants to bother with extending his environment to allow him to support several different revs of Android.
Aaron's a pretty good guy. He and I cut our teeth on PalmOS at roughly the same time, contributed a lot to the mailing list. He really has a passion for this stuff, so yeah, he'll probably do Android too just because he can.
"We're switching off Windows to Linux! We'll never be hax0r3d again!!!" "Hi fives!!!"
No one will ever try to hack Google again, now that they're fully protected by the holy blessed power of Linux! Forget actually securing your network or locking things down...all you have to do is change your operating system...it's just like changing your socks or underwear! You'll never smell bad again!
But seriously. Google hires smart people. I've known some of those guys. Why do they automatically think that throwing out their operating system is going to save them from the scary Red Chinese hackers? It's not. If someone wants your information, they'll find a way, and you can bet the Chinese can hack Linux or MacOS just as fast as they can hack Windows. These guys should know that, it's not even expert advice, it's common sense. If you take the time to secure your servers and enforce data encryption, use a secure VPN tunnel once in awhile, you're going to be as well off with any other OS provided your employees aren't merrily installing spyware and exposing their credentials and accounts. And there are ways to lock that down too if you're serious with any operating system. Ditching Windows is no silver bullet here because there is NO silver bullet concerning network security. Google's people are smart enough to know that, too.
So I'm betting this is more of an excuse to ditch Microsoft and enforce a corporate policy that will most likely wind up with Google mandating that their employees use their secret new Chrome OS instead. It helps because it publically sends a message that Microsoft is "bad" in the process...and considering that Windows is still the primary choice for business out there, it's good for Chrome OS.
Dude. That was funny 10 YEARS AGO.
Whoops, meant to say "when .NET CF for Windows CE was originally designed", not just Windows CE. It's a difference of about 5 or 6 years. 2 pint mugs of White Russians can do that to a guy.
It's how .NET CF's telephony API works. You call a function, send it a number as a parameter, and it dials it. As long as I can remember, that's pretty much been how you call that particular .NET CF function. At least, that's how it worked in 2005 with .NET CF 1.0. So basically, that particular hole has been there for probably about 5 years. Since most mobile phones run a slightly older than latest version of .NET CF, I'd imagine that quite a few phones would be vulnerable to that. That said, the main reason it doesn't prompt for verification is because a lot of big companies, carriers, major third party dev houses, etc. most likely demanded that they be able to "phone home" seamlessly and quietly for various reasons or they wouldn't support their platform.
I know, you're probably thinking "what reasons"? Well, from some of the vendors I've worked with, it ranges from location based information to cell phone recovery tracking to remote programming. None of it is absolutely necessary given current available technology and that you can do all that stuff over the data network, but when Windows CE was originally designed, data networks weren't quite as useful.
Apple wants to compete for as much non-PC market share as they possibly can. Handheld gaming is definitely in that ballpark.
However, Apple will need to actually build a gaming handheld, because the iPhone sucks to play games on. Multitouch is good for many things, but it's incredibly annoying for gaming. I hate obscuring the screen with my fingers when I'm playing something. Reading my eye movements is horribly disorienting. Tilting and shaking is moderately useful, but nothing beats a simple directional pad or joystick for gaming. Multitouch alone doesn't cut it, and most people don't want to carry around and hook up controllers to their phones. Even if they're using bluetooth. A good gaming handheld also needs reasonably good battery life, which the DS does have. A gaming handheld doesn't have to look good, it has to be very ergonomic. It can look as ugly as you want as long as it doesn't kill your fingers or wrists to use. Being able to purchase and download games off a store is probably the best advantage iPhone has in regards to gaming, but Nintendo could probably work that out fairly easily too. I've seen DS modders do some pretty crazy things with their DS...it seems to be a capable platform for supporting that functionality with a few tweaks. But the hard part is Nintendo changing their business model to get away from distributing games on cards to vendors and to a direct web download market. It's going to probably piss off a few vendors.
Seriously, who cares one way or the other? Tablets and netbooks aren't competing for the same niche. I couldn't care less about the Apple and MS fanboy back and forth between tablets and netbooks. They don't really compete for the same purposes. Realistically they could co-exist really well if the major players involved were a little more obsessed with making the customer happy than their shareholders.
Netbooks compete against laptops and desktops as a low cost, ultra-portable alternative. They're not very suitable for the things tablets are designed for, and tablets are not suitable for many of the things netbooks are designed for. The only product line the iPad could possibly put out of business is the Kindle and other e-readers. Maybe if PDAs were still around, they'd be competing in that market niche as well. But netbooks? No. Though a netbook with a detachable multitouch screen and proper online cloud support services (media store, cloud backup, etc.) might. But no, Jobs needed to start the whole brouhaha by thumping his chest about tablets being the end of netbooks.
I dropped 300 bucks for my netbook last year on a whim. I had a pretty burly laptop at the time...then the nVidia sli bug kicked in and fried my video cards. I had nothing else and I had another project come up, so I took my netbook in and used it for development (obviously hooked it up to a monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc.). Worked like a charm for me. And I do a lot of .NET development and SQL stuff, but that little Atom processor and the 2GB of RAM was plenty enough for my needs (and actually, I was able to catch a timing bug that I couldn't replicate on a higher end Win7 notebook, but I digress).
See, I can get actual WORK done on a netbook. I can do paperwork, make website edits, do a whole lot of other things without having to lug around (or pay for) a much more expensive high end laptop...and I don't see myself replacing that netbook with a bigger laptop anytime soon unless I'm stuck using higher end systems for a client. If I need to do something really high end, I use my desktop at home or whatever a client dumps on my desk for work purposes. Otherwise, the netbook is all I'd need...the only real reason I had my old laptop was for gaming, and I'm better off doing that on my desktop at home anyway.
The problem that a lot of folks have with understanding why tablets just aren't that much a threat to netbooks is that netbooks and tablets sate two different market segments. Tablets are fun, show-off things that you use to waste time (though just like netbooks, they really suck for gaming). But you can actually get work done on a netbook and a good one will cost you less, too. Sorry, tablet fans, but that's how it is. They may be super cool to you and you think that you paid 500 bucks for a great thing, but you know in your heart that you paid 500 bucks for a goof-off device.
The only thing any superpower nation can do to protect themselves is to retire from calling itself a "superpower". Any country that gets nationalistic and starts tossing its weight around as a superpower is certain to have plenty of nationalists from other countries focused on figuring out a way to knock that superpower off the top of the hill. China, you want to be called a superpower? Think it would feel good to have the world's hatred pointed squarely at you? Or is there another country that would like to be the target of the rage of every phallically-insecure ultranationalist thug in the world who wants to make himself feel bigger by blowing up your people?
As a citizen of the US who just wants to have a somewhat reasonably decent life, maybe do some good for his fellow man before he punches his ticket, anyone out there can have the ego boost that comes with being part of a superpower. I'd PAY you to take it. Oh, you don't want this? You don't want to be taxed out the wazoo so your country can fix up the economy of other countries even though your own economy is in the tank? Only to have those countries you build up decide to bite the hand that fed them? You'd rather pay your taxes for clean water, good schools, and roads instead of blowing it all on the biggest military budget in the world? You know, we don't really want this. Most of us would much rather just work hard, get something positive back from our government instead of the news that we're going to war again. With some other random country that we never imagined we'd have to go to war with because the corporations who own everything decreed that they were bad business partners. If you want this in your country, then hurry up and take it! I'm sure you'll love it. I'm sure it will make your weenies feel huge, right up to the point that some "terrorist" plants a few bombs in your office building.
Ignore all the pooh poohers here...cartridges are so much better than discs in so many ways (other than storage capacity, but with solid state, disks would be up against some very stiff competition...no pun intended).
For one, you can trust clumsy 6 year olds with them. They're way more resilient than discs. For another, solid state memory is getting so fast it's like playing your game right off your hard drive, instead of spinning a platter at a ridiculous speed (and all the heat and mechanical issues that go along with that).
Look, forget all the manufacturing "issues"...those complaints are just plain stupid. How did they make cartridge games in the old days, do you think? It's a manufacturing process and they actually flashed the software into the memory on the cartridge's board. The only 2 reasons I can think of that this wouldn't catch on is that the cost of manufacturing the memory vs. manufacturing a disk is too much that the ordinary person would opt to just download or buy the disk, or if people were dead set on backward compatibility with their current systems (which with gamers, isn't apparently the biggest deal...after all, you didn't see people sticking Atari 2400 cartridges into their Nintendo 64 systems nor do you see people trying to cram CDs into their old Super Nintendo systems...gamers will throw up their hands and upgrade their collection if the new systems are compelling enough).
No offense, but allow me to state a very simple reply to you and anyone else who dribbles on and on with nationalistic pride about things that ultimately don't matter as much as simply wanting to live where you grew up and your family and friends are:
It sucks everywhere. Remember that above everything else, and it will make you a better person to everyone else.
Yes, yes, yes, Christians have bad people too. We get it. But that's not what this is about. It's about knee-jerk reactions to the very limited depiction of a holy figure in a cartoon. A holy figure that most people have no idea what he looks like anyway, so we basically have to put his name with an arrow pointing at the figure to tell who it might be.
If you want this to slip into a "well, Christians have bad people too" thing, South Park makes Jesus Christ a recurring character all the time. The number of protests against those episodes have been relatively limited. No attempts by Christian assassins have been reported on the lives of either Matt Stone nor Trey Parker. The Scientologists pretty much had the biggest tiff against South Park, and even that was more of a huff than a "march in the streets burning things in effigy" thing.
We all know there are bad people in all religions. But the point of this is about humorous depiction, and all religions in the world have had their figures depicted humorously at times. But only one religion seems to put out a death sentence on anyone who does it to their major figure, even though almost no one even knows exactly what he looked like and generally has to be drawn as a crude stereotype with his name pointed at him for anyone to know. Which is also really sad, and I don't mean that in a mocking way, in a lot of ways.
Oh, darn it. Slashdot's login script didn't execute in time for me to post this as myself.
I've used Avast for years as well...just remember to disable the Avast! sounds. You gotta love that creepy "Virus database has been updated" voice blasting out of your speakers at 4am.
WebOS isn't really as far off from iPhoneOS as you'd think, and it handles notifications and apps running in the background just fine. WebOS basically runs Safari as a fairly majorly integrated part of the UI on top of Linux, with a lot of custom stuff in the middle layer. The main reason why iPhoneOS doesn't do what WebOS or Android does is because iPhoneOS apps are written in screwball Objective C instead of being actual managed code running in a reasonably efficient virtual machine or interpreter of some sort (even if most apps...except for 3d games, of course...are basically web apps running in a tightly integrated browser). That makes it much tougher to actually deal with multiple apps running in the background in a usable way. They're allocating memory, hitting data sources, and doing other things without a substantial management layer to deal with them properly (like hibernating tasks, locking data sources, and other things that you can do to save power and have a multitasking UI).
Actually, if you have a halfways intelligent notification system, that's not a problem at all. My Palm Pre does all that multitasking, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by anything. We've got over 2k apps now for the Pre in about 8-9 months, and I've got a lot of apps running on my phone, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by any app. We get notifications that show up as a little icon on the bottom of the screen, so when the phone call is done, I tap it and deal with it then. Or, I can choose to deal with it during the call if I so choose. In fact, I frequently open up my email while in a call on my Pre, because people call me all the freaking time and ask me if I got that email they sent. Or my calendar. Once, I opened up solitaire during a long conference call and had the call on speaker.
Exactly. I have a vertical slider because I use my phone vertically about 90% more than I use it horizontally, and having to spin my phone just to send a text message annoys me. I also prefer a smaller keyboard because I know it shrinks the device profile and fits better in the pocket...I don't need a Blackberry keyboard, not at all. So when I type messages out on my Pre with a vertical slide out keyboard, I'm about as fast as anyone else...but when I hand my phone off to a BB person, they start cursing because they're used to moving their thumbs a further distance to reach keys and they make more typos. They have learned motions that they have to retrain themselves on. Inversely, I have a tougher time typing on those side slider keyboards because I'm used to shorter reaches with the thumbs.
After all, most people I know that buy new computers and don't like IE only start up IE in order to download another browser. All this version really does is take one step out of the process. People who aren't as computer literate would probably already have a preference for IE anyway and just stick with it out of fear of the unknown. I doubt a lot of grannies who have used IE for the past 6 years are getting their new computer, looking at the browser selection screen, and saying "hmm. Maybe I should give this one a try now". Besides...IE has always had less user share in Europe than elsewhere, partially as a result of paranoia towards the scary foreign corporation and partly because of warm cuddly feelings about using a browser developed by devs all over the world or one that is basically a European-built browser.
Guh, I worded that poorly. I mean to say the difference between Linux and the proprietary OS's is in Linux, there'll be a semi-public debate about fixing something, everywhere else, you get the corporate shills. Don't want to put the wrong message out there to a community that skews heavily towards Linux. Just so you know, so do I, but you got to have the facts straight about it. Linux gets updated a lot, and personally, I think that's a good thing.