Personally, I have no problem with updates. I think any modern computer user should make themselves feel the same way. Let's face it, this stuff we use is complex. REALLY complex. Things need to be updated and improved, the lifecycle of software is moving in that direction. While the nuisance aspects of pop-up dialogs telling you you've updated could really be pared down to a minimum, this is just how it is.
What you SHOULD get furious about is if there's a security hole that puts your system at risk, but the vendor of the OS doesn't bother patching it OR even tries to talk their way out of fixing it. Yes, that includes Apple. That includes Linux, as well. The only difference between Linux and the rest is that there'll be a semi-public debate as to whether or not to fix it, and a corporate shill coming out and calling that flaw a feature or completely ignoring it until they can't hold out any longer. But it doesn't matter...whether it's Linux, Apple, or Microsoft, you got to get used to the notion that this stuff needs to be patched and you just have to cope with that. It'd be nice if the vendors didn't feel the need to pound their chests loudly with "new release" announcements, pop-up dialogs, and other nonsense when they fixed a bug in their own software, but developers are people too, and they like the feeling of accomplishment that goes into fixing something; they just want the users to know how proud they are of fixing that software.
Apple was only occasionally innovative. They generally stole a lot of their ideas just like everyone else. But I agree, they are evil, though they've only really been evil since they got their first big taste of success with the iPod and have slid into crazy evil. Once upon a time, they actually served a useful purpose as a company delivering a product that helped to motivate the whole market towards user-oriented innovation. Mainly by stealing good ideas that other companies had, nabbing ideas from here and there, and making them work within their closed loop and proving to the market that those ideas were good.
Seriously, neither Android nor iPhone are all that great for serious development. They're both underwhelming platforms for real mobile development. Android has a leg up in many aspects as it embraces more open methods of development and more open standards, but when the dust clears, both platforms have been pushed to the forefront as a result of marketing hype.
There are better options out there, but most of us mobile developers who know there are better options have been herded along with the flock of sheep simply because we have to develop apps that the biggest flock of sheep will use or end up wasting our time and effort. Compared to more comprehensive and seriously powerful applications we used to write for older mobile OS's, the bulk of them these days are basically crapware.
Sentient killing machines that are "extremely concerned about your browsing habits" and "offer you suggestions about various products it wants you to buy and websites it wants you to visit?" You got it all wrong.
Most schools teach that Androidius evolved into Googlesaurus Chromicus, which, throwing the basic concepts of evolution to the wind, took many different shapes and sizes but ultimately couldn't optimize its own form into the perfect killing machine and ended up cannibalizing itself due to an inability to hunt prey and feed itself without falling down and hurting itself repeatedly while getting sidetracked by advertisements for its own competitors and various phishing schemes.
Hold devs responsible for bugs that creep into code. Because, after all, we all know that developers always get to work on unlimited time constraints and NEVER have any pressure to cut corners and get something out fast...right?
If they do that, there has to be a means to defend oneself in that situation, or they're suggesting that unlike any other production industry, the workers would be held accountable for a company's systematic failure to provide an operating environment and schedule that could produce success. Work a developer 24 hours without paid overtime? No problem. After all, if they get delirious and check in some code they were using for testing and were too out of it to remove it and it gets into the final version...and poof...there's a bug, you can sue them for whatever they were paid during 8 hours of that shift. Or a lot more. Then, you end up with the legal problem of defining what a proper environment and schedule would be. After the dust settles, all you'll have is a pile of bureaucracy and a legal mess that will just end up in shafting the developer, and not the management ultimately responsible for the release, in the end...after way too much money and time is spent trying to wade through that mess each time a bug is found in production code. Ridiculous.
...more smartphone companies that manage both their software AND hardware don't build the best device they can upfront, and focus on the OS and software upgrades until they have no choice but to roll out a new piece of hardware (as mandated by a carrier or just as a result of some absolutely necessary hardware improvement). Oh, wait...everyone other than Apple does that. Apple makes most of their money by selling as many phones as possible to as many people as possible, so staggering minor hardware updates in new versions of their phone every 6 months, even though carrier contracts typically run 2 years, is what they're all about. Makes it look like they're improving their phone while getting as many people as possible to pay as much as possible to get a new phone. Most people, of course, don't NEED a new phone, but if I'm an 18 year old dev and I want to do an app that utilizes some hardware improvement that opens up another api call that I need to do what I want to do, and I'm stuck with an older phone and no means of reliable income otherwise, I either am SOL or I have to figure out a way to get that phone somehow.
I don't know about that, but the reasons I stopped developing for Symbian about 4 years ago were:
1. It is the most backwards and strange platform I have ever had the misfortune to develop for, both in regards to their development platform and OS architecture. Learning to develop for Symbian is kind of like learning to code while staring at a reflection of your monitor in a mirror.
2. 80% of the work to develop a Symbian app that could run on enough platforms for it to be marketable was all UI development. Now that you're done with your Series 60 UI, you had the "pleasure" of implementing Series 80, Series 90, and your UIQ interface. And yeah, some of those UIs have disappeared, but it was a mobile OS that couldn't figure out what it really wanted to be.
I was happy to give that up. If you look at what's out there right now, Symbian doesn't really add all that much to the picture. A lot of its features can be found in most modern mobile OSs, the main and only reason I'd even consider Symbian is because I don't want to deal with having Google's claws in my platform, but I don't want to pay Microsoft to license WM 6.5. As for iPhoneOS or webOS, they're proprietary and owned by one company for one line of phones. They've taken themselves out of competition to be a licensed OS...so, iPhone fans, you can pretty much ignore this article. It has no bearing at all on your favorite OS. This is more about adding an option for companies that don't want to stake themselves to Android.
1. Because the N900 supports flash.
2. Because the N900 doesn't have a capacitive touch screen. It takes more work to build a browser that supports really good multitouch properly than just a traditional touch sensitive screen. That said, the N900 does run Linux. And other platforms already have decent enough browser solutions integrated into them. Linux phones benefit from having a good open source web browser, iPhone or Android kind of have interests in promoting their parent company's browsers.
And yes, Firefox Mobile isn't exactly what I'd call the "most complete" browser out there. The term browser, on mobile devices, is very, very vague. There is an OS like webOS that has a customized webKit based browser basically integrated throughout the UI on top of Linux, you've got Explorer which is a little less integrated throughout WM, then you have true third party solutions like Opera. Calling one better than the other doesn't work so well, since an integrated browser is going to have an advantage no matter how you slice it.
C# is a lot easier and cleaner. Don't listen to the plethora of Apple and Linux fans...there's a reason Mono is still around and people invest in it. Without going into too many technical details, C# is just a flat out better language than C++. Objective C just isn't that great an improvement. C# really comes a lot closer to bridging the difference between Java and C than Objective C could ever do. I've done all of the above aforementioned languages professionally, so I'd know. My preference is C#. The.NET framework is mostly the only thing Microsoft that I actually am a fan of, and would love to see that sort of platform development effort for every platform out there.
Hey, that's precisely how most folks felt about PDAs, too! Those PDAs worked really pretty similarly...most of them ran one app at a time really well (unless it was a WinCE device). But it turned out that you could do a lot with a phone and a laptop...and that having a PDA was really a luxury. That's what the iPad is...it's a luxury. It's for people with 500-800 bucks to blow on a device that sits on a table, waiting for strangers to use to check their email or...read...stuff. And hey, if you have 500-800 bucks to blow, I can think of many less useful ways to unload that cash. But that's the point. There are better ways to unload that cash.
I'm sure there will be plenty of rich people who'd line up for this thing, and hey, probably a few less wealthy people with tax refunds to blow. But a netbook gives people a cheaper computer alternative to do actual work. A smartphone provides a communication device. A tablet...well, it's kinda redundant there. A computer and a phone are viewed as needs by people. A tablet is a straight up luxury item. It's a tweener, and that's why its long term success is going to be about the same as the PDA. Now, if you had a cheap tablet just for reading books, or an expensive, big tablet for streaming media, those replace two actual entertainment needs for a lot of people. Those could work. But the iPad is a tweener device. It does a lot of things, but nothing really better than products already available.
Dude, I'm sorry, but that's embarrassingly silly. All I had to say for my mom and every other non-technical person I've known to figure it out was "If you don't click this little button here when you're done, your computer will become unusable and you will lose all your work." I didn't have to explain memory, I didn't have to explain anything to them. I just said "Look, this thing is designed for a lot of different people doing different jobs. Some people don't have to do as much as other people. Some people have to do lots of things. If you don't have to do lots of things, click that button or your work will go away."
There are people who want to understand, then there are people who need to be scared into doing things the right way. You can usually figure out which way a person goes within 5 minutes of knowing them. The real problem is that geeks who are too enthusiastic about what they do can't switch gears and scare people into doing things the right way. If you did, you'd spend a whole lot less time fixing problems. I swear, schools really need to force geeks to take more Psych classes.
Android really doesn't do much for me. It's kind of a kludgey OS in a lot of ways, and a lot of the Android hype is just hype. It's open source, but it really feels sometimes like the UI was designed by schizophrenics. It has more potential than iPhoneOS, I guess. In any case, I love my MSI Wind netbook, so if the hardware really impresses me, I might give it a go just to have an Android device I can develop for (so I don't have to keep borrowing devices either from an employer, friend, or an emulator). But for light daily use, productivity, gaming, ebook reading, or web browsing? Probably not. I'd probably buy one though if it ran a real Linux based OS like Palm's webOS which has better gesture support, a cleaner UI, and probably a better browser. With the release of the PDK, the games are way better, too.
He might be able to trick someone into throwing a huge amount of money his direction because he proved something everyone knew already, using techniques that really don't prove all that much more than you can get a trojan on a phone, but most folks aren't buying it. The majority of software solutions for mobile devices tend towards being focused on blocking the "casual" hacker, for example, the friend who picks up your phone when you leave it out somewhere, or the phone you left in the coffee shop that the stranger who finds it might have something interesting on it (or might be good for some calls). That takes into account the typical use-case scenarios for a mobile device. Of course that stuff isn't going to block a trojan, because that comes down to the OS running on that phone having enough built in security to make it difficult for it to gain root access, or a virus scanner that runs on that phone (which is painfully hard on your battery life, and most people avoid that solution altogether) that keeps itself properly updated at all times.
I've installed FF on a LOT of machines over the years, and not once have I ever seen it suck up anywhere close to a GB of ram. In fact, I don't even understand why people leave their browser up for 3 days anymore...it's not like you're downloading DVDs through your browser on a slow ISDN connection...I hope. In fact, with several tabs open, I'm hitting about 90 megs right now on Win7.
If you're searching for other people having the same problem, have you noticed there is a fix for it?
It's a path towards creating themes that don't require a browser restart, which is and has been an annoyance since they started doing themes several years ago. Unfortunately, a huge number of themes already out there don't work that way. It seems like a preliminary step towards transitioning to how Firefox 4.0 will be dealing with themes. 3.5 and up are pretty much transitional upgrades to wean people onto 4.0 when it's released. Pretty ordinary release strategy, really.
Nice. Noticeably snappier. I like the idea of a path to themes I can apply without having to restart the browser. Browsing for the perfect theme will take a whole lot less time. The browser still takes up a bit of memory, but it's about what I expected. Just wish I could properly compare it to IE8 in Win7 without feeling like Microsoft is artificially deflating its memory usage numbers by offloading work into "operating system" processes.
Awesome. I love having as much freedom to make my browser as irritating to use to my jerk friends who don't ask for permission to use my machine as possible. It's just a thing I like to do.
...because they can't make any money on them, that they'd actually bring up the wearable computer thing again. Well, it kinda makes sense. You can charge a whole lot more margin for a wearable computer than you can for a low end, tiny laptop. But I thought we've been over this before. Wearable computers are only for dorks.
Nice rant, but totally and fundamentally wrong. Still, it's fun to declare that everyone who uses Firefox are basically teenagers. The funny thing about that is that a whole lot of that crowd uses their cellphones to surf the web, and judging by you and the GP, apparently that means they're probably all Opera users as well...well, maybe not. If smartphone sales numbers are any indicator, they're probably using Safari or some other webkit browser.
I stopped using Opera because major features never seemed to work, even though I forked out cash for it back in the day. Sure, I could have hacked the ads out, but I believed in Opera at that time, and paid for the thing. However, even with 128 bit security, it couldn't properly id itself as IE or Mozilla. Which meant I couldn't check my bank account with anything but IE6, no matter how much back and forth I had with my bank. Which meant that I crumpled up Opera and threw it in the trash for the early beta of Firefox, aka Phoenix. I started out with Lynx. I still use Firefox because it works, I'm a developer and like to tweak things, and believe me, I can tweak the hell out of Firefox to my hearts content. To get me back, Opera would have to hand me a freaking refund AND prove to me that it can do the job better than Firefox...and from the times I've done browser compatibility tests, I've seen nothing glaringly better about Opera that would really make me want to switch back, just like I haven't seen what I want in Chrome or IE8, either. A little more speed optimization at memory expense isn't going to cut it for me. And it doesn't for most of the developers I've worked with that prefer Firefox for web development, for personal surfing, and generally for just about anything (unless, of course, you're a Mac person...though I've never been fond of Safari's UI on a larger screen...though I kind of dig the webkit browser on my phone).
For any software, if you're running stuff that is basically 12 years out of date, you should expect your setup to be exploitable. You don't see a lot of people running MacOS 8, early revisions of Slackware, or Netscape 5.5 anymore, right? Neglecting to update IE is about the stupidest thing anyone with some regard for their personal security could put off. It's easily the most exploited piece of software in the history of...software. That's what having a near 100% dominance in the very sketchy playing field of the late 90's/early 00's Internet does for you. I'm no Microsoft fan, but anyone who thinks that code that was written 12 years ago is perfectly fine to use nowadays...switching to another browser isn't going to fix their problem. Medication and a good shrink will fix their problem. And maybe a Computer Science course or two. If you never updated the virus defs in your virus scanner...and you got a virus...switching virus scanners isn't going to fix the fact that you're too undisciplined to wait a few seconds and let your virus defs download no matter what setup you use. If people won't update from IE6, you can bet they won't update any other browser they install, either.
Sorry, but if you get exploited running IE6, I have absolutely NO pity for you. You're just plain stupid, and your stupidity most likely has caused you to infect other systems probably more than once. You're like a driver who plows down a couple margaritas before you go out driving on a Sunday afternoon.
That's not the point at all. The point of the whole program, which would have sat on the shelf indefinitely, was to put out of work developers back to work so THEY don't continue to sit on the shelf and end up taking forbearance on their student loans, declaring bankruptcy on their homes, and being stuck taking jobs at the local convenience store because their skills are so far out of industry practice. Think of it like unemployment, but instead of just taking a check each week, they actually make something that is of use to people. That was the reason they used those tax dollars. It's called investing back in your own country so in 5 years, we don't have a massive developer shortage and are stuck opening up the H-1 program even further (which results in more of your "precious, blood, sweat, and tears paid tax dollars" being spent on hiring more government employees to review those H-1 submittals. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Seriously. They didn't even have to do this project at all. It could have sat out there indefinitely and no one would have noticed. Just take a look at it! The ENTIRE point was to put out of work developers in THIS country back to work. So, because some suck-up politician on the take by some offshore company forced the plan to be partially offshored, it effectively circumvented the entire purpose of the project. Sure, this project might be useful in the future, but come on. There are LOADS of tools out there for job seekers. The whole purpose of this was to put guys back to work and keep them from dropping off the map, not keeping India's economy afloat.
If a foreign government had attacked non-digital assets of any US corporation, you would expect some kind of formal reprisal.
It has a whole lot less to do with the Executive branch than it has to do with Congress's near-ubiquitous lack of fundamental understanding of the importance of digital security and their lack of attention paid to updating current laws to properly cover digital security of a government OR corporate entity. That said, the physical assets of US corporations located outside US borders have been attacked more times than you can count without federal reprisal. There's an element of personal responsibility that is expected out of corporations (well, except Wall Street) to clean up their own messes.
It'd be awesome up to the point where you realize that 7 billion people eating everything in sight drained the global food supply. Then you'll be wishing you had that photosynthesis.
Slashdot Mirror
We complain when they don't update.
Personally, I have no problem with updates. I think any modern computer user should make themselves feel the same way. Let's face it, this stuff we use is complex. REALLY complex. Things need to be updated and improved, the lifecycle of software is moving in that direction. While the nuisance aspects of pop-up dialogs telling you you've updated could really be pared down to a minimum, this is just how it is.
What you SHOULD get furious about is if there's a security hole that puts your system at risk, but the vendor of the OS doesn't bother patching it OR even tries to talk their way out of fixing it. Yes, that includes Apple. That includes Linux, as well. The only difference between Linux and the rest is that there'll be a semi-public debate as to whether or not to fix it, and a corporate shill coming out and calling that flaw a feature or completely ignoring it until they can't hold out any longer. But it doesn't matter...whether it's Linux, Apple, or Microsoft, you got to get used to the notion that this stuff needs to be patched and you just have to cope with that. It'd be nice if the vendors didn't feel the need to pound their chests loudly with "new release" announcements, pop-up dialogs, and other nonsense when they fixed a bug in their own software, but developers are people too, and they like the feeling of accomplishment that goes into fixing something; they just want the users to know how proud they are of fixing that software.
Apple was only occasionally innovative. They generally stole a lot of their ideas just like everyone else. But I agree, they are evil, though they've only really been evil since they got their first big taste of success with the iPod and have slid into crazy evil. Once upon a time, they actually served a useful purpose as a company delivering a product that helped to motivate the whole market towards user-oriented innovation. Mainly by stealing good ideas that other companies had, nabbing ideas from here and there, and making them work within their closed loop and proving to the market that those ideas were good.
Seriously, neither Android nor iPhone are all that great for serious development. They're both underwhelming platforms for real mobile development. Android has a leg up in many aspects as it embraces more open methods of development and more open standards, but when the dust clears, both platforms have been pushed to the forefront as a result of marketing hype.
There are better options out there, but most of us mobile developers who know there are better options have been herded along with the flock of sheep simply because we have to develop apps that the biggest flock of sheep will use or end up wasting our time and effort. Compared to more comprehensive and seriously powerful applications we used to write for older mobile OS's, the bulk of them these days are basically crapware.
Sentient killing machines that are "extremely concerned about your browsing habits" and "offer you suggestions about various products it wants you to buy and websites it wants you to visit?" You got it all wrong.
Most schools teach that Androidius evolved into Googlesaurus Chromicus, which, throwing the basic concepts of evolution to the wind, took many different shapes and sizes but ultimately couldn't optimize its own form into the perfect killing machine and ended up cannibalizing itself due to an inability to hunt prey and feed itself without falling down and hurting itself repeatedly while getting sidetracked by advertisements for its own competitors and various phishing schemes.
Hold devs responsible for bugs that creep into code. Because, after all, we all know that developers always get to work on unlimited time constraints and NEVER have any pressure to cut corners and get something out fast...right?
If they do that, there has to be a means to defend oneself in that situation, or they're suggesting that unlike any other production industry, the workers would be held accountable for a company's systematic failure to provide an operating environment and schedule that could produce success. Work a developer 24 hours without paid overtime? No problem. After all, if they get delirious and check in some code they were using for testing and were too out of it to remove it and it gets into the final version...and poof...there's a bug, you can sue them for whatever they were paid during 8 hours of that shift. Or a lot more. Then, you end up with the legal problem of defining what a proper environment and schedule would be. After the dust settles, all you'll have is a pile of bureaucracy and a legal mess that will just end up in shafting the developer, and not the management ultimately responsible for the release, in the end...after way too much money and time is spent trying to wade through that mess each time a bug is found in production code. Ridiculous.
...more smartphone companies that manage both their software AND hardware don't build the best device they can upfront, and focus on the OS and software upgrades until they have no choice but to roll out a new piece of hardware (as mandated by a carrier or just as a result of some absolutely necessary hardware improvement). Oh, wait...everyone other than Apple does that. Apple makes most of their money by selling as many phones as possible to as many people as possible, so staggering minor hardware updates in new versions of their phone every 6 months, even though carrier contracts typically run 2 years, is what they're all about. Makes it look like they're improving their phone while getting as many people as possible to pay as much as possible to get a new phone. Most people, of course, don't NEED a new phone, but if I'm an 18 year old dev and I want to do an app that utilizes some hardware improvement that opens up another api call that I need to do what I want to do, and I'm stuck with an older phone and no means of reliable income otherwise, I either am SOL or I have to figure out a way to get that phone somehow.
I don't know about that, but the reasons I stopped developing for Symbian about 4 years ago were:
1. It is the most backwards and strange platform I have ever had the misfortune to develop for, both in regards to their development platform and OS architecture. Learning to develop for Symbian is kind of like learning to code while staring at a reflection of your monitor in a mirror.
2. 80% of the work to develop a Symbian app that could run on enough platforms for it to be marketable was all UI development. Now that you're done with your Series 60 UI, you had the "pleasure" of implementing Series 80, Series 90, and your UIQ interface. And yeah, some of those UIs have disappeared, but it was a mobile OS that couldn't figure out what it really wanted to be.
I was happy to give that up. If you look at what's out there right now, Symbian doesn't really add all that much to the picture. A lot of its features can be found in most modern mobile OSs, the main and only reason I'd even consider Symbian is because I don't want to deal with having Google's claws in my platform, but I don't want to pay Microsoft to license WM 6.5. As for iPhoneOS or webOS, they're proprietary and owned by one company for one line of phones. They've taken themselves out of competition to be a licensed OS...so, iPhone fans, you can pretty much ignore this article. It has no bearing at all on your favorite OS. This is more about adding an option for companies that don't want to stake themselves to Android.
The only multitouch phone getting Flash anytime soon is the Palm Pre. At least, that has been actually announced.
1. Because the N900 supports flash.
2. Because the N900 doesn't have a capacitive touch screen. It takes more work to build a browser that supports really good multitouch properly than just a traditional touch sensitive screen. That said, the N900 does run Linux. And other platforms already have decent enough browser solutions integrated into them. Linux phones benefit from having a good open source web browser, iPhone or Android kind of have interests in promoting their parent company's browsers.
And yes, Firefox Mobile isn't exactly what I'd call the "most complete" browser out there. The term browser, on mobile devices, is very, very vague. There is an OS like webOS that has a customized webKit based browser basically integrated throughout the UI on top of Linux, you've got Explorer which is a little less integrated throughout WM, then you have true third party solutions like Opera. Calling one better than the other doesn't work so well, since an integrated browser is going to have an advantage no matter how you slice it.
C# is a lot easier and cleaner. Don't listen to the plethora of Apple and Linux fans...there's a reason Mono is still around and people invest in it. Without going into too many technical details, C# is just a flat out better language than C++. Objective C just isn't that great an improvement. C# really comes a lot closer to bridging the difference between Java and C than Objective C could ever do. I've done all of the above aforementioned languages professionally, so I'd know. My preference is C#. The .NET framework is mostly the only thing Microsoft that I actually am a fan of, and would love to see that sort of platform development effort for every platform out there.
Hey, that's precisely how most folks felt about PDAs, too! Those PDAs worked really pretty similarly...most of them ran one app at a time really well (unless it was a WinCE device). But it turned out that you could do a lot with a phone and a laptop...and that having a PDA was really a luxury. That's what the iPad is...it's a luxury. It's for people with 500-800 bucks to blow on a device that sits on a table, waiting for strangers to use to check their email or...read...stuff. And hey, if you have 500-800 bucks to blow, I can think of many less useful ways to unload that cash. But that's the point. There are better ways to unload that cash.
I'm sure there will be plenty of rich people who'd line up for this thing, and hey, probably a few less wealthy people with tax refunds to blow. But a netbook gives people a cheaper computer alternative to do actual work. A smartphone provides a communication device. A tablet...well, it's kinda redundant there. A computer and a phone are viewed as needs by people. A tablet is a straight up luxury item. It's a tweener, and that's why its long term success is going to be about the same as the PDA. Now, if you had a cheap tablet just for reading books, or an expensive, big tablet for streaming media, those replace two actual entertainment needs for a lot of people. Those could work. But the iPad is a tweener device. It does a lot of things, but nothing really better than products already available.
Dude, I'm sorry, but that's embarrassingly silly. All I had to say for my mom and every other non-technical person I've known to figure it out was "If you don't click this little button here when you're done, your computer will become unusable and you will lose all your work." I didn't have to explain memory, I didn't have to explain anything to them. I just said "Look, this thing is designed for a lot of different people doing different jobs. Some people don't have to do as much as other people. Some people have to do lots of things. If you don't have to do lots of things, click that button or your work will go away."
There are people who want to understand, then there are people who need to be scared into doing things the right way. You can usually figure out which way a person goes within 5 minutes of knowing them. The real problem is that geeks who are too enthusiastic about what they do can't switch gears and scare people into doing things the right way. If you did, you'd spend a whole lot less time fixing problems. I swear, schools really need to force geeks to take more Psych classes.
Android really doesn't do much for me. It's kind of a kludgey OS in a lot of ways, and a lot of the Android hype is just hype. It's open source, but it really feels sometimes like the UI was designed by schizophrenics. It has more potential than iPhoneOS, I guess. In any case, I love my MSI Wind netbook, so if the hardware really impresses me, I might give it a go just to have an Android device I can develop for (so I don't have to keep borrowing devices either from an employer, friend, or an emulator). But for light daily use, productivity, gaming, ebook reading, or web browsing? Probably not. I'd probably buy one though if it ran a real Linux based OS like Palm's webOS which has better gesture support, a cleaner UI, and probably a better browser. With the release of the PDK, the games are way better, too.
He might be able to trick someone into throwing a huge amount of money his direction because he proved something everyone knew already, using techniques that really don't prove all that much more than you can get a trojan on a phone, but most folks aren't buying it. The majority of software solutions for mobile devices tend towards being focused on blocking the "casual" hacker, for example, the friend who picks up your phone when you leave it out somewhere, or the phone you left in the coffee shop that the stranger who finds it might have something interesting on it (or might be good for some calls). That takes into account the typical use-case scenarios for a mobile device. Of course that stuff isn't going to block a trojan, because that comes down to the OS running on that phone having enough built in security to make it difficult for it to gain root access, or a virus scanner that runs on that phone (which is painfully hard on your battery life, and most people avoid that solution altogether) that keeps itself properly updated at all times.
I've installed FF on a LOT of machines over the years, and not once have I ever seen it suck up anywhere close to a GB of ram. In fact, I don't even understand why people leave their browser up for 3 days anymore...it's not like you're downloading DVDs through your browser on a slow ISDN connection...I hope. In fact, with several tabs open, I'm hitting about 90 megs right now on Win7.
If you're searching for other people having the same problem, have you noticed there is a fix for it?
It's a path towards creating themes that don't require a browser restart, which is and has been an annoyance since they started doing themes several years ago. Unfortunately, a huge number of themes already out there don't work that way. It seems like a preliminary step towards transitioning to how Firefox 4.0 will be dealing with themes. 3.5 and up are pretty much transitional upgrades to wean people onto 4.0 when it's released. Pretty ordinary release strategy, really.
Nice. Noticeably snappier. I like the idea of a path to themes I can apply without having to restart the browser. Browsing for the perfect theme will take a whole lot less time. The browser still takes up a bit of memory, but it's about what I expected. Just wish I could properly compare it to IE8 in Win7 without feeling like Microsoft is artificially deflating its memory usage numbers by offloading work into "operating system" processes.
Ha, and you got tricked by a Opera or Chrome fanboy into replying. You know that's not going to make them change.
Awesome. I love having as much freedom to make my browser as irritating to use to my jerk friends who don't ask for permission to use my machine as possible. It's just a thing I like to do.
...because they can't make any money on them, that they'd actually bring up the wearable computer thing again. Well, it kinda makes sense. You can charge a whole lot more margin for a wearable computer than you can for a low end, tiny laptop. But I thought we've been over this before. Wearable computers are only for dorks.
Nice rant, but totally and fundamentally wrong. Still, it's fun to declare that everyone who uses Firefox are basically teenagers. The funny thing about that is that a whole lot of that crowd uses their cellphones to surf the web, and judging by you and the GP, apparently that means they're probably all Opera users as well...well, maybe not. If smartphone sales numbers are any indicator, they're probably using Safari or some other webkit browser.
I stopped using Opera because major features never seemed to work, even though I forked out cash for it back in the day. Sure, I could have hacked the ads out, but I believed in Opera at that time, and paid for the thing. However, even with 128 bit security, it couldn't properly id itself as IE or Mozilla. Which meant I couldn't check my bank account with anything but IE6, no matter how much back and forth I had with my bank. Which meant that I crumpled up Opera and threw it in the trash for the early beta of Firefox, aka Phoenix. I started out with Lynx. I still use Firefox because it works, I'm a developer and like to tweak things, and believe me, I can tweak the hell out of Firefox to my hearts content. To get me back, Opera would have to hand me a freaking refund AND prove to me that it can do the job better than Firefox...and from the times I've done browser compatibility tests, I've seen nothing glaringly better about Opera that would really make me want to switch back, just like I haven't seen what I want in Chrome or IE8, either. A little more speed optimization at memory expense isn't going to cut it for me. And it doesn't for most of the developers I've worked with that prefer Firefox for web development, for personal surfing, and generally for just about anything (unless, of course, you're a Mac person...though I've never been fond of Safari's UI on a larger screen...though I kind of dig the webkit browser on my phone).
For any software, if you're running stuff that is basically 12 years out of date, you should expect your setup to be exploitable. You don't see a lot of people running MacOS 8, early revisions of Slackware, or Netscape 5.5 anymore, right? Neglecting to update IE is about the stupidest thing anyone with some regard for their personal security could put off. It's easily the most exploited piece of software in the history of...software. That's what having a near 100% dominance in the very sketchy playing field of the late 90's/early 00's Internet does for you. I'm no Microsoft fan, but anyone who thinks that code that was written 12 years ago is perfectly fine to use nowadays...switching to another browser isn't going to fix their problem. Medication and a good shrink will fix their problem. And maybe a Computer Science course or two. If you never updated the virus defs in your virus scanner...and you got a virus...switching virus scanners isn't going to fix the fact that you're too undisciplined to wait a few seconds and let your virus defs download no matter what setup you use. If people won't update from IE6, you can bet they won't update any other browser they install, either.
Sorry, but if you get exploited running IE6, I have absolutely NO pity for you. You're just plain stupid, and your stupidity most likely has caused you to infect other systems probably more than once. You're like a driver who plows down a couple margaritas before you go out driving on a Sunday afternoon.
That's not the point at all. The point of the whole program, which would have sat on the shelf indefinitely, was to put out of work developers back to work so THEY don't continue to sit on the shelf and end up taking forbearance on their student loans, declaring bankruptcy on their homes, and being stuck taking jobs at the local convenience store because their skills are so far out of industry practice. Think of it like unemployment, but instead of just taking a check each week, they actually make something that is of use to people. That was the reason they used those tax dollars. It's called investing back in your own country so in 5 years, we don't have a massive developer shortage and are stuck opening up the H-1 program even further (which results in more of your "precious, blood, sweat, and tears paid tax dollars" being spent on hiring more government employees to review those H-1 submittals. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Seriously. They didn't even have to do this project at all. It could have sat out there indefinitely and no one would have noticed. Just take a look at it! The ENTIRE point was to put out of work developers in THIS country back to work. So, because some suck-up politician on the take by some offshore company forced the plan to be partially offshored, it effectively circumvented the entire purpose of the project. Sure, this project might be useful in the future, but come on. There are LOADS of tools out there for job seekers. The whole purpose of this was to put guys back to work and keep them from dropping off the map, not keeping India's economy afloat.
If a foreign government had attacked non-digital assets of any US corporation, you would expect some kind of formal reprisal.
It has a whole lot less to do with the Executive branch than it has to do with Congress's near-ubiquitous lack of fundamental understanding of the importance of digital security and their lack of attention paid to updating current laws to properly cover digital security of a government OR corporate entity. That said, the physical assets of US corporations located outside US borders have been attacked more times than you can count without federal reprisal. There's an element of personal responsibility that is expected out of corporations (well, except Wall Street) to clean up their own messes.
It'd be awesome up to the point where you realize that 7 billion people eating everything in sight drained the global food supply. Then you'll be wishing you had that photosynthesis.