In what way is this more cool than this? The sl4a provides you with your choice of scripting languages including Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Beanshell, Javascript and I'm probably missing something. With webview, you have a GUI, You can import libraries. Pretty sophisticated programs can be written in sl4a. I've written a few myself including a very useful barcode scanner that integrates with the Amazon AWS api for up to the moment price and sales velocity for products when I'm out flea marketing. The program has made me thousands of dollars. And that's pretty damn cool.
Even more reason that this notion of an SDK that you only can run on a jailbroke platform is a joke.
I'm not quite sure how to parse that sentence but, I can assure you the ASE runs on non jailbroken Android phones. Furthermore, anybody that is going to be writing code on their phones is probably up to the task of getting the runtime on an AT&T phone.
Yes. I have Ubuntu in a chroot and screen makes it pretty easy to run multiple console apps like rtorrent and vi side by side considering it features split screen both horizontal and vertically.
PS is a console application, and as such will also run in Screen, provided you get it to run on Win32 (apparently Cygwin has it these days; I've never tried).
Yeah that sounds like a lot of fun to set up and use. Or maybe I will just install ubuntu and have the real thing.
(FWIW, I also own one. It's a good device, but it reminds me much more of Windows of early 2000s than it does of Linux - down to fairly frequent crashes of stock applications.)
It isn't perfect. The only app that crashes for me is the browser and that's fairly rare. Otherwise, I think it's pretty good. Hopefully, Google will get off of their asses and ship some quick updates.
Bash runs in screen. They work hand in hand. So, I ask again, what is ps's answer to that?
For that matter, you don't need Screen if you're using a decent terminal emulator in the first place. On Windows, that would be Console2.
Console2 is comparable to gnome-terminal (albeit less powerful). It is a completely different program from screen with a different purpose. Screen allows me to share a terminal for demonstration or a collaborative session. Screen lets me to detach and resume my session on another computer and a whole lot of other unique things none of which are not at all dependent on the particular console program it is running in. I think you are confused.
Anyway, I hope you're enjoying your year of Linux on the desktop. Peace.
What are you trolling me, now? I couldn't care less about linux on the desktop. Works great on the Xoom I'm posting this on though . Not to mention my cellphone, my router, my dvr, and this website we are both posting on.
I've had the occasional graphics driver cockup to where the screen would be set to 800x600 whilst the desktop was at 1024x768 or something. If I pushed the mouse to the screen edge, the whole desktop would scroll. Let me tell you, it was supremely annoying. Every time I've used a window phone 7 phone, it reminded me of that.
Given that competition (Adobe Reader) is free, and does not derive any profit from additional copies of their software being distributed, how is it hurt?
Reader might be free but Acrobat sure isn't. Reader exists for the same reason the flash player exists. To justify the existence and price of adobe's content creation tools. If everybody is using ms's version of pdf viewer then people won't be able to use the advanced features of adobe's software since nobody will be able to read the output. That's how it hurts. Less features for the end user and less money for Adobe.
PowerShell is in the stock install since Win7/Win2008R2. Late to the party? For sure, but better late than never.
With bash, I can pipe any command line utility to any other one whether they were made to work together or not as long as they take and receive text from standard in and out. How do I do that with power shell if my utility doesn't output an object as most don't? That's where the flexibility and power of bash comes in.
Whatever Android is, it is not a traditional, community-oriented Linux distribution, and its success is bound to the mega-corp that made it happen.
What difference does it make? It still runs Linux. I can still download the source, compile it and run it on my phone. There are community distributions. I can compile and install just about any Linux program I want on it. Off the top of my head, my Droid has vim, rtorrent, elinks, ssh, gnu core-utils, bash, and more. And that's just what I can think of. What is "traditional" Linux anyway? Much of this argument rests on the fact that Linux does not dominate on the desktop. So, really, traditional Linux is server and embedded. I think Android qualifies as embedded Linux.
"Applied" Linux is not some set in stone thing that you can just point to and say this is it. It is constantly evolving and filling new niches. Android being just one of them.
If you like lxde, consider just using the components it is made up of. The lxde panel is just fbpanel with many of the features stripped out and the ability to set a background image added in. lxde window manager is just openbox. I'm not sure what changes they made but openbox is very configurable and I haven't seen anything lxde can do that ob can't. The lxde desktop and file manager is just pcmanfm.
I won't belabor the point and of course, you use what you want. It just seems that by sticking with the upstream projects, not only will you get more timely updates but, the upstream stuff seems to be more feature complete anyway. The only downside I see is lxde has some custom configuration guis but it's really not that big of a deal (to me).
I find a combination of feh, openbox and fbpanel with a few config changes is just about perfect. Much faster than kwin or metacity, runs blazingly fast on my Acer Aspire One and just plain stays out of my way.
On the subject of Gnome vs KDE, Gnome seems to be easier to beautify especially with emerald and compiz but it is just so slow and memory hungry. KDE4.x is very powerful with a plethora of whiz bang features and I do appreciate the aerosnap thing they borrowed from win7 but again, it is just so darned slow. Even on a high end desktop, the effects stutter for me. Plasma desktop is too cool though. Just my 2Â.
Thanks for the link to the "scripting layer for Android" stuff.
Glad to be of service.
It looks like a Bash shell is one of the interpreters you can install in SL4A. Do you get a complete set of command-line tools to go with it, or just something like BusyBox?
Unfortunately, it just shells you into whatever you already have on the device. In the case of the Xoom, it's even more limited than BusyBox. Very stripped down. Not even a clear command. The first thing I did after rooting was install BusyBox so it's not really that big of a deal. And there are better shell programs like connectbot than sl4a anyway so it's not anything to worry about.
The best bet is to root, install busybox so you'll have chroot and then install ubuntu. You can just make a link straight to Ubuntu on your home screen and you won't be able to even tell the difference between ubuntu and native since the chroot starts up almost instantly and you can bind mount the sdcard into your chroot environment. I just made the sdcard my/home. You can access X via the android vnc viewer program. The whole setup works surprisingly well. My bluetooth keyboard works great but I am still having trouble with the mouse. Somebody compiled a version of vim for Android that you can access natively, btw. I personally do all of my programming with vim and all of my customizations (dictionary for code completion, etc.) work on the Xoom.
As far as sl4a and python goes, I have run into very few limitations for the type of stuff I do. The only real problem is while you can access much of the android api including barcode scanner, camera, sensors, battery state, so on and so forth, you don't really have access to any type of canvas gui widget. The workaround is to use the webview instead. Some fairly sophisticated programs can be written with python on the backend and javascript/html on the front end. There is a special callback mechanism for message passing between the two so you don't have to set up some kind of clunky cgi gateway or anything.
People will be writing, browsing, and watching on these devices. The iPad has this down cold.
That was actually my point. When I quoted specs, purely as a point of academic interest, I was pointing out that despite the superior numbers, the iPad is smoother. You don't have to tell me, I know that 99 percent of people care about what they can do, not what the device can do.
That tablets computers are a fad that will fade into a niche product that isn't worth their time to pursue.
I'm more inclined to believe that the iPad is just a really, REALLY good product in its niche, priced competitively and expertly marketed. I have a friend that has an iPad 1 and a Galaxy Tab. The Tab and my Xoom are more "powerful". I have both devices rooted, I have Ubuntu installed on my Xoom, you can use the Tab as a phone, they have cameras, sdcard slots (ignoring the Xoom situation), and a whole lot more.
As someone that has used all three side by side, I can tell you a few issues that make the iPad more desirable in many people's eyes. The iPad has a butter smooth interface. The GPU acceleration of the 2D elements is executed almost perfectly. Android, not so much. Even the Xoom with dual core Tegra2 overclocked to 1400 MHz isn't as smooth as the older iPad. I understand Google's reasoning for resisting all out offloading to the GPU (compatibility issues with older phones) but, that doesn't matter to people that just want a device that works and looks good doing it.
The iPad has the iOS ecosystem to fall back on. I personally have had no problem finding what I want in the Android market so maybe it is a perception thing.
Another issue that I can see people having is Honeycomb is very dark. iOS, in contrast, is very light. It doesn't help that the Xoom screen won't get as bright as an iPad's no matter what you do. My boss who has an iPad and is a little older asked me to brighten the screen on my Xoom while I was showing him something. Well, I couldn't.
And, last but not least. Android is the underdog in the tablet market. It needs to be priced that way. There is no way in hell that most people are going to buy a 3G Xoom for more than a 3G iPad. Especially when Best Buy sticks the Xoom off in a remote corner of the PC laptop section (though, in their defence, at least the Tabs are up front and center). Maybe now that the Xoom has a wifi variant, that won't be much of a problem.
All that having been said, I love my Xoom and would never trade it for an iPad. I love the scripting layer for Android enabling me to program in Python right on the device. I love running Ubuntu on it for things like rtorrent, vim, various servers for wireless "syncing", etc. I think Google is on to something with Honeycomb being more optimized for tablets (persistent dock, etc.). But if you want to go up against the juggernaut, you have to bring some strong sauce. The Xoom is great but, it needs to be even better. And cheaper.
The hyperbole in the summary says Google is "pulling an Apple". I disagree. In order 4 that 2 b actually true, google would have had to disable side loading from android. That is the crucial difference. With apple you have no choice other than to jailbreak. With android I can install anything I want whether it is in the market or not as long as it exists. At&t notwithstanding. Pardon the number subsitutions as I dictated this with the voice recognition on my Droid.
You know, if there is one saving grace to April 1st, on slashdot, I sure do get a lot more work done by not actually spending my time reading articles and comments.
Sitting here browsing and posting this on my Xoom, I couldn't disagree more. Let's see, no heat, phenomenal battery life, extremely lightweight, intuitive touch based OS and on and on. Since getting my Xoom, my net book has barely come out of the case and my desktop is collecting dust. It does practically everything my regular computer does and most of it a whole lot better. I even hack on little python scripts with it thanks to the scriptng layer for android. And this is a first generation product. I f-ing love this thing. This guy needs to put the pipe down and step away.
Android and iOS are coming for Microsoft,and their monopoly profits like twin freight trains.
Of course, when you're paid to ignore reality...
video playback [on the nook color] doesn't work quite right, bluetooth doesn't work quite right, but both of them work. By late april it should be a clear winner, and that will make the decision much easier.
And people on here wonder why the general populous just wants an iPad.
Why is it so hard to understand that the "shock" comes from the fact that he's implying the ipad owes any of its success to the relative quality of a nook color. I know it's Sunday and everybody's hungover but, really?
The summary is just a bunch of BS somebody spouted off. The ggp was actually trying to say that the relative shittiness of the rooted nook color compared to the ipad had something to do with how popular ipads are. That's just stupid. And you are even stupider for endorsing it.
That mountain of cash MS has might help them out for a bit.
Yeah, I'm sure that didn't hurt too many people in upper management's feelings. Only time will tell if it will be worth it in the long run for the shareholders. Windows Phone 7 is extremely speculative at this point. So far, it little more than an also-ran and that doesn't appear to be on any trajectory for change any time soon. Characterizing it as the "third choice" in the grand scheme of mobile OS's as it is in a lot of the media is just pure dishonesty. I'm sure RIM might have something to say about that.
Yeah, smart in contrast to the disaster that the submission is highlighting. Somehow, I have to think there might have been a third option in there somewhere...
That's probably not unreasonable - I mean, it's not as if Apple uses its "app store" to knock out competitors to its own offerings, so allowing some big company to be your gateway is always safe. However, why aren't you worried that Google might sell on information to a large competitor? That an individual Google employee will sell it? Accidentally leak it? Provide it to the government without warrant? Google are not audited, they're not regulated, and they're infants in terms of reputation.
And providing information to help sponsors.
Arms manufacturers win by selling to both sides.
OK, I'll give you $50 in cash if you give me your credit card number. I promise not to abuse the information. My promise is legally binding. Today and for the rest of my soulless, corporate life.
Whichever anti-paranoia medication they have you own... please double it. You can thank me later.
Don't you mean the other way round? MS Office gives proper versioning control, i.e. locking of parts of document (if desired) and commits precisely when the user wants to commit. Whereas Google offers a cheap mess, like giving 10 people a sheet of A4 and allowing them all to write on it at once. Sure, it's fine for kindergarten drawing, but unmanageable for efficient, real work.
For decades, people have been huddling in front of one computer editing the same document. Now they don't have to huddle. They can be on opposite sides of the world. If you don't see the benefit of being able to do that in actual real time then you are just ignoring the blindingly obvious. Since you don't appear to be that stupid, I have to wonder why that is.
What nonsense. I have 10-year-old machines running Office 2000 perfectly with near-instant responsiveness, while I have to watch the "web page" that is Google Apps redraw.
Oh, so you were just talking smack when you said:
Google certainly doesn't do anything "instantly". If you find the responsiveness of Google Apps better than local software, you need to buy PCs less than a decade old
Effectively saying that Google Docs runs better than "local software" (Office?) on old hardware.
Does it make your head hurt talking out of both sides of your mouth? And if you have a 10 year old computer that you to have watch Google Apps redraw on, maybe you need to wipe it and do a reinstall. I have next to me an HP Pavilion zt1135 manufactured in '01 or '02. I just tested your theory on a spreadsheet in Google Docs that somebody here is working on. It came up almost instantly and was immediately editable. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just suggest a good anti-virus or update off of IE6. Surely, you're not just making stuff up.
Another bizarre argument. Are you saying cross platform compatibility is a bad thing?
Collect more straw.
I pointed out that Google Docs works on the iPad. You brought up some nonsense about Windows in the 90's. Talk about strawmen.
I hope you're not calling Google Docs "free"! Even if the "standard" edition is satisfactory, your payment right now is supplying your (i.e. your clients') data to Google for mining. What do you think Google are, a charity?
Where in my post did you see me say anything about putting any client data in Google Docs? That's right; nowhere. Not to mention the fact that we are in the wholesale sports apparel business. I'm not worried about Google trying to muscle in on that anytime soon. And furthermore, Google's stock in trade is using information for targeted ads. So, I get to use all of this great free software and all I have to do in return is see an ad that might, $DEITY forbid, be relevant to me? Oh, the humanity!!1 The day that Google decides to abuse peoples' information to compete with them is the day that Google gets dropped like a rock. Something tells me that they'd rather continue to make billions and actually stick to their privacy policy that by the way exists and is legally binding.
If you really want "real time" letter-by-letter then you're a time-wasting idiot, but you can script an automatic Ctrl-S after each letter.
Wow, the ignorance. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Use some hack to force Office to do what Google Docs does out of the box. So, ignoring that absurd suggestion, the difference between real time and saving from time to time is the difference between CB radio and a cell phone. Think about it, grampa.
Wow. When I create documents I certainly don't fucking want them "automatically shared and accessible from any other computer anywhere".
Do you download the internet every night so you can browse it the next day or do you just like to go to a website and see it as it is up to the minute? Yeah, me too. I also like my documents to be available when I need them.
If you find the responsiveness of Google Apps better than local software, you need to buy PCs less than a decade old
That argument is bizarre. So, what you are saying is Google Apps runs better than Office on an old computer (which is true). So, what I need to do is go drop hundreds to thousands on new computers and software to do what? Have a silo'd office install that offers less collaborative features and functionality? Er, yeah. Whatever. That borders on pure zealotry. The only one who should be fired is you. For the record, this box I'm typing on is an AMD Athlon X2 240 with 3 GB of RAM and Windows 7. Google Docs starts faster and runs just as fast as Office on it.
Google Docs works on the boss's iPad. MS Office does not.
Oh. You got me there. It's like in the early '90s everyone computerising would go Wintel because, well, that's what the guy in the competing firm / in head office was being shoveled, and that's where all the shiny cheap marketing was going on. Despite dozens of options, so many decisions come down to the arbitrary whim of a good feeling. You've just illustrated one.
Another bizarre argument. Are you saying cross platform compatibility is a bad thing?
Slashdot Mirror
In what way is this more cool than this? The sl4a provides you with your choice of scripting languages including Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Beanshell, Javascript and I'm probably missing something. With webview, you have a GUI, You can import libraries. Pretty sophisticated programs can be written in sl4a. I've written a few myself including a very useful barcode scanner that integrates with the Amazon AWS api for up to the moment price and sales velocity for products when I'm out flea marketing. The program has made me thousands of dollars. And that's pretty damn cool.
Even more reason that this notion of an SDK that you only can run on a jailbroke platform is a joke.
I'm not quite sure how to parse that sentence but, I can assure you the ASE runs on non jailbroken Android phones. Furthermore, anybody that is going to be writing code on their phones is probably up to the task of getting the runtime on an AT&T phone.
I want to say something but everything I can think of just seems hollow compared to what you both must be going through. Be strong.
Are you using bash and screen on Xoom?
Yes. I have Ubuntu in a chroot and screen makes it pretty easy to run multiple console apps like rtorrent and vi side by side considering it features split screen both horizontal and vertically.
PS is a console application, and as such will also run in Screen, provided you get it to run on Win32 (apparently Cygwin has it these days; I've never tried).
Yeah that sounds like a lot of fun to set up and use. Or maybe I will just install ubuntu and have the real thing.
(FWIW, I also own one. It's a good device, but it reminds me much more of Windows of early 2000s than it does of Linux - down to fairly frequent crashes of stock applications.)
It isn't perfect. The only app that crashes for me is the browser and that's fairly rare. Otherwise, I think it's pretty good. Hopefully, Google will get off of their asses and ship some quick updates.
For that matter, you don't need Screen if you're using a decent terminal emulator in the first place. On Windows, that would be Console2.
Console2 is comparable to gnome-terminal (albeit less powerful). It is a completely different program from screen with a different purpose. Screen allows me to share a terminal for demonstration or a collaborative session. Screen lets me to detach and resume my session on another computer and a whole lot of other unique things none of which are not at all dependent on the particular console program it is running in. I think you are confused.
Anyway, I hope you're enjoying your year of Linux on the desktop. Peace.
What are you trolling me, now? I couldn't care less about linux on the desktop. Works great on the Xoom I'm posting this on though . Not to mention my cellphone, my router, my dvr, and this website we are both posting on.
I've had the occasional graphics driver cockup to where the screen would be set to 800x600 whilst the desktop was at 1024x768 or something. If I pushed the mouse to the screen edge, the whole desktop would scroll. Let me tell you, it was supremely annoying. Every time I've used a window phone 7 phone, it reminded me of that.
Given that competition (Adobe Reader) is free, and does not derive any profit from additional copies of their software being distributed, how is it hurt?
Reader might be free but Acrobat sure isn't. Reader exists for the same reason the flash player exists. To justify the existence and price of adobe's content creation tools. If everybody is using ms's version of pdf viewer then people won't be able to use the advanced features of adobe's software since nobody will be able to read the output. That's how it hurts. Less features for the end user and less money for Adobe.
PowerShell is in the stock install since Win7/Win2008R2. Late to the party? For sure, but better late than never.
With bash, I can pipe any command line utility to any other one whether they were made to work together or not as long as they take and receive text from standard in and out. How do I do that with power shell if my utility doesn't output an object as most don't? That's where the flexibility and power of bash comes in.
Whatever Android is, it is not a traditional, community-oriented Linux distribution, and its success is bound to the mega-corp that made it happen.
What difference does it make? It still runs Linux. I can still download the source, compile it and run it on my phone. There are community distributions. I can compile and install just about any Linux program I want on it. Off the top of my head, my Droid has vim, rtorrent, elinks, ssh, gnu core-utils, bash, and more. And that's just what I can think of. What is "traditional" Linux anyway? Much of this argument rests on the fact that Linux does not dominate on the desktop. So, really, traditional Linux is server and embedded. I think Android qualifies as embedded Linux.
"Applied" Linux is not some set in stone thing that you can just point to and say this is it. It is constantly evolving and filling new niches. Android being just one of them.
I won't belabor the point and of course, you use what you want. It just seems that by sticking with the upstream projects, not only will you get more timely updates but, the upstream stuff seems to be more feature complete anyway. The only downside I see is lxde has some custom configuration guis but it's really not that big of a deal (to me).
I find a combination of feh, openbox and fbpanel with a few config changes is just about perfect. Much faster than kwin or metacity, runs blazingly fast on my Acer Aspire One and just plain stays out of my way.
On the subject of Gnome vs KDE, Gnome seems to be easier to beautify especially with emerald and compiz but it is just so slow and memory hungry. KDE4.x is very powerful with a plethora of whiz bang features and I do appreciate the aerosnap thing they borrowed from win7 but again, it is just so darned slow. Even on a high end desktop, the effects stutter for me. Plasma desktop is too cool though. Just my 2Â.
Thanks for the link to the "scripting layer for Android" stuff.
Glad to be of service.
It looks like a Bash shell is one of the interpreters you can install in SL4A. Do you get a complete set of command-line tools to go with it, or just something like BusyBox?
Unfortunately, it just shells you into whatever you already have on the device. In the case of the Xoom, it's even more limited than BusyBox. Very stripped down. Not even a clear command. The first thing I did after rooting was install BusyBox so it's not really that big of a deal. And there are better shell programs like connectbot than sl4a anyway so it's not anything to worry about.
The best bet is to root, install busybox so you'll have chroot and then install ubuntu. You can just make a link straight to Ubuntu on your home screen and you won't be able to even tell the difference between ubuntu and native since the chroot starts up almost instantly and you can bind mount the sdcard into your chroot environment. I just made the sdcard my /home. You can access X via the android vnc viewer program. The whole setup works surprisingly well. My bluetooth keyboard works great but I am still having trouble with the mouse. Somebody compiled a version of vim for Android that you can access natively, btw. I personally do all of my programming with vim and all of my customizations (dictionary for code completion, etc.) work on the Xoom.
As far as sl4a and python goes, I have run into very few limitations for the type of stuff I do. The only real problem is while you can access much of the android api including barcode scanner, camera, sensors, battery state, so on and so forth, you don't really have access to any type of canvas gui widget. The workaround is to use the webview instead. Some fairly sophisticated programs can be written with python on the backend and javascript/html on the front end. There is a special callback mechanism for message passing between the two so you don't have to set up some kind of clunky cgi gateway or anything.
Good luck!
...they can care less about technical specs.
People will be writing, browsing, and watching on these devices. The iPad has this down cold.
That was actually my point. When I quoted specs, purely as a point of academic interest, I was pointing out that despite the superior numbers, the iPad is smoother. You don't have to tell me, I know that 99 percent of people care about what they can do, not what the device can do.
That tablets computers are a fad that will fade into a niche product that isn't worth their time to pursue.
I'm more inclined to believe that the iPad is just a really, REALLY good product in its niche, priced competitively and expertly marketed. I have a friend that has an iPad 1 and a Galaxy Tab. The Tab and my Xoom are more "powerful". I have both devices rooted, I have Ubuntu installed on my Xoom, you can use the Tab as a phone, they have cameras, sdcard slots (ignoring the Xoom situation), and a whole lot more.
As someone that has used all three side by side, I can tell you a few issues that make the iPad more desirable in many people's eyes. The iPad has a butter smooth interface. The GPU acceleration of the 2D elements is executed almost perfectly. Android, not so much. Even the Xoom with dual core Tegra2 overclocked to 1400 MHz isn't as smooth as the older iPad. I understand Google's reasoning for resisting all out offloading to the GPU (compatibility issues with older phones) but, that doesn't matter to people that just want a device that works and looks good doing it.
The iPad has the iOS ecosystem to fall back on. I personally have had no problem finding what I want in the Android market so maybe it is a perception thing.
Another issue that I can see people having is Honeycomb is very dark. iOS, in contrast, is very light. It doesn't help that the Xoom screen won't get as bright as an iPad's no matter what you do. My boss who has an iPad and is a little older asked me to brighten the screen on my Xoom while I was showing him something. Well, I couldn't.
And, last but not least. Android is the underdog in the tablet market. It needs to be priced that way. There is no way in hell that most people are going to buy a 3G Xoom for more than a 3G iPad. Especially when Best Buy sticks the Xoom off in a remote corner of the PC laptop section (though, in their defence, at least the Tabs are up front and center). Maybe now that the Xoom has a wifi variant, that won't be much of a problem.
All that having been said, I love my Xoom and would never trade it for an iPad. I love the scripting layer for Android enabling me to program in Python right on the device. I love running Ubuntu on it for things like rtorrent, vim, various servers for wireless "syncing", etc. I think Google is on to something with Honeycomb being more optimized for tablets (persistent dock, etc.). But if you want to go up against the juggernaut, you have to bring some strong sauce. The Xoom is great but, it needs to be even better. And cheaper.
The hyperbole in the summary says Google is "pulling an Apple". I disagree. In order 4 that 2 b actually true, google would have had to disable side loading from android. That is the crucial difference. With apple you have no choice other than to jailbreak. With android I can install anything I want whether it is in the market or not as long as it exists. At&t notwithstanding. Pardon the number subsitutions as I dictated this with the voice recognition on my Droid.
You know, if there is one saving grace to April 1st, on slashdot, I sure do get a lot more work done by not actually spending my time reading articles and comments.
Android and iOS are coming for Microsoft,and their monopoly profits like twin freight trains. Of course, when you're paid to ignore reality...
video playback [on the nook color] doesn't work quite right, bluetooth doesn't work quite right, but both of them work. By late april it should be a clear winner, and that will make the decision much easier.
And people on here wonder why the general populous just wants an iPad.
What he said. Emphasis mine.
Why is it so hard to understand that the "shock" comes from the fact that he's implying the ipad owes any of its success to the relative quality of a nook color. I know it's Sunday and everybody's hungover but, really?
The summary is just a bunch of BS somebody spouted off. The ggp was actually trying to say that the relative shittiness of the rooted nook color compared to the ipad had something to do with how popular ipads are. That's just stupid. And you are even stupider for endorsing it.
Wait. You're actually comparing a rooted and hacked e-reader hobbyist project to the ipad? Wow. Just wow.
That mountain of cash MS has might help them out for a bit.
Yeah, I'm sure that didn't hurt too many people in upper management's feelings. Only time will tell if it will be worth it in the long run for the shareholders. Windows Phone 7 is extremely speculative at this point. So far, it little more than an also-ran and that doesn't appear to be on any trajectory for change any time soon. Characterizing it as the "third choice" in the grand scheme of mobile OS's as it is in a lot of the media is just pure dishonesty. I'm sure RIM might have something to say about that.
Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smart
Yeah, smart in contrast to the disaster that the submission is highlighting. Somehow, I have to think there might have been a third option in there somewhere...
That's probably not unreasonable - I mean, it's not as if Apple uses its "app store" to knock out competitors to its own offerings, so allowing some big company to be your gateway is always safe. However, why aren't you worried that Google might sell on information to a large competitor? That an individual Google employee will sell it? Accidentally leak it? Provide it to the government without warrant? Google are not audited, they're not regulated, and they're infants in terms of reputation.
And providing information to help sponsors.
Arms manufacturers win by selling to both sides.
OK, I'll give you $50 in cash if you give me your credit card number. I promise not to abuse the information. My promise is legally binding. Today and for the rest of my soulless, corporate life.
Whichever anti-paranoia medication they have you own... please double it. You can thank me later.
Don't you mean the other way round? MS Office gives proper versioning control, i.e. locking of parts of document (if desired) and commits precisely when the user wants to commit. Whereas Google offers a cheap mess, like giving 10 people a sheet of A4 and allowing them all to write on it at once. Sure, it's fine for kindergarten drawing, but unmanageable for efficient, real work.
For decades, people have been huddling in front of one computer editing the same document. Now they don't have to huddle. They can be on opposite sides of the world. If you don't see the benefit of being able to do that in actual real time then you are just ignoring the blindingly obvious. Since you don't appear to be that stupid, I have to wonder why that is.
What nonsense. I have 10-year-old machines running Office 2000 perfectly with near-instant responsiveness, while I have to watch the "web page" that is Google Apps redraw.
Oh, so you were just talking smack when you said:
Google certainly doesn't do anything "instantly". If you find the responsiveness of Google Apps better than local software, you need to buy PCs less than a decade old
Effectively saying that Google Docs runs better than "local software" (Office?) on old hardware. Does it make your head hurt talking out of both sides of your mouth? And if you have a 10 year old computer that you to have watch Google Apps redraw on, maybe you need to wipe it and do a reinstall. I have next to me an HP Pavilion zt1135 manufactured in '01 or '02. I just tested your theory on a spreadsheet in Google Docs that somebody here is working on. It came up almost instantly and was immediately editable. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just suggest a good anti-virus or update off of IE6. Surely, you're not just making stuff up.
Another bizarre argument. Are you saying cross platform compatibility is a bad thing?
Collect more straw.
I pointed out that Google Docs works on the iPad. You brought up some nonsense about Windows in the 90's. Talk about strawmen.
I hope you're not calling Google Docs "free"! Even if the "standard" edition is satisfactory, your payment right now is supplying your (i.e. your clients') data to Google for mining. What do you think Google are, a charity?
Where in my post did you see me say anything about putting any client data in Google Docs? That's right; nowhere. Not to mention the fact that we are in the wholesale sports apparel business. I'm not worried about Google trying to muscle in on that anytime soon. And furthermore, Google's stock in trade is using information for targeted ads. So, I get to use all of this great free software and all I have to do in return is see an ad that might, $DEITY forbid, be relevant to me? Oh, the humanity!!1 The day that Google decides to abuse peoples' information to compete with them is the day that Google gets dropped like a rock. Something tells me that they'd rather continue to make billions and actually stick to their privacy policy that by the way exists and is legally binding.
If you really want "real time" letter-by-letter then you're a time-wasting idiot, but you can script an automatic Ctrl-S after each letter.
Wow, the ignorance. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Use some hack to force Office to do what Google Docs does out of the box. So, ignoring that absurd suggestion, the difference between real time and saving from time to time is the difference between CB radio and a cell phone. Think about it, grampa.
Wow. When I create documents I certainly don't fucking want them "automatically shared and accessible from any other computer anywhere".
Do you download the internet every night so you can browse it the next day or do you just like to go to a website and see it as it is up to the minute? Yeah, me too. I also like my documents to be available when I need them.
If you find the responsiveness of Google Apps better than local software, you need to buy PCs less than a decade old
That argument is bizarre. So, what you are saying is Google Apps runs better than Office on an old computer (which is true). So, what I need to do is go drop hundreds to thousands on new computers and software to do what? Have a silo'd office install that offers less collaborative features and functionality? Er, yeah. Whatever. That borders on pure zealotry. The only one who should be fired is you. For the record, this box I'm typing on is an AMD Athlon X2 240 with 3 GB of RAM and Windows 7. Google Docs starts faster and runs just as fast as Office on it.
Google Docs works on the boss's iPad. MS Office does not.
Oh. You got me there. It's like in the early '90s everyone computerising would go Wintel because, well, that's what the guy in the competing firm / in head office was being shoveled, and that's where all the shiny cheap marketing was going on. Despite dozens of options, so many decisions come down to the arbitrary whim of a good feeling. You've just illustrated one.
Another bizarre argument. Are you saying cross platform compatibility is a bad thing?