What gives you any idea that this is what they will be doing? I didn't see anything about them rendering in the cloud. Maybe caching or pre-fetching html based on predictions, but not rendering.
Nothing in the articles to suggest they are doing any Rendering in the cloud. Not sure where anybody is getting this from. They will cache content, compress, etc, but I doubt they will render.
So this guy Stonebraker thinks Facebook is running too many servers or something, or its just too complex, whatever. Seems to be working for me as a user so not sure what the problem is.
Is there something that can scale to support something as big as Facebook and be done using fewer servers with less complexity? What site has actually proven that? Was it because of the underlying db engine or just a better design from the get go?
This quote: "“old SQL (as he calls it) is good for nothing” and needs to be “sent to the home for retired software.” Is just flame bait (of course I'm taking it though).
His only real point is this: "the problem with MySQL and other SQL databases is that they consume too many resources for overhead tasks (e.g., maintaining ACID compliance and handling multithreading) and relatively few on actually finding and serving data. ". He has some engine he thinks does it better (VoltDB), which does a lot of stuff in memory, similar to memcached, but built into the engine. Good idea. Oracle DB has in memory tables as well.
Has anyone put this VoltDB to the test? Is it better?
Can't for the life of me find out what Patent numbers Microsoft owns here that are "part of" Android phones. What exactly is Samsung supposed to be licensing here???
Maybe you are thinking of Microsoft (C# one example). Java is the language of choice on Android already and has been from the start. They just want everyone to stop suing them for it, so they can focus on doing cool stuff. Oracle is the beast here that needs to be rained in, not Google.
How I understand it is this: The licensing terms restrict Google from making their own platform specific version using the spec. It basically stops Google from rebranding Java to "Gava" and using it as the language of choice on Android.
The control group was also right handed. "All participants were adult,clinically healthy, right-handed men."
Anyway I agree that there are some flaws to this "study". The 2 groups (cell phone wearers/non-cell phone wearers) were drastically different in terms of average age and height. The study tries to explain that away, but I wasn't convinced. Also 2/3 of them were faculty or staff at Medical places, so sort of a strange group to test effects of electromagnetic radiation on, since they may have other significant exposures at work.
Reading a bit more on how they did the study: 2/3 of the people in the study were faculty or personnel from a Medical Sciences school or Nuclear Medicine school. Again a strange choice for studying the effects of electromagnetic radiation given that these people probably get exposed to more of that than the average joe.
This was also not a before/after study. Meaning they don't have any measurements from the cell phone wearing group before they started wearing cell phones. Nor did they follow either group over time. Basically they just got 48 people, half who wore a cell, half who didn't and measured, 1 time (as far as I can tell) their Bone Mineral Density and Bone Mineral Content.
I guess it was hard for them to find young thing people that didn't wear cell phones, thus accounting for the skewed sample ages and weights?
Also note the following: The cell phone wearing group had higher (read Better) or similar BMC and BMD for 9 out of the 12 measurements by my count.
Just looking at Table 1 in the PDF of the study you can see the sample of non-phone users to phone-users had a really weird makeup. The nonusers where older and heaver by significant margins: 47.1 years to 33.5 years and 85kg to 77kg. So non users were like 14 years older and 18 lbs heaver. Really wacked.
Why would you do a study on hips with such a skewed population? The attempt to account for this in the text, but I'm not buying it.
Also, the total number studies was 48 people (24 users, 24 non-users) so not a huge study.
Based on the populations used for the study, its my guess they had some data lying around on at least one of these groups which was probably collected differently from the data for the other group.
Hey I want to know as much as the next guy if this is for real, as I sometimes carry up to 3 cell phones (don't ask), but I'm seeing some flaws here that are just jumping out.
Not to take away from what they've done, but it really does seem to fly like Tim. So basically the Tim toy with an electric motor instead of a wound up rubber band, and maybe remote control to help steer. Ok, granted it looks like the head moves but I wasn't blown away.
Still its pretty cool, but I didn't see them do anything awesome. How about gliding? Seems pretty basic to me, flap, flap flap, glide like a real bird.
Yeah, you know its interesting, as devs, we seem to flock to the place where the most people are, but that is not always the best move. You have tons of competition, and therefore have to sell apps for small $ or give them away, and you struggle to get noticed. Sure the rewards are huge if you start getting some buzz, but most apps don't get that buzz.
I wonder if I could sell my app for 3-10 times the price on a smaller market like Windows Phone 7 or webOS, compared to what I sell it for on both the Android or iPhone app stores. Which way would I earn more $ over all? If I have the only app that does a certain function on WP7 then maybe that's worth more than being 1 out of 20 that do it on iPhone or Android?
When MeeGo comes in, say, in a year (and I'm being optimistic here), why would mobile developers care to divert resources from existing well-entrenched platforms?
Because maybe by then developers will have figured out, that being a small fish in a small pond makes you a bigger fish. Or in less obtuse terms, because there will be less competitors in their app store, so better chance of making a killing.
I didn't see anything in TFA about it being on 3G only (obviously happens over 3G or people wouldn't care about their data plans, but is it 3G only), but maybe in one of the referred links from the article? I know that article says that Microsoft says the "problems" were caused "by an unnamed "third party" service. Which sounds a bit different than a 3rd party app. Maybe something that comes as part of WP7 OS or pre-installed, but was written by a 3rd party.
Anyway speculation is sort of pointless, which is why I was hoping that someone had done some actual testing themselves and maybe discovered a thing or 2.
I work for a big retail firm.... but it would cost too much to test on enough devices to say we actually support "Android"
Not sure how that works, your're big, but you don't have enough money to test on a few Android devices.
Honestly, test on a 320x480 screen, a 480x800, 480x854 and the Galaxy Tab.
You can do all that in the simulator if you want. You can even test Android 1.5 - 2.3 on the simulator.
Most apps will work find on actual device if they work in the Simulator. Sure there are exceptions, so definitely test on a few devices. You could probably spend $5000 and have plenty of coverage.
If your app is specialized=>uses tons of processor, lots of graphics, etc, then ok, I take it back you may have a point. But I'm guessing your not in the Angry Birds category.
Android is hardly a horrible platform for developers. Its actually pretty great. Sure the various screen sizes can be tricky, but Android provides an easy way to handle it, for most cases.
When the Galaxy Tab came out I had to create a custom screen layout for only one of our screens, the rest scaled naturally.
Not to mention, iOS has the same issues with screen size now that there is the iPad. But you'll have to add double size images to all your apps if you want them to look great on iPhone 4.
iOS also has same issues with Telephone vs no Telephone (iPad, Touch), GPS vs no GPS (Touch), front facing camera vs not, etc.
Right, what the heck is the purpose of obtaining the source? So you can spoof your location? That will work well when you actually want to use a GPS app for real.
No spy code in OS, the spy code is in 3rd party libraries that developers put into their code for Ads and Analytics.
Android does not use swing or awt. It has its on UI model. It works pretty well and is easier to work with than swing or awt. Layouts can be done using a WYSIWYG interface and hand edited as needed (its in XML).
You can use many of the standard java jdk classes (java.lang, java.util, java.net, java.math, java.sql, etc, etc), but sure you will have to learn some of the android specific libraries as well.
In general programming with Android is pretty easy for experienced Java programmers. But there is certainly some learning curve to get started.
Yeah, its a bit of a pain, but not much. Andrdoid acutally lets you have different layouts for different screen size/resolution combinations. You just store the layout in directories that are named for that size/resolution and the phone will automatically use the right one.
By using device independent pixels (use "dip" units for most everything and "sp" units for text) you can often avoid having to use different layouts, but the layout directory model is convenient when you need it (I did).
You don't have to buy all models of android phones to "prove" it will work. Android Emulator works just fine and you can test different OS versions, screen sizes and resolutions on it. I do own a Motorola droid and do test on it, but I don't lose sleep worrying about how my app will run on different phones, because the emulator testing works well.
People let you know pretty fast if there is an issue with their phone model and you can release an update any time you choose (its actually instant, you post the update to the Android Market and users can immediately download the new version or update their old one).
We've (LLC) sold about 1200 copies of our app for Android, so far it seems to work fine on all models that it was designed for.
Well if by "the whole thing" you mean this/. topic then you are right.
Here's some non-reactionary things we could discuss on this topic:
What are some examples of when a non-RDBMs solution is better than RDBMS and SQL?
What are some examples of the opposite?
Is there a way we can generalize these so that its easier identify the class of problems where each solution would be optimal?
What are some non-SQL/non-RDBMS solutions out there, that are generalizable to a large class of problems, and don't require developers to roll their own system for each different problem?
Re:amazing what doesnt get asked
on
C# In-Depth
·
· Score: 1
Before.NET large companies would probably go with J2EE for a web application. Pre-.NET ASP was never a great solution.
Now with.NET and C#, many companies that were potential J2EE candidates ended up going with the Microsoft stack (where they probably would not have gone with pre-.NET technologies). Thus continuing and exacerbating the fragmentation that existed before.NET.
My company for instance merged with another company. The parent company was.NET and the company they merged with was J2EE. So now our programmers and even managers are sort of at odds with each other. Do we build the next app in.NET or Java ??
Without.NET and C# I don't think that kind of fragmentation would be as common.
Slashdot Mirror
What gives you any idea that this is what they will be doing? I didn't see anything about them rendering in the cloud. Maybe caching or pre-fetching html based on predictions, but not rendering.
Nothing in the articles to suggest they are doing any Rendering in the cloud. Not sure where anybody is getting this from. They will cache content, compress, etc, but I doubt they will render.
So this guy Stonebraker thinks Facebook is running too many servers or something, or its just too complex, whatever. Seems to be working for me as a user so not sure what the problem is.
Is there something that can scale to support something as big as Facebook and be done using fewer servers with less complexity? What site has actually proven that? Was it because of the underlying db engine or just a better design from the get go?
This quote: "“old SQL (as he calls it) is good for nothing” and needs to be “sent to the home for retired software.” Is just flame bait (of course I'm taking it though).
His only real point is this: "the problem with MySQL and other SQL databases is that they consume too many resources for overhead tasks (e.g., maintaining ACID compliance and handling multithreading) and relatively few on actually finding and serving data. ". He has some engine he thinks does it better (VoltDB), which does a lot of stuff in memory, similar to memcached, but built into the engine. Good idea. Oracle DB has in memory tables as well.
Has anyone put this VoltDB to the test? Is it better?
Can't for the life of me find out what Patent numbers Microsoft owns here that are "part of" Android phones. What exactly is Samsung supposed to be licensing here???
Someone please help a poor Google weary fool.
Maybe you are thinking of Microsoft (C# one example). Java is the language of choice on Android already and has been from the start. They just want everyone to stop suing them for it, so they can focus on doing cool stuff. Oracle is the beast here that needs to be rained in, not Google.
How I understand it is this: The licensing terms restrict Google from making their own platform specific version using the spec. It basically stops Google from rebranding Java to "Gava" and using it as the language of choice on Android.
The complete analysis is here http://thisismynext.com/2011/04/19/apple-sues-samsung-analysis/
I meant they were drastically different in terms of average age and WEIGHT. Their heights were similar.
The control group was also right handed. "All participants were adult,clinically healthy, right-handed men."
Anyway I agree that there are some flaws to this "study". The 2 groups (cell phone wearers/non-cell phone wearers) were drastically different in terms of average age and height. The study tries to explain that away, but I wasn't convinced. Also 2/3 of them were faculty or staff at Medical places, so sort of a strange group to test effects of electromagnetic radiation on, since they may have other significant exposures at work.
Reading a bit more on how they did the study: 2/3 of the people in the study were faculty or personnel from a Medical Sciences school or Nuclear Medicine school. Again a strange choice for studying the effects of electromagnetic radiation given that these people probably get exposed to more of that than the average joe.
This was also not a before/after study. Meaning they don't have any measurements from the cell phone wearing group before they started wearing cell phones. Nor did they follow either group over time. Basically they just got 48 people, half who wore a cell, half who didn't and measured, 1 time (as far as I can tell) their Bone Mineral Density and Bone Mineral Content.
I guess it was hard for them to find young thing people that didn't wear cell phones, thus accounting for the skewed sample ages and weights?
Also note the following:
The cell phone wearing group had higher (read Better) or similar BMC and BMD for 9 out of the 12 measurements by my count.
Just looking at Table 1 in the PDF of the study you can see the sample of non-phone users to phone-users had a really weird makeup. The nonusers where older and heaver by significant margins: 47.1 years to 33.5 years and 85kg to 77kg. So non users were like 14 years older and 18 lbs heaver. Really wacked.
Why would you do a study on hips with such a skewed population? The attempt to account for this in the text, but I'm not buying it.
Also, the total number studies was 48 people (24 users, 24 non-users) so not a huge study.
Based on the populations used for the study, its my guess they had some data lying around on at least one of these groups which was probably collected differently from the data for the other group.
Hey I want to know as much as the next guy if this is for real, as I sometimes carry up to 3 cell phones (don't ask), but I'm seeing some flaws here that are just jumping out.
I watched the video, and it reminds me a lot of the Tim bird: http://www.amazon.com/Schylling-NTN-Tim-Bird/dp/B000ELORZO.
Not to take away from what they've done, but it really does seem to fly like Tim. So basically the Tim toy with an electric motor instead of a wound up rubber band, and maybe remote control to help steer. Ok, granted it looks like the head moves but I wasn't blown away.
Still its pretty cool, but I didn't see them do anything awesome. How about gliding? Seems pretty basic to me, flap, flap flap, glide like a real bird.
Examples please.
If you're going to go out there and trash Apple how about some examples of what you are talking about.
Were the patches that took years to fix major issues, or minor stuff?
Yeah, you know its interesting, as devs, we seem to flock to the place where the most people are, but that is not always the best move. You have tons of competition, and therefore have to sell apps for small $ or give them away, and you struggle to get noticed. Sure the rewards are huge if you start getting some buzz, but most apps don't get that buzz.
I wonder if I could sell my app for 3-10 times the price on a smaller market like Windows Phone 7 or webOS, compared to what I sell it for on both the Android or iPhone app stores. Which way would I earn more $ over all? If I have the only app that does a certain function on WP7 then maybe that's worth more than being 1 out of 20 that do it on iPhone or Android?
When MeeGo comes in, say, in a year (and I'm being optimistic here), why would mobile developers care to divert resources from existing well-entrenched platforms?
Because maybe by then developers will have figured out, that being a small fish in a small pond makes you a bigger fish. Or in less obtuse terms, because there will be less competitors in their app store, so better chance of making a killing.
I didn't see anything in TFA about it being on 3G only (obviously happens over 3G or people wouldn't care about their data plans, but is it 3G only), but maybe in one of the referred links from the article? I know that article says that Microsoft says the "problems" were caused "by an unnamed "third party" service. Which sounds a bit different than a 3rd party app. Maybe something that comes as part of WP7 OS or pre-installed, but was written by a 3rd party.
Anyway speculation is sort of pointless, which is why I was hoping that someone had done some actual testing themselves and maybe discovered a thing or 2.
So no one here has a Windows phone 7?
Probably pretty easy to monitor what's flowing through your home router if you're on wi-fi.
Is this a problem with all phone's or just if people installed some nefarious app?
Anecdote.
I work for a big retail firm. ... but it would cost too much to test on enough devices to say we actually support "Android"
Not sure how that works, your're big, but you don't have enough money to test on a few Android devices.
Honestly, test on a 320x480 screen, a 480x800, 480x854 and the Galaxy Tab.
You can do all that in the simulator if you want. You can even test Android 1.5 - 2.3 on the simulator.
Most apps will work find on actual device if they work in the Simulator. Sure there are exceptions, so definitely test on a few devices. You could probably spend $5000 and have plenty of coverage.
If your app is specialized=>uses tons of processor, lots of graphics, etc, then ok, I take it back you may have a point. But I'm guessing your not in the Angry Birds category.
No, the 3rd party libraries are what you (the developer) added to your code for ads and analytics. Its not in the source.
Android is hardly a horrible platform for developers. Its actually pretty great. Sure the various screen sizes can be tricky, but Android provides an easy way to handle it, for most cases.
When the Galaxy Tab came out I had to create a custom screen layout for only one of our screens, the rest scaled naturally.
Not to mention, iOS has the same issues with screen size now that there is the iPad. But you'll have to add double size images to all your apps if you want them to look great on iPhone 4.
iOS also has same issues with Telephone vs no Telephone (iPad, Touch), GPS vs no GPS (Touch), front facing camera vs not, etc.
Right, what the heck is the purpose of obtaining the source? So you can spoof your location? That will work well when you actually want to use a GPS app for real. No spy code in OS, the spy code is in 3rd party libraries that developers put into their code for Ads and Analytics.
Android does not use swing or awt. It has its on UI model. It works pretty well and is easier to work with than swing or awt. Layouts can be done using a WYSIWYG interface and hand edited as needed (its in XML).
You can use many of the standard java jdk classes (java.lang, java.util, java.net, java.math, java.sql, etc, etc), but sure you will have to learn some of the android specific libraries as well.
In general programming with Android is pretty easy for experienced Java programmers. But there is certainly some learning curve to get started.
Yeah, its a bit of a pain, but not much. Andrdoid acutally lets you have different layouts for different screen size/resolution combinations. You just store the layout in directories that are named for that size/resolution and the phone will automatically use the right one.
By using device independent pixels (use "dip" units for most everything and "sp" units for text) you can often avoid having to use different layouts, but the layout directory model is convenient when you need it (I did).
You don't have to buy all models of android phones to "prove" it will work. Android Emulator works just fine and you can test different OS versions, screen sizes and resolutions on it. I do own a Motorola droid and do test on it, but I don't lose sleep worrying about how my app will run on different phones, because the emulator testing works well.
People let you know pretty fast if there is an issue with their phone model and you can release an update any time you choose (its actually instant, you post the update to the Android Market and users can immediately download the new version or update their old one).
We've (LLC) sold about 1200 copies of our app for Android, so far it seems to work fine on all models that it was designed for.
The whole thing is just reactionary mumbo-jumbo
Well if by "the whole thing" you mean this /. topic then you are right.
Here's some non-reactionary things we could discuss on this topic:
Before .NET large companies would probably go with J2EE for a web application. Pre-.NET ASP was never a great solution.
.NET and C#, many companies that were potential J2EE candidates ended up going with the Microsoft stack (where they probably would not have gone with pre-.NET technologies). Thus continuing and exacerbating the fragmentation that existed before .NET.
.NET and the company they merged with was J2EE. So now our programmers and even managers are sort of at odds with each other. Do we build the next app in .NET or Java ??
.NET and C# I don't think that kind of fragmentation would be as common.
Now with
My company for instance merged with another company. The parent company was
Without