I love Chrome's speed. But I miss Firefox's rich library of extensions whenever I try Chrome (or a Chromium-derived browser). Most critically, I miss Adblock Plus and Flashblock. To a lesser extent, some of the other extensions I use.
When I last tried Chrome, I believe I found that there was an ad-blocking extension for it (Ad-Sweep) but it required switching to the "developer channel" rather than the standard "channel". Rather than just downloading a beta version of the browser, there was an arcane process to switch channels that simply didn't work at the time. As in I jumped through the hoops, but Chrome never properly entered into the developer channel mode. The Channel Changer was simply broken at the time. Don't try to be too clever Google, just make a separate beta or nightly build and let me install it.
Sure, there are proxy-based solutions and the like, but I can't use a browser that I can't add ad-blocking rules to easily and customize easily.
I'll give Chrome a try again in 6 months, but it looks like for now, AdSweep still requires using Channel Changer, and unless that's been fixed I ain't screwing around with it again.
Sure, Firefox can't compete with Safari and Chrome on speed, but on a modern Core 2 Duo or Core i5/i7 machine the difference is only perceptible on the most Javascript-intensive of sites.
Um, Android is open source. If you don't like it as is, you can run any number of community-developed ROMs. These often have custom-rolled browsers in them, UI improvements, etc. CyanogenMod is far superior to stock Android on the older G1 and other first generation Android phones that still don't have official 2.1 support.
The only stuff that isn't open source are the "Google branded" apps, like Google Maps, Google Latitude and the Gmail app. But you can easily pull those out from the official ROMs and install them on your phone, as you do in the current CyanogenMod install.
So yeah, there really is no legitimate concern about Google locking down the browser and forcing Flash on you. Google can't force your hand in that way, because unlike iPhone OS, Android is an open platform. You can install apps from anywhere you please, not just the official Market, so take your pick of browsers.
Uhh, just because you don't see the ads doesn't mean they aren't using the data to advertise to you.
You see Google ads all over the web. I'd be willing to bet a few pretty pennies that Google correlates information, knows who you are, and uses info about you to serve up ads, either on Google or via their AdSense ads all over the web. If they also host all your email, whether you are looking at it via the web or not, they can still use that data and provide it to advertisers.
I'm not a tin foil hat type, and I realize there are bigger problems out there in the world to worry about, I'm just saying if it costs 3 or 4 bucks a month (i.e. less than a Starbucks Mochalatteccino) to get a superior service from a company that specializes in that area, I'd much rather pay that than know that my email contents are fodder for the advertising industry.
Yeah, I think I'll pass on giving a company that makes its money advertising access to all my private and business emails and stick with companies that make their money at offering email as a service. Tuffmail won't compromise your privacy because they'll go out of business if they do. Whereas Google owes you nothing.
I was a Fastmail.fm customer for years until their huge outage a couple years back. I switched to Tuffmail, and haven't looked back. Great service, rock solid reliability, never a lost email, no more than a few hours of downtime over the last several years.
I know of no other service that offers that kind of reliability for the very reasonable price Tuffmail charges.
This is a pretty obvious thing to do, no? I mean, a quick Google will pull up one liner scripts using mencoder to do FLV to H.264 conversion. A script to do this on the server side, run it through mencoder, and return the result would be what, a 10 liner script? Unless they are doing something more complicated than that, which I doubt. And a bit of logic in the browser itself to translate FLV references.
Of course, it's got to use a lot of CPU cycles on the server side to do this at any sort of scale, built into a browser. But I guess if you are making enough money off your browser, then cool.
That's all nice, but who pays for the health care? Oh yeah, WE do. WE being the parents of other children employed by the same company that insures these children. WE being the taxpayers who pay for the government financed Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The costs of bad parenting are in certain cases borne by society in general. You have the right and freedom to raise your children how you want, up to the point that it infringes on the rest of our rights. I think we agree as a society that spending more than a quarter of our GDP on health care to keep our sick, unhealthy selves alive is not ideal. And many people just don't take individual responsibility in this area. And huge marketing budgets are spent working against the forces of personal and parental responsibility. Therefore I see nothing wrong with legislating certain basic things, like the way products are marketed to children that damage children's health.
They can still sell you a toy, and you can still buy toys for your kids. And food. They just can't bundle them in a way that pressures people to make unhealthful decisions that the rest of us then bear the consequences of, just to increase profits of the fast food chains.
I see nothing inherently wrong with this. If personal responsibility and parental responsibility alone were enough, we wouldn't be facing down tax increases combined with stagnant income levels because of massively increasing health insurance premiums.
Okay, Mr. AC, I see your points. However, you could at least indicate who you are rather than post AC since clearly you know who droopus is and you are outing him. I am a disinterested party who just started posting in this little thread, I don't know the guy or know whether he was guilty or not.
What seems clear is that there was more that went on than just target practice in the woods that happened to damage an old port-o-potty. That may be what droopus was actually charged with, but it sounds like there was a string of incidents that included some inhabited buildings and some abandoned structures that were used as target practice with explosive targets.
It sounds like the direct evidence tying Mr. Forest to the series of explosions was really weak. The only thing the stories say is that police stopped him while he was driving fast near the site of a reported explosion (they say "speeding away from", but that's an opinion, not a factual description of what happened). And that the guy had guns with him, and lots of guns at his house, all of which he possessed legally.
So... a very weak, circumstantial case, for an infraction that while not murder or even assault was a bit more serious than just shooting up a single port-a-potty while doing some target practice in the woods, which would really be vandalism at most.
But... if you read a bit about what the guy did and think about the type of people he must have pissed off in the process in the piracy scene AND on the Federal law enforcement side, you can see why he might have been a bit paranoid and started carrying guns around. Trying to play at double agent isn't something most of us are cut out for, and it sounds like this guy found that out the hard way.
Back in the day, i.e. the early 1990s, I used to hang out at the 2600 meetings in New York and mingle with some of the mixed lot of colorful characters in that scene. I did something, and I'll never know quite what, to piss off some people involved in running a warez group, and they stalked (both electronically, via phone and email, and physically) and scared the shit out of my 15 year old self beyond belief. I can only imagine if the offenses were real rather than imagined how you could end up with people shooting at you, and you could sit around at night with a rifle trying to protect your family.
Posting anonymously because I really don't want anybody to associate some of that stuff that went on back in the day with me.:)
CyanogenMod no longer bundles the Google applications, since October or thereabouts. You can download those in a separate package from a third party, or pull them from your existing ROM. The current solution was implemented with consent from Google. Unlike Apple, who actively try to shut down jailbreaking and modding, Google doesn't really care, and doesn't interfere, as long as you aren't redistributing copyrighted, closed source apps of theirs.
In any case, my iPhone was unlocked and jailbroken, so I am comparing apples to apples here. One significant difference is that with every release Apple tries harder and harder to prevent unlocking and hacking, while Google has come out with the Nexus One where you have root and complete freedom out of the box. Another is that even a jailbroken iPhone has limitations - you can't compile a custom version of the Mail app, for example, since it's all closed source, and fundamental improvements to the operating system are much harder to make.
Well, I originally clarified, but edited my post for brevity. In short - the reason Android came so far in the first 12-18 months post launch was because it sucked at launch, and those early gains were easy. That is true. You can say essentially the same thing about the iPhone of course - at launch it lacked a real SDK or app framework, it was slow and buggy and limited in functionality, so it came a long way at first as well.
But factoring that first rush of progress out and looking at what's going on right now - things like k9mail and CyanogenMod have no real analogs in the iPhone world. These are improvements to the fundamentals of the platform (email app, home page/launcher, browser, etc.) that are being made by the community, rather than by Google itself or the hardware licensees - though some licensees such as HTC have made their own excellent improvements as well (HTC's keyboard, and their Sense UI).
I think Steve Jobs is the nail strip - the unwillingness to open up the platform to real changes or innovations from the outside gives Apple more control over the user experience, and may make things more consistent and predictable and profitable for Apple, but it also limits progress in the longer run.
Well, I still find page rendering quite slow on the G1 relative to an iPhone 3G (i.e. under wifi so it's not a network speed issue), but the UI I find totally fine under CyanogenMod. With a complex page like Slashdot (in old mode, the new web2.0-style Slashdot pages just don't work for shit), it takes something like two to three times as long to render. That's annoying - in fact, EDGE browsing on my iPhone 3G is generally faster than 3G browsing on the G1 which is just stupid.
One note - you have to use the lock home in memory option (should be enabled by default) or else the home page respawns can be excruciating if you are using a bunch of widgets or many icons. Once I figured that out, no problems.
The G1 is stupidly designed with way too little memory, and an underpowered CPU. Like I said, the hardware is lame, no doubt.
I think I'm going to get myself a Nexus One this week.
I can smell the momentum in the air with Android. I was one of the first people (suckers/early adopters) to buy a G1 handset from T-Mobile. At the time I had a 2G iPhone. Used the G1 for a week, went back to my unlocked, jailbroken iPhone because it had a bunch of great apps that worked well, better form factor, better touchscreen, and much more usable.
Fast forward 16 months, during which time the G1 has sat there and gathered dust. I've finally gotten fed up with my 3G iPhone, the closed ecosystem, the limited email application which is the dealbreaker for me (lack of IMAP IDLE still - msgpush.com is not an option for me, and switching email services to support the technologies Steve Jobs approves of is ridiculous). The other day I decided to blow the dust off my G1, update to the latest software (which on a G1 means running CyanogenMod since the official updates are still stuck at Android 1.6 for G1s, and CyanogenMod is a 1.6/2.0 hybrid - and despite rumors to the contrary, CyanogenMod is rock-solid stable on the G1) and see how much things have improved over the last 18 months.
The openness of the Android platform is what really is blowing me away. Running CyanogenMod, installing themes, downloading up-to-the-minute app releases and bug fixes from open source projects and vendors without having to go through Market is absolutely liberating after 2 and change years of iPhone usage, and having to clamor for every feature addition and update. On Android, if you want a new feature, you can usually find it or you can add it yourself - K9mail is the best living example of this itch-scratching driving innovation.
Anyway, more specifically on the topic - I don't know if Fennec/Mobile Firefox will be a winner or not in the short run. Most likely it will take a while to get there - remember how long Mozilla took to get to a usable desktop browser? But ultimately, more browser competition on Android will be a very good thing, and AdBlock would be sweet. The fact that we have these choices on Android drives innovation and competition, and is the reason that the platform is currently improving faster than the iPhone platform. And makes it a much more fun place to be as a geek than iPhone-land right now.
Well, the first statute is the federal arson statute, and it specifically refers to using fire or explosive devices (as defined in the following section) to damage property involved in interstate commerce. The second statute is the federal gun mandatory minimum statute. It refers to using or carrying a gun during a crime of violence or drug trafficking crime (I'm assuming the first is relevant here) - see this nice little chart here.
My non-lawyer interpretation is that you would have to have maliciously burned down or tried to blow up a port-a-potty, while somebody was in it, and you were in possession of a firearm (or perhaps even brandished or discharged one) while committing this violent act, in order to qualify for these charges.
Doesn't necessarily mean somebody was injured or killed though - I'm guessing malicious arson might qualify in and of itself as a violent crime. And a port-a-potty just has to be involved in interstate commerce to qualify for federal prosecution - for example, having been rented across state lines is probably enough. It doesn't mean the port-a-potty was itself federal property, nor that the persons involved were federal employees.
But yeah, sounds like there's more to this story than a guy wrote a nasty message about his boss in red marker on the port-a-potty wall and some feds with a stick up their asses about his attitude toward piracy charged him. But we don't really have all the info here, so you never know.
Oh, I fully acknowledge that the no-API and no-notifications/background apps issues are now not relevant any more. Like you said the iPhone was released several years ago now.
Obviously, the iPhone as it is today wallops on the Treo as it was in 2003-2004, but that's an unfair comparison. The Treo had its era in which it was the best product out there, and it was a very functional product for its time, and essentially created the smartphone category.
I spent days and hours frothing at the mouth because "in theory" the Palm "should" be able to do X, Y, and Z or because the Palm was "so close" do doing what I needed... and yet with all the hours and evenings spent trying to "just make it do this one little thing" that would make my life easier, the Palms always fell short. I always fell back into "well, what are you going to do, those are the trade-offs of mobile devices" thinking.
Seriously? On my old Treo 650, I installed Chattermail and instantly had real push email with my existing IMAP email account. It took me less than 10 minutes to get it running and I absolutely loved it.
I *still* can't have it with my iPhone. STILL. No goddamned IMAP IDLE. The closest thing is msgpush.com, which requires me to give a third party my login to my email account so they can fetch my email and share it over an Airsync/Exchange mechanism. Absolutely retarded. And Apple of course won't let anybody release competing email apps. I find the email on my iPhone to suck and it's the one, huge absolute frustration.
Also, I had AIM chat on my old Treo when I wanted it. It would actually notify me if somebody IMed me. iPhone has IM applications, but at least until a few months ago, couldn't run anything in the background to get notifications (I don't really use IM anymore, so I haven't checked this out lately - I suspect that you can now get IM apps that run in the background with iPhone OS 3.0).
Shit, I remember when iPhone came out and Apple said nobody needed a native app SDK at all! They said everything should be a web app. They had no intention of even creating an SDK and App Store until they got petitions from users demanding it!
iPhone is doing well now, but let's not pretend it hasn't been an incredibly rocky trip getting there. And let's not pretend that Apple's absurd restrictions on apps don't have real impact on usability of the device. They do, for anybody who wants more than the limited drek that Apple spoon feeds you.
Now that Android is maturing a bit, I'm seriously considering trying it again. At least I can run a real third party email client there (or at least a fork of the included email app), k9mail, that supports IMAP IDLE. I tried a G1 when it first came out but it was very half-baked compared to where iPhone was. I think that's changed at least somewhat now.
The Treos were the best smartphones on the market in their day (i.e. around 2003). Especially with Chattermail, the awesome push email app for Treo that used IMAP IDLE and worked with no added infrastructure for the vast majority of users. Still a far superior email device to the iPhone today.
The Treo 600/650 could do basically everything a Blackberry could do, and a whole lot more. I loved my 650. Every geek had one back in the day.
The problem is they let their platform basically go unchanged for 8 years. Palm OS 5 came out in June 2002. Palm OS 6 never saw the light of day. WebOS took years to pull together.
By the time they got it together, the company was in a precarious state and nobody wanted to bet on Palm. And they had lost the lead to two much larger companies, Apple and Google, who have far more resources and more consistent track records. It's sad - hopefully somebody with the money to make the WebOS platform really sing will buy Palm, because WebOS has so much potential. I think it is much better than Android, and superior to iPhone OS in many ways.
You don't have to. There is an option in the privacy settings to turn off your publicly indexable profile. You can still be on Facebook, share info with people you want to, and just disable the ability of search engines and data miners to pull information out of a publicly available profile.
I just enabled this option today now that FB has decided to put information into public profiles that, while not "secret" by any means, isn't stuff I want to encourage every data miner in the world to index about me.
What the fuck is with these moronic companies that hire all these software engineers and then cheap out when it comes to physical plant? I mean, you must pay these guys 60-80k a year each, plus benefits. Figure 4 of them cost you 400k a year total, when you include cost of benefits.
Why in the hell would you want to cram them all into 100 square feet of bullpen shit cube space and waste at least a hundred thousand bucks a year worth of productivity? Lease expense for even the finest of office space is what, 30 bucks a square foot a year, so to give them 400 square feet of space (four 100 square foot offices) costs you at most an extra $9000 a year for the whole team in question.
That's about 2% of what you are spending on these 4 developers each year. It's a fricking rounding error. Shit, if it makes them happy and gets them to be even 5% more productive, it's well worth it. In reality, the difference between a non-productive, noisy office environment and a productive, happy quiet one is more like 50%-100% from my personal experience.
I mean, either you buy a lot of boring shit, in which case nobody cares. Or you spend lots of fucking money on cool shit, in which case sharing it with the world is utterly obnoxious - nobody wants you to rub their face in how rich you are.
I don't get it. Then again, I'm one of those people who never really got the point of Twitter either.
I didn't say it was. If you go back to the GP and parent post of my post, you'll see they were discussing changing EULA terms specifically, not the question of operating system patches.
I have discussed this with a friend who is a Harvard Law School grad. I don't promise that everything he says is always right, but I trust his basic understanding of contract theory.
So you are either claiming that a contract can permit one party to unilaterally modify it in the future and a judge will hold that enforceable. This is patently irrational, so I assume you aren't going to argue that.
Or you are saying that I am incorrect about the grounds on which these terms would be ruled unenforceable. In which case, please suggest something other than that they are unconscionable and lack demonstrated meeting of the minds on the modified terms.
Oh wait, you can't. You're just trolling. Nevermind then.
That's reasonable advice, but it just addresses an aside comment I made, not the actual point.
Furthermore, as advice, it greatly oversimplifies the nature of human relationships. While it's possible to be more fine-grained on Facebook, by far the easiest things to do are to share stuff with everybody or nobody. As a result, I generally opt for nobody (i.e. real, personal information doesn't get posted by me to Facebook any more, and I have my account privacy settings completely locked down now).
Furthermore there are people like business contacts, associates, acquaintances - people I know, and might talk to when I see them at a party, but they aren't the first people I'd pick up a phone and call if the shit hit the fan in my life. The information I want to share with them is different from what I'd share with a good friend.
And unless you are a habitual oversharer, there is essentially no cost to leaving people as "friends" on Facebook - unless they are annoying updaters, in which case I simply block their info from my feed. Fine, that's solved.
But there is a real cost to actually de-friending people who are within your real life social networks, even if you do not consider them friends any more. The cost is the awkwardness and embarrassment that can ensue from them knowing they have been de-friended by you. Unless they are so creepy that you want absolutely nothing to do with them, the harm from allowing them to continue as your Facebook "friend" is minimal. De-friending people you really never see or relate to, and don't like - sure, that's easy enough.
Additionally, it is very awkward to ignore friend invitations from people. The only people I actively refuse Friend invites from are a couple of folks I really strongly dislike who just don't get that I don't like them, and from my ex-girlfriends (and people I actually don't know).
These days, if I actually want to share pictures with my friends, I upload them to Picasa, make a private album, and give access to the people I want to have access to them and email those people a link. Much safer than putting stuff on Facebook where privacy settings and access control are in constant flux and the site defaults everything to share with everybody. And if I want to share personal information with a group of friends, I send an email.
Facebook is just something to idly gawk at, and to "microblog" some clever but completely irrelevant and impersonal bullshit you found online in your status line.
Slashdot Mirror
I love Chrome's speed. But I miss Firefox's rich library of extensions whenever I try Chrome (or a Chromium-derived browser). Most critically, I miss Adblock Plus and Flashblock. To a lesser extent, some of the other extensions I use.
When I last tried Chrome, I believe I found that there was an ad-blocking extension for it (Ad-Sweep) but it required switching to the "developer channel" rather than the standard "channel". Rather than just downloading a beta version of the browser, there was an arcane process to switch channels that simply didn't work at the time. As in I jumped through the hoops, but Chrome never properly entered into the developer channel mode. The Channel Changer was simply broken at the time. Don't try to be too clever Google, just make a separate beta or nightly build and let me install it.
Sure, there are proxy-based solutions and the like, but I can't use a browser that I can't add ad-blocking rules to easily and customize easily.
I'll give Chrome a try again in 6 months, but it looks like for now, AdSweep still requires using Channel Changer, and unless that's been fixed I ain't screwing around with it again.
Sure, Firefox can't compete with Safari and Chrome on speed, but on a modern Core 2 Duo or Core i5/i7 machine the difference is only perceptible on the most Javascript-intensive of sites.
EARTH HAS 4 CORNER
SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY
TIME CUBE
IN ONLY 24 HOUR ROTATION.
Oh wait, what site are we on again?
Um, Android is open source. If you don't like it as is, you can run any number of community-developed ROMs. These often have custom-rolled browsers in them, UI improvements, etc. CyanogenMod is far superior to stock Android on the older G1 and other first generation Android phones that still don't have official 2.1 support.
The only stuff that isn't open source are the "Google branded" apps, like Google Maps, Google Latitude and the Gmail app. But you can easily pull those out from the official ROMs and install them on your phone, as you do in the current CyanogenMod install.
So yeah, there really is no legitimate concern about Google locking down the browser and forcing Flash on you. Google can't force your hand in that way, because unlike iPhone OS, Android is an open platform. You can install apps from anywhere you please, not just the official Market, so take your pick of browsers.
Uhh, just because you don't see the ads doesn't mean they aren't using the data to advertise to you.
You see Google ads all over the web. I'd be willing to bet a few pretty pennies that Google correlates information, knows who you are, and uses info about you to serve up ads, either on Google or via their AdSense ads all over the web. If they also host all your email, whether you are looking at it via the web or not, they can still use that data and provide it to advertisers.
I'm not a tin foil hat type, and I realize there are bigger problems out there in the world to worry about, I'm just saying if it costs 3 or 4 bucks a month (i.e. less than a Starbucks Mochalatteccino) to get a superior service from a company that specializes in that area, I'd much rather pay that than know that my email contents are fodder for the advertising industry.
Dunno what you are talking about, Tuffmail supports TLS and SSL over a variety of ports, for both IMAP and SMTP traffic.
All the email I ever send to or retrieve from Tuffmail has been over a secured connection.
In fact, you can even manage your Sieve filters over an SSL connection.
Additionally, their webmail client (which ain't so great, but I only use it in emergencies) uses HTTPS.
This takes about 2 seconds to discover on their website - not exactly hidden information.
Yeah, I think I'll pass on giving a company that makes its money advertising access to all my private and business emails and stick with companies that make their money at offering email as a service. Tuffmail won't compromise your privacy because they'll go out of business if they do. Whereas Google owes you nothing.
I was a Fastmail.fm customer for years until their huge outage a couple years back. I switched to Tuffmail, and haven't looked back. Great service, rock solid reliability, never a lost email, no more than a few hours of downtime over the last several years.
I know of no other service that offers that kind of reliability for the very reasonable price Tuffmail charges.
This is a pretty obvious thing to do, no? I mean, a quick Google will pull up one liner scripts using mencoder to do FLV to H.264 conversion. A script to do this on the server side, run it through mencoder, and return the result would be what, a 10 liner script? Unless they are doing something more complicated than that, which I doubt. And a bit of logic in the browser itself to translate FLV references.
Of course, it's got to use a lot of CPU cycles on the server side to do this at any sort of scale, built into a browser. But I guess if you are making enough money off your browser, then cool.
That's all nice, but who pays for the health care? Oh yeah, WE do. WE being the parents of other children employed by the same company that insures these children. WE being the taxpayers who pay for the government financed Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The costs of bad parenting are in certain cases borne by society in general. You have the right and freedom to raise your children how you want, up to the point that it infringes on the rest of our rights. I think we agree as a society that spending more than a quarter of our GDP on health care to keep our sick, unhealthy selves alive is not ideal. And many people just don't take individual responsibility in this area. And huge marketing budgets are spent working against the forces of personal and parental responsibility. Therefore I see nothing wrong with legislating certain basic things, like the way products are marketed to children that damage children's health.
They can still sell you a toy, and you can still buy toys for your kids. And food. They just can't bundle them in a way that pressures people to make unhealthful decisions that the rest of us then bear the consequences of, just to increase profits of the fast food chains.
I see nothing inherently wrong with this. If personal responsibility and parental responsibility alone were enough, we wouldn't be facing down tax increases combined with stagnant income levels because of massively increasing health insurance premiums.
Oops, anonymous posting fail. Oh well, nothing too secret here anyway. :)
Okay, Mr. AC, I see your points. However, you could at least indicate who you are rather than post AC since clearly you know who droopus is and you are outing him. I am a disinterested party who just started posting in this little thread, I don't know the guy or know whether he was guilty or not.
What seems clear is that there was more that went on than just target practice in the woods that happened to damage an old port-o-potty. That may be what droopus was actually charged with, but it sounds like there was a string of incidents that included some inhabited buildings and some abandoned structures that were used as target practice with explosive targets.
It sounds like the direct evidence tying Mr. Forest to the series of explosions was really weak. The only thing the stories say is that police stopped him while he was driving fast near the site of a reported explosion (they say "speeding away from", but that's an opinion, not a factual description of what happened). And that the guy had guns with him, and lots of guns at his house, all of which he possessed legally.
So... a very weak, circumstantial case, for an infraction that while not murder or even assault was a bit more serious than just shooting up a single port-a-potty while doing some target practice in the woods, which would really be vandalism at most.
But... if you read a bit about what the guy did and think about the type of people he must have pissed off in the process in the piracy scene AND on the Federal law enforcement side, you can see why he might have been a bit paranoid and started carrying guns around. Trying to play at double agent isn't something most of us are cut out for, and it sounds like this guy found that out the hard way.
Back in the day, i.e. the early 1990s, I used to hang out at the 2600 meetings in New York and mingle with some of the mixed lot of colorful characters in that scene. I did something, and I'll never know quite what, to piss off some people involved in running a warez group, and they stalked (both electronically, via phone and email, and physically) and scared the shit out of my 15 year old self beyond belief. I can only imagine if the offenses were real rather than imagined how you could end up with people shooting at you, and you could sit around at night with a rifle trying to protect your family.
Posting anonymously because I really don't want anybody to associate some of that stuff that went on back in the day with me. :)
CyanogenMod no longer bundles the Google applications, since October or thereabouts. You can download those in a separate package from a third party, or pull them from your existing ROM. The current solution was implemented with consent from Google. Unlike Apple, who actively try to shut down jailbreaking and modding, Google doesn't really care, and doesn't interfere, as long as you aren't redistributing copyrighted, closed source apps of theirs.
In any case, my iPhone was unlocked and jailbroken, so I am comparing apples to apples here. One significant difference is that with every release Apple tries harder and harder to prevent unlocking and hacking, while Google has come out with the Nexus One where you have root and complete freedom out of the box. Another is that even a jailbroken iPhone has limitations - you can't compile a custom version of the Mail app, for example, since it's all closed source, and fundamental improvements to the operating system are much harder to make.
Well, I originally clarified, but edited my post for brevity. In short - the reason Android came so far in the first 12-18 months post launch was because it sucked at launch, and those early gains were easy. That is true. You can say essentially the same thing about the iPhone of course - at launch it lacked a real SDK or app framework, it was slow and buggy and limited in functionality, so it came a long way at first as well.
But factoring that first rush of progress out and looking at what's going on right now - things like k9mail and CyanogenMod have no real analogs in the iPhone world. These are improvements to the fundamentals of the platform (email app, home page/launcher, browser, etc.) that are being made by the community, rather than by Google itself or the hardware licensees - though some licensees such as HTC have made their own excellent improvements as well (HTC's keyboard, and their Sense UI).
I think Steve Jobs is the nail strip - the unwillingness to open up the platform to real changes or innovations from the outside gives Apple more control over the user experience, and may make things more consistent and predictable and profitable for Apple, but it also limits progress in the longer run.
Well, I still find page rendering quite slow on the G1 relative to an iPhone 3G (i.e. under wifi so it's not a network speed issue), but the UI I find totally fine under CyanogenMod. With a complex page like Slashdot (in old mode, the new web2.0-style Slashdot pages just don't work for shit), it takes something like two to three times as long to render. That's annoying - in fact, EDGE browsing on my iPhone 3G is generally faster than 3G browsing on the G1 which is just stupid.
One note - you have to use the lock home in memory option (should be enabled by default) or else the home page respawns can be excruciating if you are using a bunch of widgets or many icons. Once I figured that out, no problems.
The G1 is stupidly designed with way too little memory, and an underpowered CPU. Like I said, the hardware is lame, no doubt.
I think I'm going to get myself a Nexus One this week.
I can smell the momentum in the air with Android. I was one of the first people (suckers/early adopters) to buy a G1 handset from T-Mobile. At the time I had a 2G iPhone. Used the G1 for a week, went back to my unlocked, jailbroken iPhone because it had a bunch of great apps that worked well, better form factor, better touchscreen, and much more usable.
Fast forward 16 months, during which time the G1 has sat there and gathered dust. I've finally gotten fed up with my 3G iPhone, the closed ecosystem, the limited email application which is the dealbreaker for me (lack of IMAP IDLE still - msgpush.com is not an option for me, and switching email services to support the technologies Steve Jobs approves of is ridiculous). The other day I decided to blow the dust off my G1, update to the latest software (which on a G1 means running CyanogenMod since the official updates are still stuck at Android 1.6 for G1s, and CyanogenMod is a 1.6/2.0 hybrid - and despite rumors to the contrary, CyanogenMod is rock-solid stable on the G1) and see how much things have improved over the last 18 months.
The openness of the Android platform is what really is blowing me away. Running CyanogenMod, installing themes, downloading up-to-the-minute app releases and bug fixes from open source projects and vendors without having to go through Market is absolutely liberating after 2 and change years of iPhone usage, and having to clamor for every feature addition and update. On Android, if you want a new feature, you can usually find it or you can add it yourself - K9mail is the best living example of this itch-scratching driving innovation.
Anyway, more specifically on the topic - I don't know if Fennec/Mobile Firefox will be a winner or not in the short run. Most likely it will take a while to get there - remember how long Mozilla took to get to a usable desktop browser? But ultimately, more browser competition on Android will be a very good thing, and AdBlock would be sweet. The fact that we have these choices on Android drives innovation and competition, and is the reason that the platform is currently improving faster than the iPhone platform. And makes it a much more fun place to be as a geek than iPhone-land right now.
Well, the first statute is the federal arson statute, and it specifically refers to using fire or explosive devices (as defined in the following section) to damage property involved in interstate commerce. The second statute is the federal gun mandatory minimum statute. It refers to using or carrying a gun during a crime of violence or drug trafficking crime (I'm assuming the first is relevant here) - see this nice little chart here.
My non-lawyer interpretation is that you would have to have maliciously burned down or tried to blow up a port-a-potty, while somebody was in it, and you were in possession of a firearm (or perhaps even brandished or discharged one) while committing this violent act, in order to qualify for these charges.
Doesn't necessarily mean somebody was injured or killed though - I'm guessing malicious arson might qualify in and of itself as a violent crime. And a port-a-potty just has to be involved in interstate commerce to qualify for federal prosecution - for example, having been rented across state lines is probably enough. It doesn't mean the port-a-potty was itself federal property, nor that the persons involved were federal employees.
But yeah, sounds like there's more to this story than a guy wrote a nasty message about his boss in red marker on the port-a-potty wall and some feds with a stick up their asses about his attitude toward piracy charged him. But we don't really have all the info here, so you never know.
Look on the bright side, at least you've still got your 5 digit Slashdot user ID!
Oh, I fully acknowledge that the no-API and no-notifications/background apps issues are now not relevant any more. Like you said the iPhone was released several years ago now.
Obviously, the iPhone as it is today wallops on the Treo as it was in 2003-2004, but that's an unfair comparison. The Treo had its era in which it was the best product out there, and it was a very functional product for its time, and essentially created the smartphone category.
I spent days and hours frothing at the mouth because "in theory" the Palm "should" be able to do X, Y, and Z or because the Palm was "so close" do doing what I needed... and yet with all the hours and evenings spent trying to "just make it do this one little thing" that would make my life easier, the Palms always fell short. I always fell back into "well, what are you going to do, those are the trade-offs of mobile devices" thinking.
Seriously? On my old Treo 650, I installed Chattermail and instantly had real push email with my existing IMAP email account. It took me less than 10 minutes to get it running and I absolutely loved it.
I *still* can't have it with my iPhone. STILL. No goddamned IMAP IDLE. The closest thing is msgpush.com, which requires me to give a third party my login to my email account so they can fetch my email and share it over an Airsync/Exchange mechanism. Absolutely retarded. And Apple of course won't let anybody release competing email apps. I find the email on my iPhone to suck and it's the one, huge absolute frustration.
Also, I had AIM chat on my old Treo when I wanted it. It would actually notify me if somebody IMed me. iPhone has IM applications, but at least until a few months ago, couldn't run anything in the background to get notifications (I don't really use IM anymore, so I haven't checked this out lately - I suspect that you can now get IM apps that run in the background with iPhone OS 3.0).
Shit, I remember when iPhone came out and Apple said nobody needed a native app SDK at all! They said everything should be a web app. They had no intention of even creating an SDK and App Store until they got petitions from users demanding it!
iPhone is doing well now, but let's not pretend it hasn't been an incredibly rocky trip getting there. And let's not pretend that Apple's absurd restrictions on apps don't have real impact on usability of the device. They do, for anybody who wants more than the limited drek that Apple spoon feeds you.
Now that Android is maturing a bit, I'm seriously considering trying it again. At least I can run a real third party email client there (or at least a fork of the included email app), k9mail, that supports IMAP IDLE. I tried a G1 when it first came out but it was very half-baked compared to where iPhone was. I think that's changed at least somewhat now.
The Treos were the best smartphones on the market in their day (i.e. around 2003). Especially with Chattermail, the awesome push email app for Treo that used IMAP IDLE and worked with no added infrastructure for the vast majority of users. Still a far superior email device to the iPhone today.
The Treo 600/650 could do basically everything a Blackberry could do, and a whole lot more. I loved my 650. Every geek had one back in the day.
The problem is they let their platform basically go unchanged for 8 years. Palm OS 5 came out in June 2002. Palm OS 6 never saw the light of day. WebOS took years to pull together.
By the time they got it together, the company was in a precarious state and nobody wanted to bet on Palm. And they had lost the lead to two much larger companies, Apple and Google, who have far more resources and more consistent track records. It's sad - hopefully somebody with the money to make the WebOS platform really sing will buy Palm, because WebOS has so much potential. I think it is much better than Android, and superior to iPhone OS in many ways.
You don't have to. There is an option in the privacy settings to turn off your publicly indexable profile. You can still be on Facebook, share info with people you want to, and just disable the ability of search engines and data miners to pull information out of a publicly available profile.
I just enabled this option today now that FB has decided to put information into public profiles that, while not "secret" by any means, isn't stuff I want to encourage every data miner in the world to index about me.
What the fuck is with these moronic companies that hire all these software engineers and then cheap out when it comes to physical plant? I mean, you must pay these guys 60-80k a year each, plus benefits. Figure 4 of them cost you 400k a year total, when you include cost of benefits.
Why in the hell would you want to cram them all into 100 square feet of bullpen shit cube space and waste at least a hundred thousand bucks a year worth of productivity? Lease expense for even the finest of office space is what, 30 bucks a square foot a year, so to give them 400 square feet of space (four 100 square foot offices) costs you at most an extra $9000 a year for the whole team in question.
That's about 2% of what you are spending on these 4 developers each year. It's a fricking rounding error. Shit, if it makes them happy and gets them to be even 5% more productive, it's well worth it. In reality, the difference between a non-productive, noisy office environment and a productive, happy quiet one is more like 50%-100% from my personal experience.
I mean, either you buy a lot of boring shit, in which case nobody cares. Or you spend lots of fucking money on cool shit, in which case sharing it with the world is utterly obnoxious - nobody wants you to rub their face in how rich you are.
I don't get it. Then again, I'm one of those people who never really got the point of Twitter either.
I didn't say it was. If you go back to the GP and parent post of my post, you'll see they were discussing changing EULA terms specifically, not the question of operating system patches.
Really? Please elucidate.
I have discussed this with a friend who is a Harvard Law School grad. I don't promise that everything he says is always right, but I trust his basic understanding of contract theory.
So you are either claiming that a contract can permit one party to unilaterally modify it in the future and a judge will hold that enforceable. This is patently irrational, so I assume you aren't going to argue that.
Or you are saying that I am incorrect about the grounds on which these terms would be ruled unenforceable. In which case, please suggest something other than that they are unconscionable and lack demonstrated meeting of the minds on the modified terms.
Oh wait, you can't. You're just trolling. Nevermind then.
That's reasonable advice, but it just addresses an aside comment I made, not the actual point.
Furthermore, as advice, it greatly oversimplifies the nature of human relationships. While it's possible to be more fine-grained on Facebook, by far the easiest things to do are to share stuff with everybody or nobody. As a result, I generally opt for nobody (i.e. real, personal information doesn't get posted by me to Facebook any more, and I have my account privacy settings completely locked down now).
Furthermore there are people like business contacts, associates, acquaintances - people I know, and might talk to when I see them at a party, but they aren't the first people I'd pick up a phone and call if the shit hit the fan in my life. The information I want to share with them is different from what I'd share with a good friend.
And unless you are a habitual oversharer, there is essentially no cost to leaving people as "friends" on Facebook - unless they are annoying updaters, in which case I simply block their info from my feed. Fine, that's solved.
But there is a real cost to actually de-friending people who are within your real life social networks, even if you do not consider them friends any more. The cost is the awkwardness and embarrassment that can ensue from them knowing they have been de-friended by you. Unless they are so creepy that you want absolutely nothing to do with them, the harm from allowing them to continue as your Facebook "friend" is minimal. De-friending people you really never see or relate to, and don't like - sure, that's easy enough.
Additionally, it is very awkward to ignore friend invitations from people. The only people I actively refuse Friend invites from are a couple of folks I really strongly dislike who just don't get that I don't like them, and from my ex-girlfriends (and people I actually don't know).
These days, if I actually want to share pictures with my friends, I upload them to Picasa, make a private album, and give access to the people I want to have access to them and email those people a link. Much safer than putting stuff on Facebook where privacy settings and access control are in constant flux and the site defaults everything to share with everybody. And if I want to share personal information with a group of friends, I send an email.
Facebook is just something to idly gawk at, and to "microblog" some clever but completely irrelevant and impersonal bullshit you found online in your status line.