Wow, I can't see how anybody could be even remotely surprised with this.
Android was touted as being open. But users are stuck with all kinds of limitations. This has been known since day one it was out there. Sure you can jailbreak it though, but wth. You can't even write native apps (well you technically can, but its not supported)
Why are people surprised at this move? Sure, the G1 is on sale in many countries around the world and not just by T-Mobile USA, but Google bends to T-Mobile USA anyways.
When you get down to it, the G1 is just a glorified Java-phone not deserving of ANY of the hype. Basically, you can compare it to an iPhone, but without the 'charm' of Apple, and it just doesn't really work half as well. And even worse than iPhone, you cant get these apps in Europe in the appstore either anymore.
And guess what, I actually am from Europe and have a tethering-allowed data plan - from T-Mobile! Not even Apple removed the tethering stuff for their EU users....
Google... I've just shut off my G1 for the last time. Back to playing with WM. Hey it ain't as shiny as iPhone but at least there's none of this ridiculous crap involved.
I find this somewhat hard to believe. I'm Dutch myself, and there are relatively few people who can speak or understand Dutch compared to for example English, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Portugese, etc. (Total is about 50 million worldwide, AFAIK)
However, I've been to many places all over the world many times, and there's pretty much always people who can speak or understand Dutch around. It's a freaking given.
What is also a given is that you will run into at least two people who know German for every person you run into that knows Dutch.
I can't imagine Germans aren't aware of this either. Thinking you can have a private conversation even halfway across the world from home in your native tongue is... well, ridiculous even for Germans!;) Especially in non-Asian territory.
Seriously though, what you did is good. Keep it up. Self teaching is a very valuable skill in the software business.
Don't let those other people fool you though. They do not truly understand what you are doing, and how simple/complicated (depending on the thing you do) it is. The best judge there is about what you are doing is yourself, at least if you are honest. And though you are being a tad bit disrespectful to those fucking retarded people, it seems you got that point fairly well covered. It's good, and it is something to be proud of, but that's pretty much where it ends. You're not special - but perhaps you will be? Everybody can self-teach, but few people do.
So many hours of my own life have been utterly wasted, never to be reclaimed, listening to people saying how 'absolutely awesome' and whatnot whatever I did was, while in truth usually they praised silly stuff they could relate to or which 'looked cool', and the parts that are 'pure genius' are ignored because they simple don't follow - and you can't blame them. After all, what do you really know about their area of expertise, aside from the obvious bits?
The point is, you can't really judge what you are doing by the praise of people who do not _understand_ what you are doing. But keep on self-teaching. Though I'm afraid I lost a bit of that myself along the way (yes yes, getting back to it), nevertheless, it's always good to do so. While you have the time to do it, try doing 'fun' things and/or challenges as well. Unrelated to each other too.
Go and write yourself a compiler with all the language knowledge you have now. Try to improve things. Try actually writing something in that new language and find out why your choices were or weren't so great. Do something silly like for example rewriting PAR2 encoding/decoding from scratch without looking at the original source code, just the specifications and the near unfindable mathematical theory behind it. Take your favorite 'normal' device, hack it, and make it do things it completely wasn't designed for. Every cool idea you have, build a proof-of-concept. Etc, etc. These are just examples, I'm sure you'll run into a bunch of things you'll enjoy doing. This will keep you learning new and weird things that will unexpectedly give you great insights in many parts of the software (and hardware) field, and will keep you doing something fun between all the insanely boring CS crap you'll get in school (not to say it isn't useful, though).
In the end, make sure you enjoy it. And yes, I do agree, the 'amazing self taught' thought it silly - but it's mostly because 99% of people can't be bothered to do it:)
This response is a bit late seeing the post count and when the summmary was posted, but I was sleeping off my jetlag. I was there at the conference and at the speech Ballmer made (let me note, by the way, that the AT&T CEO made a really good speech in the same session though its content did seem completely contrary to how AT&T works, and the Nokia CEO should really be banned from opening his mouth at all).
Both TFA linked and a lot of the comments I see are so focused on the iPhone, yet it didn't actually get mentioned that much and wasn't the tone of the session at all. Furthermore the summary is just one big MS bash with fairly little relevance to what is actually going on right here.
What was being said however is that there is an abundance of OS's for the mobile market, and instead of getting less (like predicted at earlier MWC's) they are getting more in number. A call for more interoperability (sp?) was made, which would be good for everyone. Because of all the MS bashing going around here, let me just point out that MS did open up their ActiveSync and related infrastructure to other mobile OS's to accomplish exactly this.
Being "open" really does have a very different definition for everyone involved. Some people relate it to open source, which would be a bad call in this case. Take Android, for example, which is hyped up everywhere as being "open", while in reality, if you are using an Android phone you are severely limited in what you can and cannot do with the device (due to developers being limited in what they can/cannot access/do). In fact, Android may be the most "open source" OS (though it does have a bunch of binary blobs), but on the currently available devices it is reduced to be nothing more than a glorified Java-phone OS (and it isn't even that compatible with J2ME!). So it's open, but at the same time it's pretty closed (note that some of the limitations are carrier-implemented, but not all of them!).
I'd like to make a comment about the new "open" Symbian variant, but I'm afraid I haven't looked into it far enough to make decent comments about it, so I'll skip that one.
Now if we take the iPhone, it isn't "open" like Android, but the end result isn't that different. Both are severaly limited in what you can/cannot do. Apple excerts more control, but at the same time Google still has that kill switch (not to mention the Google integration with Android which is completely horrific). For both these platforms you will need to jailbreak to do the really interesting stuff. In fact what I find hilarious is that I see large numbers of iPhone adopters in my 'personal space' actually switching (back?) to the Windows Mobile platform because of all the limitations.
Now look at Windows Mobile. In it's nature, it is completely closed. However, in a completely unexpected and under-lighted move from Microsoft, you can actually do anything _you_ want with the OS and devices. It really is a playground for developers, you are not limited in any way in what you can do. If you are using the 'light' variant of the OS, the "Smartphone" (non-touchscreen) version, you may need to get your app signed, but most devices use the 'heavy' Professional variant you can actually just do this yourself without any MS interaction. No jailbreaking required. So in term of possibilities, WM is actually the most "open". Nor does MS excert much (if any) control over the OS itself. Of course we'll have to see where their appstore will go with this. MS is opening up some of their protocols (like ActiveSync and such) for other players, which is also an "open" move. (Just FYI, yes I am a mobile app developer and yes we have made some really funky things that wouldn't even be possible to do on the other OS's, and we literally get 100s of support requests PER DAY asking for these apps on iPhone and Android!). Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a WM fanboy though, some things are broken, others are behind the times, and 6.5 is little late for what it brings.
It's also why film looks acceptable despite 24 fps.
I'm sorry, what? Granted, I'm only using a very expensive very large LCD instead of the plasma everybody here seems delirious about, and my eyes aren't 20/20. However, if you are watching any recent movie with even minor action in it in 24 fps on a sufficiently large screen (lets say starting at somewhere around 40", from not too far away) and you are not completely annoyed with the low fps when the image is panning, you definitely need to get your eyes checked out (or perhaps it's your brain can't handle the fast images? who knows). And no, it's not my TV, I see it on many brands in many sizes, of various reputed quality.
It's like those old DOS games who'se authors hadn't yet figured out how to program the video card's registers to pan smoothly and instead move X pixels per screen update (if that doesn't make sense to you, don't even worry about it), but now it's a hell of a lot more pixels.
And I may not be a salesman or a researcher, but if you can't see the difference between HD and SD (barring a really crappy cable provider), you also need to get your eyes checked out. Not a single person that has ever watched a movie or otherwise HD TV in my apartment has gone without saying something along the lines of "WOW! WTF?", and this is in a PAL country, so the difference is generally less than those of you watching in NTSC (though granted, if you got a really good cable - and I am talking about line quality here - analogue PAL can actually look halfway decent).
It's like people not being able to discern even the best of CGI in the movies of today and things that were actually filmed... Are you even looking at the same thing I am?
You can get the source to Android, you just can't do anything useful with it. Most of the really interesting things you could do with a device like this, you actually can't, due to lack of root (some pretty normal stuff requires root on this phone).
For most intents and purposes, it is as closed as the iPhone, with Symbian and Windows Mobile being the "open" platforms in terms of what you can and cannot do on the devices. Only real difference with iPhone is that you can run un-approved apps.
I'm scratching my head here on why you would want an Android device. If you want a shiny interface, go iPhone. You want to hack to your hearts content, OpenMoko. Corporate stuff, BlackBerry. Mucking about with anything you want, Symbian and Windows Mobile.
I talked to some Google engineers and the thing that stuck to me is one of them said "its just a phone". With that attitude, Android is never going to be anything. If I want "just a phone", I'll dig up me old Nokia 3310. Another one is them saying root is a security issue, because all sort of malware could happen - really, I still have to run into the first virus etc for WM - but it's not a security risk to store your data on an external company's servers? I don't know about you, but I have no reason to trust Google with this data, and several not to.
I'm severely disappointed with the "open"-ness of the phone in question.
I loved Total Annihilation (and Absolute!) and Supreme Command. Forged Alliance added some direly need rebalancing to Supreme Commander, however the game was never 'finished'. It had some serious unit bugs that were, indeed, possible to live with, but should be patched (and many have been patched by the community). However, FA slows down. And slows down. And slows down.
I have a really fast computer, but still, just launch a game with two LAN players and no AI. Do _nothing_. Just let it run 'nothing' for an hour or two. The game will have slowed to a crawl. You cannot play long games or 'epic battles' in FA because of this - with real play it happens, in my computers, after about 30-45 minutes on the ingame clock... a second will not take up to 10 real seconds.
Sad, really. I'm sure I'll buy SC2, but as a proud owner of TA, SC and FA (In total I legally own 10 games, and play less) I do hope FA gets fixed, it had a lot of potential, but pretty much died for lack of support.
Thanks for the info. I don't think the EU is all bad actually, but often when I hear about something going on in the EU my only thought is "FFS, why?!".
As to the council, they are elected by people I didn't vote for. I don't know what it is like where you're from, but where I'm from the government is generally made up of fear-mongering bullying fairy-tale believers (yeah, I mean you, religious nuts), and the people with actual common sense who really want to deal with the problems (instead of say, ignoring them or just adding legislation that has been tested in other areas and countries with the conclusion that it won't work or help) never get in the government. Now that is democracy, and so that is how it should be. I didn't vote for them though, and them having a say in ever more powerful institutions hence does make me itch. I don't think anyone I ever voted for made government, actually. Round here you only get in the govenment if your party name includes the word Christian.
As for the parliament, yeah, we can vote for them. But they have very little policy-making power. That's still in the hands of people I didn't vote for - worse, those that can make the policy are from national government bodies, and hence seem to mostly consider things that are relative to their country rather than to Europe.
(Not that I think I'd do any better, but then again, I'm not in politics!)
I don't think we should start over or throw the EU away, as I said it's a great idea (I'd love to see us merge to a single standing EU army and a single foreign policy minister for the entire EU, for example). But we do need more "action", more transparancy, and more exposure.
And less BS. Take that "constitution" for example. In my book a document like that is short, to the point, and readable by somebody who doesn't know legal-speak. It is NOT a document the size of a small spaceship in legal talk your average lawyer would find difficult to understand. Those other things may become part of the law, but having them part of the "base of the law" is crazy.
And of course you are right about 500M, my mistake.
In case none of you know, the EU is pretty much a mislabeled dictatorship. Citizens of the EU have pretty much nothing to say about what goes on or who gets "elected" for this or that. Democracy, pah!
The EU is a very good idea gone horribly wrong. Read me right, I want a united Europe, but not like this. We can vote for people who have get no actual power, yay! We waste money on going from A to B X times a month to not hurt France and Germany's pride, yay! We the people decline on the new "constitution" (what a joke) and they try pushing it through anyways, yay! I could go on, but what's the use...
All the good ideas get tossed, more (insane) regulation nobody wants gets piled. Media pay no attention to it either. What's going on in EU politics? You wont get it from the telly, the paper, or the generic news sites (though Obama is all over the place)...
The EU as a government body is a farce in need of some serious fixing, the only problem is some countries have serious ego and other countries actually care.
Give me the information and my 1/300m'th say in who our new EU overlords are, and I shall welcome them!
Re:I haven't followed the whole Android business,
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T-Mobile G1 Rooted
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Sure you will. I know people are working on it (guess I'm going to be guinea pig for this again). Most HTC Windows Mobile devices this has been done long ago (and usually takes only a couple of days after a new one comes out).
Not having the signing keys is usually not that much of an issue (just disable the key check).
Sorry mate, tried modding you +1 Insightful, yet somehow it got passed to/. as -1 Redudandant. This post will take away the -1 though, if all is well:)
If I had mod points (of course you never do when you need 'em), I'd mod you up some more with +1 suddenoutbreakofcommonsense.
I am also angered by the views of many people in the tangible vs digital reproduction discussion.
Just because a copy costs $0, the initial investment is there just as with tangible goods. The dumbed down math looks something like this (IANAEconomist):
(((development cost) / (minimum expected number of sales)) + (reproduction cost)) * (profit margin) = sale price
The only difference between tangible and digital is that the reproduction cost is now 0. I completely fail to see how this makes sale price 0 as well, as some people seem to think it should be.
Now of course, if the situation warrants it, you can change that formula if you do business a different way. But you can't ever take out the (development cost) part. Radiohead came out on top (I think) just because of the very big number of sales. This will only work in certain instances. 'Small businesses' can't do this, the list of situations where this just doesn't work is endless.
What ticks me off most is the argument that if you copy a digital good it isn't stealing, because the original is still there. Perhaps the word stealing is not 100% literally correct, I will grant you that. However, you are still denying income to the authors. The argument that you would not have bought it doesn't fly either. If it is useful and provides a function people need, people will buy it. However, if they can get it for free, they will do that instead.
In the end, all these people are doing is making sure the developers cant feed their children and move to other things instead. Bottom line is they don't want to pay up, and make up all kinds of excuses why they shouldn't have to. It's like a little kid in the candy store, mommy doesn't want to buy you the candy, so they go crying and stomping around. Grow up.
And then of course the OSS enthousiasts will show up claiming it works for project X and Y so it should work for Z as well. Big-corp A will pay coders to work on it! Now, there is nothing wrong with OSS, in fact, I think it's great. But this model, again, does not work for a lot of projects, and all you're doing this is actually putting more into Big-corp A. Sell support contracts? Again, this works for some projects, not for others. Kinda put the effort out of trying to write decent software that doesn't need support too. The development cost has to be made back somewhere.
In the end, there are different business models, some work for some things, others for others. Thinking one-size-fits-all is IMHO shortsighted. And just because the business model used for product X you want is not agreeable to you, does NOT give you ANY right whatsoever to just pirate it instead.
Undoubtedly Prototype is very nice as well. Never used it though, after Dojo (which was pretty heavy at the time, with lots of server requests) I decided to pick a new framework; jQuery and Prototype were the candidates at the time, and I picked jQuery. Not sure why I picked it over Prototype at the time, though, but this was already some time ago.
Either way, the last part of your 'rewrite' seems to imply there are some specific cases where you'd pick Prototype over jQuery (or vice versa). Care to elaborate on these? Always an interesting read, at least for me.
Congratulations to everybody who has worked on jQuery!
I have used jQuery extensively and it is easy to learn and easy to handle. In fact, I had been using JavaScript for quite a while before jQuery, but after I started using jQuery, read some source, wrote a few plugins, etc. (even some patches, including performance related ones), I feel my understanding of the weird and advanced things in JavaScript is also much much better - and it didn't require any hard work or thinking:)
In comparison, before jQuery I used Dojo, which still gives me a headache just to think about. This is now some time ago though, so I will not bash Dojo as it's quite likely my specific problems with it have long been solved. However, Dojo never 'invited' me to become better at JavaScript myself.
All in all, jQuery is a great tool, it makes JavaScript fun again, and it makes me feel sorry I'm hardly doing any webdevving anymore (imagine that!)
I have actually built a similar system to that a year or so back, and ran it on our mail servers. Obviously, because it was just for testing, it only tagged spam and didn't block anything, and only for preselected accounts.
If I say so myself, it worked extraordinarily well. It took a lot of tweaking, but it's hit-rate was nearly perfect, if you of course ignore the spam from legitimate domains (which would subsequently usually be picked up and tagged by the SPF filter). False positives were virtually non-existent (one in many thousands), and after investigation all of those proved to be from people running their own mail servers at home without 'proper' domain names and records.
The project was put on hold because one of my other projects suddenly went through the roof in sales (yay!), though as things seem to be calming down on that front a bit (work-wise, not sale-wise), I'm still looking at options for continuing that work. The big problem here is of course that the anti-spam market is filled with products, lots of 'em free, and I don't easily see a way to break in there. I like doing it for the tech side, but the business side of such things is really not something I enjoy doing...
On a side-note, I wouldn't use low TTL's for detection...
"For the last 10 years RIM has dominated the smartphone market"... right. Blackberry has never, and will never, dominate any smartphone market whatsoever.
Symbian is #1 in users, and Windows Mobile is #1 in usability. Blackberry is a closed system and will ultimately completely fail. So will the iPhone, by the way, aside from a personal(!!) gadget.
It's virtually impossible to develop anything for the Blackberry. Add to that thats it's features are insanely expensive compared to the alternatives. It's only somewhat big in the US. Sure nowadays you can get Blackberry in Europe, but seriously, who other than an easily duped executive would ever order it?
Your average Symbian or Windows Mobile device is way more compatible with existing infrastructure, costs a fraction of a Blackberry (with the latter mostly being insane subscription costs, at least over here).
But what is most important - customizibility. There are almost an infinite number of apps available for Symbian and Windows Mobile (and as a developer, and I hate to say it, Windows Mobile easily has my preference). Your company needs something not 100% the standard package? You just call somebody with the knowledge and get it tailored to your needs.
Virtually anything you want to do is possible. That's the power. Some times, it can also be a drawback, but usually it's a power.
As for the iPhone, same shit different day. It's closed (enough to be called closed). They want to exert control. You'll always be a step behind that way. Even if your interface is shiny, what can it actually do? Forgive me for laughing at everybody who ever bought an iPhone, but WTH, no 3G ? For what it's supposed to do as a device, it's somewhat comparable to buying a black and white flatscreen 42". It may mean nothing to a non-techy, but I'm sure we can all agree iPhone is not a business device.
I remember going to a conference once, about 3 years ago, here in Europe, where there was also a seminar on Blackberry. The spokespeople were very enthousiastic about it. Feature this, feature that. Most of the audience was completely unimpressed. Our phones already do that. RIM may have fooled you Americans, but they offer very little extra. They may have some extra technical management stuff, but all of that will be in the next WM (and probably Symbian, too) release, and they only have it at the cost of using the device how you want it to be used.
I for one, am glad to see both Delphi and Pascal are on the rise (albeit very little - and personally I think they should be taken together).
Delphi was great in it's day (up to version 7) as an IDE and RAD environment. But ofcourse, leave it to Borland to destroy a good product. Their track record says enough:)
Either way, Object Pascal is a great development language and I still use it daily. Compared to C++ it's a breeze to work with and you can do pretty much anything you can do with C++ with OP (and it'll still compile it all in a fraction of a second). I know for a fact Delphi 5 & 7 are still heavily used in large (and government) projects, btw.
Delphi may be dead, but FreePascal+Lazarus is still very much alive and useful. Providing a RAD environment largely compatible with Delphi, but compiling to many many different platforms. From Linux to Windows, from Windows Mobile to NDS, sporting various GUI toolkits, etc.
I still develop many small tools for Windows in Delphi and crossplatform or 'weirdplatform' stuff in FreePascal+Lazarus.
The language is easy to learn (but beware, the 'last mile' is not so easy) and you can make use of all the C/C++ goodness out there. You may need to translate a header or two, but that's it. It compiles natively and it's damned fast.
I'd go so far as to say that developing in Pascal is at least twice as fast as developing in C++ - and yes I also develop in C++ when necessary (ie, client requirement).
A little known fact about OP is that it actually does support garbage collection if you do some smart coding ('abusing' scope-dependant reference counted variables). It's not 'built in' like in C# and Java, but after doing it for a day or two it comes natural. Actually this trickery is also very useful for debug logging and such, as you're able to perform operations both when variables are declared and when it goes out of scope. I can just see you thinking "smart coding, that must be a lot of code then". It isn't. It takes about 3 or 4 lines of code per class to add this functionality.
Something that's more interesting though is Windows Mobile development. You might be interested to know that one of the most tricky and 'undocumented feature abusing' application available for Windows Mobile is written in FreePascal (I'll not spam the program itself) and I'm quite sure it would've taken a lot more time to write in C++.
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As for PHP, I'm also a happy user of that. Yes, it's a language that invites abuse from the users who start with scripting languages, and not always as elegant as for example Python (should spend more time on that one) and Ruby (overhyped not really useful IMHO), but again, if you use it correctly you can do amazing things with it. Well structured, large, maintainable, scalable and code-wise intuitive applications are definitely something PHP shines at, if used correctly.
If there's one thing getting me down in this list it's JavaScripts fairly low rating. In todays web development world, knowing JavaScript, and knowing it well, is definitely a requirement. I wouldn't hire a web developer (not a designer!) who doesn't know all the JS basics and at least a fair share of the more advanced stuff. Knowing your way around jQuery (or Dojo, ExtJS, whatever) is good, but if you don't WHY and HOW it works, you're still no good, and you WILL run into problems you will not be able to solve.
Though webdevelopment used to be a bit of a small brother to 'real software development', the complexity of it is rising rapidly. Combining really advanced/complex designs (functionality-wise as well as visual) into HTML and CSS operating correctly cross-browser is something that already requires a lot of quirk-knowledge. JavaScript isn't implemented very consistently across browsers either. Enter the complexities of making it a full extensive AJAX application, it's not a small feat.
Especially if you realise that many of todays 'webcoders' are expected to do the server side (PHP/ASP/
Well I'm using HSPA right now (you could say it's the GSM version of EVDO RevA), coming in on a cellphone turned into a wifi hotspot using WMWifiRouter (.com ), and have several computers connected to that hotspot (Our landline just crapped out, waiting for the technician to show up). Works great to provide your own internet feed anywhere you have access (granted, wifi isn't that secure, but if you are feeding to just a single computer, you can use a cable instead).
Either way, with speeds possible up to 14.4mbit and the much lower latency than previous cellular data connections, "fast" is not really an issue. Reliable? Depends on your location (ie, the coverage of your cellular provider... I'll bet they have better coverage than public wifi has). The country I'm from has 95%+ coverage for most providers.
As for security, I imagine EVDO has similar security to UMTS. While it is probably possible to hijack an UMTS data connection, it's not easy, and requires specialistic equipment not available at your average Radio Shack. Compare that to a $200 laptop that's all you need to hijack most wifi networks. Add to that that cell providers are big corps with billions on the line. I would put much more faith in them not man-in-the-middle'ing you than I would put in whoever set up the wifi AP you're using in your hotel.
I run a business, about a month ago we started to accept PayPal as payment (while waiting for our own merchant account to clear). We made about $17k in a week. We transferred the first $7.5k to our bank account (thank god!) after a day or two. After no more than seven days, PayPal closed our account, without giving any reason.
After having our lawyer write some letters to them (they didn't respond to us ourselves at all), and PayPal giving several different and evasive andwers, it came out that the 'contact person' for our business account had once ordered something of an erotic nature with PayPal, and that is against their agreement.
Now, several things are wrong with that. I won't go so far as to say that person has never bought erotica, I don't know and really don't care. What is definitely wrong with that, though, is that said person has only made two PayPal payments in his life and they weren't related to erotica (yes I am sure of this). Furthermore, PayPal mentions accounts that do not actually exist and never have. It's complete BS.
What else is wrong with that, how the hell can they close a business account because they do not like the contact person's personal account. Since when is a company responsible for their employees' private actions? What's worse, their allegations aren't even true.
So now PayPal is sitting on $10k of my money I desperately need, without a valid reason. They refuse to clear it, they refuse to discuss it. They have even refused giving us the 'offending' transaction details (how the hell can we dispute anything if we don't have access to the data?) - lawyer is dealing with that, though.
All in all, the money, the lawyer costs, the lost customers, reputation damage, etc, are now easily more than a $50k loss for us.
Should you read this and be a no cure no pay type lawyer (hey, PayPal got my money) in the UK, feel free to drop me a line so we can talk about sueing PayPal's pants off (our company lawyers cannot help us there, as PayPal Europe operates under English law and we're not from England).
Hey, I thought it wouldn't happen to me. But yeah I got burned. Doing business with PayPal is an accident waiting to happen...
Let's see, I pay 10 euros a month for unlimited (tethering allowed, no hidden bandwidth cap) 3G access on my phone here in Europe. Ok, it's only full UMTS, not full HSPA, but it gets the job done when I'm not on a 8-24 mbit line at home or work. That's 30 times cheaper than 10 euro's a day. What a strange 'simple' figure is that anyway, who spends 10 euros a day on mobile internet?
As for the wifi hotspots, well to be honest I havent encountered many of them and I do live in a big city, but I haven't really searched for them either. I know the university and two or three of my favourite bars have them (never see people with laptops in there, but I imagine it's nice for others who have wifi enabled phones but don't have a data plan). Unsecured access points are everywhere.
Roaming are awful though, especially here in Europe. You go somewhere near the border, you get the same provider but from a different country and suddenly you have to get a second mortgage to google. Glad the EU is looking into it.
That being said, if you are waiting around somewhere and you need internet where your data plan isn't 'valid' (or you don't have one), you can make a wifi hotspot anywhere if you can find somebody with a phone and a data plan with WMWifiRouter or JoikuSpot softwares, depending on the type of phone they have.
While that may be true media="handheld" only works on the CSS part. Although I would say for just that most of our visuals just don't work at 320x240. A more important point however, is that mobile users have significantly less bandwidth to waste, so we want to strip out as much text content, images, desktop-IE specific code, etc from what is transmitted as possible. A few KB on a 'landline' makes very little difference (for these kinds of site, as they are graphics centered which already take a lot of bandwidth), but for mobile users you really try to slice off every last byte.
And what the hell, use Flash? From someone who is so adamant about standards as you are, that must be the most rediculous critique I have ever heard.
In the end what I'm saying is, it IS standards friendly to some extend, but it also has to look a lot more 'crispy' than your standard sites because the target audience just is that way. You wouldn't open a $500 dollar a meal restaurant in the tip of the eiffel tower and use bums as waiters, would you?
You misunderstand me there. My stuff actually does work with screenreaders and such, but LOOKING at it with a CSS-less browser will not be pretty. But then again, if you are using a screenreader, I guess that doesn't really matter to you.
But no, indeed, even if it didn't work, these people do not fit the target audience, as these sites I make are all in the visual art realm. As for mobile viewers, that's what we make mobile versions of the site for. I'm pretty much a mobile devices freak and I know what does and doesn't work. What doesn't work is trying to make a rich desktop web site work on a mobile device. The resolutions won't work, Pocket Internet Explorer is even worse than the normal Internet Explorer, even mobile Opera lacks some bits of essential javascript support (this however, is expected to be fixed in Opera Mobile 9 out soon, hurrah, that actually might work after all). As indicated before, it all really depends on the site.
I'd type more but I have to go out to dinner. I do understand what you are getting at, and yes, we do care about and take care of these issues. The 'one site fits all' simply doesn't fly for this niche of sites though, I hope you understand that. And yes, that really has to do with the combination of main target audience and limitations of how HTML, CSS and JS work. As stated before, a site like Google can do that 'all in one', but for these sites, we can't.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I can't see how anybody could be even remotely surprised with this.
Android was touted as being open. But users are stuck with all kinds of limitations. This has been known since day one it was out there. Sure you can jailbreak it though, but wth. You can't even write native apps (well you technically can, but its not supported)
Why are people surprised at this move? Sure, the G1 is on sale in many countries around the world and not just by T-Mobile USA, but Google bends to T-Mobile USA anyways.
When you get down to it, the G1 is just a glorified Java-phone not deserving of ANY of the hype. Basically, you can compare it to an iPhone, but without the 'charm' of Apple, and it just doesn't really work half as well. And even worse than iPhone, you cant get these apps in Europe in the appstore either anymore.
And guess what, I actually am from Europe and have a tethering-allowed data plan - from T-Mobile! Not even Apple removed the tethering stuff for their EU users....
Google ... I've just shut off my G1 for the last time. Back to playing with WM. Hey it ain't as shiny as iPhone but at least there's none of this ridiculous crap involved.
I find this somewhat hard to believe. I'm Dutch myself, and there are relatively few people who can speak or understand Dutch compared to for example English, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Portugese, etc. (Total is about 50 million worldwide, AFAIK)
However, I've been to many places all over the world many times, and there's pretty much always people who can speak or understand Dutch around. It's a freaking given.
What is also a given is that you will run into at least two people who know German for every person you run into that knows Dutch.
I can't imagine Germans aren't aware of this either. Thinking you can have a private conversation even halfway across the world from home in your native tongue is ... well, ridiculous even for Germans! ;) Especially in non-Asian territory.
Fast forward a year or ten, and you're me ;)
Seriously though, what you did is good. Keep it up. Self teaching is a very valuable skill in the software business.
Don't let those other people fool you though. They do not truly understand what you are doing, and how simple/complicated (depending on the thing you do) it is. The best judge there is about what you are doing is yourself, at least if you are honest. And though you are being a tad bit disrespectful to those fucking retarded people, it seems you got that point fairly well covered. It's good, and it is something to be proud of, but that's pretty much where it ends. You're not special - but perhaps you will be? Everybody can self-teach, but few people do.
So many hours of my own life have been utterly wasted, never to be reclaimed, listening to people saying how 'absolutely awesome' and whatnot whatever I did was, while in truth usually they praised silly stuff they could relate to or which 'looked cool', and the parts that are 'pure genius' are ignored because they simple don't follow - and you can't blame them. After all, what do you really know about their area of expertise, aside from the obvious bits?
The point is, you can't really judge what you are doing by the praise of people who do not _understand_ what you are doing. But keep on self-teaching. Though I'm afraid I lost a bit of that myself along the way (yes yes, getting back to it), nevertheless, it's always good to do so. While you have the time to do it, try doing 'fun' things and/or challenges as well. Unrelated to each other too.
Go and write yourself a compiler with all the language knowledge you have now. Try to improve things. Try actually writing something in that new language and find out why your choices were or weren't so great. Do something silly like for example rewriting PAR2 encoding/decoding from scratch without looking at the original source code, just the specifications and the near unfindable mathematical theory behind it. Take your favorite 'normal' device, hack it, and make it do things it completely wasn't designed for. Every cool idea you have, build a proof-of-concept. Etc, etc. These are just examples, I'm sure you'll run into a bunch of things you'll enjoy doing. This will keep you learning new and weird things that will unexpectedly give you great insights in many parts of the software (and hardware) field, and will keep you doing something fun between all the insanely boring CS crap you'll get in school (not to say it isn't useful, though).
In the end, make sure you enjoy it. And yes, I do agree, the 'amazing self taught' thought it silly - but it's mostly because 99% of people can't be bothered to do it :)
This response is a bit late seeing the post count and when the summmary was posted, but I was sleeping off my jetlag. I was there at the conference and at the speech Ballmer made (let me note, by the way, that the AT&T CEO made a really good speech in the same session though its content did seem completely contrary to how AT&T works, and the Nokia CEO should really be banned from opening his mouth at all).
Both TFA linked and a lot of the comments I see are so focused on the iPhone, yet it didn't actually get mentioned that much and wasn't the tone of the session at all. Furthermore the summary is just one big MS bash with fairly little relevance to what is actually going on right here.
What was being said however is that there is an abundance of OS's for the mobile market, and instead of getting less (like predicted at earlier MWC's) they are getting more in number. A call for more interoperability (sp?) was made, which would be good for everyone. Because of all the MS bashing going around here, let me just point out that MS did open up their ActiveSync and related infrastructure to other mobile OS's to accomplish exactly this.
Being "open" really does have a very different definition for everyone involved. Some people relate it to open source, which would be a bad call in this case. Take Android, for example, which is hyped up everywhere as being "open", while in reality, if you are using an Android phone you are severely limited in what you can and cannot do with the device (due to developers being limited in what they can/cannot access/do). In fact, Android may be the most "open source" OS (though it does have a bunch of binary blobs), but on the currently available devices it is reduced to be nothing more than a glorified Java-phone OS (and it isn't even that compatible with J2ME!). So it's open, but at the same time it's pretty closed (note that some of the limitations are carrier-implemented, but not all of them!).
I'd like to make a comment about the new "open" Symbian variant, but I'm afraid I haven't looked into it far enough to make decent comments about it, so I'll skip that one.
Now if we take the iPhone, it isn't "open" like Android, but the end result isn't that different. Both are severaly limited in what you can/cannot do. Apple excerts more control, but at the same time Google still has that kill switch (not to mention the Google integration with Android which is completely horrific). For both these platforms you will need to jailbreak to do the really interesting stuff. In fact what I find hilarious is that I see large numbers of iPhone adopters in my 'personal space' actually switching (back?) to the Windows Mobile platform because of all the limitations.
Now look at Windows Mobile. In it's nature, it is completely closed. However, in a completely unexpected and under-lighted move from Microsoft, you can actually do anything _you_ want with the OS and devices. It really is a playground for developers, you are not limited in any way in what you can do. If you are using the 'light' variant of the OS, the "Smartphone" (non-touchscreen) version, you may need to get your app signed, but most devices use the 'heavy' Professional variant you can actually just do this yourself without any MS interaction. No jailbreaking required. So in term of possibilities, WM is actually the most "open". Nor does MS excert much (if any) control over the OS itself. Of course we'll have to see where their appstore will go with this. MS is opening up some of their protocols (like ActiveSync and such) for other players, which is also an "open" move. (Just FYI, yes I am a mobile app developer and yes we have made some really funky things that wouldn't even be possible to do on the other OS's, and we literally get 100s of support requests PER DAY asking for these apps on iPhone and Android!). Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a WM fanboy though, some things are broken, others are behind the times, and 6.5 is little late for what it brings.
As a comment to another post I saw here,
It's also why film looks acceptable despite 24 fps.
I'm sorry, what? Granted, I'm only using a very expensive very large LCD instead of the plasma everybody here seems delirious about, and my eyes aren't 20/20. However, if you are watching any recent movie with even minor action in it in 24 fps on a sufficiently large screen (lets say starting at somewhere around 40", from not too far away) and you are not completely annoyed with the low fps when the image is panning, you definitely need to get your eyes checked out (or perhaps it's your brain can't handle the fast images? who knows). And no, it's not my TV, I see it on many brands in many sizes, of various reputed quality.
It's like those old DOS games who'se authors hadn't yet figured out how to program the video card's registers to pan smoothly and instead move X pixels per screen update (if that doesn't make sense to you, don't even worry about it), but now it's a hell of a lot more pixels.
And I may not be a salesman or a researcher, but if you can't see the difference between HD and SD (barring a really crappy cable provider), you also need to get your eyes checked out. Not a single person that has ever watched a movie or otherwise HD TV in my apartment has gone without saying something along the lines of "WOW! WTF?", and this is in a PAL country, so the difference is generally less than those of you watching in NTSC (though granted, if you got a really good cable - and I am talking about line quality here - analogue PAL can actually look halfway decent).
It's like people not being able to discern even the best of CGI in the movies of today and things that were actually filmed... Are you even looking at the same thing I am?
Does he deserve it for degrading gracefully?
Absolutely right, there.
You can get the source to Android, you just can't do anything useful with it. Most of the really interesting things you could do with a device like this, you actually can't, due to lack of root (some pretty normal stuff requires root on this phone).
For most intents and purposes, it is as closed as the iPhone, with Symbian and Windows Mobile being the "open" platforms in terms of what you can and cannot do on the devices. Only real difference with iPhone is that you can run un-approved apps.
I'm scratching my head here on why you would want an Android device. If you want a shiny interface, go iPhone. You want to hack to your hearts content, OpenMoko. Corporate stuff, BlackBerry. Mucking about with anything you want, Symbian and Windows Mobile.
I talked to some Google engineers and the thing that stuck to me is one of them said "its just a phone". With that attitude, Android is never going to be anything. If I want "just a phone", I'll dig up me old Nokia 3310. Another one is them saying root is a security issue, because all sort of malware could happen - really, I still have to run into the first virus etc for WM - but it's not a security risk to store your data on an external company's servers? I don't know about you, but I have no reason to trust Google with this data, and several not to.
I'm severely disappointed with the "open"-ness of the phone in question.
Ehm, no, you can't.
they will finally patch Forged Alliance!
I loved Total Annihilation (and Absolute!) and Supreme Command. Forged Alliance added some direly need rebalancing to Supreme Commander, however the game was never 'finished'. It had some serious unit bugs that were, indeed, possible to live with, but should be patched (and many have been patched by the community). However, FA slows down. And slows down. And slows down.
I have a really fast computer, but still, just launch a game with two LAN players and no AI. Do _nothing_. Just let it run 'nothing' for an hour or two. The game will have slowed to a crawl. You cannot play long games or 'epic battles' in FA because of this - with real play it happens, in my computers, after about 30-45 minutes on the ingame clock... a second will not take up to 10 real seconds.
Sad, really. I'm sure I'll buy SC2, but as a proud owner of TA, SC and FA (In total I legally own 10 games, and play less) I do hope FA gets fixed, it had a lot of potential, but pretty much died for lack of support.
Thanks for the info. I don't think the EU is all bad actually, but often when I hear about something going on in the EU my only thought is "FFS, why?!".
As to the council, they are elected by people I didn't vote for. I don't know what it is like where you're from, but where I'm from the government is generally made up of fear-mongering bullying fairy-tale believers (yeah, I mean you, religious nuts), and the people with actual common sense who really want to deal with the problems (instead of say, ignoring them or just adding legislation that has been tested in other areas and countries with the conclusion that it won't work or help) never get in the government. Now that is democracy, and so that is how it should be. I didn't vote for them though, and them having a say in ever more powerful institutions hence does make me itch. I don't think anyone I ever voted for made government, actually. Round here you only get in the govenment if your party name includes the word Christian.
As for the parliament, yeah, we can vote for them. But they have very little policy-making power. That's still in the hands of people I didn't vote for - worse, those that can make the policy are from national government bodies, and hence seem to mostly consider things that are relative to their country rather than to Europe.
(Not that I think I'd do any better, but then again, I'm not in politics!)
I don't think we should start over or throw the EU away, as I said it's a great idea (I'd love to see us merge to a single standing EU army and a single foreign policy minister for the entire EU, for example). But we do need more "action", more transparancy, and more exposure.
And less BS. Take that "constitution" for example. In my book a document like that is short, to the point, and readable by somebody who doesn't know legal-speak. It is NOT a document the size of a small spaceship in legal talk your average lawyer would find difficult to understand. Those other things may become part of the law, but having them part of the "base of the law" is crazy.
And of course you are right about 500M, my mistake.
Thanks for that link though, bookmarked!
In case none of you know, the EU is pretty much a mislabeled dictatorship. Citizens of the EU have pretty much nothing to say about what goes on or who gets "elected" for this or that. Democracy, pah!
The EU is a very good idea gone horribly wrong. Read me right, I want a united Europe, but not like this. We can vote for people who have get no actual power, yay! We waste money on going from A to B X times a month to not hurt France and Germany's pride, yay! We the people decline on the new "constitution" (what a joke) and they try pushing it through anyways, yay! I could go on, but what's the use...
All the good ideas get tossed, more (insane) regulation nobody wants gets piled. Media pay no attention to it either. What's going on in EU politics? You wont get it from the telly, the paper, or the generic news sites (though Obama is all over the place)...
The EU as a government body is a farce in need of some serious fixing, the only problem is some countries have serious ego and other countries actually care.
Give me the information and my 1/300m'th say in who our new EU overlords are, and I shall welcome them!
Sure you will. I know people are working on it (guess I'm going to be guinea pig for this again). Most HTC Windows Mobile devices this has been done long ago (and usually takes only a couple of days after a new one comes out).
Not having the signing keys is usually not that much of an issue (just disable the key check).
Sorry mate, tried modding you +1 Insightful, yet somehow it got passed to /. as -1 Redudandant. This post will take away the -1 though, if all is well :)
If I had mod points (of course you never do when you need 'em), I'd mod you up some more with +1 suddenoutbreakofcommonsense.
I am also angered by the views of many people in the tangible vs digital reproduction discussion.
Just because a copy costs $0, the initial investment is there just as with tangible goods. The dumbed down math looks something like this (IANAEconomist):
(((development cost) / (minimum expected number of sales)) + (reproduction cost)) * (profit margin) = sale price
The only difference between tangible and digital is that the reproduction cost is now 0. I completely fail to see how this makes sale price 0 as well, as some people seem to think it should be.
Now of course, if the situation warrants it, you can change that formula if you do business a different way. But you can't ever take out the (development cost) part. Radiohead came out on top (I think) just because of the very big number of sales. This will only work in certain instances. 'Small businesses' can't do this, the list of situations where this just doesn't work is endless.
What ticks me off most is the argument that if you copy a digital good it isn't stealing, because the original is still there. Perhaps the word stealing is not 100% literally correct, I will grant you that. However, you are still denying income to the authors. The argument that you would not have bought it doesn't fly either. If it is useful and provides a function people need, people will buy it. However, if they can get it for free, they will do that instead.
In the end, all these people are doing is making sure the developers cant feed their children and move to other things instead. Bottom line is they don't want to pay up, and make up all kinds of excuses why they shouldn't have to. It's like a little kid in the candy store, mommy doesn't want to buy you the candy, so they go crying and stomping around. Grow up.
And then of course the OSS enthousiasts will show up claiming it works for project X and Y so it should work for Z as well. Big-corp A will pay coders to work on it! Now, there is nothing wrong with OSS, in fact, I think it's great. But this model, again, does not work for a lot of projects, and all you're doing this is actually putting more into Big-corp A. Sell support contracts? Again, this works for some projects, not for others. Kinda put the effort out of trying to write decent software that doesn't need support too. The development cost has to be made back somewhere.
In the end, there are different business models, some work for some things, others for others. Thinking one-size-fits-all is IMHO shortsighted. And just because the business model used for product X you want is not agreeable to you, does NOT give you ANY right whatsoever to just pirate it instead.
Undoubtedly Prototype is very nice as well. Never used it though, after Dojo (which was pretty heavy at the time, with lots of server requests) I decided to pick a new framework; jQuery and Prototype were the candidates at the time, and I picked jQuery. Not sure why I picked it over Prototype at the time, though, but this was already some time ago.
Either way, the last part of your 'rewrite' seems to imply there are some specific cases where you'd pick Prototype over jQuery (or vice versa). Care to elaborate on these? Always an interesting read, at least for me.
That's not uncommon even if the the site isn't slashdotted. It's getting a lot better, though :)
Congratulations to everybody who has worked on jQuery!
I have used jQuery extensively and it is easy to learn and easy to handle. In fact, I had been using JavaScript for quite a while before jQuery, but after I started using jQuery, read some source, wrote a few plugins, etc. (even some patches, including performance related ones), I feel my understanding of the weird and advanced things in JavaScript is also much much better - and it didn't require any hard work or thinking :)
In comparison, before jQuery I used Dojo, which still gives me a headache just to think about. This is now some time ago though, so I will not bash Dojo as it's quite likely my specific problems with it have long been solved. However, Dojo never 'invited' me to become better at JavaScript myself.
All in all, jQuery is a great tool, it makes JavaScript fun again, and it makes me feel sorry I'm hardly doing any webdevving anymore (imagine that!)
I have actually built a similar system to that a year or so back, and ran it on our mail servers. Obviously, because it was just for testing, it only tagged spam and didn't block anything, and only for preselected accounts.
If I say so myself, it worked extraordinarily well. It took a lot of tweaking, but it's hit-rate was nearly perfect, if you of course ignore the spam from legitimate domains (which would subsequently usually be picked up and tagged by the SPF filter). False positives were virtually non-existent (one in many thousands), and after investigation all of those proved to be from people running their own mail servers at home without 'proper' domain names and records.
The project was put on hold because one of my other projects suddenly went through the roof in sales (yay!), though as things seem to be calming down on that front a bit (work-wise, not sale-wise), I'm still looking at options for continuing that work. The big problem here is of course that the anti-spam market is filled with products, lots of 'em free, and I don't easily see a way to break in there. I like doing it for the tech side, but the business side of such things is really not something I enjoy doing...
On a side-note, I wouldn't use low TTL's for detection...
Blackberry... who?
... right. Blackberry has never, and will never, dominate any smartphone market whatsoever.
"For the last 10 years RIM has dominated the smartphone market"
Symbian is #1 in users, and Windows Mobile is #1 in usability. Blackberry is a closed system and will ultimately completely fail. So will the iPhone, by the way, aside from a personal(!!) gadget.
It's virtually impossible to develop anything for the Blackberry. Add to that thats it's features are insanely expensive compared to the alternatives. It's only somewhat big in the US. Sure nowadays you can get Blackberry in Europe, but seriously, who other than an easily duped executive would ever order it?
Your average Symbian or Windows Mobile device is way more compatible with existing infrastructure, costs a fraction of a Blackberry (with the latter mostly being insane subscription costs, at least over here).
But what is most important - customizibility. There are almost an infinite number of apps available for Symbian and Windows Mobile (and as a developer, and I hate to say it, Windows Mobile easily has my preference). Your company needs something not 100% the standard package? You just call somebody with the knowledge and get it tailored to your needs.
Virtually anything you want to do is possible. That's the power. Some times, it can also be a drawback, but usually it's a power.
As for the iPhone, same shit different day. It's closed (enough to be called closed). They want to exert control. You'll always be a step behind that way. Even if your interface is shiny, what can it actually do? Forgive me for laughing at everybody who ever bought an iPhone, but WTH, no 3G ? For what it's supposed to do as a device, it's somewhat comparable to buying a black and white flatscreen 42". It may mean nothing to a non-techy, but I'm sure we can all agree iPhone is not a business device.
I remember going to a conference once, about 3 years ago, here in Europe, where there was also a seminar on Blackberry. The spokespeople were very enthousiastic about it. Feature this, feature that. Most of the audience was completely unimpressed. Our phones already do that. RIM may have fooled you Americans, but they offer very little extra. They may have some extra technical management stuff, but all of that will be in the next WM (and probably Symbian, too) release, and they only have it at the cost of using the device how you want it to be used.
I for one, am glad to see both Delphi and Pascal are on the rise (albeit very little - and personally I think they should be taken together).
:)
Delphi was great in it's day (up to version 7) as an IDE and RAD environment. But ofcourse, leave it to Borland to destroy a good product. Their track record says enough
Either way, Object Pascal is a great development language and I still use it daily. Compared to C++ it's a breeze to work with and you can do pretty much anything you can do with C++ with OP (and it'll still compile it all in a fraction of a second). I know for a fact Delphi 5 & 7 are still heavily used in large (and government) projects, btw.
Delphi may be dead, but FreePascal+Lazarus is still very much alive and useful. Providing a RAD environment largely compatible with Delphi, but compiling to many many different platforms. From Linux to Windows, from Windows Mobile to NDS, sporting various GUI toolkits, etc.
I still develop many small tools for Windows in Delphi and crossplatform or 'weirdplatform' stuff in FreePascal+Lazarus.
The language is easy to learn (but beware, the 'last mile' is not so easy) and you can make use of all the C/C++ goodness out there. You may need to translate a header or two, but that's it. It compiles natively and it's damned fast.
I'd go so far as to say that developing in Pascal is at least twice as fast as developing in C++ - and yes I also develop in C++ when necessary (ie, client requirement).
A little known fact about OP is that it actually does support garbage collection if you do some smart coding ('abusing' scope-dependant reference counted variables). It's not 'built in' like in C# and Java, but after doing it for a day or two it comes natural. Actually this trickery is also very useful for debug logging and such, as you're able to perform operations both when variables are declared and when it goes out of scope. I can just see you thinking "smart coding, that must be a lot of code then". It isn't. It takes about 3 or 4 lines of code per class to add this functionality.
Something that's more interesting though is Windows Mobile development. You might be interested to know that one of the most tricky and 'undocumented feature abusing' application available for Windows Mobile is written in FreePascal (I'll not spam the program itself) and I'm quite sure it would've taken a lot more time to write in C++.
----
As for PHP, I'm also a happy user of that. Yes, it's a language that invites abuse from the users who start with scripting languages, and not always as elegant as for example Python (should spend more time on that one) and Ruby (overhyped not really useful IMHO), but again, if you use it correctly you can do amazing things with it. Well structured, large, maintainable, scalable and code-wise intuitive applications are definitely something PHP shines at, if used correctly.
If there's one thing getting me down in this list it's JavaScripts fairly low rating. In todays web development world, knowing JavaScript, and knowing it well, is definitely a requirement. I wouldn't hire a web developer (not a designer!) who doesn't know all the JS basics and at least a fair share of the more advanced stuff. Knowing your way around jQuery (or Dojo, ExtJS, whatever) is good, but if you don't WHY and HOW it works, you're still no good, and you WILL run into problems you will not be able to solve.
Though webdevelopment used to be a bit of a small brother to 'real software development', the complexity of it is rising rapidly. Combining really advanced/complex designs (functionality-wise as well as visual) into HTML and CSS operating correctly cross-browser is something that already requires a lot of quirk-knowledge. JavaScript isn't implemented very consistently across browsers either. Enter the complexities of making it a full extensive AJAX application, it's not a small feat.
Especially if you realise that many of todays 'webcoders' are expected to do the server side (PHP/ASP/
Well I'm using HSPA right now (you could say it's the GSM version of EVDO RevA), coming in on a cellphone turned into a wifi hotspot using WMWifiRouter ( .com ), and have several computers connected to that hotspot (Our landline just crapped out, waiting for the technician to show up). Works great to provide your own internet feed anywhere you have access (granted, wifi isn't that secure, but if you are feeding to just a single computer, you can use a cable instead).
Either way, with speeds possible up to 14.4mbit and the much lower latency than previous cellular data connections, "fast" is not really an issue. Reliable? Depends on your location (ie, the coverage of your cellular provider... I'll bet they have better coverage than public wifi has). The country I'm from has 95%+ coverage for most providers.
As for security, I imagine EVDO has similar security to UMTS. While it is probably possible to hijack an UMTS data connection, it's not easy, and requires specialistic equipment not available at your average Radio Shack. Compare that to a $200 laptop that's all you need to hijack most wifi networks. Add to that that cell providers are big corps with billions on the line. I would put much more faith in them not man-in-the-middle'ing you than I would put in whoever set up the wifi AP you're using in your hotel.
Yup, PayPal definitely sucks.
I run a business, about a month ago we started to accept PayPal as payment (while waiting for our own merchant account to clear). We made about $17k in a week. We transferred the first $7.5k to our bank account (thank god!) after a day or two. After no more than seven days, PayPal closed our account, without giving any reason.
After having our lawyer write some letters to them (they didn't respond to us ourselves at all), and PayPal giving several different and evasive andwers, it came out that the 'contact person' for our business account had once ordered something of an erotic nature with PayPal, and that is against their agreement.
Now, several things are wrong with that. I won't go so far as to say that person has never bought erotica, I don't know and really don't care. What is definitely wrong with that, though, is that said person has only made two PayPal payments in his life and they weren't related to erotica (yes I am sure of this). Furthermore, PayPal mentions accounts that do not actually exist and never have. It's complete BS.
What else is wrong with that, how the hell can they close a business account because they do not like the contact person's personal account. Since when is a company responsible for their employees' private actions? What's worse, their allegations aren't even true.
So now PayPal is sitting on $10k of my money I desperately need, without a valid reason. They refuse to clear it, they refuse to discuss it. They have even refused giving us the 'offending' transaction details (how the hell can we dispute anything if we don't have access to the data?) - lawyer is dealing with that, though.
All in all, the money, the lawyer costs, the lost customers, reputation damage, etc, are now easily more than a $50k loss for us.
Should you read this and be a no cure no pay type lawyer (hey, PayPal got my money) in the UK, feel free to drop me a line so we can talk about sueing PayPal's pants off (our company lawyers cannot help us there, as PayPal Europe operates under English law and we're not from England).
Hey, I thought it wouldn't happen to me. But yeah I got burned. Doing business with PayPal is an accident waiting to happen...
What, 10 euros a day?
Let's see, I pay 10 euros a month for unlimited (tethering allowed, no hidden bandwidth cap) 3G access on my phone here in Europe. Ok, it's only full UMTS, not full HSPA, but it gets the job done when I'm not on a 8-24 mbit line at home or work. That's 30 times cheaper than 10 euro's a day. What a strange 'simple' figure is that anyway, who spends 10 euros a day on mobile internet?
As for the wifi hotspots, well to be honest I havent encountered many of them and I do live in a big city, but I haven't really searched for them either. I know the university and two or three of my favourite bars have them (never see people with laptops in there, but I imagine it's nice for others who have wifi enabled phones but don't have a data plan). Unsecured access points are everywhere.
Roaming are awful though, especially here in Europe. You go somewhere near the border, you get the same provider but from a different country and suddenly you have to get a second mortgage to google. Glad the EU is looking into it.
That being said, if you are waiting around somewhere and you need internet where your data plan isn't 'valid' (or you don't have one), you can make a wifi hotspot anywhere if you can find somebody with a phone and a data plan with WMWifiRouter or JoikuSpot softwares, depending on the type of phone they have.
While that may be true media="handheld" only works on the CSS part. Although I would say for just that most of our visuals just don't work at 320x240. A more important point however, is that mobile users have significantly less bandwidth to waste, so we want to strip out as much text content, images, desktop-IE specific code, etc from what is transmitted as possible. A few KB on a 'landline' makes very little difference (for these kinds of site, as they are graphics centered which already take a lot of bandwidth), but for mobile users you really try to slice off every last byte.
And what the hell, use Flash? From someone who is so adamant about standards as you are, that must be the most rediculous critique I have ever heard.
In the end what I'm saying is, it IS standards friendly to some extend, but it also has to look a lot more 'crispy' than your standard sites because the target audience just is that way. You wouldn't open a $500 dollar a meal restaurant in the tip of the eiffel tower and use bums as waiters, would you?
You misunderstand me there. My stuff actually does work with screenreaders and such, but LOOKING at it with a CSS-less browser will not be pretty. But then again, if you are using a screenreader, I guess that doesn't really matter to you. But no, indeed, even if it didn't work, these people do not fit the target audience, as these sites I make are all in the visual art realm. As for mobile viewers, that's what we make mobile versions of the site for. I'm pretty much a mobile devices freak and I know what does and doesn't work. What doesn't work is trying to make a rich desktop web site work on a mobile device. The resolutions won't work, Pocket Internet Explorer is even worse than the normal Internet Explorer, even mobile Opera lacks some bits of essential javascript support (this however, is expected to be fixed in Opera Mobile 9 out soon, hurrah, that actually might work after all). As indicated before, it all really depends on the site. I'd type more but I have to go out to dinner. I do understand what you are getting at, and yes, we do care about and take care of these issues. The 'one site fits all' simply doesn't fly for this niche of sites though, I hope you understand that. And yes, that really has to do with the combination of main target audience and limitations of how HTML, CSS and JS work. As stated before, a site like Google can do that 'all in one', but for these sites, we can't.