In the first place, Android apps are not Java apps. They are compiled to a different byte-code and run on a different VM, which is Android-specific.
Yours is the typical VM FUD. If it's a VM, it MUST be slower, right guys? Please. Look what native code has gotten the iPhone: no multi-tasking for custom apps, no garbage collection, developers saddled to an antiquated language (ObjectiveC). These things can be worked around, and there are lots of great iPhone apps, but native-code is not everything it's cracked up to be.
VM's are a GOOD thing, and the Android implementation is excellent. The system-wide event model is outstanding, allowing one to write apps that stay running, and do things, say, when you change locations (your physical location), flip the phone upside down, run too fast, receive a phone call, etc. The VM has made all of this much easier to accomplish, because the code is managed.
GPRS (2G) is roughly dialup. EDGE (2.5G) is more like slow DSL, in the 128K to 230K range. GPRS can actually do better than dial-up. It maxes out at 59K.
The G1 does all three, and it distinguishes between them on the display. Perhaps your iPhone doesn't.
Interestingly enough, this was one bit of canon that originated in the Star Trek novels well before that episode was written. I wish I could remember which ones — it has been over 20 years since I read those things. They were called the Progenitors in a number of the books.
Can't stand those thumb-balls. I love the old Microsoft Trackball Explorer fingertip ball (I use it on my macs all the time, and with ControllerMate IV can program it however I wish). The ball NEVER dulls or scratches. It does, however, occasionally need lubrication (nose grease works perfectly). Pop out the ball, and blow it out occasionally, and flick the dust off of the three surface contacts. Going on 5 years on three of them. No problems.
I'll never understand how you thumb-ball guys get any control out of those things. I can be so precise with the fingertip balls (I do a lot with graphics design so that's important). Of course, you probably think the same about us fingertip guys.
I wouldn't be using iMovie or iDVD for professional video editing and DVD mastering.
And just who is "everyone"? Yes, you can find a few of them online, but I can't find Firewire enclosures or drives in the Twin Cities on the shelf anywhere. I went looking for 2.5" external enclosures. I like to put spare hard drives in them and use them on Macs around the office. It's handy, because with the 30V power of Firewire, I never have problems with under-powered USB ports.
Newegg.com sells only 1 enclosure and 4 external drives. (They sell 8 that are dual USB/Firewire but I have had problems dual enclosures in the past.) They sell 4 In contrast, they sell 171 2.5" USB drives, and 101 USB enclosures.
Tiger Direct: No enclosures. 4 Firewire-400 externals, 2 Firewire-800. Buy.com? No enclosures. No 2.5" drives.
Not exactly "everyone". You know why? Because too few people buy them, and for obvious reasons. A USB drive can be used anywhere. A Firewire drive, almost nowhere. Even all those Dell and Sony laptops have only 4-pin Firewire connectors, meaning the pain of having to use external power.
The situation is better for 3.5" drives. But again, they are dwarfed by USB. None of the retailers around here carry them.
And you have no idea what you are talking about. Firewire is used all over the place. I would venture to say that Firewire usage in PCs far exceeds Firewire usage on Macs. On my home PCs, I use Firewire for external hard drives and video, drive Firewire wide-format printers at work from Windows based RIPs. Firewire is a staple in Professional Audio and Video - preferred for multi-track work because USB sucks at streaming.
If you install django and run "django-admin.py startproject cms" you'd be 80% done too.
Yeah, if you wanted everybody to edit their templates from the filesystem, didn't care about most CMS niceties like a menu system integrated with a hierarchical page structure, expected people to edit regex tuples to configure URLs - in short if all you cared about was a way to do quick-and-dirty page templating with barebones authentication - then yeah, you would be 80% done.
Django makes building a CMS much easier, probably easier than any framework in existence. But be realistic. It's quite easy to patch a bunch of stand-alone apps together, but to integrate them well with one another in something that does not bear a resemblance to Frankenstein's monster? No.
Many web applications can benefit from CMS functionality, particularly if they are public-facing and part of a company's product. Personally, I like to start with a strong and flexible framework, on top of which I implement a very basic CMS system, that can be used to allow customers to manage all their own content and even the CSS and layout of the site, without requiring them to know anything about the application functionality except where it "plugs in" to the page content.
That said, some applications do not at all fit that model and do net need CMS functionality. That is why I prefer to start with a good framework, not a CMS.
Well, "completely" is not quite true. What it did was hook 16-bit DOS callbacks into a 32-bit stack to provide some essential OS services. It replaced some of what DOS did (such as when 32-bit disk access was enabled), and some it did not replace (like reading the system clock). I saw demonstration code of how one could replace some of these 16-bit callbacks with 32-bit VXDs (the aforesaid clock access). So, it would be more accurate to say that it ran partially on DOS.
Heh. It means, "I'm tired of brainless troubleshooting-tree following monkeys." In other words - they don't use their heads. If the troubleshooting tree says to do something, they do it, no matter what, even if they tried it 10 times already, and it didn't work.
I am not an Apple fan. I am an Apple user. I have shunned the iPhone, and am waiting for Android, as I cannot stand Apple's DRM, and though I could learn ObjectiveC, I don't care to, as I already know Java, and so can develop on Android. So there.
Anyway - I never said that there were no other mobile browsers. I am currently saddled with a WM6 Blackjack. I hate moble ie. I hate mobile Opera. They all suck on these devices. I wasn't aware of the Symbian browser. Thank you for that.
But in any case, it's not only the browser that's the key. It's the way it can be used. The zooming abilities, multi-touch, etc. It's the whole package that made it an attractive platform. It put together a set of features that make it extremely easy for the college crowd to navigate, even if they are not geeks like all of us.
Consider this - Until the iPhone there was no practical device of the kind for browsing the web, with the full power of the web. As noted many times in this article, all previous generations of mobile browsers sux0r.
Kind of pointless to talk about supporting other platforms when there are, as yet, no other platforms to support (speaking of the mobile web, that is). They say, in the article, that they can always evaluate Android later.
Abilene has had this program for a long time now. They piloted it on the original iPhone, and were Apples poster-child for demonstrating the iPhone as a platform.
And no, in their case, it makes no bloody sense at all to allow multiple-OSs. They have developed the iPhone to the hilt, integrating everything from school maps, class schedules, class notes, recordings of classes, messaging, notices, etc., all into one integrated platform. There is no way they could have accomplished the same thing on mobile devices if they had to support mixed platforms, without making it both harder to use, run slower on mobile devices, and a support nightmare. The iPhone provided them an ideal opportunity, and they took it. More power to them.
Could they have gone open? Sure. If Android had been available already, perhaps they would have gone that direction. But you can be sure that even if they went open, they would have settled on ONE platform for the same reasons as noted above.
I've been using the betas of 3.0 on my Mac for a while now. I invariably have switched back to NeoOffice. I will still likely stay away from the official build, because there are too many things still broken, most notably fonts.
I tend to use a number of large OpenType font families, such as Warnock or Minion. For whatever reason, OOo 3.0 has serious trouble with them. It gets the styles mixed up constantly. Regular comes out as Italic. NeoOffice just plain works and does not have these issues. (Yes, I filed a bug.)
Patrick has put so much work into making NeoOffice work like a Mac application should — work with which the official build will likely never catch up. Windows behave as expected. Tool windows look like tool windows, not document windows. Command-~ switching works properly. The regular File, Edit, Tools, etc. menus are still there even when no documents are open. (In OOo, the Recent Documents menu goes away once you close all open documents.) Printing and fonts are far more integrated. The native Mac Media Browser is integrated. Leopard grammar checker support is integrated. To top it all off, the screen drawing code in NeoOffice has been reimplemented as native Mac code instead of hacked into place. As a result the windows and documents redraw several times faster than OOo. In fact, almost everything is faster in NeoOffice than in OOo. Add this to the fact that NeoOffice has backported the MS Office 2007 filters, and VBA support, and I really have no compelling reason to switch.
And, work on NeoOffice 3.0 is well under way.
I tell you, the people over at Sun who shun Patrick and his work are cutting off their nose to spite their face.
And if you have ever actually used Office for Mac, you would realize that it's compatibility with Office for Windows is hardly any better than NeoOffice or OOo 3.0.
Not only that, it's slow. It has horribly stupid font management. Every release since Office for Mac 10 has gotten progressively worse. The current release, 12, is so bad, that on an Intel machine, it is actually faster to run version 11 (which is PPC only) through Rosetta emulation.
I am nearly convinced that Microsoft deliberately stunts Office for Mac to drive Mac users to Windows. Well it worked for me. I deleted Office for Mac, and now run Office 2003 via VMWare Fusion.
My Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 can do IPV6, you insensitive clod! (with Tomato firware)
So — seriously — what this shows is that the bulk of the routers in existence could be made IPV6-capable with a firmware upgrade. Of course, whether the manufacturers would have the incentive to do so when they could otherwise just claim, “I know, it sucks, but you need to buy a new router,” and dramatically pump their bottom line, is another question altogether.
Now that I find funny, is back in the 80's we were using a TRS-80 Model III to do word processing, and outputting to a big ugly noisy Daisy Wheel printer. Beautiful proportionally spaced output - if you don't mind a single font for everything, or changing font wheels constantly.
Our main typesetter had a fit when we switched to Microsoft Word for DOS.
His biggest pet peeve with Word, was that there was NO way to page through a document a visual page at a time. I cannot remember the name of the Tandy word processor, but it had exactly the behavior that Microsoft just patented, but Microsoft was missing, up through Word for DOS 5.0.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because, as we know, T-Mobile employees have special SIM chips that enable secret Traffic Shaping protocols for T-Mobile branded phones.
Please.
I love generalizations.
In the first place, Android apps are not Java apps. They are compiled to a different byte-code and run on a different VM, which is Android-specific.
Yours is the typical VM FUD. If it's a VM, it MUST be slower, right guys? Please. Look what native code has gotten the iPhone: no multi-tasking for custom apps, no garbage collection, developers saddled to an antiquated language (ObjectiveC). These things can be worked around, and there are lots of great iPhone apps, but native-code is not everything it's cracked up to be.
VM's are a GOOD thing, and the Android implementation is excellent. The system-wide event model is outstanding, allowing one to write apps that stay running, and do things, say, when you change locations (your physical location), flip the phone upside down, run too fast, receive a phone call, etc. The VM has made all of this much easier to accomplish, because the code is managed.
Edge is roughly dialup.
BZZZZT! Wrong.
GPRS (2G) is roughly dialup. EDGE (2.5G) is more like slow DSL, in the 128K to 230K range. GPRS can actually do better than dial-up. It maxes out at 59K.
The G1 does all three, and it distinguishes between them on the display. Perhaps your iPhone doesn't.
Interestingly enough, this was one bit of canon that originated in the Star Trek novels well before that episode was written. I wish I could remember which ones — it has been over 20 years since I read those things. They were called the Progenitors in a number of the books.
But sadly, all you're likely to get is Plan 9 From Outer Space, only this time it won't be so bad it's good.
Oh, and this is my first posting from my new G1.
Can't stand those thumb-balls. I love the old Microsoft Trackball Explorer fingertip ball (I use it on my macs all the time, and with ControllerMate IV can program it however I wish). The ball NEVER dulls or scratches. It does, however, occasionally need lubrication (nose grease works perfectly). Pop out the ball, and blow it out occasionally, and flick the dust off of the three surface contacts. Going on 5 years on three of them. No problems.
I'll never understand how you thumb-ball guys get any control out of those things. I can be so precise with the fingertip balls (I do a lot with graphics design so that's important). Of course, you probably think the same about us fingertip guys.
And where, exactly, on the new Macbook are you going to plug in that 9-pin adapter? RTFA.
Ah, yes. And that is why the new Macbooks are cheaper than the old Macbooks.
Oh, wait ...
And lets add to his list:
I wouldn't be using iMovie or iDVD for professional video editing and DVD mastering.
And just who is "everyone"? Yes, you can find a few of them online, but I can't find Firewire enclosures or drives in the Twin Cities on the shelf anywhere. I went looking for 2.5" external enclosures. I like to put spare hard drives in them and use them on Macs around the office. It's handy, because with the 30V power of Firewire, I never have problems with under-powered USB ports.
Newegg.com sells only 1 enclosure and 4 external drives. (They sell 8 that are dual USB/Firewire but I have had problems dual enclosures in the past.) They sell 4 In contrast, they sell 171 2.5" USB drives, and 101 USB enclosures.
Tiger Direct: No enclosures. 4 Firewire-400 externals, 2 Firewire-800. Buy.com? No enclosures. No 2.5" drives.
Not exactly "everyone". You know why? Because too few people buy them, and for obvious reasons. A USB drive can be used anywhere. A Firewire drive, almost nowhere. Even all those Dell and Sony laptops have only 4-pin Firewire connectors, meaning the pain of having to use external power.
The situation is better for 3.5" drives. But again, they are dwarfed by USB. None of the retailers around here carry them.
And you have no idea what you are talking about. Firewire is used all over the place. I would venture to say that Firewire usage in PCs far exceeds Firewire usage on Macs. On my home PCs, I use Firewire for external hard drives and video, drive Firewire wide-format printers at work from Windows based RIPs. Firewire is a staple in Professional Audio and Video - preferred for multi-track work because USB sucks at streaming.
If you install django and run "django-admin.py startproject cms" you'd be 80% done too.
Yeah, if you wanted everybody to edit their templates from the filesystem, didn't care about most CMS niceties like a menu system integrated with a hierarchical page structure, expected people to edit regex tuples to configure URLs - in short if all you cared about was a way to do quick-and-dirty page templating with barebones authentication - then yeah, you would be 80% done.
Django makes building a CMS much easier, probably easier than any framework in existence. But be realistic. It's quite easy to patch a bunch of stand-alone apps together, but to integrate them well with one another in something that does not bear a resemblance to Frankenstein's monster? No.
Or rather: symfony
Yes, there is. CakePHP or Symphony.
Many web applications can benefit from CMS functionality, particularly if they are public-facing and part of a company's product. Personally, I like to start with a strong and flexible framework, on top of which I implement a very basic CMS system, that can be used to allow customers to manage all their own content and even the CSS and layout of the site, without requiring them to know anything about the application functionality except where it "plugs in" to the page content.
That said, some applications do not at all fit that model and do net need CMS functionality. That is why I prefer to start with a good framework, not a CMS.
Well, "completely" is not quite true. What it did was hook 16-bit DOS callbacks into a 32-bit stack to provide some essential OS services. It replaced some of what DOS did (such as when 32-bit disk access was enabled), and some it did not replace (like reading the system clock). I saw demonstration code of how one could replace some of these 16-bit callbacks with 32-bit VXDs (the aforesaid clock access). So, it would be more accurate to say that it ran partially on DOS.
Heh. It means, "I'm tired of brainless troubleshooting-tree following monkeys." In other words - they don't use their heads. If the troubleshooting tree says to do something, they do it, no matter what, even if they tried it 10 times already, and it didn't work.
For some reason the a-umlaut got screwed up.
I am not an Apple fan. I am an Apple user. I have shunned the iPhone, and am waiting for Android, as I cannot stand Apple's DRM, and though I could learn ObjectiveC, I don't care to, as I already know Java, and so can develop on Android. So there.
Anyway - I never said that there were no other mobile browsers. I am currently saddled with a WM6 Blackjack. I hate moble ie. I hate mobile Opera. They all suck on these devices. I wasn't aware of the Symbian browser. Thank you for that.
But in any case, it's not only the browser that's the key. It's the way it can be used. The zooming abilities, multi-touch, etc. It's the whole package that made it an attractive platform. It put together a set of features that make it extremely easy for the college crowd to navigate, even if they are not geeks like all of us.
Consider this - Until the iPhone there was no practical device of the kind for browsing the web, with the full power of the web. As noted many times in this article, all previous generations of mobile browsers sux0r.
Kind of pointless to talk about supporting other platforms when there are, as yet, no other platforms to support (speaking of the mobile web, that is). They say, in the article, that they can always evaluate Android later.
They aren't forced. RTFA. If they don't want to switch phones, they are given an iPod Touch for free, which gives them all the same stuff.
Abilene has had this program for a long time now. They piloted it on the original iPhone, and were Apples poster-child for demonstrating the iPhone as a platform.
And no, in their case, it makes no bloody sense at all to allow multiple-OSs. They have developed the iPhone to the hilt, integrating everything from school maps, class schedules, class notes, recordings of classes, messaging, notices, etc., all into one integrated platform. There is no way they could have accomplished the same thing on mobile devices if they had to support mixed platforms, without making it both harder to use, run slower on mobile devices, and a support nightmare. The iPhone provided them an ideal opportunity, and they took it. More power to them.
Could they have gone open? Sure. If Android had been available already, perhaps they would have gone that direction. But you can be sure that even if they went open, they would have settled on ONE platform for the same reasons as noted above.
I've been using the betas of 3.0 on my Mac for a while now. I invariably have switched back to NeoOffice. I will still likely stay away from the official build, because there are too many things still broken, most notably fonts.
I tend to use a number of large OpenType font families, such as Warnock or Minion. For whatever reason, OOo 3.0 has serious trouble with them. It gets the styles mixed up constantly. Regular comes out as Italic. NeoOffice just plain works and does not have these issues. (Yes, I filed a bug.)
Patrick has put so much work into making NeoOffice work like a Mac application should — work with which the official build will likely never catch up. Windows behave as expected. Tool windows look like tool windows, not document windows. Command-~ switching works properly. The regular File, Edit, Tools, etc. menus are still there even when no documents are open. (In OOo, the Recent Documents menu goes away once you close all open documents.) Printing and fonts are far more integrated. The native Mac Media Browser is integrated. Leopard grammar checker support is integrated. To top it all off, the screen drawing code in NeoOffice has been reimplemented as native Mac code instead of hacked into place. As a result the windows and documents redraw several times faster than OOo. In fact, almost everything is faster in NeoOffice than in OOo. Add this to the fact that NeoOffice has backported the MS Office 2007 filters, and VBA support, and I really have no compelling reason to switch.
And, work on NeoOffice 3.0 is well under way.
I tell you, the people over at Sun who shun Patrick and his work are cutting off their nose to spite their face.
And if you have ever actually used Office for Mac, you would realize that it's compatibility with Office for Windows is hardly any better than NeoOffice or OOo 3.0.
Not only that, it's slow. It has horribly stupid font management. Every release since Office for Mac 10 has gotten progressively worse. The current release, 12, is so bad, that on an Intel machine, it is actually faster to run version 11 (which is PPC only) through Rosetta emulation.
I am nearly convinced that Microsoft deliberately stunts Office for Mac to drive Mac users to Windows. Well it worked for me. I deleted Office for Mac, and now run Office 2003 via VMWare Fusion.
My Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 can do IPV6, you insensitive clod! (with Tomato firware)
So — seriously — what this shows is that the bulk of the routers in existence could be made IPV6-capable with a firmware upgrade. Of course, whether the manufacturers would have the incentive to do so when they could otherwise just claim, “I know, it sucks, but you need to buy a new router,” and dramatically pump their bottom line, is another question altogether.
resolution. This is irregardless wether
cringe
resolution, regardless whether
There. Fixed that for you.
Now that I find funny, is back in the 80's we were using a TRS-80 Model III to do word processing, and outputting to a big ugly noisy Daisy Wheel printer. Beautiful proportionally spaced output - if you don't mind a single font for everything, or changing font wheels constantly.
Our main typesetter had a fit when we switched to Microsoft Word for DOS.
His biggest pet peeve with Word, was that there was NO way to page through a document a visual page at a time. I cannot remember the name of the Tandy word processor, but it had exactly the behavior that Microsoft just patented, but Microsoft was missing, up through Word for DOS 5.0.