Given that your willing to write off the population of an entire country on your limited anecdotal evidence, I have to wonder whether the people outsourcing the role knew they'd get incompetents, but at least the new incompetents would be cheaper.
Hey, how do you know his evidence is limited and anecdotal?
Maybe he knows everyone in India and just isn't very impressed with them!
My brother used to work for them! He would always tell me how great they were, but he was just believing what the marketing team told him. I always knew they wouldn't survive. -Taylor
1.)Release new version of iTunes that checks specifically for the Pre. 2.)Release new firmware for existing iPods to ensure they work with the new version of iTunes.
You just lost me at step 2.
The fact is that firmware upgrades for older iPods are unlikely to be installed by users for some time. It could take a year or more for that to propagate.... not to mention that whatever change you make to the older iPods can more easily be mimicked by Palm than it is to put together for Apple at this point! Apple would have to dust off development kits for retired iPods of all stripes, whereas Palm just has to tweak new code with the few things that change...
It would not be unlike apple to force the update on people. This is the same company that made their updater tell people Safari needed an "Update" even if it wasn't installed, and then made it the default browser.
Plus, I'm rather sure that their would be no dusting off needed, they probably know those iPods so well that they could easily add a check to them.
Of course, Palm catching up is much harder to stop, but it could certainly be inconvenient for Pre users. -Taylor
... If Apple were a bit smarter, they would make iTunes available for 50 quid for non-iPod devices.
Haha, what? That is ridiculous. I'm no fanboy, but when it comes to business tactics, apple is incredibly smart (see their market share on media players, as well as the computer prices they get away with for reference). I'd like to see you take over a multi-billion dollar market with ideas like that!
Why on earth would they want $50 from someone when they will make far more if that person gives in and buys an ipod? They have the VAST majority of the market, and that keeps people buying their hardware. And not just a one time $50 license, but many iPod owners upgrade ipods every few years. That is a recurring income that adds up to WAY more than $50. I wish other devices worked with iTunes, but I sure as hell don't think they're dumb for not allowing that.
Apple's worst nightmare is that the general populace becomes aware of other good MP3 players, they will NEVER open up itunes, or if for some reason they do, it sure as hell won't be just to make a quick buck on a license.
I'm impressed with the two guys who did it *manned* in the 60s
from tfa:
In January 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh made the first and only manned voyage in a Swiss-built bathyscaphe known as the Trieste. The vessel consisted of a 2m-diameter (6ft) steel sphere containing the crew suspended below a huge 15m-long (50ft) tank of petrol, designed to provide buoyancy. During the nine-hour mission, the two men spent just 20 minutes on the ocean floor; enough time to measure the depth as 10,916m (35,813 ft).
Yeah, I remember seeing a special on that when I was younger (like 10 years ago), and I still remember it, because it's such an awesome story. I really suggest that if anyone is bored you look this story up, it's really awesome.
The sad thing is that once they hit the bottom, the sand down there was so fine that it threw up a cloud of it that never cleared during the time that they were there, so they didn't get to see much except for what they saw right before they landed!
Back in the early 90's (92, I believe), I was co-op'ing for IBM and was lucky enough to get to go to COMDEX provided I man a booth for a while. The product I was demo'ing was voice independant voice recognition (it was all the rage at the time). There was no training required, random guy from the street could walk up and interact with the computer by voice, regardless of dialect or accent. I got pretty good with it, but I noticed that some people did have to repeat themselves (but not more than twice) to get it to work -- again, early times in terms of speech recognition. But the reason I was good at it was that repeated practice actually trained ME to speak the way it wanted instead of it being able to adjust to how I spoke. Speech recognition has become more prevelant since then (BING 411 anyone? http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/ ), and I'm sure you've made adjustments to how you speak to computers just to get past the voice prompts. You speak slower with more distinct pauses between words.
Behavior modification is an effective way to improve computer input.
Hah, that reminds me of an old phone that I had. It has voice dialing and it would always speak back the name it thought i meant in it's own "voice". The funny thing is, it basically sounded like an asian with a thick accent, which is probably because that's who programmed the english into it (it was an LG, and I'm pretty sure they're made in Japan, right?). Anyway, I basically learned that if I faked a thick accent it would understand me better. When i wanted to call my friend Zack, it would only work half the time, until I learned to say "Sek" instead, which is how it said it back to me when it worked.
It also wasn't really programmed to handle acronyms, so I had to speak those out.
Once i learned how it worked, it was perfect, but it definetely trained me! -Taylor
the iphone doesn't win on features, it wins on status symbolism ($800, really?), flashy advertising, and eye candy.
disclaimer: i don't even own a cellphone (or a tv, yes sometimes you need to be disconnected) but i notice that this is definitely true with people i see around me all the time, and i can give specific examples if need be. there's a lot of keeping up the joneses involved here.
Seriously, i hear a *lot* of people mention that the iphone is supposed to be some status symbol, but is that even really true? It certainly sounds good to say, but I have *never* met anyone with an iPhone that I thought had it because of some status thing - people certainly drink the kool-aid and think it's the best thing out there, but that still means they bought it because they thought it was genuinely good, even if they were uninformed.
Maybe it's because I live in silicon valley, one freeway exit from Apple headquarters itself, and everyone around here owns an iPhone just because it's decent (even if it's not great, it's certainly alright) and people tend to be well off enough to have a smartphone of some kind. And so maybe it's how common it is that makes it not a status symbol here, but I've never seen it treated as such.
Does it really seem like a status symbol somewhere? -Taylor
Alright, maybe I was a bit hasty, I see that they did link to Engadget - I didn't see "Engadget" in the summary so I figured someone was just passing it off as their own writing. But should it have at least been mentioned that it was via Engadget, rather than leaving the reader to actually follow the link to see where the text came from? How does that work? -Taylor
According to the summary it seems like it will be emulating everything, that raises a real speed concern, not perhaps for newer desktops but for older hardware and netbooks. Wouldn't a better option be to have a second real kernel being launched within the real one and native libs, etc? I know it might be hard to do and would have security problems, but it seems a lot faster that way.
I'm not sure if it is emulated or not, but even if it's slow to run an app, a desktop likely has a much faster processor than the phone the app was designed to run on, so it would probably be fine normally. -Taylor
If you RTFA it's not a joke, but it's not meant for home use, it's for doctors to use in the doctor's office to put kids under with less anxiety. -Taylor
If I were running a fast food restaurant one of the first things it would make sense to do is pick groups of customer to punch in the face instead of giving them their order. It's all for a good cause. We want to know just how much abuse they'll take before they go down the road to the competition. That will help us figure out how good our food is. Now did you want a fries with that burger? *PUNCH* How about a *PUNCH* drink?
See how absurd it sounds?
That's just fucking ridiculous. Do you really feel similarly violated when a page loads 500mS slower versus someone punching you in the face?
If so, then wake the fuck up. It's a pretty interesting problem to determine how fast is "fast enough" for a page to load and I don't blame them.
Imagine google.com could load ten times faster than it currently does, but would increase their operating costs by ten times. I would bet that no one suggests that it would be worth it, so why is it so unreasonable to investigate the opposite?
Think before you type. You may be modded funny, but to me, that's only because there isn't a "douchebag" mod. -Taylor
Yeah, what the hell is this? Why do people post articles without at least a *little* bit of description of what the hell they are talking about!? -Taylor
Android will likely run on the Pandora. The Pandora is the spiritual successor to the GP2X. (as opposed to actual successor)
A bunch of community/forum elites got tired of fighting with lame design choices like the difficult to use joystick, or poorly thought out DPAD, or removal of networking/debugging support; they're making their own dream handheld, which is significantly more powerful, and is designed right.
According to them, it has the best input scheme they've ever tried.;) That could just be creators tooting their own horn, but after talking with them and reading their posts for the past year, I really doubt it.
The GP2X F100 was the best version of the GP2X, with every version after that getting worse. Updating firmware was absolutely horrible, as no less than five versions of the GP2X were released, all of them bricked by different versions of the firmware.
Despite the lame joystick, the F100 v1 was the best because of projects like USB networking, USB debugging, and even a Java VM. Then GPH replaced the USB chip with a cheaper one, cutting two of those features, and they continued to make bad choices after that.
Despite all this, the community persists.
The GP2X has very lackluster hardware, but emus are reported to run better on it than on a PSP or even iPhone. (despite both of those having significantly faster hardware) That's because of the relatively open nature of the platform.
Most of the GP2X community (gp32x) is throwing their weight behind the Pandora, because it's fully open, rather than just relatively open. We don't want to have our input ignored, then fight with lame design choices. We want the devs to listen, and we want a platform that has mature open source drivers available - a platform like the OMAP 3530.:)
Ah, awesome, thanks for the info! Sounds like a good project.:) -Taylor
I'm beginning to think that android should be on every portable, and for something like this that runs linux, one would imagine it's either doable at worst, or officially supported at best.
Right click on the project in Eclipse and click build APK.
Hmm... Well, that doesn't seem to be what I have with the newest copy of the SDK and plugin, but you did lead me to find it.
For anyone curious:
In the package explorer, right click on the project, go to "Android Tools" at the bottom of the menu, then "Export Signed Application Package" (or unsigned if you'd like).
for free (if I don't want to distribute them, or for just $25 one time developer's fee if I do)
You mean "distribute them through the Android Market". On Android, there's nothing stopping you from distributing it through the web (apart from a user-configurable option flag in a somewhat obvious place). Just point your phone to an.apk and let it do the rest.
But I payed the $25 anyway. One-time and cheap to use their distribution system and have an easy way for people to use my app? I'll go with that.
Yeah, I thought you could compile.apk's without paying the fee, but I don't see any instructions on how to do that! Even on the developer docs it just says "after compiling...." and it doesn't explain how. Am I missing something? -Taylor
Slashdot Mirror
Given that your willing to write off the population of an entire country on your limited anecdotal evidence, I have to wonder whether the people outsourcing the role knew they'd get incompetents, but at least the new incompetents would be cheaper.
Hey, how do you know his evidence is limited and anecdotal?
Maybe he knows everyone in India and just isn't very impressed with them!
-Taylor
One of the best apps I've seen that uses the combination of GPS, 3D Accelerometer and Incline-corrected Compass....
Here here! :)
That app is awesome, and free!
It is really truly impressive.
-Taylor
My brother used to work for them!
He would always tell me how great they were, but he was just believing what the marketing team told him.
I always knew they wouldn't survive.
-Taylor
1.)Release new version of iTunes that checks specifically for the Pre.
2.)Release new firmware for existing iPods to ensure they work with the new version of iTunes.
You just lost me at step 2.
The fact is that firmware upgrades for older iPods are unlikely to be installed by users for some time. It could take a year or more for that to propagate.... not to mention that whatever change you make to the older iPods can more easily be mimicked by Palm than it is to put together for Apple at this point! Apple would have to dust off development kits for retired iPods of all stripes, whereas Palm just has to tweak new code with the few things that change...
It would not be unlike apple to force the update on people. This is the same company that made their updater tell people Safari needed an "Update" even if it wasn't installed, and then made it the default browser.
Plus, I'm rather sure that their would be no dusting off needed, they probably know those iPods so well that they could easily add a check to them.
Of course, Palm catching up is much harder to stop, but it could certainly be inconvenient for Pre users.
-Taylor
... If Apple were a bit smarter, they would make iTunes available for 50 quid for non-iPod devices.
Haha, what? That is ridiculous. I'm no fanboy, but when it comes to business tactics, apple is incredibly smart (see their market share on media players, as well as the computer prices they get away with for reference). I'd like to see you take over a multi-billion dollar market with ideas like that!
Why on earth would they want $50 from someone when they will make far more if that person gives in and buys an ipod? They have the VAST majority of the market, and that keeps people buying their hardware. And not just a one time $50 license, but many iPod owners upgrade ipods every few years. That is a recurring income that adds up to WAY more than $50. I wish other devices worked with iTunes, but I sure as hell don't think they're dumb for not allowing that.
Apple's worst nightmare is that the general populace becomes aware of other good MP3 players, they will NEVER open up itunes, or if for some reason they do, it sure as hell won't be just to make a quick buck on a license.
-Taylor
I'm impressed with the two guys who did it *manned* in the 60s
from tfa :
In January 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh made the first and only manned voyage in a Swiss-built bathyscaphe known as the Trieste.
The vessel consisted of a 2m-diameter (6ft) steel sphere containing the crew suspended below a huge 15m-long (50ft) tank of petrol, designed to provide buoyancy.
During the nine-hour mission, the two men spent just 20 minutes on the ocean floor; enough time to measure the depth as 10,916m (35,813 ft).
Yeah, I remember seeing a special on that when I was younger (like 10 years ago), and I still remember it, because it's such an awesome story. I really suggest that if anyone is bored you look this story up, it's really awesome.
The sad thing is that once they hit the bottom, the sand down there was so fine that it threw up a cloud of it that never cleared during the time that they were there, so they didn't get to see much except for what they saw right before they landed!
-Taylor
Back in the early 90's (92, I believe), I was co-op'ing for IBM and was lucky enough to get to go to COMDEX provided I man a booth for a while. The product I was demo'ing was voice independant voice recognition (it was all the rage at the time). There was no training required, random guy from the street could walk up and interact with the computer by voice, regardless of dialect or accent. I got pretty good with it, but I noticed that some people did have to repeat themselves (but not more than twice) to get it to work -- again, early times in terms of speech recognition. But the reason I was good at it was that repeated practice actually trained ME to speak the way it wanted instead of it being able to adjust to how I spoke. Speech recognition has become more prevelant since then (BING 411 anyone? http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/ ), and I'm sure you've made adjustments to how you speak to computers just to get past the voice prompts. You speak slower with more distinct pauses between words.
Behavior modification is an effective way to improve computer input.
Hah, that reminds me of an old phone that I had. It has voice dialing and it would always speak back the name it thought i meant in it's own "voice". The funny thing is, it basically sounded like an asian with a thick accent, which is probably because that's who programmed the english into it (it was an LG, and I'm pretty sure they're made in Japan, right?). Anyway, I basically learned that if I faked a thick accent it would understand me better. When i wanted to call my friend Zack, it would only work half the time, until I learned to say "Sek" instead, which is how it said it back to me when it worked.
It also wasn't really programmed to handle acronyms, so I had to speak those out.
Once i learned how it worked, it was perfect, but it definetely trained me!
-Taylor
the iphone doesn't win on features, it wins on status symbolism ($800, really?), flashy advertising, and eye candy.
disclaimer: i don't even own a cellphone (or a tv, yes sometimes you need to be disconnected) but i notice that this is definitely true with people i see around me all the time, and i can give specific examples if need be. there's a lot of keeping up the joneses involved here.
Seriously, i hear a *lot* of people mention that the iphone is supposed to be some status symbol, but is that even really true? It certainly sounds good to say, but I have *never* met anyone with an iPhone that I thought had it because of some status thing - people certainly drink the kool-aid and think it's the best thing out there, but that still means they bought it because they thought it was genuinely good, even if they were uninformed.
Maybe it's because I live in silicon valley, one freeway exit from Apple headquarters itself, and everyone around here owns an iPhone just because it's decent (even if it's not great, it's certainly alright) and people tend to be well off enough to have a smartphone of some kind. And so maybe it's how common it is that makes it not a status symbol here, but I've never seen it treated as such.
Does it really seem like a status symbol somewhere?
-Taylor
Alright, maybe I was a bit hasty, I see that they did link to Engadget - I didn't see "Engadget" in the summary so I figured someone was just passing it off as their own writing. But should it have at least been mentioned that it was via Engadget, rather than leaving the reader to actually follow the link to see where the text came from? How does that work?
-Taylor
The summary is completely taken from Engadget. Are we just copying and pasting now? WTF?
I think the "shown after the break" should have been a tipoff, there's no "break" in a regular summary!
Lame.
From Engadget:
"We knew Pixel Qi was up to something when it pledged to give us a cheap laptop that could last 40 hours on a charge. Now we can finally see what, with the OLPC spin-off releasing some images of a prototype screen called 3qi that looks like it can combine the best of e-ink and traditional LCD displays -- prototypes that will be shown in the flesh at Computex next week. The screen can work as a traditional backlit LCD when indoors, can have that backlight disabled to be perfectly visible outdoors (shown after the break), and, as its piÃce de résistance, can be toggled into an energy-efficient "epaper" mode. How exactly the company is fitting these seemingly disparate slices of technology into a single 10.1-inch screen is something of a mystery, but we're guessing much will be answered next week ahead of a planned product launch by the end of the year. Color us intrigued. "
>
After all, they are placed essentially at random...
Do you have a source for that claim? ;)
-Taylor
According to the summary it seems like it will be emulating everything, that raises a real speed concern, not perhaps for newer desktops but for older hardware and netbooks. Wouldn't a better option be to have a second real kernel being launched within the real one and native libs, etc? I know it might be hard to do and would have security problems, but it seems a lot faster that way.
I'm not sure if it is emulated or not, but even if it's slow to run an app, a desktop likely has a much faster processor than the phone the app was designed to run on, so it would probably be fine normally.
-Taylor
Google, you listenin'?
Agreed!
Just what we need - more ways to mess up a browser. I thought we were supposed to be working towards standards not adding more extensions!
The idea *is* to use standards! People already make add-ons, they might as well be interoperable too.
Does this not make sense to you?
-Taylor
If you RTFA it's not a joke, but it's not meant for home use, it's for doctors to use in the doctor's office to put kids under with less anxiety.
-Taylor
If I were running a fast food restaurant one of the first things it would make sense to do is pick groups of customer to punch in the face instead of giving them their order. It's all for a good cause. We want to know just how much abuse they'll take before they go down the road to the competition. That will help us figure out how good our food is. Now did you want a fries with that burger? *PUNCH* How about a *PUNCH* drink?
See how absurd it sounds?
That's just fucking ridiculous. Do you really feel similarly violated when a page loads 500mS slower versus someone punching you in the face?
If so, then wake the fuck up. It's a pretty interesting problem to determine how fast is "fast enough" for a page to load and I don't blame them.
Imagine google.com could load ten times faster than it currently does, but would increase their operating costs by ten times. I would bet that no one suggests that it would be worth it, so why is it so unreasonable to investigate the opposite?
Think before you type. You may be modded funny, but to me, that's only because there isn't a "douchebag" mod.
-Taylor
Yeah, what the hell is this? Why do people post articles without at least a *little* bit of description of what the hell they are talking about!?
-Taylor
Jailbreakers have been able to do this for a while, and I haven't seen much come from it.
Seems pointless. It would hurt battery life, would have a poor uptime, and would be slow to interact with.
So why is this even on here?
-Taylor
Android will likely run on the Pandora. The Pandora is the spiritual successor to the GP2X. (as opposed to actual successor)
A bunch of community/forum elites got tired of fighting with lame design choices like the difficult to use joystick, or poorly thought out DPAD, or removal of networking/debugging support; they're making their own dream handheld, which is significantly more powerful, and is designed right.
According to them, it has the best input scheme they've ever tried. ;) That could just be creators tooting their own horn, but after talking with them and reading their posts for the past year, I really doubt it.
The GP2X F100 was the best version of the GP2X, with every version after that getting worse. Updating firmware was absolutely horrible, as no less than five versions of the GP2X were released, all of them bricked by different versions of the firmware.
Despite the lame joystick, the F100 v1 was the best because of projects like USB networking, USB debugging, and even a Java VM. Then GPH replaced the USB chip with a cheaper one, cutting two of those features, and they continued to make bad choices after that.
Despite all this, the community persists.
The GP2X has very lackluster hardware, but emus are reported to run better on it than on a PSP or even iPhone. (despite both of those having significantly faster hardware) That's because of the relatively open nature of the platform.
Most of the GP2X community (gp32x) is throwing their weight behind the Pandora, because it's fully open, rather than just relatively open. We don't want to have our input ignored, then fight with lame design choices. We want the devs to listen, and we want a platform that has mature open source drivers available - a platform like the OMAP 3530. :)
Ah, awesome, thanks for the info! Sounds like a good project. :)
-Taylor
Ok, so where do you calculate BAC?
Where is the polling of the sensors?
Where is the rest of the code for the device?
Wait, you mean my 3 line program isn't all that is needed? That won't compile and run on it's own?
*gasp*
It was a joke, relax. I know embedded stuff, I know there is more work than that.
I still know that is should not be that hard to take a sensor reading and display it to the user.
-Taylor
...from the article:
So, make sure to strip out those TODOs before checking in the code. Bah!
As opposed to, you know, "temporary, forever." ;)
-Taylor
How about:
int main (void)
{
if(BAC>0.0008)
{
sprintf("Jail");
}else
{
sprintf("Home");
}
}
How hard can that be!?
Does anyone know if this can/will run android?
I'm beginning to think that android should be on every portable, and for something like this that runs linux, one would imagine it's either doable at worst, or officially supported at best.
Any thoughts?
-Taylor
Right click on the project in Eclipse and click build APK.
Hmm... Well, that doesn't seem to be what I have with the newest copy of the SDK and plugin, but you did lead me to find it.
For anyone curious:
In the package explorer, right click on the project, go to "Android Tools" at the bottom of the menu, then "Export Signed Application Package" (or unsigned if you'd like).
But thanks for getting me close!
-Taylor
for free (if I don't want to distribute them, or for just $25 one time developer's fee if I do)
You mean "distribute them through the Android Market". On Android, there's nothing stopping you from distributing it through the web (apart from a user-configurable option flag in a somewhat obvious place). Just point your phone to an .apk and let it do the rest.
But I payed the $25 anyway. One-time and cheap to use their distribution system and have an easy way for people to use my app? I'll go with that.
Yeah, I thought you could compile .apk's without paying the fee, but I don't see any instructions on how to do that! Even on the developer docs it just says "after compiling...." and it doesn't explain how. Am I missing something?
-Taylor