I like convergence. The fact that Android supports a mouse is a huge advantage for me!
With VNC or Remote Desktop my Android device is just as useful as a laptop. I have a pretty good app for that on my iPad. They probably do the best job possible to make an on-screen mouse. It still SUCKS!
USB host and the ability to install drivers for things the manufacturer did not intend... I sometimes use my phone with an RTL-SDR stick as a software defined radio.
I also use it now and then as a quick and dirty Arduino programmer when I don't feel like pulling out a 'real' computer.
There is even an IDE for developing Android applications right on an Android device. I don't think I would use it solely on the touch screen but using a decent sized tablet with bluetooth keyboard/mouse or my phone with a Lapdock it is pretty nice.
I realize that these are all edge-case uses that don't interest most people. But... that flexibility satisfies MY use case. It does not harm anyone else's experience. And it means that other people's weird use cases would probably be easy to support on Android.
Apple could have done this easier than Google did. Google wrote a new UI. They must have had to actually write in mouse support. Apple basically took OSX and dumbed it down. At some point they purposefully made an effort to REMOVE mouse support. WTF?
They also made a special effort to prevent the user from loading in any other USB drivers. So.. only storage devices and maybe a few other chosen peripherals can functon. Even to use those you have to buy an adapter because of those horrible proprietary connectors they make an extra effort to re-design themselves every couple of models rather than just use industry standards.
Finally.. in order to get that nice, on-device IDE.. they would only have to NOT ban compilers from their store! How much effort would that take them? Oh wait... why does it matter? That's right.. because they will not allow you to install anything not on their store! They make tons of effort with every iOS release to ensure that!
I would say the biggest advantage of Android is not cost. It's that it isn't owned by a bunch of control-freak assholes!
I don't understand the huge rush to switch to BLE. So the software stack still has rough edges? No shit! It's new! Meanwhile regular Bluetooth chips and modules are available for pennies by the pound! If you are just a geek looking for something to play with yourself then by all means.. shiny! If you are developing a product though.. well.. would you install a 1.0 something on a production server?
Just stick with regular Bluetooth for now. These issues will be worked out. Can you really tell me that the average customer is DEMANDING BLE in their products? Do they even know what it is? I'm really doubting it!
Yes, I get it that Apple has already polished their BLE implementation. Of course they did... they didn't even have Bluetooth serial support! They had a major feature gap and a need to compete. So.. they threw all their effort into it just to try to show they are different.
I think most of those a-holes ARE imagining 'every' phone maker having their own OS. It's their dream! Of course.. key to that dream is Apple being the ONLY phone maker. The whole concept of there being a world outside of Apple's walled garden is scary. It's far better for them if they can spread FUD until it is destroyed.
"Soon it will be your auto insurance provider demanding you install this"
Doubtful. New cars will already come with it. Old ones usually get state minimun insurance where the service wouldn't really benefit the inusrance company anyway.
There is one thing an employer has to look at when a new graduate tries to enter the workforce. School performance.
In todays world this is often at the college level, not the high school level however colleges have one thing to look at when accepting new students. High school performance.
I'm sorry but not all high schools are created equally. I'm sorry if this is not fair however it is an undeniable reality. Without standardized tests all a college has to go on is grades. How can the grades of a student at one school which is focussed on getting kids ready for college be compared to the grades of a student from another school where perhaps they were never taught anything beyone Algebra? Clearly it takes more work to get an A at one then at the other!
Further.. how can there be any hope to improve the bad schools or maintain the good ones if there is not measurement of the school's performance? I realize that situations are different. I realize that you can't expect teachers in some poorly funded inner city district where parents are not helping and encouraging their childeren to magically get their students up to the level of the ones on the richer side of the tracks. But.. how can they be expected to do the best that they can with what they have by burying their heads in the sand and not even measuring performance?
TL/DR - I might end up getting into model railroading and it's because of my wife, not because of myself.
I haven't had a model railroad since I was about 10. Nothing against it but it isn't something that is on my mind as a way I really need to spend my time today.
My wife inheritted a large and nice model railroad set from her grandfather. It's boxed up in our storage unit now. She has a lot of good memories playing with it with him as a kid. From time to time she talks about getting it out and setting it up for our daughter. (probably for her too). So far the main thing stopping us has been space.
So... I might actually end up model railroading because of a woman. Not sitting alone with in a basement because of a model railroad. Go figure...
Nah, surely the people doing the actual chosing have more than just 2 candidates to chose from. No doubt the real action is before even the primaries. All that idiot A, idiot B stuff is just the show to keep the masses cooperating.
Well.. no, I didn't actually just say don't do it. I also presented good reasons why not to as well as much better alternatives. All A/C presented was 'cock sucking'. Yup, that comparison pretty well explains how we have ended up with an internet full of Flash and now HTML5 streaming!
Because most people are stupid and humanity is a hopeless case. I wonder what the neadertals and denisovans were really like. Maybe the wrong homo won.
It's pretty fucking simple. Streaming is one problem requiring one solution. Web browsing is a different problem requiring a different solution.
For live stations just set up an icecast server. Put a link to it on your webpage. DONE! And... it works on all sorts of platforms right out of the box. This solutions has been available since the 1990s FCOL!
Are you worried people listening to your stream won't be forced to visit your popup riddled webpage anymore? So what?!?!? If you are putting out a live stream then you are basically a radio or television station. Your listeners/viewers will get your adds directly from your mouth! You don't need some shitty eye-candy that swamps your customer's PC every time they browse to your site.
Also.. why aren't you using something that they can easily access on a mobile device?
Maybe it detects that Flash is installed and tries to use it but then can't. i've noticed that that is how Youtube seems to work. If there is Flash I get one interface (complete with Full Screen support). If there is no Flash I get a different one (still no Full Screen damnit!)
I worked for a radio station back in the late 90s. I built the streamer and server that put us on the internet. At first it was Real Audio, then Icecast (streaming MP3). Icecast of course opened us up to a whole bunch of listeners who would have never downloaded and installed RealPlayer. But.. we did have quite a following on the RealAudio stream so we actually kept both going for many years.
Once we had Icecast it was easy for the web users. They just clicked the link on the webpage and for the non-techies Windows Media Player or whatever media player was standard, pre-installed on Macs at the time would just pick it up and start playing. Even better, our Icecast server could anounce itself to Shoutcast giving us a listing in their directory which brought in listeners that might never have even heard of us!
I will never undterstand why these people thought they just HAD to have what Flash provides. All it is ever provided was a way to wrap their streaming audio in a shitty, unstable, gaudy looking interface and ensure that nobody could ever listen to it on any kind of portable device or for many years even on a non Windows/Mac PC.
Now HTML 5 is going to let them keep doing the same although at least it shouldn't be so unstable.
Is it because they want to make sure that users have to go through their web site and see their ads in order to listen? It's a broadcast FCOL! They are going to HEAR your ads! Don't make it artificially difficult for them to do so just to get some web hits!
Whatever makes you think the machines no longer exist? There is tons of old equipment available at hamfests, ebay and various surplus outlets. This stuff is what allows young hobyists that don't have their employer's bank acount backing them get into electronics in the first place! If these were scanned and placed online this would be a tremendous value to a lot of people.
Where are you from? I thought that California thinks of itself as something like 90% of the country, not 1/2. The rest of us surely know it is far less than even 1/2.
It's hard to be cheaper than something that is already in your junkbox. Don't have a junkbox? Show up at a hamfest and some time around noon somebody will give you a ready filled junk-box for free. Most likely it is the junkbox of a recent silent key (ham who died).
Don't worry. Some day those old parts will be rare and expensive so they will only get used for fixing old stuff and maybe making audio amplifiers for people who are nostalgic for the sounds of their childhood. Hobbyists will then be building things with the parts you like to use today. Of course.. those too will be obsolete and the kids will be writing articles about how they shouldn't bother and should be using some new stuff.
I still like the underwater habitat idea. You are right, the conditions are more mars-like at the poles. But an undwerwater habitat HAS to be completely self-contained. If there is a leak they are going to know about it very quickly! With an Antarctic (or Arctic) habitat there would always be a little lingering doubt.. did they really manage to maintain the proper O2 to CO2 balance.. or was there mixing going on with the outside air...
Ideally they would do both but it would be nice if they made it into space before everyone here is dead of old age.
Why does the NRAO care? There are already protected by the National Radio Quiet Zone. Is this going to interfere with their operations form outside the zone? And worse than all the other electronics running outside the zone?
Surely these aren't going to be allowed within it, are they? If they are to be allowed there then maybe that's the problem the NRAO should be interested in, not the more general fact that this technology is made available to the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
"The only advantage is low cost"
I like convergence. The fact that Android supports a mouse is a huge advantage for me!
With VNC or Remote Desktop my Android device is just as useful as a laptop. I have a pretty good app for that on my iPad. They probably do the best job possible to make an on-screen mouse. It still SUCKS!
USB host and the ability to install drivers for things the manufacturer did not intend... I sometimes use my phone with an RTL-SDR stick as a software defined radio.
I also use it now and then as a quick and dirty Arduino programmer when I don't feel like pulling out a 'real' computer.
There is even an IDE for developing Android applications right on an Android device. I don't think I would use it solely on the touch screen but using a decent sized tablet with bluetooth keyboard/mouse or my phone with a Lapdock it is pretty nice.
I realize that these are all edge-case uses that don't interest most people. But... that flexibility satisfies MY use case. It does not harm anyone else's experience. And it means that other people's weird use cases would probably be easy to support on Android.
Apple could have done this easier than Google did. Google wrote a new UI. They must have had to actually write in mouse support. Apple basically took OSX and dumbed it down. At some point they purposefully made an effort to REMOVE mouse support. WTF?
They also made a special effort to prevent the user from loading in any other USB drivers. So.. only storage devices and maybe a few other chosen peripherals can functon. Even to use those you have to buy an adapter because of those horrible proprietary connectors they make an extra effort to re-design themselves every couple of models rather than just use industry standards.
Finally.. in order to get that nice, on-device IDE.. they would only have to NOT ban compilers from their store! How much effort would that take them? Oh wait... why does it matter? That's right.. because they will not allow you to install anything not on their store! They make tons of effort with every iOS release to ensure that!
I would say the biggest advantage of Android is not cost. It's that it isn't owned by a bunch of control-freak assholes!
I don't understand the huge rush to switch to BLE. So the software stack still has rough edges? No shit! It's new! Meanwhile regular Bluetooth chips and modules are available for pennies by the pound! If you are just a geek looking for something to play with yourself then by all means.. shiny! If you are developing a product though.. well.. would you install a 1.0 something on a production server?
Just stick with regular Bluetooth for now. These issues will be worked out. Can you really tell me that the average customer is DEMANDING BLE in their products? Do they even know what it is? I'm really doubting it!
Yes, I get it that Apple has already polished their BLE implementation. Of course they did... they didn't even have Bluetooth serial support! They had a major feature gap and a need to compete. So.. they threw all their effort into it just to try to show they are different.
I think most of those a-holes ARE imagining 'every' phone maker having their own OS. It's their dream! Of course.. key to that dream is Apple being the ONLY phone maker. The whole concept of there being a world outside of Apple's walled garden is scary. It's far better for them if they can spread FUD until it is destroyed.
"Soon it will be your auto insurance provider demanding you install this"
Doubtful. New cars will already come with it. Old ones usually get state minimun insurance where the service wouldn't really benefit the inusrance company anyway.
Have you ever tried to get anything other than your distro's default configuration out of PulseAudio?
Virtual dentist trip would be a breeze!
Who said economics had to be the reason for "governments to chose winners"?
Investors would happily enrich themselves all the way into a dead planet if that's where the money lies.
There is one thing an employer has to look at when a new graduate tries to enter the workforce. School performance.
In todays world this is often at the college level, not the high school level however colleges have one thing to look at when accepting new students. High school performance.
I'm sorry but not all high schools are created equally. I'm sorry if this is not fair however it is an undeniable reality. Without standardized tests all a college has to go on is grades. How can the grades of a student at one school which is focussed on getting kids ready for college be compared to the grades of a student from another school where perhaps they were never taught anything beyone Algebra? Clearly it takes more work to get an A at one then at the other!
Further.. how can there be any hope to improve the bad schools or maintain the good ones if there is not measurement of the school's performance? I realize that situations are different. I realize that you can't expect teachers in some poorly funded inner city district where parents are not helping and encouraging their childeren to magically get their students up to the level of the ones on the richer side of the tracks. But.. how can they be expected to do the best that they can with what they have by burying their heads in the sand and not even measuring performance?
This would be great! But when are we going to get true full-screen from Youtube + HTML5?
TL/DR - I might end up getting into model railroading and it's because of my wife, not because of myself.
I haven't had a model railroad since I was about 10. Nothing against it but it isn't something that is on my mind as a way I really need to spend my time today.
My wife inheritted a large and nice model railroad set from her grandfather. It's boxed up in our storage unit now. She has a lot of good memories playing with it with him as a kid. From time to time she talks about getting it out and setting it up for our daughter. (probably for her too). So far the main thing stopping us has been space.
So... I might actually end up model railroading because of a woman. Not sitting alone with in a basement because of a model railroad. Go figure...
Nah, surely the people doing the actual chosing have more than just 2 candidates to chose from. No doubt the real action is before even the primaries. All that idiot A, idiot B stuff is just the show to keep the masses cooperating.
Didn't I see you in Idiocracy? Wow, we have a movie star in our presence!
Hey, if you value keeping the average human lifespan down feel free to do your part with your own!
Well.. no, I didn't actually just say don't do it. I also presented good reasons why not to as well as much better alternatives. All A/C presented was 'cock sucking'. Yup, that comparison pretty well explains how we have ended up with an internet full of Flash and now HTML5 streaming!
You know.. some people chose NOT to move their furniture around when they have blind pets.
Just sayin...
That was supposed to read HTTP, not HTML
Because most people are stupid and humanity is a hopeless case. I wonder what the neadertals and denisovans were really like. Maybe the wrong homo won.
The brain is hugely complicated with many inputs and many outputs and many many loops within.
A neural net is a very simplified version of a brain with one set of inputs and one set of outputs, and a very limited number of loops within.
So... STOP TRYING TO STREAM USING HTML!
It's pretty fucking simple. Streaming is one problem requiring one solution. Web browsing is a different problem requiring a different solution.
For live stations just set up an icecast server. Put a link to it on your webpage. DONE! And... it works on all sorts of platforms right out of the box. This solutions has been available since the 1990s FCOL!
Are you worried people listening to your stream won't be forced to visit your popup riddled webpage anymore? So what?!?!? If you are putting out a live stream then you are basically a radio or television station. Your listeners/viewers will get your adds directly from your mouth! You don't need some shitty eye-candy that swamps your customer's PC every time they browse to your site.
Also.. why aren't you using something that they can easily access on a mobile device?
Flash is a sucky solution for sucky marketroids!
Maybe it detects that Flash is installed and tries to use it but then can't. i've noticed that that is how Youtube seems to work. If there is Flash I get one interface (complete with Full Screen support). If there is no Flash I get a different one (still no Full Screen damnit!)
I worked for a radio station back in the late 90s. I built the streamer and server that put us on the internet. At first it was Real Audio, then Icecast (streaming MP3). Icecast of course opened us up to a whole bunch of listeners who would have never downloaded and installed RealPlayer. But.. we did have quite a following on the RealAudio stream so we actually kept both going for many years.
Once we had Icecast it was easy for the web users. They just clicked the link on the webpage and for the non-techies Windows Media Player or whatever media player was standard, pre-installed on Macs at the time would just pick it up and start playing. Even better, our Icecast server could anounce itself to Shoutcast giving us a listing in their directory which brought in listeners that might never have even heard of us!
I will never undterstand why these people thought they just HAD to have what Flash provides. All it is ever provided was a way to wrap their streaming audio in a shitty, unstable, gaudy looking interface and ensure that nobody could ever listen to it on any kind of portable device or for many years even on a non Windows/Mac PC.
Now HTML 5 is going to let them keep doing the same although at least it shouldn't be so unstable.
Is it because they want to make sure that users have to go through their web site and see their ads in order to listen? It's a broadcast FCOL! They are going to HEAR your ads! Don't make it artificially difficult for them to do so just to get some web hits!
Whatever makes you think the machines no longer exist? There is tons of old equipment available at hamfests, ebay and various surplus outlets. This stuff is what allows young hobyists that don't have their employer's bank acount backing them get into electronics in the first place! If these were scanned and placed online this would be a tremendous value to a lot of people.
Where are you from? I thought that California thinks of itself as something like 90% of the country, not 1/2. The rest of us surely know it is far less than even 1/2.
Cheaper?
It's hard to be cheaper than something that is already in your junkbox. Don't have a junkbox? Show up at a hamfest and some time around noon somebody will give you a ready filled junk-box for free. Most likely it is the junkbox of a recent silent key (ham who died).
Don't worry. Some day those old parts will be rare and expensive so they will only get used for fixing old stuff and maybe making audio amplifiers for people who are nostalgic for the sounds of their childhood. Hobbyists will then be building things with the parts you like to use today. Of course.. those too will be obsolete and the kids will be writing articles about how they shouldn't bother and should be using some new stuff.
I still like the underwater habitat idea. You are right, the conditions are more mars-like at the poles. But an undwerwater habitat HAS to be completely self-contained. If there is a leak they are going to know about it very quickly! With an Antarctic (or Arctic) habitat there would always be a little lingering doubt.. did they really manage to maintain the proper O2 to CO2 balance.. or was there mixing going on with the outside air...
Ideally they would do both but it would be nice if they made it into space before everyone here is dead of old age.
Why does the NRAO care? There are already protected by the National Radio Quiet Zone. Is this going to interfere with their operations form outside the zone? And worse than all the other electronics running outside the zone?
Surely these aren't going to be allowed within it, are they? If they are to be allowed there then maybe that's the problem the NRAO should be interested in, not the more general fact that this technology is made available to the rest of us.