On anything except Outlook or a very complicated document, I can't see the splash screen long enough to read the title, much less the cancel button. On OpenOffice, just opening Writer without even loading a document takes several seconds.
Features which I use and that Firefox lacked last I checked: Process separation by tab (so that a crashing tab does not bring down the others) and seperating tabs from chrome (so that if one tab hangs, you can kill it and/or continue using other tabs without killing the browser). I'm not exactly sure whether IE8 or Chrome introduced this first - I think IE8 had the first working public beta - but it's been available for a few years.
Use of Low Integrity Level process sandboxing to limit the potential damage if the browser becomes compromised. IE7+ and Chrome. Does Firefox have this yet? (Yes, this is platform-specific, but it *is* a good feature.)
Ability to "tear out" a tab into its own window, and to re-combine tabs into existing windows (Opera, Chrome, IE9).
I'll grant that Firefox's extension selection is the best out there, and includes a lot of very cool features including some that are hard to find - if not completly unavailable at the same quality level - on other platforms. However, there's some stuff that's just integral to the browser itself, and the last few Firefox upgrades have not impressed me in that category (rapidly change your browser's skin!!)
PCs are a lot less common in most of China than they are in first-world nations. An iPad is an awfully expensive toy if you need a PC to go with it. Internet cafes are OK for a bit of email, IM, or gaming, but they aren't really suitable for downloading 10 GB of media for your iPad.
Actually, if you have any kind of dedicated GPU (it doesn't have a to be a good, a cheap midrange card for $50 or less is fine) turning off Aero will actually harm performance, because it increases the CPU load. It will probably even increase power consumption; you turn off the GPU but must increase CPU clock rate (Windows, like most modern OSes, dynamically scales down the CPU at less-than-peak load).
I can understand reverting to the classic theme on an aesthetic basis, especially on XP (I happen to like Aero though) but turning *on* desktop composition on anything better than Intel Integrated GMA 950 is probably going to make it run "snappier."
Exchange has had Outlook Web Access for years - it literally invented the AJAX webmail interface, in fact. My university started offering webmail through outlook.com (which really does look and work a lot like desktop Outlook) a couple years ago, and it's far better than any other webmail interface that I've tried.
Clear(wire), using WiMAX today, has latencies of about 60ms. It's not ideal, but it works for gaming.
Unfortunately, they've also started to have *really* bad congestion problems - on a nominally unlimited download plan (practically speaking, the top DL rate is ~12 Mbps), I've been getting 0.2 to 3.2 Mbps for the last couple weeks. The upload, which is capped at 1Mbps, is almost unaffected and often substantially faster than the DL.
Even though the latency is staying pretty good, modern VoIP-capable games start to choke at speeds below 0.25 Mbps/game, which means if my apartment mate and I want to play games at the same time and the connection speed drops too low, we start getting truly atrocious lag spikes.
I've ordered Qwest (fiber backbone, DSL last-mile; I don't live in an able with fiber-to-the-door). It may not be the fastest or the cheapest, but it's less subject to congestion, has lower latency, and the speeds are more consistently high. I'll consider Clear again when they get their congestion sorted out, but according to their tech support people that won't be until mid-January. Thanks, but I'm not going to put up with two months of shitty Internet when I can just go with a cheaper competitor.
Seriosuly. There are a couple of full-volume encryption options available right now, Windows (Vista and up) even has a built-in one. Lacking that, encrypt individual files (all versions of Windows since 2000) or use an encrypted folder or volume image created using any number of third-party options.
At some businesses, especially ones handling sensitive data, having unsecured sensitive data (present in clear text on a removable device, including a laptop) is grounds for termination. I don't think a university needs to go quite that far, but there's no excuse for not having *some* serious data protection requirement.
Actually, this was probably the most interesting part of the whole summary.
I will tell you that if I am asked for a password, I almost always reject the story immediately, or go find a better URL. Heck, *yesterday* I rejected a NY Times story for this exact reason.
Holy crap, a/. editor doing editorial things! Hopefully this fine example will encourage the others.
If you recard a soccer math and replay it, then no, the pixels on your screen have no free will.
The difference between the recorded video and the actual players is what distinguishes you from God (well, one important aspect, you con probably derive the others from it): you can only observe what happens after it occurs (a recording) whereas God is under no such restriction. To Him, we are all just as pixels on the screen, and while he can write the "code" that makes us believe to have free will, he already knows how everything plays out...
Either that, or He doesn't exist at all, and I just wrote this because it amused me to do so, mostly because of capitalized pronouns.
It's very good for "everyday web" but is not perfect. It doesn't support HTML5 yet - apparently IE9's rendering engine will be ported Soon(tm) but has not yet been - but damn near everything pages rendered perfectly including a few pages that mobile Webkit browsers fail at (most seemed to involve frames, which are old but not-yet-dead tech). It's fast and the zooming is super-smooth. I've only played with it for a few minutes, but all the reviews I read state that the browser experience is excellent even if the rendering engine is outdated. No Flash yet, though.
Strictly speaking, the "verifiably type-safe subset" qualifier applies to C# as well, since if use of the "unsafe" keyword is allowed then porting C++ code becomes very easy. Sadly, it's not (currently) allowed.
Mind you, this is technically before the devices are even released. It is entirely possible that MS will open up the native SDK to everybody once they're confident of the security model and so forth. In fact, that's how it went for most of the current-generation smartphones...
Uh... the WP7 SDK has been out for months now. It's been downloaded half a million times, according to MS. I have no idea how many apps will be available at launch or thereafter, but they sure as hell are allowing - in fact, encouraging - "a rich ecosystem... where people can make their own apps and have them integrate..." Come on, the prototype boxes even had "Developers Devlopers Developers" on the side - this is a big push for WP7.
WTF? The complete drivel people will mod up here...
MS just crammed a windows-like interface onto a phone. They didn't rethink the GUI in tiny screen terms like Apple and Google did
That was Windows Mobile. Windows Phone 7 isn't *ANYTHING* like WinMo. The fact that you even included the line I quoted in your post shows that you have no fucking clue what you're talking about with regard to WP7. It looks nothing like desktop Windows. It looks nothing like iOS or Android. It looks nothing like Maemo. It looks nothing like WebOS. It most certainly looks nothing like WIndows Mobile.
From what I've seen, MS put a lot *more* thought into the tiny screen UI issues than Apple did, actually. They might be late to the party, but they've used that time to not just learn from the advantages of the different UIs but to come out with their own that acknowledges their past mistakes and throws them all out. The WP7 interface is made by somebody who looked at iPhones and said "that is good, but we can do better and made something that is *new* (and dare I say it, innovative).
I thought that was weird too, but a little thinking (as opposed to knee-jerk bashing) led to me realizing the obvious use case: It's for movies. Showing off your home videos to friends. Showing mom her new grandkids when you go to visit. Give the kids in the car something to watch. Sharing a YouTube video around the lunch table.
I be it's also great at doing turn-by-turn directions for driving and similar things. The Droid can do it but the sound quality of bloody terrible. See also listening to Pandora in the car (where it's unsafe to use earbuds) or any other situation where more than one person wants to listen to music (any audio, really).
It's not for me, and it's probably not for you. It may not have a large enough niche to justify its existence. It certainly isn't a worthless feature though, and some people are going to love it.
Re:Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple
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Motorola Sues Apple
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· Score: 1
Kin sure, but I hardly see WP7 as a "colossal failure" in any way. The software is only just out, the hardware isn't available yet, and unless you work for MS the odds that you've held even a prototype in your hand are damn low.
Its launch day announcement has a huge number of phones signed up already - 5 launch devices in the US alone, and twice that around the world. When the CDMA version comes out there will be a bunch of new devices as Sprint and Verizon get in the game. The state of the app store is currently an unknown, but MS claims that the SDK has been downloaded "over half a million times" which is a pretty damn impressive number of developers for a platform that isn't even quite available yet...
The market will tell, eventually, but don't count MS out just yet.
That was one of my first thoughts reading the summary - I hope it's not *too* many years of bragging rights. I want to live in a world where "I saw the curvature of the Earth and experienced a few minutes of free fall" is worth about as much bragging rights as an American of today saying "I went to Canada once!" Sure, a lot of people still will never leave a 100-mile radius of their home town, but anybody who wants to will be able to go much further and see much more.
Office 2007 early betas ("Office 12 Beta") included PDF export out of the box. Office 2007 RC removed it, but Microsoft added an optional download that provided the PDF export capability. Office 2010 includes built-in PDF export.
Third parties are already allowed to use Microsoft Update, and some of them (mostly drivers) do. However, the updates much pass extremely rigorous testing. Since this is basically required for WHQL anyhow, getting drivers on board is pretty easy. However, even if that level of testing is done anyhow (don't count on it), proving that to Microsoft's satisfaction is... trickier.
Mind you, there's been talk of a Windows app store for a while now. Not quite like Linux package management, but possibly a major improvement anyhow if it ever materializes.
My understanding is that rooting an Android device is generally vastly easier than doing the same to an iPhone. Granted, I don't have either, but my friends with Droids have all manner of unsanctioned functionality enabled.
There were quite a few of them at PAX, and they were a lot of fun. There are some (live try-it-out demo stations) at big electronics stores around here. It's real tech and people want it. The only thing harder to do that see over the ring of people watching is wait in line long enough for a chance to play.
I take it you didn't get to PAX this year... lots of Kinect demos (both by MS and by third-party developers). They all worked pretty well. Some had huge lines of people waiting to play. They all had people watching. Everybody walking away afterward looked excited.
Don't get me wrong, Kinect is far from perfect and the cost is substantial, but the system most assuredly works and people are hyped for the games.
Sure. It protects people from malware. That's it, and it's a perfectly justifiable reason. This is intended for the people who don't even know how to protect themselves, much less how to intentionally root the phone themselves.
The only question here is whether that feature was exposed beforehand to purchasers, and whether it's possible to disable it. If the answers are no and no, then and only then can you even hope to have a case of "device does not do what I paid for" which is the core of "acceptable behavior from a consumer electronics device."
If they had explicitly stated that it could be rooted and then shipped this reafure, unremovably, instead, you could sue them and win. If you assumed it would be rootable but this was never stated, you're in murky water. If this feature was published anywhere, you're SOL - should have done your research. It's marketed as a consumer electronics device that runs apps and makes calls, not as a handheld computer you can tinker with (no matter what Slashdot leads you to think).
TL;DR: If it's not documented to be a rootable device, you have no reasonable expectation of being able to root it.
Works fine on T-Mobile. I realize not everybody lives in their coverage area, but I had a T-Mo phone for years spent very little time outside their primary coverage (I live in the Seattle area). Full speed, and you don't even need a contract - they offer month-to-month SIM cards that work with any T-Mo or unlocked phone for very good rates.
Slashdot Mirror
On anything except Outlook or a very complicated document, I can't see the splash screen long enough to read the title, much less the cancel button. On OpenOffice, just opening Writer without even loading a document takes several seconds.
Features which I use and that Firefox lacked last I checked:
Process separation by tab (so that a crashing tab does not bring down the others) and seperating tabs from chrome (so that if one tab hangs, you can kill it and/or continue using other tabs without killing the browser). I'm not exactly sure whether IE8 or Chrome introduced this first - I think IE8 had the first working public beta - but it's been available for a few years.
Use of Low Integrity Level process sandboxing to limit the potential damage if the browser becomes compromised. IE7+ and Chrome. Does Firefox have this yet? (Yes, this is platform-specific, but it *is* a good feature.)
Ability to "tear out" a tab into its own window, and to re-combine tabs into existing windows (Opera, Chrome, IE9).
I'll grant that Firefox's extension selection is the best out there, and includes a lot of very cool features including some that are hard to find - if not completly unavailable at the same quality level - on other platforms. However, there's some stuff that's just integral to the browser itself, and the last few Firefox upgrades have not impressed me in that category (rapidly change your browser's skin!!)
PCs are a lot less common in most of China than they are in first-world nations. An iPad is an awfully expensive toy if you need a PC to go with it. Internet cafes are OK for a bit of email, IM, or gaming, but they aren't really suitable for downloading 10 GB of media for your iPad.
Actually, if you have any kind of dedicated GPU (it doesn't have a to be a good, a cheap midrange card for $50 or less is fine) turning off Aero will actually harm performance, because it increases the CPU load. It will probably even increase power consumption; you turn off the GPU but must increase CPU clock rate (Windows, like most modern OSes, dynamically scales down the CPU at less-than-peak load).
I can understand reverting to the classic theme on an aesthetic basis, especially on XP (I happen to like Aero though) but turning *on* desktop composition on anything better than Intel Integrated GMA 950 is probably going to make it run "snappier."
Exchange has had Outlook Web Access for years - it literally invented the AJAX webmail interface, in fact. My university started offering webmail through outlook.com (which really does look and work a lot like desktop Outlook) a couple years ago, and it's far better than any other webmail interface that I've tried.
The latest version of Outlook Web Access is pretty browser-agnostic. Previous versions were not, that's true.
Office Web Apps work fine on Firefox, though they might require having Silverlight installed. I'm not going to touch Safari, thanks.
Clear(wire), using WiMAX today, has latencies of about 60ms. It's not ideal, but it works for gaming.
Unfortunately, they've also started to have *really* bad congestion problems - on a nominally unlimited download plan (practically speaking, the top DL rate is ~12 Mbps), I've been getting 0.2 to 3.2 Mbps for the last couple weeks. The upload, which is capped at 1Mbps, is almost unaffected and often substantially faster than the DL.
Even though the latency is staying pretty good, modern VoIP-capable games start to choke at speeds below 0.25 Mbps/game, which means if my apartment mate and I want to play games at the same time and the connection speed drops too low, we start getting truly atrocious lag spikes.
I've ordered Qwest (fiber backbone, DSL last-mile; I don't live in an able with fiber-to-the-door). It may not be the fastest or the cheapest, but it's less subject to congestion, has lower latency, and the speeds are more consistently high. I'll consider Clear again when they get their congestion sorted out, but according to their tech support people that won't be until mid-January. Thanks, but I'm not going to put up with two months of shitty Internet when I can just go with a cheaper competitor.
Seriosuly. There are a couple of full-volume encryption options available right now, Windows (Vista and up) even has a built-in one. Lacking that, encrypt individual files (all versions of Windows since 2000) or use an encrypted folder or volume image created using any number of third-party options.
At some businesses, especially ones handling sensitive data, having unsecured sensitive data (present in clear text on a removable device, including a laptop) is grounds for termination. I don't think a university needs to go quite that far, but there's no excuse for not having *some* serious data protection requirement.
Actually, this was probably the most interesting part of the whole summary.
I will tell you that if I am asked for a password, I almost always reject the story immediately, or go find a better URL. Heck, *yesterday* I rejected a NY Times story for this exact reason.
Holy crap, a /. editor doing editorial things! Hopefully this fine example will encourage the others.
If you recard a soccer math and replay it, then no, the pixels on your screen have no free will.
The difference between the recorded video and the actual players is what distinguishes you from God (well, one important aspect, you con probably derive the others from it): you can only observe what happens after it occurs (a recording) whereas God is under no such restriction. To Him, we are all just as pixels on the screen, and while he can write the "code" that makes us believe to have free will, he already knows how everything plays out...
Either that, or He doesn't exist at all, and I just wrote this because it amused me to do so, mostly because of capitalized pronouns.
It's very good for "everyday web" but is not perfect. It doesn't support HTML5 yet - apparently IE9's rendering engine will be ported Soon(tm) but has not yet been - but damn near everything pages rendered perfectly including a few pages that mobile Webkit browsers fail at (most seemed to involve frames, which are old but not-yet-dead tech). It's fast and the zooming is super-smooth. I've only played with it for a few minutes, but all the reviews I read state that the browser experience is excellent even if the rendering engine is outdated. No Flash yet, though.
Strictly speaking, the "verifiably type-safe subset" qualifier applies to C# as well, since if use of the "unsafe" keyword is allowed then porting C++ code becomes very easy. Sadly, it's not (currently) allowed.
Mind you, this is technically before the devices are even released. It is entirely possible that MS will open up the native SDK to everybody once they're confident of the security model and so forth. In fact, that's how it went for most of the current-generation smartphones...
Uh... the WP7 SDK has been out for months now. It's been downloaded half a million times, according to MS. I have no idea how many apps will be available at launch or thereafter, but they sure as hell are allowing - in fact, encouraging - "a rich ecosystem... where people can make their own apps and have them integrate..." Come on, the prototype boxes even had "Developers Devlopers Developers" on the side - this is a big push for WP7.
WTF? The complete drivel people will mod up here...
That was Windows Mobile. Windows Phone 7 isn't *ANYTHING* like WinMo. The fact that you even included the line I quoted in your post shows that you have no fucking clue what you're talking about with regard to WP7. It looks nothing like desktop Windows. It looks nothing like iOS or Android. It looks nothing like Maemo. It looks nothing like WebOS. It most certainly looks nothing like WIndows Mobile.
From what I've seen, MS put a lot *more* thought into the tiny screen UI issues than Apple did, actually. They might be late to the party, but they've used that time to not just learn from the advantages of the different UIs but to come out with their own that acknowledges their past mistakes and throws them all out. The WP7 interface is made by somebody who looked at iPhones and said "that is good, but we can do better and made something that is *new* (and dare I say it, innovative).
I thought that was weird too, but a little thinking (as opposed to knee-jerk bashing) led to me realizing the obvious use case: It's for movies. Showing off your home videos to friends. Showing mom her new grandkids when you go to visit. Give the kids in the car something to watch. Sharing a YouTube video around the lunch table.
I be it's also great at doing turn-by-turn directions for driving and similar things. The Droid can do it but the sound quality of bloody terrible. See also listening to Pandora in the car (where it's unsafe to use earbuds) or any other situation where more than one person wants to listen to music (any audio, really).
It's not for me, and it's probably not for you. It may not have a large enough niche to justify its existence. It certainly isn't a worthless feature though, and some people are going to love it.
Kin sure, but I hardly see WP7 as a "colossal failure" in any way. The software is only just out, the hardware isn't available yet, and unless you work for MS the odds that you've held even a prototype in your hand are damn low.
Its launch day announcement has a huge number of phones signed up already - 5 launch devices in the US alone, and twice that around the world. When the CDMA version comes out there will be a bunch of new devices as Sprint and Verizon get in the game. The state of the app store is currently an unknown, but MS claims that the SDK has been downloaded "over half a million times" which is a pretty damn impressive number of developers for a platform that isn't even quite available yet...
The market will tell, eventually, but don't count MS out just yet.
That was one of my first thoughts reading the summary - I hope it's not *too* many years of bragging rights. I want to live in a world where "I saw the curvature of the Earth and experienced a few minutes of free fall" is worth about as much bragging rights as an American of today saying "I went to Canada once!" Sure, a lot of people still will never leave a 100-mile radius of their home town, but anybody who wants to will be able to go much further and see much more.
Office 2007 early betas ("Office 12 Beta") included PDF export out of the box. Office 2007 RC removed it, but Microsoft added an optional download that provided the PDF export capability. Office 2010 includes built-in PDF export.
Third parties are already allowed to use Microsoft Update, and some of them (mostly drivers) do. However, the updates much pass extremely rigorous testing. Since this is basically required for WHQL anyhow, getting drivers on board is pretty easy. However, even if that level of testing is done anyhow (don't count on it), proving that to Microsoft's satisfaction is... trickier.
Mind you, there's been talk of a Windows app store for a while now. Not quite like Linux package management, but possibly a major improvement anyhow if it ever materializes.
Remarkably similar to how they handled security, actually. MS has at least done a bit better there in the last few years.
My understanding is that rooting an Android device is generally vastly easier than doing the same to an iPhone. Granted, I don't have either, but my friends with Droids have all manner of unsanctioned functionality enabled.
There were quite a few of them at PAX, and they were a lot of fun. There are some (live try-it-out demo stations) at big electronics stores around here. It's real tech and people want it. The only thing harder to do that see over the ring of people watching is wait in line long enough for a chance to play.
I take it you didn't get to PAX this year... lots of Kinect demos (both by MS and by third-party developers). They all worked pretty well. Some had huge lines of people waiting to play. They all had people watching. Everybody walking away afterward looked excited.
Don't get me wrong, Kinect is far from perfect and the cost is substantial, but the system most assuredly works and people are hyped for the games.
Sure. It protects people from malware. That's it, and it's a perfectly justifiable reason. This is intended for the people who don't even know how to protect themselves, much less how to intentionally root the phone themselves.
The only question here is whether that feature was exposed beforehand to purchasers, and whether it's possible to disable it. If the answers are no and no, then and only then can you even hope to have a case of "device does not do what I paid for" which is the core of "acceptable behavior from a consumer electronics device."
If they had explicitly stated that it could be rooted and then shipped this reafure, unremovably, instead, you could sue them and win. If you assumed it would be rootable but this was never stated, you're in murky water. If this feature was published anywhere, you're SOL - should have done your research. It's marketed as a consumer electronics device that runs apps and makes calls, not as a handheld computer you can tinker with (no matter what Slashdot leads you to think).
TL;DR: If it's not documented to be a rootable device, you have no reasonable expectation of being able to root it.
Works fine on T-Mobile. I realize not everybody lives in their coverage area, but I had a T-Mo phone for years spent very little time outside their primary coverage (I live in the Seattle area). Full speed, and you don't even need a contract - they offer month-to-month SIM cards that work with any T-Mo or unlocked phone for very good rates.