I have been under the impression that Google prohibits business use of these connections. Including running servers. Can somebody confirm or deny this?
If they allow this, then it would be very tempting. A 1Gbps pipe costs a lot more, even at wholesale prices, from other vendors.
I have a Kindle Fire and a Google Nexus 7. My advice to anybody out there considering buying an Amazon Kindle Fire is: "Don't do it"
Do yourself a favor and buy the Nexus 7. Kindle Fire OS is utter crap. It has limited hardware, is slower, cannot compete on battery life or RAM or cameras... the list goes on. In a world with Google Nexus 7, nobody should be buying Kindle Fire.
I don't think a president alone has the power to do that. Also patents are seen by many as one of the ways America makes a lot of money. Siding with Samsung in an Apple vs. Samsung is just not good politics for an American president.
Oh please. I hate the clueless sales people as much as the next guy but you are really making me sympathize with the sales people. You go back to the store without the receipt and want them to help you? Are you a child? Do you know of any store that will do what you are asking?
Some will say that this is a good way to admit fault and do right by customers, even though they haven't done this before with previous faults. Others will say that Microkia is giving phones away to gain market share because they cannot get people to buy their hyped up and top of the line phone for $100.
Once the business friendly Republicans win more elections, all of this will be reversed. AT&T needs to start bribing / donating some big bucks in that direction to make it happen.
All the hosted projects should be archived. I was looking for an older uvcvideo driver source the other day and all the links Google pointed me to were dead BerliOS links. It was a very maddening experience.
I offer to host an archived version of BerliOS over a dedicated 35Mbps (symmetric) connection and have systems and TBs of hard drive space to spare. Please get in touch with me if you think this will help. Whatever you do, don't kill the whole thing. Not all projects will get exported before the closure. That would be a terrible waste.
Can you imagine all business users switching to tablets? Or enthusiasts completely ditching their powerful and configurable systems for tablets? I don't think that is happening. Market for PCs and computer parts of all kinds will be around for a long time. It may shrink some. And it probably will kill smaller component retailers. But the bigger ones like Newegg will get more entrenched.
I have a two Asus RT-N16 routers, one running DDWRT and other running Tomato USB. I have been extremely happy with them. These guys have monster specs as far as wireless routers go.
Ethernet Ports = WAN x 1 RJ-45 for 10/100/1000 Base T, LAN x 4 RJ-45 for 10/100/1000 Base T USB ports = USB2.0 x 2 Unit RAM = 128 MB (2x 64MB - Samsung K4N511163QZ-HC25 or 2x 64MB - Samsung K4T51163QG-HCE6) Unit Flash = 32 MB (MACRONIX MX29GL256EHTI2I-90Q) Unit CPU = Broadcom4718A, 533 MHz (Factory clocked to 480MHz)
I am ssh'ed into one one of them right now and trying to install webcam drivers into it. I plan to do some fun stuff, including using motion detection etc using the relatively powerful CPU in this router. Could you do anything even remotely like this with Apple Airport Extreme? No.
This is a hacker's router and smokes the competition.
BTW, openwrt is not supported on this router. But as I mentioned earlier, DDWRT and Tomato USB are. And they are both running rock solid for me. Whatever you do, do not use the Asus firmware. It's worse than junk.
I have many portable devices. ipads, ipod touches, various Android tablets and phones. I like them all and use them as a user and a developer. I had never used a WebOS device before. I went ahead and splurged for the $99 tablet and I was blown away. The card interface is beyond awesome. I had seen videos of it before, but that didn't do much for me. Using it in person was a different matter. The control and the visual feedback this interface provides is unbelievably good in my opinion as an advanced user of these devices.
Apple dumbs down their interfaces to appeal to an average user. Android provided a more advanced but somewhat complex UI. They have been attempting to dumb it down too with their honeycomb tablets, with horrible results (my opinion). WebOS managed to provide a more capable and advanced user interface while keeping it simple. Google should, nay, must, beg, borrow or steal some of these ideas.
Now that I have seen a superior interface, as primarily an Android user, I am quite bummed out that I have to put up with mediocrity that is Android UI.
I did a little more research into various PDF option for Android after posting my earlier comment. And I think I have found a really good one. APV PDF Viewer. It is considerably better than any of the other PDF readers I have tried. Including the ones on ipad. It has a lot of useful features. What's more, it is completely opensource. So if I develop a minor itch, I can scratch without too much fuss.
I am in the same boat as you. I wanted an ideal portable device for reading PDF documents. Here is what I have tried so far:
1. Barnes and Noble Nook B&W e-ink device. PDFs simply do not look right on this device. 2. Barnes and Noble Nook Color. Slow processor and small screen. Some squinting and patience is required to read PDFs on this device. 3. ipad (1 & 2). Really good PDF rendering and pages turn fast. Downsides are: a) No easy way to transfer documents. Some may consider iTunes easy to work. I do not. b) Lower resolutio and physical size of the display when compared to Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and other similar Android devices. 4. Samsung Galaxy Tab 7". Very portable and reasonably fast processor. Downsides are: a) Battery drains faster than other modern tablets. b) Small and low resolution screen when compared to its big brother. 5. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. This is my current PDF reading device. I use it quite frequently. Display is excellent. Battery performance is outstanding. There are many ways to transfer documents. I just mount a share over the network and drag and drop content. Messing with cables and another computer etc. for doing this is stupid and Steve Jobs should know it. The only downside is that the PDF reader options on Android are not as good. The built-in reader on ipad is really really good. On Android, you have Adobe reader, that is missing some really critical functionality. For example you cannot bookmark a page. I currently use Aldiko. It is OK. It is a bit slow. And appears to render PDFs not as sharp. Also it acts utterly dumb if you switch to landscape mode. There is no way to tell it to fill the width of the screen. So I mostly read my docs in portrait mode and for that it is quite good. I really like the ability to change brightness level without using menus and moving my finger up and down.
Microsoft (and countless other companies) sell you their software in the same way. You get the top of the line product for more money. The ones with less features (you call them crippled) go for less.
Some of these companies allow you to upgrade these products later for a fee.
How the hell is this different? When you make your CPU purchase, you know exactly what you are getting. You have an option to upgrade later if you would like. Can someone point out exactly where the scam is, while not just pretending to be utterly dumb?
I agree with the other poster. Touch screen HTC? What the hell is that? You could be comparing a really really poor HTC device with iphone.
My wife is non-techie as well. I gave her a Samsung Galaxy S phone. She did not have to ask me any questions. And she does all the aforementioned things. Send pictures, emails, downloads apps etc. All of these are dead simple. Seamlessly switching between wifi and 3G, again, quite simple and unobtrusive.
I fail to understand what is difficult about UI on a modern Android device.
As much as I hate locked phones, I agree these are valid points. I will add a few of mine.
1. Several enthusiasts, like myself will never buy a phone with locked bootloader. This group may be in minority but appears to have a very loud voice. Also, I buy phones for all of my family members and make recommendations to friends and relatives. 2. To the best of my knowledge some Android vendors have never locked their bootloaders. For example, Samsung. My Samsung Epic 4G is one of these phones. These manufacturers should be lauded and rewarded for these decisions. 3. It is near impossible to brick a Samsung Android phone.
Some of the other well known blogs have their utterly stupid people. I know. Usually the stupid people on Slashdot are of a little higher quality. Not on legal matters though. They are just as stupid as utterly dumb Engadget commenters.
I don't know how you'll manage it, but do try to get this through your thick thick skull:
Google does not have to release the Honeycomb source. Not because they have expensive lawyers or some shit like that. It is because they are not required to.
1. They fucking own the source code they are not releasing. AND even if they did not 2. Apache license does not require it.
This is the sort of stuff everybody can benefit from. I wish more companies did this. And as an Oregon resident, this is doubly good for my state. BTW, what are large concrete security barriers doing there around the facebook data center? Is Facebook concerned about someone bombing them? Or do they serve a different purpose?
Before Google "open" mobile platforms were a bad joke. I wanted them to succeed. But no hardware manufacturer or carrier took them seriously. Some companies like Motorola did build very bad phones based on Linux but they were very closed devices. Google comes along and gives you a platform that is completely open, gives it away for free. Do whatever the hell you want to do with it. Many vendors like Motorola take the bits and build phones around it. Most of these phones are locked. But you can hardly fault Google for it.
If somebody builds a device with Linux that you do not like, do you blame Linus Torvalds for it?
When I was in the market for a new phone a a month or so ago, I narrowed down my choices to:
iphone/iOS Blackberry Windows Phone 7 Android
Tell me, which one is the most open platform of them all? For me, I decided to go with Samsung Epic and have not regretted that decision for a minute. It is easy to root the phone and install whatever the hell I want on it, including my own damn Linux kernel.
I am thankful that Google is here. I have a crop of very capable devices running Linux to choose from. Without Google, these options would not be available to us. Give credit where credit is due.
Just adding some additional data. I have a Samsung Epic in Portland area. I sometimes use 4G on my phone. I do not believe my phone has ever crashed in the 2 months I have owned it.
I am very happy with my setup. And I arrived at this after much trial and error. I am mostly a Linux person but I reached a point in my life where I could not deny that I need both Windows and Linux to get stuff done. So I setup a quite beefy 6 core CPU machine to handle all my home computing needs and then some. You don't have to go all out like I did, if your needs are simpler. Here is the setup details:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Motherboard: GA-785GMT-USB3 Memory: 16GB Hard Drives: 4 1TB RAID10 OS: Windows 7 home premium VM: VMWare Server 2.02 with a bunch of Linux and Windows guests
I put it all in a quite case with lots of air flow and placed it under the 60" TV in the living room. My wife and kids get a free DVR (Windows Media Center) out of this deal. And I get a system that I can remote desktop/SSH into and run whatever the hell I want without breaking a sweat. Nice thing about this system is that it consumes little power (About 70W avg.) for what it provides and generates little heat. And it runs very very reliably.
I have done something similar for quite a while. Mostly to chat with sub-ordinates in another country. I setup Skype hooked up to a Windows laptop, hooked up to a Logitech Camera I could rotate. (Logitech Orbit AF). I also setup the laptop so that I could remote desktop into it. I configured Skype to auto-answer. Sometimes the connection would drop, but it was super easy to re-establish the connection without bugging the other other party. And the remote desktop ability let me debug any issues remotely, again without bugging anybody on the other side.
Whatever you setup, make sure to test it well. When you are gone there may not anybody that can fix problems for you. And use good quality cameras. Don't buy anything from D-Link. They make absolute and utter crap. Their cameras are worse than junk.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been under the impression that Google prohibits business use of these connections. Including running servers. Can somebody confirm or deny this?
If they allow this, then it would be very tempting. A 1Gbps pipe costs a lot more, even at wholesale prices, from other vendors.
Third party candidates have the benefit of knowing what the questions are and are able to give prepared answers.
Not that it really matters. We all know that none of the third party candidates will come close to getting even 5% of the votes.
I have a Kindle Fire and a Google Nexus 7. My advice to anybody out there considering buying an Amazon Kindle Fire is: "Don't do it"
Do yourself a favor and buy the Nexus 7. Kindle Fire OS is utter crap. It has limited hardware, is slower, cannot compete on battery life or RAM or cameras ... the list goes on. In a world with Google Nexus 7, nobody should be buying Kindle Fire.
I don't think a president alone has the power to do that. Also patents are seen by many as one of the ways America makes a lot of money. Siding with Samsung in an Apple vs. Samsung is just not good politics for an American president.
I recognize this and I hate software patents.
Oh please. I hate the clueless sales people as much as the next guy but you are really making me sympathize with the sales people. You go back to the store without the receipt and want them to help you? Are you a child? Do you know of any store that will do what you are asking?
Some will say that this is a good way to admit fault and do right by customers, even though they haven't done this before with previous faults. Others will say that Microkia is giving phones away to gain market share because they cannot get people to buy their hyped up and top of the line phone for $100.
Who is right?
Once the business friendly Republicans win more elections, all of this will be reversed. AT&T needs to start bribing / donating some big bucks in that direction to make it happen.
All the hosted projects should be archived. I was looking for an older uvcvideo driver source the other day and all the links Google pointed me to were dead BerliOS links. It was a very maddening experience.
I offer to host an archived version of BerliOS over a dedicated 35Mbps (symmetric) connection and have systems and TBs of hard drive space to spare. Please get in touch with me if you think this will help. Whatever you do, don't kill the whole thing. Not all projects will get exported before the closure. That would be a terrible waste.
Can you imagine all business users switching to tablets? Or enthusiasts completely ditching their powerful and configurable systems for tablets? I don't think that is happening. Market for PCs and computer parts of all kinds will be around for a long time. It may shrink some. And it probably will kill smaller component retailers. But the bigger ones like Newegg will get more entrenched.
I have a two Asus RT-N16 routers, one running DDWRT and other running Tomato USB. I have been extremely happy with them. These guys have monster specs as far as wireless routers go.
Ethernet Ports = WAN x 1 RJ-45 for 10/100/1000 Base T, LAN x 4 RJ-45 for 10/100/1000 Base T
USB ports = USB2.0 x 2
Unit RAM = 128 MB (2x 64MB - Samsung K4N511163QZ-HC25 or 2x 64MB - Samsung K4T51163QG-HCE6)
Unit Flash = 32 MB (MACRONIX MX29GL256EHTI2I-90Q)
Unit CPU = Broadcom4718A, 533 MHz (Factory clocked to 480MHz)
More at: http://dd-wrt.ca/wiki/index.php/Asus_RT-N16
I am ssh'ed into one one of them right now and trying to install webcam drivers into it. I plan to do some fun stuff, including using motion detection etc using the relatively powerful CPU in this router. Could you do anything even remotely like this with Apple Airport Extreme? No.
This is a hacker's router and smokes the competition.
BTW, openwrt is not supported on this router. But as I mentioned earlier, DDWRT and Tomato USB are. And they are both running rock solid for me. Whatever you do, do not use the Asus firmware. It's worse than junk.
I have many portable devices. ipads, ipod touches, various Android tablets and phones. I like them all and use them as a user and a developer. I had never used a WebOS device before. I went ahead and splurged for the $99 tablet and I was blown away. The card interface is beyond awesome. I had seen videos of it before, but that didn't do much for me. Using it in person was a different matter. The control and the visual feedback this interface provides is unbelievably good in my opinion as an advanced user of these devices.
Apple dumbs down their interfaces to appeal to an average user. Android provided a more advanced but somewhat complex UI. They have been attempting to dumb it down too with their honeycomb tablets, with horrible results (my opinion). WebOS managed to provide a more capable and advanced user interface while keeping it simple. Google should, nay, must, beg, borrow or steal some of these ideas.
Now that I have seen a superior interface, as primarily an Android user, I am quite bummed out that I have to put up with mediocrity that is Android UI.
I did a little more research into various PDF option for Android after posting my earlier comment. And I think I have found a really good one. APV PDF Viewer. It is considerably better than any of the other PDF readers I have tried. Including the ones on ipad. It has a lot of useful features. What's more, it is completely opensource. So if I develop a minor itch, I can scratch without too much fuss.
I cannot recommend this reader enough.
I am in the same boat as you. I wanted an ideal portable device for reading PDF documents. Here is what I have tried so far:
1. Barnes and Noble Nook B&W e-ink device. PDFs simply do not look right on this device.
2. Barnes and Noble Nook Color. Slow processor and small screen. Some squinting and patience is required to read PDFs on this device.
3. ipad (1 & 2). Really good PDF rendering and pages turn fast. Downsides are: a) No easy way to transfer documents. Some may consider iTunes easy to work. I do not. b) Lower resolutio and physical size of the display when compared to Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and other similar Android devices.
4. Samsung Galaxy Tab 7". Very portable and reasonably fast processor. Downsides are: a) Battery drains faster than other modern tablets. b) Small and low resolution screen when compared to its big brother.
5. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. This is my current PDF reading device. I use it quite frequently. Display is excellent. Battery performance is outstanding. There are many ways to transfer documents. I just mount a share over the network and drag and drop content. Messing with cables and another computer etc. for doing this is stupid and Steve Jobs should know it. The only downside is that the PDF reader options on Android are not as good. The built-in reader on ipad is really really good. On Android, you have Adobe reader, that is missing some really critical functionality. For example you cannot bookmark a page. I currently use Aldiko. It is OK. It is a bit slow. And appears to render PDFs not as sharp. Also it acts utterly dumb if you switch to landscape mode. There is no way to tell it to fill the width of the screen. So I mostly read my docs in portrait mode and for that it is quite good. I really like the ability to change brightness level without using menus and moving my finger up and down.
Microsoft (and countless other companies) sell you their software in the same way. You get the top of the line product for more money. The ones with less features (you call them crippled) go for less.
Some of these companies allow you to upgrade these products later for a fee.
How the hell is this different? When you make your CPU purchase, you know exactly what you are getting. You have an option to upgrade later if you would like. Can someone point out exactly where the scam is, while not just pretending to be utterly dumb?
I agree with the other poster. Touch screen HTC? What the hell is that? You could be comparing a really really poor HTC device with iphone.
My wife is non-techie as well. I gave her a Samsung Galaxy S phone. She did not have to ask me any questions. And she does all the aforementioned things. Send pictures, emails, downloads apps etc. All of these are dead simple. Seamlessly switching between wifi and 3G, again, quite simple and unobtrusive.
I fail to understand what is difficult about UI on a modern Android device.
As much as I hate locked phones, I agree these are valid points. I will add a few of mine.
1. Several enthusiasts, like myself will never buy a phone with locked bootloader. This group may be in minority but appears to have a very loud voice. Also, I buy phones for all of my family members and make recommendations to friends and relatives.
2. To the best of my knowledge some Android vendors have never locked their bootloaders. For example, Samsung. My Samsung Epic 4G is one of these phones. These manufacturers should be lauded and rewarded for these decisions.
3. It is near impossible to brick a Samsung Android phone.
Some of the other well known blogs have their utterly stupid people. I know. Usually the stupid people on Slashdot are of a little higher quality. Not on legal matters though. They are just as stupid as utterly dumb Engadget commenters.
I don't know how you'll manage it, but do try to get this through your thick thick skull:
Google does not have to release the Honeycomb source. Not because they have expensive lawyers or some shit like that. It is because they are not required to.
1. They fucking own the source code they are not releasing. AND even if they did not
2. Apache license does not require it.
Gawd, extreme stupidity is infuriating.
Would it kill them to release video support for Android phones, like they did for iphone/itouch devices a while back?
What, throwing it in fire wouldn't have worked?
This is the sort of stuff everybody can benefit from. I wish more companies did this. And as an Oregon resident, this is doubly good for my state. BTW, what are large concrete security barriers doing there around the facebook data center? Is Facebook concerned about someone bombing them? Or do they serve a different purpose?
Before Google "open" mobile platforms were a bad joke. I wanted them to succeed. But no hardware manufacturer or carrier took them seriously. Some companies like Motorola did build very bad phones based on Linux but they were very closed devices. Google comes along and gives you a platform that is completely open, gives it away for free. Do whatever the hell you want to do with it. Many vendors like Motorola take the bits and build phones around it. Most of these phones are locked. But you can hardly fault Google for it.
If somebody builds a device with Linux that you do not like, do you blame Linus Torvalds for it?
When I was in the market for a new phone a a month or so ago, I narrowed down my choices to:
iphone/iOS
Blackberry
Windows Phone 7
Android
Tell me, which one is the most open platform of them all? For me, I decided to go with Samsung Epic and have not regretted that decision for a minute. It is easy to root the phone and install whatever the hell I want on it, including my own damn Linux kernel.
I am thankful that Google is here. I have a crop of very capable devices running Linux to choose from. Without Google, these options would not be available to us. Give credit where credit is due.
Just adding some additional data. I have a Samsung Epic in Portland area. I sometimes use 4G on my phone. I do not believe my phone has ever crashed in the 2 months I have owned it.
For anyone considering Microsoft Virtual PC, please keep in mind that it cannot run 64-bit guests. For me this was a non-starter.
I am very happy with my setup. And I arrived at this after much trial and error. I am mostly a Linux person but I reached a point in my life where I could not deny that I need both Windows and Linux to get stuff done. So I setup a quite beefy 6 core CPU machine to handle all my home computing needs and then some. You don't have to go all out like I did, if your needs are simpler. Here is the setup details:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
Motherboard: GA-785GMT-USB3
Memory: 16GB
Hard Drives: 4 1TB RAID10
OS: Windows 7 home premium
VM: VMWare Server 2.02 with a bunch of Linux and Windows guests
I put it all in a quite case with lots of air flow and placed it under the 60" TV in the living room. My wife and kids get a free DVR (Windows Media Center) out of this deal. And I get a system that I can remote desktop/SSH into and run whatever the hell I want without breaking a sweat. Nice thing about this system is that it consumes little power (About 70W avg.) for what it provides and generates little heat. And it runs very very reliably.
I have done something similar for quite a while. Mostly to chat with sub-ordinates in another country. I setup Skype hooked up to a Windows laptop, hooked up to a Logitech Camera I could rotate. (Logitech Orbit AF). I also setup the laptop so that I could remote desktop into it. I configured Skype to auto-answer. Sometimes the connection would drop, but it was super easy to re-establish the connection without bugging the other other party. And the remote desktop ability let me debug any issues remotely, again without bugging anybody on the other side.
Whatever you setup, make sure to test it well. When you are gone there may not anybody that can fix problems for you. And use good quality cameras. Don't buy anything from D-Link. They make absolute and utter crap. Their cameras are worse than junk.