When apps on iOS, Android and even Windows Phone are way better than Blackberry apps and people begin to realise that these types of outages are not possible on those platforms (everything on a Blackberry, including internet usage, goes through continental proxies; not the case on Apple et. al. except for specialised services like iCloud and Gmail and such), free apps aren't good enough. On top of that, this doesn't do anything for companies like mine that prohibit end-users from installing anything on our Blackberry phones for regulatory reasons.
Even if they release a phone that's super-awesome and is somewhat competitive with today's smartphones (so far, this seems unlikely), their hub-spoke service model for consumer service is ridiculously outdated. Wake me up when they've gotten rid of BIS and internet proxies.
I don't think Apple has been "turning away" from them. They had a definite and seemingly infallible edge when Photoshop and Illustrator were created and released for MacOS years ago; the PC was long behind them in this department, so those weren't really an option.
Today, aesthetic quirks aside, the only difference between a Macbook and a PC laptop is the Macbook's ability to natively run OS X. Both of the aforementioned titles are available (and widely used) on Windows without limitations. Worse, Windows has many more titles and options available than the Mac does because there are many more Windows developers out there than OS X developers. (I wouldn't say that Windows is any easier to develop for than OS X, but Visual Studio is really, really nice.) On the other hand, many people find Macbooks to be extremely pretty (because they are) and OS X to be easier to use and more secure, though we all know the "bad guys" are slowly chipping away at the latter advantage. We all know that Macbook, iPhone, iPad and a Starbucks Grande-size Latte are the holy trinity in being "cool;" the PC is not a good substitute for this.
Apple has, and hopefully always be, about making profit by catering to the consumer. Let's not get deluded about that.
This will be awesome when it becomes more widely accepted in the corporate space (RIM better have a backup plan!), but how will companies deal with work phone lines? This must put them in a catch-22 position, where they either provide (limited) service for work AND personal use (which is unlikely; most people abuse free things) or compensate users for using their own personal plans for work use. If the latter is the case, will employees feel comfortable with their employers going over their records to justify what should and shouldn't be compensated for?
What would be ideal is if those dual-SIM adapters advanced enough to allow users to use both personal and work SIMs together.
If you wanted to open a program, you had to have a shortcut to it on the Desktop; otherwise, you were off searching. The Start Menu eased this considerably by consolidating everything in one place. You still had to find stuff if it wasn't on the Start menu, but almost every program that was installed properly had a reference there.
Then there were the easy links to Documents, Pictures, etc. that was useful to people.
The Start Menu was an innovative answer to a then-inherent lack of organisation and difficulty in finding things. Yes, you had the File Manager on Windows and Finder on OS X, but good luck if you're looking for that "client document about some paintings" if you don't remember anything in its relative path.
Today, almost all mainstream desktops and laptops have two or more cores per CPU. Dual-core is starting to become a commodity even on phones, where it's use is starting to come to fruition quite nicely (camera enhancements, smoother video chat, better speech recognition, games, etc). 4GB of RAM is pretty common too, with 8GB RAM stock right on the horizon. SSDs are cheap now..and they are FAST. With this much power available to us on the cheap, searching for stuff from the Start Menu (or Spotlight on OS X) is a much better alternative than doing the Start -> click motions of the past. Furthermore, outside of work, most people spend more time on their mobiles than their desktops or laptops...and none of those have a Start menu. (Well, Windows Mobile did but look where that went.)
I welcome this change; it was pretty much inevitable. I'm even more glad that it's only superficial, since Windows 8 can revert back to Classic pretty easily for the luddites! I hope they copy^H^H^Hinnovate on Apple's state-saving feature since that would make Hibernate as fast as doing a Standby without its unreliability.
Most people including myself were hopefully for the thinner design, larger edge-to-edge 4 inch screen, metal back, NFC, 3D glassless display, 4G wireless data, etc. that were mentioned in the iPhone 5 rumours/hype. What a huge let down. No innovative must have features offer! Definitely not worth an update over the popular iPhone 4.
While all of this is true, the refresh will still sell like mini-hotcakes. There are the people that jump at any new revision Apple puts out, the people that can finally have an iPhone on Sprint (there are still a LOT of people on Sprint) and the folks that actually are interested in the new features it provides. This will probably be like the iPhone 3Gs release in that its announcement was a bit less bombastic as its predecessor, but still enough of a worthy upgrade for many people.
The two problems I see with this in today's climate is that (a) it's certainly faster, but not that much faster than iPhone 4 like the 3Gs was to the 3G and (b) Android is a LOT more mature, both technically and professionally, than it was during the time of the 3Gs. It was well ahead of any other phone out there, though they were slowly catching up. The 4Gs, on the other hand, caught up to the Samsung Galaxy S II...and they are about to release a new Nexus phone soon. This is even more pressing given the much wider selection of apps available on the Market and Google's cloud offerings to date.
The iPhone still has the edge on user experience, but today's (comparably dull) conference left me wondering if that's the only edge they have left.
I'm usually skeptical to "GAPING HOLE" stories like this, but the Android Police article referenced in the article provided (link here) clearly demonstrates that this is a serious problem.
Google or, I think, HTC can just remove the app OTA until they clean this up. I can see why they need SOME of that data (build information, phone information, stack trace, etc), but what are they going to do with SMS messages and call history??
The affected employees work in manufacturing, location and commerce, and supporting functions, Nokia said on Thursday.
Unfortunately, it seems like the typical cut for a company in troubled straits.
I really hope they make an awesome comeback on Windows Mobile. I loved their phones and would love to go back. Still wish they went Android, though.
I bet the corporate culture at Amazon is better than it is at Palm at the moment, so a merger might be liberating for the employees. This is also great for competition; Android might get some benefits, but I'm looking forward to see how they will leverage their mindshare with their tablet business. It's nice to see another big name giving Apple a run for their money.
I think Google would have bought them a good while ago if they really wanted them. In fact, I think that they probably considered them before buying out Motorola Mobility and decided on the latter because of their (much) stronger patent portfolio.
(a) First post!
(b) I was going to do research into voting protocols as a senior design project. I'm convinced that there is no truly, 100% secure way of implementing this, unfortunately. I wish there was, though.
Why is it that even poorly-performing CEO's get incredibly huge severance packages? I can understand CEOs that actually helped raise a company getting nice parting gifts (like Lou Gerstner and Bill Gates), but shouldn't leaders that, effectively, failed to lead? get much, much less?
When strapped with huge loans (in the US, at least), would you rather spend two more years accumulating debt for a Master's, take a research job that's cutting-edge, but doesn't pay the bills or take a $65,000 job doing IT right out the bat?
It was, pretty much, a dead product after Windows 7 came out. Native searching in operating systems are much better now; it doesn't make any sense to have an auxiliary product that isn't as well integrated doing, essentially, the same thing.
As for the others on the chopping block; did they ever have that many users?
The site said that self-effacing men have greater success rates, with words such as "awkward, apologise, kinda" and "probably" likely to increase success because "appearing unsure makes the writer seem more vulnerable and less threatening".
Let's see how many guys put all of these words in their first messages!:)
From my experience with online dating (been using it mostly on-and-off for a few years), I don't think this is the biggest reason why some (many?) guys have problems finding anyone on these sites. Instead, I think the real issue is two-fold: bad (boring) profiles and bad (boring) pictures. Besides the fact that lots of guys online come off as horribly desperate or think a bathroom pic of their pecs/chest will land them something, there are very, very, very few profiles that are enticing or interesting enough to read through them. Additionally, not a lot of folks post pictures that make them really stand out; with most online dating sites having way more men than women (by design), this becomes a problem in the long run. First messages are definitely a problem as well; women I've met online usually tell me about the many guys that either say the stuff outlined in the summary ("hey baby," "what's up," "you look beautiful/really good") or send long messages about themselves that they've already covered in their profile!
My profile and messages were really boring and borderline desperate when I first started out; consequently, I wasn't very successful. I had a lot more success when I put pictures of me doing different stuff and changed my profile to better reflect my real personality.
It's not just the men that have work to do, either. Women's profiles start to become one in the same after a few minutes of looking, and many of them aren't very engaging in conversation either. (This is really a two-way street, though, so it's not fair to put that fault solely on them.) However, since women are the "commodity" on these sites, they generally don't have to worry as much. In fact, really hot women, like in real life, don't have to do anything at all if they're after attention; they'll get hundreds of messages a week without even thinking about it. (This is worse than it seems, though.)
Despite me having said all of this, I think it's better to find people in real-life. (I hate the term 'meatspace;' who the hell came up with this?) Your first impressions aren't bound to still moments or clever word choices, and it's the only way you can really capture someone's "energy" right then and there. People can definitely lie in this respect (clubs, bars and parties are great examples), but at least you know that guy isn't a 80-year old grandma or that woman isn't really 80 pounds more than she looked online.
I suppose it wouldn't be too hard for them, considering how their Cinema Displays are one of the best out there and they have enough clout in the marketplace to secure bigger, but similarly amazing, LCD displays for this. Plus, even though their Apple TVs haven't really sold much, I'm sure they could push tons of them if they up their marketing.
Considering that the last major jailbreak used a PDF rendering exploit in Safari to allow users to jailbreak their devices online, which requires modifications to files in system directories, I'd highly beg to differ.
And while jailbreaks for iOS happen for almost every point release, they are getting tougher and tougher to find (as in it takes the dev-team more and more time to find a patch).
If most everyone used linux in their homes that would kill off virtually Hundreds of thousands of jobs supporting the crap. No more $70 mom and pop shop reloads, no more field service calls that are resolved by running virus cleaner and repairing an infected machine, no more recycled machines that get put back into circulation simply because the owners perceives an infected machine as a hardware failure or simply not worth the investment in repair over an opportunity to "upgrade."
There's more to these jobs than reloads and virus cleaning. We'd still be good; in fact, since it's Linux, we might even charge more.:)
Navigation on a tablet (or smartphone) OS across all the major ecosystems is leaps and bounds better than it is on the PC. Take the common action of opening a Control Panel for an application, for example. For many Windows applications, you'll find it underneath a "Tools" context menu. However, some applications that use alternative GUI toolkits (Qt, Gtk, etc.) will put it in the "Edit" context menu to stay consistent with Linux/OS X tradition. Then there are the applications that put it in weird places like "File" or something. An even better example is Firefox; one presses Backspace in Windows to go to the last page visited. The same action in Linux is ALT+left arrow. I think it's different in OS X too.
Slashdot Mirror
When apps on iOS, Android and even Windows Phone are way better than Blackberry apps and people begin to realise that these types of outages are not possible on those platforms (everything on a Blackberry, including internet usage, goes through continental proxies; not the case on Apple et. al. except for specialised services like iCloud and Gmail and such), free apps aren't good enough. On top of that, this doesn't do anything for companies like mine that prohibit end-users from installing anything on our Blackberry phones for regulatory reasons.
Even if they release a phone that's super-awesome and is somewhat competitive with today's smartphones (so far, this seems unlikely), their hub-spoke service model for consumer service is ridiculously outdated. Wake me up when they've gotten rid of BIS and internet proxies.
I don't think Apple has been "turning away" from them. They had a definite and seemingly infallible edge when Photoshop and Illustrator were created and released for MacOS years ago; the PC was long behind them in this department, so those weren't really an option.
Today, aesthetic quirks aside, the only difference between a Macbook and a PC laptop is the Macbook's ability to natively run OS X. Both of the aforementioned titles are available (and widely used) on Windows without limitations. Worse, Windows has many more titles and options available than the Mac does because there are many more Windows developers out there than OS X developers. (I wouldn't say that Windows is any easier to develop for than OS X, but Visual Studio is really, really nice.) On the other hand, many people find Macbooks to be extremely pretty (because they are) and OS X to be easier to use and more secure, though we all know the "bad guys" are slowly chipping away at the latter advantage. We all know that Macbook, iPhone, iPad and a Starbucks Grande-size Latte are the holy trinity in being "cool;" the PC is not a good substitute for this.
Apple has, and hopefully always be, about making profit by catering to the consumer. Let's not get deluded about that.
This will be awesome when it becomes more widely accepted in the corporate space (RIM better have a backup plan!), but how will companies deal with work phone lines? This must put them in a catch-22 position, where they either provide (limited) service for work AND personal use (which is unlikely; most people abuse free things) or compensate users for using their own personal plans for work use. If the latter is the case, will employees feel comfortable with their employers going over their records to justify what should and shouldn't be compensated for?
What would be ideal is if those dual-SIM adapters advanced enough to allow users to use both personal and work SIMs together.
I guess it forgot to 'pick up' the job cuts and absolute chaos this would ensue while it was at it.
If you wanted to open a program, you had to have a shortcut to it on the Desktop; otherwise, you were off searching. The Start Menu eased this considerably by consolidating everything in one place. You still had to find stuff if it wasn't on the Start menu, but almost every program that was installed properly had a reference there.
Then there were the easy links to Documents, Pictures, etc. that was useful to people.
The Start Menu was an innovative answer to a then-inherent lack of organisation and difficulty in finding things. Yes, you had the File Manager on Windows and Finder on OS X, but good luck if you're looking for that "client document about some paintings" if you don't remember anything in its relative path.
Today, almost all mainstream desktops and laptops have two or more cores per CPU. Dual-core is starting to become a commodity even on phones, where it's use is starting to come to fruition quite nicely (camera enhancements, smoother video chat, better speech recognition, games, etc). 4GB of RAM is pretty common too, with 8GB RAM stock right on the horizon. SSDs are cheap now..and they are FAST. With this much power available to us on the cheap, searching for stuff from the Start Menu (or Spotlight on OS X) is a much better alternative than doing the Start -> click motions of the past. Furthermore, outside of work, most people spend more time on their mobiles than their desktops or laptops...and none of those have a Start menu. (Well, Windows Mobile did but look where that went.)
I welcome this change; it was pretty much inevitable. I'm even more glad that it's only superficial, since Windows 8 can revert back to Classic pretty easily for the luddites! I hope they copy^H^H^Hinnovate on Apple's state-saving feature since that would make Hibernate as fast as doing a Standby without its unreliability.
Most people including myself were hopefully for the thinner design, larger edge-to-edge 4 inch screen, metal back, NFC, 3D glassless display, 4G wireless data, etc. that were mentioned in the iPhone 5 rumours/hype. What a huge let down. No innovative must have features offer! Definitely not worth an update over the popular iPhone 4.
While all of this is true, the refresh will still sell like mini-hotcakes. There are the people that jump at any new revision Apple puts out, the people that can finally have an iPhone on Sprint (there are still a LOT of people on Sprint) and the folks that actually are interested in the new features it provides. This will probably be like the iPhone 3Gs release in that its announcement was a bit less bombastic as its predecessor, but still enough of a worthy upgrade for many people.
The two problems I see with this in today's climate is that (a) it's certainly faster, but not that much faster than iPhone 4 like the 3Gs was to the 3G and (b) Android is a LOT more mature, both technically and professionally, than it was during the time of the 3Gs. It was well ahead of any other phone out there, though they were slowly catching up. The 4Gs, on the other hand, caught up to the Samsung Galaxy S II...and they are about to release a new Nexus phone soon. This is even more pressing given the much wider selection of apps available on the Market and Google's cloud offerings to date.
The iPhone still has the edge on user experience, but today's (comparably dull) conference left me wondering if that's the only edge they have left.
I'm usually skeptical to "GAPING HOLE" stories like this, but the Android Police article referenced in the article provided (link here) clearly demonstrates that this is a serious problem.
Google or, I think, HTC can just remove the app OTA until they clean this up. I can see why they need SOME of that data (build information, phone information, stack trace, etc), but what are they going to do with SMS messages and call history??
"Privacy is dead. Get over it" -Steve Rambam
The affected employees work in manufacturing, location and commerce, and supporting functions, Nokia said on Thursday.
Unfortunately, it seems like the typical cut for a company in troubled straits.
I really hope they make an awesome comeback on Windows Mobile. I loved their phones and would love to go back. Still wish they went Android, though.
I bet the corporate culture at Amazon is better than it is at Palm at the moment, so a merger might be liberating for the employees. This is also great for competition; Android might get some benefits, but I'm looking forward to see how they will leverage their mindshare with their tablet business. It's nice to see another big name giving Apple a run for their money.
I think Google would have bought them a good while ago if they really wanted them. In fact, I think that they probably considered them before buying out Motorola Mobility and decided on the latter because of their (much) stronger patent portfolio.
Links:
Kindle Fire porn via SlashGear: http://androidcommunity.com/amazon-kindle-fire-hands-on-gallery-20110928/
Enjoy!
(a) First post! (b) I was going to do research into voting protocols as a senior design project. I'm convinced that there is no truly, 100% secure way of implementing this, unfortunately. I wish there was, though.
Why is it that even poorly-performing CEO's get incredibly huge severance packages? I can understand CEOs that actually helped raise a company getting nice parting gifts (like Lou Gerstner and Bill Gates), but shouldn't leaders that, effectively, failed to lead? get much, much less?
When strapped with huge loans (in the US, at least), would you rather spend two more years accumulating debt for a Master's, take a research job that's cutting-edge, but doesn't pay the bills or take a $65,000 job doing IT right out the bat?
That is incorrect. Computer Science is about the science of computing. Programming is an applied application of this.
Now Facebook is even more like real life!
SDIO Wi-fi cards have been around for ages; I remember trying to find one for my Palm Treo 650 to get it online and not being able to afford it.
one
two
It was, pretty much, a dead product after Windows 7 came out. Native searching in operating systems are much better now; it doesn't make any sense to have an auxiliary product that isn't as well integrated doing, essentially, the same thing.
As for the others on the chopping block; did they ever have that many users?
That's the way it is everywhere; get used to it.
The site said that self-effacing men have greater success rates, with words such as "awkward, apologise, kinda" and "probably" likely to increase success because "appearing unsure makes the writer seem more vulnerable and less threatening".
Let's see how many guys put all of these words in their first messages! :)
From my experience with online dating (been using it mostly on-and-off for a few years), I don't think this is the biggest reason why some (many?) guys have problems finding anyone on these sites. Instead, I think the real issue is two-fold: bad (boring) profiles and bad (boring) pictures. Besides the fact that lots of guys online come off as horribly desperate or think a bathroom pic of their pecs/chest will land them something, there are very, very, very few profiles that are enticing or interesting enough to read through them. Additionally, not a lot of folks post pictures that make them really stand out; with most online dating sites having way more men than women (by design), this becomes a problem in the long run. First messages are definitely a problem as well; women I've met online usually tell me about the many guys that either say the stuff outlined in the summary ("hey baby," "what's up," "you look beautiful/really good") or send long messages about themselves that they've already covered in their profile!
My profile and messages were really boring and borderline desperate when I first started out; consequently, I wasn't very successful. I had a lot more success when I put pictures of me doing different stuff and changed my profile to better reflect my real personality.
It's not just the men that have work to do, either. Women's profiles start to become one in the same after a few minutes of looking, and many of them aren't very engaging in conversation either. (This is really a two-way street, though, so it's not fair to put that fault solely on them.) However, since women are the "commodity" on these sites, they generally don't have to worry as much. In fact, really hot women, like in real life, don't have to do anything at all if they're after attention; they'll get hundreds of messages a week without even thinking about it. (This is worse than it seems, though.)
Despite me having said all of this, I think it's better to find people in real-life. (I hate the term 'meatspace;' who the hell came up with this?) Your first impressions aren't bound to still moments or clever word choices, and it's the only way you can really capture someone's "energy" right then and there. People can definitely lie in this respect (clubs, bars and parties are great examples), but at least you know that guy isn't a 80-year old grandma or that woman isn't really 80 pounds more than she looked online.
I suppose it wouldn't be too hard for them, considering how their Cinema Displays are one of the best out there and they have enough clout in the marketplace to secure bigger, but similarly amazing, LCD displays for this. Plus, even though their Apple TVs haven't really sold much, I'm sure they could push tons of them if they up their marketing.
Considering that the last major jailbreak used a PDF rendering exploit in Safari to allow users to jailbreak their devices online, which requires modifications to files in system directories, I'd highly beg to differ.
And while jailbreaks for iOS happen for almost every point release, they are getting tougher and tougher to find (as in it takes the dev-team more and more time to find a patch).
If most everyone used linux in their homes that would kill off virtually Hundreds of thousands of jobs supporting the crap. No more $70 mom and pop shop reloads, no more field service calls that are resolved by running virus cleaner and repairing an infected machine, no more recycled machines that get put back into circulation simply because the owners perceives an infected machine as a hardware failure or simply not worth the investment in repair over an opportunity to "upgrade."
There's more to these jobs than reloads and virus cleaning. We'd still be good; in fact, since it's Linux, we might even charge more. :)
Navigation on a tablet (or smartphone) OS across all the major ecosystems is leaps and bounds better than it is on the PC. Take the common action of opening a Control Panel for an application, for example. For many Windows applications, you'll find it underneath a "Tools" context menu. However, some applications that use alternative GUI toolkits (Qt, Gtk, etc.) will put it in the "Edit" context menu to stay consistent with Linux/OS X tradition. Then there are the applications that put it in weird places like "File" or something. An even better example is Firefox; one presses Backspace in Windows to go to the last page visited. The same action in Linux is ALT+left arrow. I think it's different in OS X too.