hammersend

So, when Sun got bought by Oracle, did that count as 'surviving'? because what youre saying implies that and it's wrong.

It's still Elop's fault that he Osborned their Symbian business. And now Nokia's been Osborned by Microsoft with the Windows Phone 8 announcement. And Samsung makes the Android money because they make the best Android phones. That could be Nokia.

The only thing I was arguing against is the completely false claim that "almost all" Android widgets "silly" "attention grabbing" "obtrusive" etc. That is not even remotely true unless I am just the luckiest widget picker in the world. Maybe you are going off the widgets that HTC and Samsung ship with their skins. Yes, those widgets are garrish but it's just like how the TV's in the showroom will be cranked up to maximum brightness and saturation. It looks good in the store next to the other guy (I suppose). The widgets I have downloaded off the market including AK Notepad, Aldiko, Apollo, BTMono, Connectbot, Drive, Dropbox, Elixir, Engadget, Evernote, Flashlight, Google Play Music, gReader, Google Voice, Juice Defender and on and on, none of them have the behavior and appearance you are decrying.

As far as your question of why Android apps look like crap sometimes I would imagine that devs have an easier time making money in the iOS app store so they make a larger effort polishing the apps that they put in there. Some apps are exactly the same between Android and iOS like Pulse. Some apps have a better iOS counterpart like the Engadget app. And of course, some very similar apps have better Android versions like gReader vs. Feedler.

I have devices that run iOS, Android and Windows Phone and for many reasons, I use my Android devices 90 percent of the time and the 10 percent of the time I use the other stuff it has nothing to do with the quality of the apps.

What's wrong with giving developers great capabilities? If bad widgets are made people won't keep them installed. When the occasional true gem comes along it will make the enhanced capabilities worth it. As far as widgets go in general, if you don't like them you can just not install any at all or you can be very selective and only keep the ones that conform to your personal sensibilities and taste. Advocating removing power from developers on a component that is completely optional seems daft.

"This can tarnish the platform experience."

Yeah, the Android experience is so "tarnished" that the OS ships on almost a million phones a day. Did you ever consider the possibility that the majority of consumers have a different opinion of what is useable than you?

"Because almost every single widget is that way."

Pure unadulterated BS. Carry on.

Edit: The mod down is funny. So "almost every" Android widget has "far too attention grabbing and obtrusive- silly animations of clouds moving in front of a sun, nonsense like that" now? Almost every single one? Because that's what he said. I actually have several Android devices and it is absolutely not true that almost every widget is like that.

And furthermore, who says weather widgets with the sun and clouds and whatever else are silly? There are a lot of people that actually like those widgets and it seems a bit arrogant to condescend their tastes just because you think you know better.

This brand of partisan hate and mod-bombing is why I avoid the comment section on almost every tech site these days.

Android is "too far the other way" because some developers throw everything they have at making a whiz-bang widget? How about just not using that widget instead of using it to cast the platform in a negative light?

"Do you have the same issues with Android? There's a platform that's destined to be the "future IE". How many Android users are stuck on 2.2 or 2.3, with a horribly crippled browser?"

You do realize that there are third party browsers on Android that have their own rendering engines that you can install right? You don't have to ever use the built in Android browser if you don't want to. I've found Firefox works quite well actually.

I've never ran Steam under Wine but I have played quite a few games with varying degrees of success. My question is since Steam runs beautifully for you under Wine, does that translate into the games themselves running beautifully as well or is it still hit and miss?

Memorial Day observed is on the 28th. Actual memorial day is on the 29th according to my calendar.

Sounds like a good place for them to me.

Android does just fine running the true Dalvik VM.

With Cornerstone on Android tablets, you can have 3 apps on screen simultaneously. One main app and two smaller apps on the side. It's really cool because apps that have a tablet and smartphone mode use the appropriate version depending on the size of the window. I quite often have Google Voice in one small window, YouTube in another small one and my browser in the main window surfing.

I've been getting smooth animations on my Nexus S ever since I put ICS on it a few months back and this phone "only" has a 1 GHz single core CPU and 512 MB of RAM.

I've been running Debian and U untu chroots on all of my Android devices going back to the G1. It actually works very well. One key for me was making sure to bind mount the sdcard inside of the chroot environment so I have access to all of my local files. As far as X goes, I find the vnc solution works okay provided you aren't trying to watch videos but for programs like Writer and Geany, it's fine. The X server you can download from the market needs a lot of work to be useful but hopefully that'll happen.

I do believe standby and hibernate are different as standby keeps memory contents hot whilst hibernate actually shuts the computer completely down. I was talking about the former in my post above.

As has been mentioned full disk encryption loses a lot of its efficacy if you just put your laptop in standby all the time. I'd add that as long as a faster boot doesn't compromise your system in other ways, why wouldn't you want it?

There's a lot more to it than that. If somebody clicks your ad and then peel out within a few seconds then obviously your ad didn't do anything for them so the next time somebody clicks, your price goes up. Pretty soon you write a better ad. I know it isn't popular to say this but sometimes when I'm looking for a product to buy, ads are relevant. And the better the ad the more I appreciate it.

"Then watch where Google Analytics shows up. This will be some rather surprising places, including porn sites and things you might find yourself feeling rather sensitive about."

I'm not a huge porn surfer but when I do find my self in certain corners of the internet, I use private browsing mode and a vpn. I doubt Google is using that as part of my profile.

The rest you say doesn't bother me as again it is a trade off. I trade information to get good search results.

I would expect that the more a search engine knows about me the more relevant my results will be. I have yet to see a compelling argument why that isn't the case. Since I use a search engine for the sole purpose of getting the result I'm looking for as quickly as possible, I am more than happy to make the trade off.

On 12.04 here 64 bit kernel and Chrome v. 18.0.1025.162.

Everything works perfectly both to localhost and across the lan.

I have a Xoom but I've found

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui...

this remarkably capable for Android development. You can even open up an Eclipse project directly in it and edit and install right on the device. Not sure if this is the kind of development you're looking for but developing for Android on Android is a reality with surprisingly few compromises. The IDE is called AIDE by the way.

That's only valid in the UK. The Oracle vs Google trial is taking place in the United States where the KJV bible is most certainly in the public domain.

There are copyright notices in printed editions of the king James bible yet the words themselves are still in the public domain and you are free to use them however you want to.

I realize this website penalizes people for pointing out the obvious but I have to ask you, did you even read what you responded to because what you wrote has absolutely nothing to do with the question the GP asked. Getting your talking points in is one thing but at least try to put it in context.

I just took the time to read the GPL both versions 2 and 3. It is pretty cut and dry as far as licenses go. Do you have any actual evidence that small groups or individuals are having trouble understanding it to the extent that it would have a statistically significant impact on its uptake?

There were multiple Android prototypes as the OS was designed to run on different form factors from touch-less candy bars to devices like the HTC Dream that had a full touch screen.

Here's another prototype: http://www.osnews.com/img/25264/android-phone-touchscreen.jp... http://www.osnews.com/img/25264/android-phone-history.jpg showing the latter configuration.

The fact that the myth of Android being a Blackberry clone until the iPhone came out is a text book example of something being repeated so many times that people just think it's true. Of course there was a prototype that looked like the Blackberry but it was just one prototype. There were obviously others.

The only Google sanctioned "tablet" from that time was as you mention the Galaxy Tab. The only reason it had the market was because it was essentially a big phone. In Europe, you even pop a sim in it and make calls out of the box. However, the others were not sanctioned thus hardly qualifying as a "generation" and even the Galaxy Tab was discouraged by various people involved in Android development.

There's only been one generation of Android tablets that's played out and they all came with Honeycomb with Tegra 2's. Even Google admitted that HC was a thrown together hack so its not surprising that the devices weren't particularly competitive. The upcoming Tegra 3 devices is the second generation.

"Look at mobile, 2007: J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry -> 2012: iOS, Android, Windows Phone."

Blackberry remains much more relevant than windows phone. You also forgot to mention Bada which also has more share than wp and is growing. I'm not trying to beat up on wp but as it stands reality conflicts significantly with marketing.

Edit: why the down mod? if I'm in error, please point out where.