kamechan

high number of commits can be one indicator of "goodness"

but consider an unsolvable problem that tempts developers, yet stumps them at the same time. they could all commit a solution thinking it's the right one, yet nobody actually solves a problem.

not saying this about BSD ... obviously, but: high number of commits is not a very good metric besides indicating that people are committing.

> There is no more hardware back button on any recent android phone either...

Any?

While the Galaxy Nexus has onscreen navigation controls now (and the Nexus7 followed suit), both the One X and the Samsung Galaxy SIII have dedicated capacitive back buttons "off screen". On the OneX the button is in the normal place (on the left) and is oddly (but in keeping with the SII) on the right on the SIII.

I took the challenge and google beat bing 4 to 1 for me.

X1 carbon still designed in Japan, along with a couple of other models. http://blog.lenovo.com/design/developers-on-the-x1-carbon-in...

i can confirm this too. 3 private message threads from 2009-2010 were on my wall with the privacy set to "friends". these were conversations right out of my private messages (which were also in my private messages).

i'm deleting every facebook message as a result of this, which isn't easy as it has to be done one by one.

i am in the US, but my UK friends are the ones who alerted me to it, as it was happening to them as well.

> Kind of like when you see a fake Rolex from 20 inches away and it looks pretty good, but then you look up close and suddenly one little flaw makes the whole thing fall apart.

The crystal on a Rolex sticks up above the bezel as well.

> does apple have a maps program on the android devices?

not that i'm aware of. i don't believe there to be a browser interface for their maps "solution". i could be wrong.

> are there other maps program available on the ios devices?

yes. google maps, or any other maps via the browser. sure, not the kind of integration one gets from an app. but there, nevertheless.

on battery life, i get anywhere from 1.5 to 3 days on my HSPA+ nexus (from play store) the way i use it. definitely have never sweated getting through a day.

* fair amount of web browsing

* little or no media or games

* heavy twitter, fairly heavy facebook

* 50+ SMS/gvoice messages per day

* 50+ emails a day

* ~1-2 hours of phone

* ~30 mins of tethering a day

coming from an iphone myself i was worried about battery life on the nexus, but it actually does better than my iphone did.

the numbers are all over the place. would be nice if they also did an average score among all the phones with the same name.

here's a Galaxy S3 score better than the iPhone5:

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1026099

and here's one showing the One X beating the iPhone 5:

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/989732

of course there are lower ones as well. probably depends a lot on the ROM you're using.

to me, this comment seems to be phrased a tad bit negatively, even though it may be factually correct.

a lot of people like to talk about "android fragmentation". while the variety of devices out there can sometimes be annoying as a consumer and developer, i tend to think of it as "android diversity" instead.

to me, it's wonderful that your so-called "poor people", who may not even have a regular computer and for whom the "premium" experience that apple is not an option, still have an opportunity to participate in the "modern world". even if it's with a device that gearheads would turn their noses up at.

technology liberates, informs, and elevates people. the fact that the android ecosystem is flexible enough to accommodate a huge demographic is a strength, in my mind, and not a weakness.

If by "strategy" you mean patenting obvious and likely things that already existed and then litigating the crap out of people, you may be right...this trial has set a precedent that might make that sustainable for them.

In the global market where android now has 60 something percent market share and iPhones have 18.

Works at Whole Foods and Peet's coffee.

If it were a google TV also, and played android games via some innovative controller like ouya's, i'd buy it in a second.

Apparently, according to the verge, a windows client was not weeks away. http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/21/3174803/sparrow-for-window...

My nexus 7 has JB, my Galaxy Nexus has JB, how is that out of sync?

There's a vim mode in st2. I'm not near my computer at the moment but IIRC it's in the preferences (classic mode I think it's called?).

edit: back at my computer now. to put st2 into vim mode, just comment this line out in the default preferences:

   "ignored_packages": ["Vintage"]

itty bitty bytes of space for the commodore 64.

i never used the screen-size qualifiers myself, but good to know they've deprecated them in favor of what seems to be simpler.

AFAIK, the density qualifiers are still being used, and are mentioned in the "new" design guidelines document as well, giving me the impression they may stick around for a while. http://developer.android.com/design/style/devices-displays.h...

in android, one provides four different density-specific resources.

  ldpi:  low-density screens (~120dpi)
  mdpi:  medium-density (~160dpi) [baseline]
  hdpi:  high-density (~240dpi)
  xhdpi: extra high-density (~320dpi)

there is a nodpi qualifier which is intended for density-independent resources.

there are also screen size qualifiers, small, normal, large, extra large.

Heating your computer is a side effect.

i actually returned a macbook pro retina yesterday over this. i know it's insignificant to apple's bottom line, but their tactics against competitors seem to be growing increasingly unsavory.

i think in many tech patent cases if someone were found in violation, as the nexus apparently is, the normal strategy would be for the violator to pay the holder of the patent some licensing fees. maybe it doesn't always work out this way...

but even if licensing were an option and google and/or samsung were willing to pay to license the technology, with apple's very publicly stated goal of destroying android, i don't think they'd ever go along with it.

so this is basically bad for non-apple consumers and good for apple. i mean, it's rational that they'd try to maintain their competitive advantage, and even though multi-source search has existed in android as far back as donut and longer than that as a programming/computational task, i guess apple planted their flag first with this [IMO, obvious] patent

regarding the X1 carbon, ... i'm very excited about it myself. i currently have a T420 and thinkpads have great support for linux, which is my primary operating system. i'm just hoping they give the X1 carbon a decent display. the one on the T420 is pretty lousy.

here's to hoping that google will step in here as they did with linux and make it run anyway...

you know it was more work to type "and no, I didn't put the okina(s) in. Fuck that noise." than to put the okina(s) in, right?

> "Android and Ubuntu are clearly different and describing both as "Linux" is not particularly helpful to anyone."

except they both run on the Linux kernel, so it is, nevertheless, accurate.

personally, i think it is helpful. there seems to be an ongoing criticism of Linux that it hasn't made much progress as the basis for a desktop operating system. while that may be true, talking about Linux in relation to android helps raise awareness that there's another kernel out there not put out by apple or microsoft that's responsible for running a large percentage of mobile devices on the market.

as apple frequently states, we're now living in the "post pc era". who's to say that the desktop and mobile spaces won't continue to merge, at which point your "not particularly helpful to anyone" use of the word Linux to describe both will become more relevant.

indeed, ubuntu is already trying to push things in this direction. http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

i have a t420 running arch, and am able to get 13 hours on idle and 10-12 doing work. posted something about how i did this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564400

Ahh, yes. Thanks for asking.

It occurred to me I probably should have included this info in my original post only after the window for editing it had passed. I'd previously written a bit about how to optimize the Thinkpad power consumption on another HN post here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564400

FYI, I find that the kernel flags are necessary even with the latest kernel. I'm currently on 3.3.8-1-ARCH and experimented with turning them off because the power regression that started in kernels > 2.6 was supposed to have been fixed and merged back into the kernel code. But I found that passing the pcie_aspm=force flag at boot time still results in a significant savings. Indicating that the regression (for at least my configuration) might still be there.

If you have an Intel video card, then check out the other kernel args I'm passing as well for additional power savings (and there are more parameters you can play with outlined here http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel...)

I experimented with a few different combinations before settling on the ones I posted in my HN link, but they're what gives me optimal battery life on my T420.

Despite what the other poster had said, I'm getting battery life now that's significantly better than what I get booting into Windows on the same machine, which usually stays at around 9-10 watts idle. I'm getting 6.8-7.8W

Without any optimization, my battery life was much less than I'd expected to get from the 9-cell (~7 hours). But with the power management script and the kernel flags, I can get 13 hours with light use and 10-11 while doing development (i.e. apache, mysqld, eclipse, multiple browsers, etc... all running).

edit: FYI powertop2 was the beta release of powertop at the time. the source has been merged back into powertop so you can just use that.

thinkpad T420 user here running archlinux.

i agree with none of these points, actually, except #1, which i wouldn't know about because i'm not using dual-mode graphics card.

"2. inability to use multiple monitors" < incorrect. i use a docking station with a dell u2711 hooked up to it. pressing fn+f7 switches correctly between external, internal, and external+internal with no problems.

"3. some ports being unusable" < incorrect. every port on my thinkpad is usable, including the ports on the docking station.

"4. audio glitches" < incorrect. my audio works better with my u2711 (via display-port audio) than it does over my macbook air (via display-port audio). why? because i can control the volume via the volume control via linux+pulse whereas OSX artificially restricts me -- it tells me i can't control the audio levels via mini-display port unless i'm using an apple display.

"5. hand patching required to keep the laptop stable" < incorrect? by this, do you mean updates? don't all OSs benefit from updates? if you mean configuration, udev (now systemd-tools) found everything correctly on my thinkpad on the first go. this was the case when i recently ran ubuntu 12.04 off of a flash drive as well.

"6. poor support for X11 even with simple intel integrated graphics" < incorrect. i have the intel HD3000 on my thinkpad, which runs everything pretty much the same way that my macbook air (with the intel3000) runs them. flash video at fullscreen with no tearing, etc (in fact, flash runs better on linux than it does on my macbook).

regarding battery life, i did have to do a bit of tinkering there. but that's because i'm a bit power-consumption obsessed. i used powertop to show me what needed fine tuning, then wrote a power management script that changes my computer's parameters depending on whether it's plugged in. the result: an idle 7w power consumption (with wi-fi on). that's roughly the same power consumption i get from the macbook air, which is an ULV chipset. battery life for windows on my T420 is ~10 hrs. with linux,...~12hrs.

"no competitively priced linux laptops"? my T420 was $1000 with a 2520M processor, 1600x900 resolution display, 160GB intel SATA 3 SSD, and 8GB of RAM.

been using arch for a while and have always wondered whether there's a good utility to grab a .deb package and install it (including all the dependencies -- from AUR, when possible)?

how's the desk position? i found this was actually the most important thing...crucial to get those elbows so that the angle from bicep to forearm is about 105 degrees.