I am 4 short of 500 karma, so I can't give you a downvote - instead, I make this comment. I'm an Indian, and I find it very hard to believe that an entire nation unequivocally hates another country. Firstly, there are plenty of educated, curious and free-thinking Pakistanis who bear no such hatred toward India - just read the blogs in the Dawn website. Second, among those who aren't educated nearly well enough, I imagine that the preoccupation with day-to-day survival is far more important to them than the hatred that they are told they should feel toward a remote enemy.
On a meta note, why is this still on the front page? This is worse than politics - any discussion of this will devolve into vague statements(in the absence of actual knowledge or data) about how one country is better than the other and then rapidly into name-calling and jingoism. I hope we can keep this type of story away from HN.
Is there any particular reason that Buzz and Plus need public profiles? I really like Plus, but I have a friend who has voiced a few significant concerns where it defaults to public on some occasions(such as when you change your picture). Especially given that Plus is so integrated with the rest of Google's services, I want to fully understand the privacy implications before committing to it.
This is the most braindead review of the service that I have read. Any social network goes through the ghost town - early adopters - your mom stage, When your mom arrives, you can't say "fuck" anymore, and so you feel the need to move to another service. Add to this the copious amounts of wall-spam generated in Facebook and a lot of people are excited about Plus. Particularly because Circles is central to the service, even when your mom finally arrives, you'll still theoretically be able to let your mouth off. That's why this thing might have legs. Not because some nebulous and self-congratulatory definition of "geek" would theoretically like it.
Unfortunately, the cost of the lawsuit will be borne by the handset makers and not by Google. The price of these patents is fairly indeterminable because the chilling effect of the almost certainly imminent lawsuits is hard to estimate. Now Google has no choice but to back the OEMs to the hilt and fight this to the death in the courts.
Yeah, Apple got this one right. No matter what you do with your phone, you can just press the big black button and everything is back to normal. If anything, I think these software buttons will lead to further user frustration.
I don't know about others, but the reason I love desktop Linux is because of it's modularity. I can use Gnome, KDE or whatever other applications with whatever window manager I choose, and it all works. In an era where everything is being dumbed down for the lowest common denominator, I'm just glad that there is one environment where power users can flourish.
On the face of it, it just seems like clever agreement drafting by Google. Google's agreement with Motorola requires Motorola to allow location data collection by Google, whereas it's agreement with Skyhook explicitly forbids it. At that point, it's simply a question of Motorola choosing its most valuable partner. Whether this is anticompetitive or not is clearly up for question. Regardless, it's become really clear that Google has far more power over shipping devices than it has ever admitted in public.
It's all the other nonsense that comes along with managing a typical PC that's the problem. System update every so often, upgrade the system every six months, driver problem with graphics, an endless stream of support requests. On the Windows side, its even worse. I shudder every time I see my Mom's Windows install after a gap of a few months - only half the screen is visible in Firefox because of all the malicious toolbars that got installed in the meantime. An iPad would actually be perfect, but its not as affordable(at least for some models). I'm getting the Acer model for my parents when this comes out.
I think those rates only apply to the CR-48, not to the new devices announced today, because the new ones are also going to Europe, where CDMA is pretty much non-existent.
And now for a bit of perspective, here in India I am working with a 512kbps connection, which is the only one I can get without any 'fair use' caps. The latency for the fastest DNS is about 350ms, and on weekends, my bandwidth can be as low as 200kbps.
Exactly. I've been using Ubuntu for the past 2 years without ever logging into a Gnome session. The package management, the drivers, the sane defaults are all worth it even if you disagree with all their design decisions. What doesn't work in the repos get fixed really fast. I am typing this from a Natty laptop running Awesome WM and I never have to see Unity if I don't want to.
Heh. Close to six months in Gnome and I never realised that those shortcuts existed. Apparently, I have severely underestimated the Gnome desktop for a long time.
The built-in search and launcher are killer features for me, and the multitasking with super+num is great. It also has the 'run-or-raise' capability that I've failed to get to work in Awesome. As such, the window management capabilities of Unity pale in comparison with Awesome, but the fact that I can run Matlab and get the speed and multitasking is pure win for Unity. Java apps in Awesome are a source of unlimited pain for me.
I last tried gnome-shell when it was buggy as hell, so it's probably not a good comparison- but Unity is fast, really fast. Having used a minimalist wm for a long time, I'm generally intolerant of lag and other nonsense that gets in the way, but Unity was as fast as any wm I've ever used. A lot of it depends on the quality of the gpu, so ymmv.
On the contrary, I find that Unity is much more keyboard friendly than Gnome. Multitasking with the keyboard is very easy, just hold super and press the relevant number. I find that it is much more conducive to multitasking once I got used to it. Give it a fair shake. It's different, and I had some initial revulsion, but once you get over it, it can be one of the most pleasant desktop experiences you've ever had.
I have to say, as an Awesome WM user, I was sceptical of Unity. But after a day of using it, I think I might never go back to Awesome. It is just ridiculously well thought out, in a way that I have never experienced on Linux before. It really is a leap, if only for the methodology they used. I hope other distros start doing this kind of deep analysis.
Google needs to seriously start cleaning house in the Market. Given that most Android phones out there can sideload, there won't even be that much of a backlash. I suspect the only reason they aren't already doing this is because they have an organisational distaste for manual screening. The sooner they fix the market, the healthier the Android ecosystem.
It's a wildly varying experience that depends on your hardware and the distro. What I've noticed with Ubuntu, though is that hardware support keeps getting better with each new version. Before I buy any new piece of hardware, I check for Ubuntu support.
As an Android user who suffers from lag every time a background service starts up, I concur. This whole article was nonsense. How could he talk about Android development without mentioning the woeful mess that is the emulator?
Its time to start working on Ubuntu Tablet Edition, isn't it? What with the Xoom having an unlockable bootloader, and the whole rash of honeycomb tablets expected this year, maybe its time for the traditional Linux stack to arrive at the next frontier.
This is actually an extremely interesting technical problem though, isn't it? Given all the computational power Google has, I'm sure they could dedicate one emulator per new submission, and run continuous checks on the app without ever resorting to manually reviewing the apps the way that Apple does. My guess is that the Android team is the most overworked team inside Google, and they're struggling to keep up with their own growth, so they've had to deprioritize some things like the market, and focus on simply getting Honeycomb out of the door. By my theory, the Market should see some real improvements in the coming months. We'll see, I guess.
I vote for making the flag button more powerful. Most often, the worst discussions are about flamebait from TC about something Apple or Google has done(I am as guilty of this as anyone). If, with enough flags, those stories could be moved off, then we could go back to having saner, less shrill discussions, and improve the overall quality of HN as well.
Well, when you bought your iPad, weren't you fully aware of Apple's whimsical and capricious nature in dealing with the App Store? Even though Apple are just being assholes here, I have no sympathy for computer-literate people who would willingly take part in an ecosystem which has DRM built into its DNA.
Hey, I know this must be there in the sdk docs somewhere, but can the knob on the side of the watch be used as an input device? Also, I wish I had more upvotes to give you.
EDIT: Oh, never mind, just saw that its a button, not a knob.