Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 13th Jul 2012 23:39 UTC
Ars Technica is running an interesting article about the Mail application on Windows 8. It's one of the first party Metro applications, and Ars' conclusion is that it's really, really not up to snuff - it can't even compare favourably to the mail application on Windows Phone. The sad thing is, however - this applies to virtually all Metro applications.
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RE[5]: Too many platforms
by PieterGen on Sun 15th Jul 2012 14:38
in reply to "RE[4]: Too many platforms"
Member since:2012-01-13
"The more serious problem on Linux is fragmentation........As a result, the experience is rarely consistent"
I am not a coder. I am a power user, and I do some sys admin and user interface work. So excuse me if I am wrong - here we go - Actually I find Windows more fragmented then Linux. Windows has xp, vista, 7, 8; various servers; WinPhone 7; winphone8; now we have a seperate ARM version (was there a lack of Windows-versions??); home/student/enterprise/professional/media/ etc versions; English/French/Spanish (Windows has seperate programs for every language - the concept of language packs was too simple I suppose?); a jungle of licenses and activations; and a general tendency to make simple things very complicated.
The linux landscape is for me (as a non-expert) much simpler. Yes, some applications requiere certain frameworks, but I never had problems with that..... might be different if you code though.
Edited 2012-07-15 14:42 UTC
RE[6]: Too many platforms
by moondevil on Mon 16th Jul 2012 05:59
in reply to "RE[5]: Too many platforms"
Member since:2005-07-08
Windows has xp, vista, 7, 8; various servers; WinPhone 7; winphone8; now we have a seperate ARM version
Have you ever counted the amount of Linux distributions available in Distrowatch, each with different set of APIs, many ignorant of the LSB, disparate packet systems, development tools, ...?
Just today I can see around 300.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/19/13 23:02 UTC, submitted by M.Onty
"Microsoft has sensationally abandoned its controversial plans to restrict the sharing of XBox One games, and has also removed daily online authentication requirements for its forthcoming console", reports The Guardian. They had no choice. Still a good move.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/19/13 22:28 UTC
"A snippet of code in the Steam digital distribution platform has revealed that Valve may be planning to let users easily share their games with friends in the future. The Verge has verified the code's authenticity, which was originally spotted by a member of the NeoGAF gaming forum; the code references a 'shared game library' and a notification that would alert a user when their games are currently in use by a borrower." This would change the, uh, game.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
"I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)".
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
"The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 21:03 UTC
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."More News »
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Member since:
2012-07-15
You are now mixing ABI compatibility, API compatibility, and familiarity in the same argument. Qt 4 is very similar to previous Qt versions. I have been programming in Qt since the early Qt 3 versions, and the switch from Qt 3 to Qt 4 was simple for programmers in terms of familiarity. The leap from an older Qt version to Qt 4 will be very small compared to e.g. the Win32 API to WPF.
API compatibility between Qt3 and Qt4 is not perfect, but acceptable. For many classes that were deprecated, there are (Q3*) classes, so that the old functionality is still available.
The ABI compatibility between Qt versions is not so good, e.g. 4.8 is guaranteed to be binary compatible with 4.7, but that is all you get. Of course, you can still run older precompiled applications using older Qt libraries.
In the preceding discussion the argument was around familiarity. People say that Microsoft asks developers to learn a new API every few years or so. The transition between Qt versions was non-disruptive, evolutionary, and simple. So, I don't think that the argument that Qt released 4 major versions in the last 15 years really applies. It's not as if Qt programmer had to learn a completely new framework.
The more serious problem on Linux is fragmentation. People do not just use Qt, they use Qt, GTK+, wxWidgets, or even Tk and many permutations of other libraries. As a result, the experience is rarely consistent.
The APIs of Windows are more clouded in this respect. Some people will argue that WinRT and WPF both use XAML, and consequently are very similar. Others will argue that they are completely different APIs. For companies making a new product, it is a difficult choice, Metro could be the future, so developing an application using WPF could be deprecated soon. On the other hand, if Metro flops, having developed a WinRT application would've been a waste of time.
On the other hand, although I am not a Windows developer, I think such arguments tend to be overstated. In a serious application, UI code will only be a fraction of an application. If the underlying application is written in a .NET language, it's probably not too hard to target WPF or WinRT at will.
Right. People often forget Carbon, or how Apple pushed Cocoa on Java, to deprecate it just a few years later. Or how Objective-C garbage collection was the next great thing, to deprecate it in no-time for ARC. The gcc -> llvm-gcc -> clang switch in a short amount of time was also not pretty, with everything from small codebases or Haskell compilers breaking every few months.