Posts by Zephyrus Spacebat 18 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Mar 2011
I think that this is a decent concept, in theory, and I hope it spreads to more than tacky Yank theme parks.
It would be nice if NFC chips got really cheap - as in, enough so that they are embedded in products or the paper price tags. Eg. have a Coles/Woolworths (two Australian chains) app on your Droid/iDevice, tap it against the product, and get the price, and other details - I suppose having the dietary information displayed, and an integrated shopping list would be a handy thing to have. Of course, this would already be doable with QR codes, and QR codes are readable by nearly every smartphone these days.
However, seeing as the local Coles here just got the "$x.xx per L" thing on the paper price tags not less than 4 months ago, I don't think we'll see it for a long time (except in that one rerun of Beyond Tomorrow, with the European FutureStore(TM)...)
~ # rm --help
BusyBox v1.18.3 (2011-05-14 13:22:58 CEST) multi-call binary.
I'm sorry, but this is BusyBox. BusyBox is GPL, yes, and they have gone after GPL violators, yes... but that doesn't suddenly make it GNU coreutils! Even though there may be some kind of GNU in there (I'm not /exactly/ sure what's part of the provided JS/Linux), it is possible to make a Linux-based OS without enough GNU software to warrant it calling GNU/Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busybox
...if everything weren't so reliant on Active Directory (of which the FOSS-connector I tried didn't work on a 2003-level domain - correct me if it does work good, and I just suck at configuring it :P), Exchange (of which nothing desktop-FOSS ever seems to work with once you upgrade to Exchange Server 2007 - again, correct me if I'm wrong (for the love of god correct me)) and the elephant in the room that is Office and legacy VB6 apps (of which the latter barely works on Windows anyway).
:(
"and my experience there is apps crash, it reboots itself daily or freezes randomly."
I've never seen an Android reboot itself, and only ever once seen an app "crash" (force close requiring). What phone did you have? Was it running Froyo/Gingerbread? If not, there's your problem, really - truth be told, 2.2 is a whole lot more stabler than 2.1 on my Desire, and about twice as good as my old JB'd iP3GS (ahh, tethered jailbreaks...).
Otherwise, I think you need to choose some better apps. Android is like anything - you still get your utter junk apps done by cruddy devs... and I'm hoping I don't end up being one of those, heh. :)
Telstra Exec 1: "Hey, guys. How can we overload our network even more and make our mobile broadband users experience even worse?"
Telstra Exec 2: "Let's give the iPad better deals for data than our flagship Android devices!"
Telstra Exec 3: "Yeah, and let's make a marketing push for wireless broadband to get even more users onto our already overloaded rural 3G cells!"
Telstra Exec 1: "Brilliant ideas, everyone! Now, how about this? We offer to broadcast the footy!"
Telstra Exec 3: "Wouldn't that cost us a tonne to broadcast it to everyone who wants it?"
Telstra Exec 1: "No, we don't give it to them FREE. We offer it to them through the bundled bloatware on the non-Apple smartphones, and they'll hit okay at every prompt telling them this'll cost them megabytes off our extortionally priced data plans!"
Telstra Exec 2: "And we'll be shoving yet MORE data down to those crowded 3G cells! BRILLIANT!"
The other day I was in Perth, away from my distant Kimberley town, and decided to do some web browsing on my phone, looking around for a nearby JB Hifi. However, my 3G didn't seem to work at all during daylight hours, and I was struggling to get anything back at the hotel until about 10PM at night. Running my phone's Speedtest.net app during the day, I got the results of "-0.00Mbps down, 16.53Mbps up". That's right. Negative zero megabits per second. Brilliant. Contrasted with at least 5Mbps down, 1Mbps up in my little corner of the dustland.
Chucking a few hundred iPhone/iPad/Android/MobBroadband wielding footy fans onto the already quite awful 3G cell here will probably cause the poor fibre optic to melt... that's if Telstra doesn't run over their own cable, or cable-tie it to a bridge, or leave it exposed on the roadside...
(And yes, I was 'holding it right' - this is a Desire after all :) )
Wow, 30% of the US market is really indicative that Google are sinking. Because the average US netizen that probably makes up that 30% can tell which has "superior results"... and isn't just using it because their "blue e" defaults to it.
And Android doesn't make a loss - it's getting people interested in Google services. For example: Google Maps/Gmail/Google Search on my Desire. If I were using, say, a Nokia, I'd probably not be using Google Maps for my directions and Gmail for my email - I'd be using the Garmin maps (or whatever Nokia use these days) as well as POP3/SMTP to my domain's email.
Penguin for obvious reasons.
Yes, Firefox/Chrome/Opera are better than IE. Yes, IE is hardly ever any good. However, it's nice to think that we'll be able to get a browser with at least a semi-current standards compliance rating or higher into nearly every PC.
I can recommend Firefox 4 for (nearly) every platform, but for those that refuse to use non-MS software, I can still do my infinitesimally small bit of helping move the general Windows-using population to one of the bright, @font-face'd Standards Of Tomorrow(TM)-capable browsers out there.
Maybe we might be seeing internal HTML5 webapps, instead of ActiveX, because "Microsoft supports it". (A man can hope...)
The reason why IT professionals complain when a website relies on Flash is that it just plain renders it unusable. Example, the IdeaCom website - http://www.ideacom.com.tw - blocking Flash makes FF position the blocked flash header over the top of the buttons to choose the language. This is detrimental to the user experience.
However, sometimes I *do* want to use Flash on a mobile device - eg, the (Australian) ABC's iView. I do not know of a way to use iView on an iPhone - there isn't an app, as far as I remember (haven't had my iPhone for a year now).
Flash does suck, but it is getting better. Slowly, but it is.
(Also, assuming most Flash-dependent sites have HTML5 versions/apps for your phone is rather naive, don't you think? As far as HTML5 <canvas> websites go, I've honestly seen nothing that isn't a proof of concept or gimmick.)
I personally cannot wait until things like WP and Windows proper are 'unified' - I'd like to see a 'minimum specification' for Windows PCs (like WinPho7 phones have - eg. 1GHz CPU, this res screen, this size camera), that each OEM has to meet. Might stop the godawful flood of cheap Acers which can barely run the Windows 7 Home Premium that is installed on it, and save us "extended-family tech support" types a bit of a headache.
A downside is that such a unification of Windows may bring along with it some of the lock-in and lock-downs of most phone OSs. But no matter, that's why we have Linux/BSD/Haiku/etc. :)
This just seems like a logical first step.
On topic of the article, I hope they roll this out to other countries (cough Australia cough) soon.
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