Posts by Niall 40 publicly visible posts • joined 4 May 2007
@Jedit
I have their Galaxy Tab 7.7, and actually it can be used as a phone. I was in Dublin airport with an Irish 3G SIM, wanted to make a phone call but my HTC phone took micro-SIM. Was seriously tempted to use the tablet for a phone call. Fearing the ridicule, paid roaming charges!
Not sure why they actually put an earpiece in it.
Another option - Creative D100.
I've had a Creative D100 for 2 years.
Pros:
- sound quality is really good, even good bass
- bluetooth range is really good
- cheaper @£35
Cons:
- bigger than this Desaia one
- no internal rechargeable battery, takes 4xAA or mains
- has a proprietary power supply, not usb
Sennheiser have a few bluetooth headphones too. The sound quality is excellent but OMG they are expensive.
Anyway- regardless of what headphones you have- install the Equalizer app from the android market! It's free, lets you adjust bass and treble etc. (even with spotify), and really makes a difference to music.
And I was a solid user (work and home) for 6+ years. I even ran Ubuntu as the only OS on my macbooks.
Unity is worse than Linux in the old days. At least back then, when you had to configure stuff manually, the end result was a productive desktop.
If I ever return I'll try Xfce. Thanks for the good review.
...certainly know how to block VOIP traffic.
They are running a scam where people who naively sign up for a mobile broadband contract (3G dongle) see skype work well for the first 7 days, only to find that after 7 days skype gets blocked.
Then a call to Vodafone reveals they want an extra €20 per month to unblock it. The scheme has some nice synergies with their "return within [but not after] 7 days for a full refund" facility.
You know I often would like to rent movies via the PSN store, but the search feature is just so ridiculously lame. Like you can either browse (but not search) all movies to rent OR search all movies to buy + rent together. So you end up with majority of search results not available to rent.
It's such a basic failure. I hope they fix that.
Having been a Sony fan for years - TVs, surround sound, ps3, phones, I swore last year that I would never buy a Sony Ericsson or Sony device again, following a ridiculous experience with my Xperia X10 phone - outlandish bugs, crapware, no updates, blatant apathy from customer service, and a locked bootloader to prevent me installing roms that actually work.
Then this week they announce they'll deliver Gingerbread to the X10, and future phones will have bootloader unlocked? Significant steps in the right direction.
Shame for Sony I've switched to HTC as a result, and I've recommended to people to avoid SE, but now I might consider them again if they stay competitive with this sort of approach.
@whiteafrican
Android market transaction fees:
http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=112622
Advertising income:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/05/googles-eric-schmidt-says-android-is-profitable-could-eventual/
"Are you profitable if it was broken out as a separate business?"
Rubin: "Yes."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/07/android-profitable-rubin-google
FYI Java is the #1 language requested in job advertisements. So it's not surprising that it's the one taught in universities at all. See http://langpop.com/ or http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html . I agree with the author's supply & demand rationale, but in practice the highest demand is for Java.
I'm a Java developer [surprised? :)] (graduate of 2003), employed, and whilst I disagree with the author on language choice, I agree that so many new graduates have no idea how basic elements of computers work.
To be a really good programmer I'd expect candidates to have *curiosity about how things work*.
We have 10 Windows servers and 35 Linux servers i.e. 12% Windows 78% Linux.
Our purchases of Windows licenses were recorded. Our CentOS installations from templates (which must be a really common way to roll out Linux servers) are not recorded.
All market share surveys I've seen would count companies like us as 100% Windows shops, but it couldn't be further from reality.
60% of web servers run Linux. 40% run Windows. It's very easy to determine web server market share by OS reliably, because web server software identifies itself. Source: Steve Ballmer http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/151568/ballmer_still_searching_for_an_answer_to_google.html
The question is whether web server OS market share is indicative of non-web server market share (the OS running on servers which are not directly on the Internet). In our case it is indicative.
You do realise that most general server OS market share "reports" by the likes of IDC are based on Linux Vs. Windows server *revenues*? Can you spot a problem there?
Regarding the suitability for Linux versus Windows on servers. Does Microsoft compete on performance anymore? Name a benchmark that shows Windows is a better choice.
The only thing Microsoft is competing on is "familiarity". And that is shaky ground.
We have 10 Windows servers and 35 Linux servers i.e. 12% Windows 78% Linux.
Our purchases of Windows licenses were obviously recorded. But we self-installed Linux on the other servers, and we don't need support.
The criteria in all IDC surveys I've seen would count companies like us as 100% Windows shops.
In mild terms I'd say IDC surveys are deliberately misleading. They never mention such omissions in their reports.
I'm a Java developer, and I agree that Java desktop apps have been rubbish. Mainly I hated the way they looked. As others have said, non-technical people would be more familiar with Java as crappy-looking Java desktop apps than when they unknowingly access Java servers. And that has annoyed me.
Until last year that is. There was a major release of Java last year (Java 6 update 10) which added a new theme for Java desktop apps called "Nimbus" which finally makes Java apps look slick. Better late than never.
You should try IntelliJ IDEA. It's simply the best IDE I've ever used.
If you use it you'll never want to go back to eclipse/netbeans. It takes 1 keystroke in IDEA to do things that take 3 mouse clicks in the others. It just understands Java programming so well it suggests in the context of what you're doing what you might want to do next as the first option, so you can just hit Enter without taking your hands off the keyboard.
It's Swing editor is crap though by the way- I still use Netbeans for designing Swing forms. But for everything most things IDEA is brilliant.
You can try it free for 30 days then persuade your company to buy it for you :)
We use JBoss exclusively here, on CentOS. I like Ubuntu desktop a lot, but bundling an app server we don't use will make me want to move to Ubuntu server less.
@Joe Geer- PHP vs Java, I think there's space for both. However take note that Java is the most popular programming language in the world: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
... so by claiming it's slow [citation needed] or "dog like on the server" [citation needed] isn't going to get agreement from its many advocates!
"any app that is remotely complex or unusual will likely run with major glitches"
I use Wine to run only one Windows program on Linux - SlingPlayer. I'd consider this both very complex and unusual - streaming live TV from a remote device, remote controlling it and displaying the video in acellerated DirectX.
SlingPlayer works perfectly in Wine, just like on Windows, and lets me watch my SlingBox from Linux. SlingMedia provide instructions for doing this, which is quite easy.
I don't get that. I use Open Office all the time, and I haven't found anything that it can't do that MS Office does.
In fact I find the spreadsheet app has much nicer graphing options than I had previously in MS Office, and I've used it to do some fairly complex analyses.
Ignoring Open Office is a bit like ignoring the large elephant sitting in the corner of your room. You're scared, I get it. But sooner or later you should investigate some alternatives to MS because those who have tend not to look back.
I lived in the States for a while about 5 years ago, and back then at least, I found the cost of using a mobile there a lot more expensive than in Europe.
The most significant difference I found was that I had to pay to *receive* calls as well as to make calls. Another difference I remember was going into cellphone stores asking what the tariff for sending text messages to Europe was, and they were like "what's a text message"!
I believe things have changed significantly re:text messaging Stateside since i.e. it is now available and used. Having to pay for receiving calls still puzzles me however. I had a prepay phone at the time and one time I had 50c credit left (enough to make a 1 minute call back then), and someone called me with a wrong number, and by answering it I used all my remaining credit! (calls were billed per-minute) I'm sure things have improved in 5 years, but back then I found the cellphones a lot more expensive Stateside.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
