AndrewHampton

Here's a picture of what it looks like: http://twitpic.com/3dupcl

I believe magamiako is referring to areas in World of Warcraft where thorium can be found.

I got really excited about this, so I immediately went to my local Radio Shack and picked this up. Sadly, my hopes of reading my work ID, passport, and store purchases were dashed when I saw the reader only works with the EM4100 family of RFIDs. I'm not sure what that means other than it won't ready anything I've stuck next to it other than the two supplied RFID tags.

Ah, that explains it. I didn't see that in the article.

I don't know much about voice encoding, but I'm really curious as to why all the example files are the same size (46.9 KB). Could someone explain why this is an advancement if the file sizes remain the same?

I suspect it has something to do with all of them using wav as the container, but would love to hear from someone more knowledgeable.

I think I would stick with yours if you were planning on continuing development for it. If you're not, I'll probably switch.

Thanks for developing the app, I've been using it for quite a while and really like it.

Just to be clear, does this mean you'll no longer be developing your app?

I think promises are gone now too. Removed sometime in this past Spring.

The 2.2 stats were updated today:

http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...

28% on 2.2 and almost 75% on 2.x

I think there's a third concept as well which is where most of the "openness" hype stems which is the ability to replace entire parts of the platform. Don't like the homescreen, dialer, camera app, keyboard? Just replace it with something you do like.

That's what I find most compelling about the Android platform. As long as I have access to the Android Market and the ability to install apps directly from the internet, most of the problems mentioned in the article can be sidestepped. With that being said, I do find the trend mentioned in the article to be somewhat alarming. Removing those two features really cripples the phone, but I expect most Android phones to leave those enabled.

I disagree. I think being able to install any .apk file I want from any source on the internet is a clear benefit of this openness.

Yes, I definitely think it's possible for Carriers/Manufacturers to really screw up the Android experience on any given phone. I just hope that those phones fail in the market.

The point I wanted to make in the original comment was just to debunk one of the arguments he was making for why Android is closed.

I think he is arguing it's less open when he says "isn’t the point of "open" supposed to be that the consumer can choose what they want on their own devices? Instead, open is proving to mean that the carriers can choose what they want to do with Android."

It could bring down the quality of the OS, but the fact that the option exists for Verizon or anyone to make their own Market makes it more open in my book.

I would agree with you if he was talking about removing the Android Market, but that's not the argument he made in the article. He said "it would likely be more prominently displayed than Android’s own Market for apps" which would leave the Android Market intact.

I don't understand how he could interpret Verizon making and promoting their own app store as meaning the platform isn't open. Am I missing something or is the fact that anyone can make their own app store mean the platform is more open?

Also, one minor nit is the 2.2 stats he's referring to are from August 2. I'm sure they'll be much higher with the 2.2 rollouts that occurred for Droids and Incedibles (others?) in August.

In the end, if manufacturers/carriers make a bad product, it will fail in the market, but with Android, they're free to do that if they want.

I really hope something this trivial doesn't merit the time of Congress. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

Same here, looks like they're rolling it out over the next few days:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/chat/thread?tid=74c14d...

Interesting that Google's Chrome 5.0 doesn't display the browser examples correctly, but the browser on my Android phone does.

Link to examples: http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma_dalai_lama.html

League of Legends is a really fun DoTA based game that I've been playing recently.

http://www.leagueoflegends.com/

Thanks for the explanation.

Based on the little I know about signal strength for digital phones, the number of bars really doesn't matter, The bars could just be replaced with an indicator letting you know whether or not you have strong enough signal to make a call. And from that perspective, the stats discussed today that there is less than one additional dropped call per 100 calls make this whole thing seem like a non-issue.

However, what I haven't heard discussed and would like to hear about from someone who knows what their talking about is whether or not signal strength affects data transfer rates. I use data a lot more than voice on my phone and if it's significantly easier to reduce the signal quality on the iPhone 4, I don't think I would get one.

Maybe I'm missing something, but if the problem is just the software that displays the number of bars, why does the iPhone 4 drop more bars than other iPhones which are running the same software?

It seems like there's still a problem with the antenna design that was just made more obvious by the software.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty the Motorola Droid has vanilla Android installed.

Edit: This doesn't really address your complaint since 2 vanilla Android phones isn't really that much different than one, but just wanted make sure the Droid wasn't left out.

I've been using GV for almost a year now and for the most part it's been great. I have had issues with certain people trying to call me as well and getting busy signals or operator error messages. From what I've read I think this has to do with routing tables not being updated in certain states for certain GV number blocks, and that it's really hard to get resolved.

That's exactly what I thought. It does look like a counter-intuitive route on the map though.

Never attribute to Google's malice that which can be adequately explained by ATT's stupidity.

There are the only 4 numbers in the results. Although I do see a few in this format XXXXXXXXXXXX2376.

(Edited to remove actual numbers in case they're not test numbers)

Any plans for an Un-Like-O-Matic?

I realized after about 20 of these that I would use the hex code when talking about these colors. While using firebug to check out the source, I noticed this field in the form:

input type="hidden" value="#2309a7" name="color"

It looks like anyone could just change the value of that hidden input and screw up the results.

I've been using this since the last time it was posted on HN and highly recommend it as well.