akmiller

The best advice I could ever offer on this topic is to know your audience. If you have a server in the U.S. and you have a large customer base in China you will generally be better served by fewer larger requests than several smaller requests as the latency on each request is often the biggest killer of performance.

I can only offer my opinion obviously, but I like the information that can be available at a glance. Launching my most often applications are also 1 click away instead of 2 or 3. However, that being said, my favorite part of Windows 8 (so far) is how keyboard friendly it is. I use OSX, Ubuntu, and now Windows 8 daily and I think they have all gotten to a state where if you like your hands to rarely leave the keyboard you can work within all 3 very well.

Back to your original point though, I would suggest trying it out for a week or so. I was hesitant as well, but so far it seems very natural and fluid to me. Even scrolling sideways to see more tiles just feels very natural.

I think flip-flopping in politics is often a politician changing his view in a short amount of time and not admitting to the prior held view.

If a politician changes his view and publicly states that he held a very different view before but he was swayed by x, y, and z then I think nobody would accuse them of flip-flopping.

I'd like to see someone provide a service in a similar vein to this but just for photos.

What I'm thinking is a service that uses Glacier to store my photo library and some type of front end service (like dropbox) that keeps a low res version of that photo along with some meta data about it.

My reasoning for this is that we all build up pretty significant photo libraries (mines already over 60GB) and I'm always trying to make sure I have them backed up. I currently use a paid plan at Dropbox so I can put them all up there but it's kind of a waste since I hardly ever pull many of them down again. Every once in awhile I browse through them looking for certain pictures that I might need to get a copy of (which is why I'd need the low res copies easy to access/browse) and then be able to choose which ones to pull down from glacier. The other good thing about a service like that is the need is not typically immediate.

Maybe I'll look into building this since it's something I'd love to have for myself!

Have you never worked for a large corporation that owned or was owned by another entity. I have and I can tell you that while we were owned by someone else we still operated as an individual company. Their may have been some changes, but day to day operations were very much unchanged.

Why does Apple Insider continually use "Google" in this story instead of Motorola Mobility. Yes, Google owns them but they are still their own entity. It's silly to suggest that since a company owns another company that they oversee everything that company does. I think it's fair to say "Google's Motorola Mobility", but if you just read this article you would think that Google itself was behind the advertising campaign.

Samsung makes windows phones as well. In fact they are one of the first to announce Windows 8 device:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/samsung-windows-pho...

I despise Apple's practices, but I'm typing that on my MBP. In all fairness it is a company machine and my main reason for having it is that we do some iOS development. That being said, it's still one of the nicest laptops (as far as form factor and hardware) around so I wouldn't fault anyone for choosing their hardware. I would personally, however, choose a linux variant in a heartbeat if I could somehow solve the iOS development issue.

This really messes with the way I work with images. I'll open base prototypes and start playing with changes not knowing at that point if I'll want to save them or not. If I end up keeping them, at that point I'd save as a new file. Seems like auto-save should be app level preferences that should be able to be turned off. I don't want to duplicate a file every time I want to do some experimentation!

You would still hope that an OS upgrade wouldn't leave your data in an unusable state! As someone above pointed out, it would've been pretty easy for the OS install to determine if you had feeds and export them into an open format and let the user know where they had been exported too so that they may then do something with it.

I don't think the lack of the feature is the main complaint in the article it's that her data seemed to be suddenly gone (I know she eventually found it but it took a third part tool to try to export the proprietary format into something usable).

And if you spent years and millions of dollars coming up with it and some other company somewhere else was doing the same and in the end you had very similar if not identical algorithms why is it that one of you is entitled to use your own creation and the other is not?

That's the thing I can't get past with most of your arguments on here. If an algorithm is truly unique and worth the patent then in reality it shouldn't need the patent at all.

I also don't understand the "I invented an extremely complicated algorithm for solving X" mentality. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us in solving more and more complicated problems. Without the software, algorithms, and general knowledge of computing that have been made available to us we'd not be able to take that and build ever more complicated systems on top of that.

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't it be possible for Google to take the Q, add more of the Android experience including the full Google Marketplace, create a nice bluetooth controller for it, and completely squash this thing? They'd probably need to come down in price about 100 bucks, but I bet that's doable.

Those may be skewed though by the amount of people that simply choose tethering over getting a 3g enabled tablet/device.

I'm one of those people as I have several devices (kindles and tablets) so I prefer paying for one data plan on my phone and tethering vs. individual data plans for each.

Where Microsoft is going makes much more sense to me (I actually think Apple may be headed that direction too as each release of the desktop OS seems to add more and more iOS features).

It seems like Microsofts end game is that you will have one device and the interface for interacting with that device will depend on where you are. If docked at home with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse you get more of the desktop feel. Unplug the device and take it with you and you have more of the touch based interface.

I assumed that sharing media to the Q would show up as a new intent in the Jelly Bean SDK but I haven't seen anything to that effect yet. Hopefully something like that will be in the SDK soon!

I don't see inclusion of 4G on any tablet devices as a plus. It drives up the cost slightly more and it has never really made sense for each device to have their own cellular connection.

Most people who buy tablets are likely to have a smartphone so it would seem more appropriate to have tethering and use that one connection for multiple devices.

I realize that's a personal choice, but I currently own an iPad 2, Kindle Fire, 2 Kindle Touches, and I just bought the Nexus 7. I'd rather pay for one connection and tether all those devices to that connection than each one have their own.

" and even if they try to repair it I can never forgive them for ie6."

You can never forgive them for making the absolute best browser on the market at the time it was released? Don't blame Microsoft because there are people out there are still trying to use IE6 today.

Exactly, not sure why I got the down-vote above. You can't simply edit the app name and change it after the app has passed review.

No, you cannot change the App name once the application is in the app store. On top of that, all app names must be unique.

That's not true. Almost all decisions in court are made in light of similar cases that had been tried in the past.

Therefore, it stands to reason that any decision made, whether for or against Google, could effect future decisions for companies involved in similar suits.

I think, in this particular instance, a decision against Google could have set a terrible precedent.

Why are people building frameworks to sit on top of yet another framework to try to write cleaner more maintainable code???

What is wrong with writing your core application logic physically removed from any of these frameworks. Why do people insist on fitting their application into the Rails framework or any other web framework.

Write your core application code in Ruby (or your language of choice), package it in another gem, use tools and patterns we've had all along to plug that code into a dependency for persistence (if needed)...communicate with it through a standard API that you define for your delivery mechanism (i.e. Rails).

I just don't get this idea of trying to contain my application code within the confines of a specific framework.

What is your point exactly? I'm pretty certain the carriers do their homework before placing orders. They don't want a ton of inventory just sitting on their shelves. So the carriers expect to sell them and Samsung did sell them (doesn't matter who bought them).

Maybe it's the version of Android? I just got the HTC One X and everything flies on that phone. No delays or lag on anything. Best phone I've used to date (and I've had all iPhones except the 4s).

> The (huge) sticking point is cross-platform development and work on Windows.

It's still pretty good thanks to the work the Xamarin guys have done.

We have a large .NET code based developed on Windows for Windows and out of curiosity once we tried to compile under Mono. We were expecting hundreds of issues and we ended up with only a few errors and if I'm not mistaken I believe it had to do with some of the file based handling code we had. Granted we never fixed those and attempted to run it, but I think they've done some amazing work.

Even now, one of the only ways (maybe the only?) to build a re-usable library for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 is to build .Net library that compiles under Mono.

One thing, many of these anti-IE articles seem to ignore is business outside of the United States.

We are a global business and China's most popular browser (at least with users hitting our site) seems to be Maxthon which is based on the Trident rendering engine (which of course is what IE uses). This makes it nearly impossible for us to ever consider cutting off IE support unless we wanted to neglect one of our largest growing user-bases in the world.

Make sure you seriously consider which parts of the world your app could potentially be used in and do the research to find out what browsers they use in that area.

Try BrowserStack, it's awesome. I am not affiliated with them in any way, but we have to support several different configurations for our web application and it's pretty impressive. Much better than having several virtual machines locally which I used to do!

I'd like the ability to have 16GB of RAM in a machine that's the size of an Air or Ultrabook. It seems at the moment, that is impossible to find.

I keep hearing the "lack of 3rd party apps" and I have to wonder, are people really using that many applications? I was on iOS for a long time and am now using WP7 and I guess I just don't understand what apps people are looking for??

What I find lacking, coming from the Apple world, is the severe lack of accessories for my phone. Finding even a simple dock or a decent case is a pain.

I'm also a Windows Phone user and the Zune software on the phone is 2nd to none. However, I do not subscribe to Zune for the simple reason that my desktop of choice is Linux and OSX and Microsoft refuses to make a way for me to be able to listen to my music on those platforms (without running a virtual). How hard is it to allow me web access to their music collection!

It's definitely an inspirational story in a way...but lets not be quick to call the other kids "losers".

We must remember that they are all kids just trying to find their way. Some kids find their way by trying their best to fit in while others might be like the kid in this story.

You can build this kid up while not tearing the others down. Even the kids who are popular and mean, like the girl he mentions in the story, may at an older age find some of the things they did in school reprehensible. Lets not condemn them while they are still young and immature.