babebridou

I was merely trying to disambiguate the notion of state (as in United States of America) and the notion of State (as in Member State of the European Union), but you're right in putting a big warning sign on my taxonomy, since it's easily the kind of things that could (and actually has) lead to wars.

Oh and good thing my terms are German-centric, since I'm French. We don't even have the notion of state here in our civic system (but we do have tons of others of course).

Every time I read about Vim I feel left off of something huge. Some of the super duper easy shortcuts suggested in this thread translate horribly to AZERTY. For instance ctrl+[ is alt+shift+ctrl+5 on a French Mac or ctrl+altgr+4 on a French PC keyboard.

This is just false. Just to clear things up:

- a state with lower-case S is a subdivision of a Federal Country.

- a State with upper-case S is a synonym of Country.

- All members of the EU are States/Countries. Some of these countries are Federal (Germany for instance) and are subdivised into states (Länder in the case of Germany).

- Some States of the EU include multiple Nations. UK is one of these. Scotland is neither a State nor a state for example, but it's a nation.

- Some States of the EU have territories that encompass States that are not members of the EU. Monaco or the Vatican are examples. Some of these States belong to the Eurozone though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstates_and_the_European_Un...

You don't need to "own the domain", strictly speaking, you need to use a unique package identifier. Owning the domain and using it for package naming is a good enough convention and helps avoid conflicting identifiers.

Java package naming convention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_package#Package_naming_con...

Useful Stackoverflow discussion http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6273892/android-package-n...

If you don't own any domain, get one, it will help you tons and you can recoup the cost by passing on a cup of coffee every other sunday morning.

Mine is to just stand up, push the volume a bit and start dancing as if the world was ending outside. This is so satisfying!

Your mileage may vary on the quality of the team's job.

From where I stand Android is one of those big corporate projects that lets people watch its source code. The ugly parts are on display for all to see, point and rage at, like you just did.

On the other side of the fence, even tickets (open or closed) for iOs aren't publicly available. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6355397/list-of-known-xco...

I've got a serious mental contingency bomb setup to explode whenever my mind wanders and thinks about reflection. I think about it, the bomb explodes, I stand up and go for a walk and when I come back the whole thought process that lead me to consider reflection is wiped clean, ready for a fresh redesign from scratch.

It's not that I don't see value in Reflection, it's just that I'm sick of debugging it.

Abstractfactories are not that bad, actually if you're in the habit (like me) to always step in and write an interface before you start any abstract, you pretty soon understand why it's a good or bad idea - interfaces of factories are so damn trivial that even an abstractfreak will see this as redundant work and will want to write an interface of this factory interface and then a factory interface factory through code injection, preferrably through annotations, but it could be from other means such as a properties file or xml configuration, so they think about a factory interface abstract factory (and of course its interface). By then, even the craziest persons give up and just do their job.

3 years into Android and those devices still can't display webpages at the speed and precision that we'd need them to. I haven't had the chance to try out Ice Cream Sandwich yet, but I have this rule of thumb: html5 is crossbrowser alright, but not crossplatform yet.

When I look at how my desktop's chrome browser is faring with Twitter being laggy to scroll, with processes taking up far more ram than what the android heap would allow, all this while the devices display sizes increase radically and hog for even more graphic performance... I simply don't see HTML5 as any sort of reasonable option for Android, at least until the market is filled with ICS+ API level devices. And even then, I still haven't seen if ICS can handle webviews properly enough for building full apps.

As I said in the other thread, there are two patterns, one is a Delegate pattern (IOS) where draw method lookup per pixel coordinate is trivial, and the other is a listener pattern, where view layout, composition and superposition is trivial. One is easy 98% of the time and super hard 2% of the time (iOS) and the other is relatively slow all the time but with much more potential for cross-process interactions.

In Android, you can have a translucent popups from App#1 appear on top of any sort of screen of App#2. You can't have this on iOS. At all.

On the other hand, animations and scrolling are blazing fast on iOS without any need for superior hardware.

I honestly believe that this alone explains the "lacking" in performance that Android suffers from: it targets super high-end multi-core devices, with JIT compilers and optimizers that don't exist yet, in order to allow functionalities that are unclear to everyone of us.

Shameless plug: I made an app (1) that illustrates what iOS will never be able to do. The question is, will anyone ever need that sort of app on their phone?

(1) https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.linkpr...

Poor choice of words on my part. It's not "poor code" but "inadequate code". The Android graphics API is, overall, inadequate for avoiding GCs at all costs. Java on the other hand, is not necessarily inadequate. The issues with GC and the Bitmap class are a good example: Bitmaps aren't designed to work at the lowest & fastest level but at the highest and easiest level.

Nothing beats primitives and buffers - the performance gap between the two methods is huge, that's true, but it's not a showstopper.

I don't recall gcs in other processes hurting my apps performances though. With that said, if I'm going to write a game, I'll make sure none of the threads in my process will trigger a GC past the loading/splash screen. This means no instanciations of any additional iterators, collections, Strings... The overhead of allocations is almost as bad for the framerate as the GC anyway.

You're beating a dead horse alright, but it's the wrong one.

Garbage collection has never had anything to do with poor UI performances, and everything to do with making poor code stutter. When the GC starts hitting your framerate, it means you are creating far too many objects and far too frequently. Before ICS, android implemented the incremental GC that runs more often but for "negligible" sub-1ms lengths.

If you absolutely need 60fps, make sure the GC never gets to do any work and start monitoring your own memory through buffers, just like you would in any other language.

You're 100% right. For more information on this issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434

I'm afraid I have absolutely no knowledge of these. I'm more of a high-level self-taught app dev, things that happen under the hood go far above my head most of the time :)

If you want to enjoy both smooth scrolling and responsive input method in a webview, you need to juggle between those layer types.

LAYER_TYPE_HARDWARE enables smooth hardware-backed scrolling but glitches badly when the soft keyboard is visible (no resizing/panning of the webview, multiple seconds of delay between key type and text updates inside textfield forms).

LAYER_TYPE_NONE makes scrolling in the webview unbearably stuttering, but at least the soft keyboard becomes responsive, the webview pans correctly to show the field in which you're inputting text, and the key types are instant.

On top of that, there is the problem that you don't have access to keyboard show/dismiss events, so you have to inject javascript code to catch those in every page you plan your webview to display. This is at least the case on the Motorola Xoom and the Acer Iconia tablets running the latest versions of honeycomb.

I've had the chance to enjoy dual-core android phones (Atrix, 2.2) & tablets (Xoom, 3.1). The difference compared to single-cores is gigantic, everything is super smooth, on the level of the iPhone/iPad as far as responsiveness goes for apps and home screen. I have to say that if the goal is to have a superb OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception:

Android's Webview unfortunately requires a rewrite from scratch. It just doesn't work as soon as the webview is more than a static page. Css Animations don't play anywhere near fast enough, there are furious hardware acceleration glitches whenever the touch keyboard pops up, touch events are slow as hell, etc.

The article only touches the surface of the problems with the Webview component. At this point we don't care about scrolling. since one pretty much has to hack a custom Webview component just to avoid all the hardware glitches, display artifacts, buggy input handling, terrifying variations of performance from device to device...

I wonder if it has anything to do with the Delegate pattern used in iOS vs Android's Listener pattern when it comes to handling continuous touch events on the main thread, rather than the rendering speed.

A good part of that is episodic and accidental. There have been instances of those "spammy" internal mails that just can't give up, such as a mail sent by the HR to inform people that a car was left with lights on in the morning with everyone (and not just the building) in cc instead of bcc or a contact group, with endless streams of "reply all" asking to remove them from the mailing list.

These happen, and in very large companies these issues can degenerate fast unless your email admins are on their toes. Repeat the incident once a year and it's fine. Repeat it once a month and you have a failing email system with very visible streaks of 200+ mails/day.

So isn't your best strategy to install both apps just to be sure? They don't seem to have the exact same detection procedure nor the same result.

I'm starting to wonder why I'm even arguing, it's like comparing the landing page of a company website to its wikipedia entry when all you want is the exact spelling of their latest product.

UI? what ui? All the app does is open a detection report. The "better app" shows a green/yellow icon and links to other apps. The "worse app" shows a list of tests performed along with "found/not found".

The whole app UI is basically install/run/home/uninstall.

(by the way, no carrierIQ found on Motorola Atrix w/Orange French ISP)

Thanks for the useful link. Now to enable proxy settings on the Atrix...

Alright. So for now I don't see much "phone-home trouble" but I'm far from the security expert around here. There are a few http queries (both GET and POST) made using some plain text OAUTH tokens to the MotoBLUR servers, but as far as I could notice nothing was really sending much information. Then again, the first thing you do when you launch blur for the first time is giving it your twitter/facebook/gmail account login&passwords, so... I'll get what I deserve here :P

The only "tracking/keylogging" queries I could find were done to data.flurry.com, and were only tracking (in plain text) my inputs on the Winamp App, so I call it fair play.

I'm a bit relieved here, thanks again for the tip with Charles. Let's hope someone with a better expertise than me will definitely rule Motorola out of that CarrierIQ logging thing, but so far, so good.

I just checked on my Motorola Atrix. I didn't see any CarrierIQ process, but the Blur framework is logging tons of stuff on ADB, such as all key inputs for the autocompletion software or every swipe movement on the home screen, but no https query appear to be logged at first glance. "Search Intent" terms on the other hand are logged. I never really trusted Blur because until the latest few versions of the ADT the LogCat console was messed up with debug messages from EON & Blur and it was a pain to keep it somewhat static and readable for my own devs, but these couple reports on keylogging frameworks make me look twice at my own phone now.

I'd like to run wireshark to check out what's really going out of my phone when I'm on the wifi - I'm a bit of a novice in that area (network monitoring), does anyone have any pointers of things to look for?

Here's an interesting experiment done by indie game developer SoS for Black Friday: he released a bundle of 13 indie games for 1$, available for just one day. He got some traction thanks to Notch, who tweeted that the games were interesting and easily worth 1/13th of a dollar each.

The bundle is (was?) accessible from http://sos.gd/bundle/

The transaction takes place in 3 steps:

  1. download
  2. purchase - this step is optional
  3. play
  unspecified 4: purchase if you haven't, still optional

I personally didn't even download them so I can't say anything about the quality of the product, I just thought it was somewhat relevant to the discussion, since SoS published real time stats during the operation. That's pretty much ideal conditions in my book for indie publishing, so the stats are actually worth something:

4207 downloads and $276 earnings within a single day. 6.5% of the downloaders purchased the product, regardless of whether they liked what they saw.

Recent (French) history tells us that this argument will probably not be taken into account by the law makers, because they are in majority incompetent, and more importantly this argument isn't backed with promises of positive income nor better behaviour. They will blindly look at the exposed pros and cons, and their limited expertise will merely say "so what" to these cons. The SOPA project, much like all Internet regulation projects, are considered as short-term "win-win" deals and long-term "win-don't care" deals with the Entertainment Majors. Since they expect the masses to not understand the cons either and keep voting the way they always did, they don't foresee any negative mid-term consequences either.

Arguments against Internet Regulation laws have to include profits for the government, otherwise I'm afraid the law makers will keep on not listening.

Ah, yeah, true. And fortunately, they are not that dumb as to hurry up and make things worse than they already are... or are they?

Orange (major French ISP) tried to monetize a securization solution based on a 2€/month contract that would block P2P traffic from unauthorized WLAN clients directly on the box. The solution was hacked within days (hours? not sure), simply by grabbing plain-text IP adresses of all the users with a simple /status http query to the webserver of the service provider, and injecting them on random P2P networks using IPFuck (sic), de facto forcing all customers to break the law.

Orange retired their solution from the market and decided to never again try to take on that subject.

Right now the only official stance from HADOPI (3-strikes organization) is a recommandation to use WPA2 instead of WEP. Still no means of securization, so if you get caught, you're to blame for not doing something nobody knows how to do.

Your analysis is right, but unfortunately the decree has been published last year. The first few third-strokes were struck in the past few months.

(FR) http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;?cidTexte...

I'm French and this is honestly the very first time I ever heard of this service. I'm not in the target audience, but 8 million users in France? Riiiiiight, that's more than 13% of our total population, roughly 20% of all French internet users, or one Facebook user in three. It's roughly equal to sum of the population of the top 3 to 10 most populated cities in the country along with their whole urban surroundings, or 2/3rd of the population of Paris.

This figure makes no sense to me. Even assuming it's targetting a very specific population that I share no connection to, it's still a ridiculous figure. The biggest (in revenue) dating website in France (and apparently, in Europe, too) is Meetic. It had less than a million registered users in december 2010 in total, including other companies in the group.

After a quick search on independent consumer satisfaction services, turns out there are a lot of people whose accounts were created through fishing or the likes, or even without consent. Just by reading the tons of user comments, this really looks like a major scammy, fishy, spammy and illegal service (illegal at least in France, since it refuses to comply to our Privacy & Freedom directives).

There are some satisfied comments, too, so this service probably works well enough in some ways, I just can't take these figures at face value.

I agree with you 100% - my comment was mostly wishful thinking, a description of how Dell could make me change my mind.

This kind of marketing is one I can't quite understand. I mean, what is he after? Buzz? Funding? What's his endgame? Why & how is he paying people to work on it? Is his marketing strategy to troll the profession & the audience, and he really has something big up his sleeve?

Why is he using the Vaporware approach?

What I don't like with "Unlimited Details" is that Dell refuses to say what the engine can't do yet. We know it's a work in progress. We (the internet) are excited about it because it's an experiment that's on scale with what we could expect from that branch of 3D graphics technology. Trillions of atoms, whatever. Show us what's still in progress because the internet is skeptical about this, this and this.

Hacking reflexion by duplicating the scene is a good way to start, because no one can say whether it's a good or a bad solution to a non-trivial problem - it gets the job done for now - but can you have multiple coexisting versions of the world? like a vertical mirror, a horizontal body of water and an underwater section?

To Dell: just stop handwaving the questions already, we get it that you ignored the state of the art and built your own thing, just tell us what it can't do yet, show us your current progress and you'll be met with much less skepticism, and even help, even if you keep your trade secrets, at least show us your specs! You won't be struck down by lightning if you talk - no one ever died from reinventing/copying the wheel and making it so good that the wheel can fly.

It's not that easy. I live in France, and the taxes you currently pay are far inferior to ours in many cases. We still see the same phenomenon as you do with speeding tickets.

Speeding tickets are a boon for any form of government, just like smoking taxes or any other easily justified tax/ticket for punishing bad habits of the masses. You can't make them disappear by finding another source of revenue, because they represent an opportunity for easy cash that is also politically correct.

> The 112,000 or so tickets given each day add up to over 41 million tickets per year – that’s 19.5% of the populous! Between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6 American citizens will be ticketed for speeding this year [...]

This struck me as a misleading use of statistics, because Pareto likes to say hi everytime we try to correlate a repeatable event and a global population. Most of those tickets will actually go to the same drivers, and Pareto's Law even gives us handy empirical proportions. 80% of the tickets will probably go to the same 20% subgroup.

This means that we have ~8 million tickets to distribute more or less randomly/statistically (over let's say ~8 million american citizens), and then ~2 additional millions get the rest of the tickets, for a total of 10 million ticketed people per year, or roughly 3-5% of the population.

Which is still huge and doesn't exactly change the author's point.