Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Eve Online (Score 1) 555

There is another reason why majority of players is older gamers : in EVE, your character skill is directly linked to real-life time.

To equip the best ships, to be able to make the best items, to get the most from what you mine, ... you need skills... And skills are trained in real-time with ridiculous long training times...

x1 means 4 days for level 5... and it go up to x14 or such which means something like 2 month for the level 5 (and you need to train lower level too... and prerequisite skills...) So, before your character has some decent skill, you need several months (5-6 month at least) and before having serious skills, you need 1 or 2 years of game...

Your activity in game has very little influence on your character development... well, you have to raise your standings by doing some missions, that'll lower taxes and allow you to create jumpclones (unless one of your corp members has a clone vat in his capital ship)... You'll be able to make money... But CCP has formalized the "gold farming" by selling PLEX which can then be traded for 1/2 billion ISK in game...

So, unless you're playing with real life friends, EVE is a very frustrating game...

Comment Re:Feeble minds. (Score 0) 432

The only thing found on objective testing is in execution of java based benchmarks within browsers. There is nothing comparing it in any meaningful way beyond that.

There are standard phone benchmarks.

Benchmark suppose comparing two phones doing the same thing in same conditions. I suppose OpenGL rendering from native code could apply... Executing native code on one side and Dalvik code on the other is not.

Camera quality is just like audiophile equipment, entirely subjective. No one can agree on what makes a camera good.

There are measures of camera quality. More importantly things like "do pictures blur under situation x" aren't subjective.

Camera quality... like having saphire glass tainting the picture (errrhmmm)... Or good camera resolution (hmmmm)... or good sensor sensitivity accompagned by a good flash system... Saying that the iPhone has a superior camera is a bold affirmation... and probably false.

. Being able to wait two days between charges is not fantastic.

It is for a smartphone

Samsung Galaxy SII, brand new battery, not rooted (so no CPU speed trick), with a power-manager (which turns on/off wifi/2G/3G according to the situation) can last nearly one week before having to be charged... two days you say ???

As long as the criteria is only comparing walled gardens.

Yeah.

Humble Bundle... OK for Android, forget it for iPhone (and other) Most major application exist on both platform... some are specific on ONE... and it happens both way. For example, as a Go Player, I can only play on KGS with an Android Phone... No port to iPhone... (and KGS is probable THE reference for serious Go players, IGS is going junk, Yahoo is a joke, ...)

What does that even mean?

It means it has productivity apps designed for the form factor (phone or tablet) people use with it.

Stop with that non-sense... If you want to do serious productivity work, forget about the phones and even about the tablets... You really need some computer. You can't replace mouse/keyboard and lots of RAM... The smartphones and tablets are meant to CONSUME data, not to create it... The only tablet that comes near to a productivity-ready is the Galaxy Note 10.1 with it's stylus (same technology than Wacom drawing tablets... well... stylus made by Wacom so it's normal)... And even so, it's far from a REAL computer.

There are many free cloud services that don't require you to buy something in order to get it.

For applications. No there aren't. Name 2.

Cloud for application is a joke... you are only meant to CONSUME data so you only have to have a way to DOWNLOAD data... so Dropbox and other are more than enough... and are way more compatible with other equipment (including sharing with people in Windows/Linux world). Cloud without data-sharing is a joke... Even more when you can plug a 32-64Gb SD-card in your phone which exceed whatever cloudstorage that you can have. Your analysis is based on some false premices like "an iPhone is made for productivity"... A smartphone is about being able to read mail (and write SHORT answers), using apps to CONSUME data, having a nice shared calendar (and on that point, Google with it's Google Calendar is way more useful than iPhone) and some little things like that... Try to write a 10-15 pages report on your phone so we can have a good laugh at you !!!

Comment Re:Only relevant line (Score 2, Insightful) 629

Google already made an HTML5 version of his youtube app... it's called the web version of youtube... With full Youtube experience...

Also, I understand that Google is picky about Ad in it's content... First, it's his (only ?) source of income and second, it's part of the restriction that content-owners putt with their app and if Google don't manage it reliably, the content owners will deny access to their content to whole Youtube community !

Comment Re:Cheap adapter AND APPLE's fault (Score 1) 457

That's why there is the second option : a fully-insulated enclosure (like you have in nearly all the phones... or is it all the phones except apple's ?)

In Belgium, we have another thing that makes things secure : the whole electrical installation in houses has to go through a 300mA differential switch (and lines to water rooms an additionnal 30mA) which means that if there is a leak to the ground, the whole circuit will shut down.

You can't be sure that every computer USB socket, every wall-mounted USB-socket, every "public phone charge booth" and so on will be secure... so, common sense would be to be sure that the phone is secure.

Comment Cheap adapter AND APPLE's fault (Score 3, Interesting) 457

The cheap adapter may have sent big voltage to the phone connecteor... But IT'S THE APPLE DESIGN that bring that voltage outside the phone...

If the two leads of the charger are (relative to ground) 220V and (220+5)V, the phone should charge just fine and the user would still be fine...
If the charger send a rogue voltage (like 0V and 220V), the phone internals should get fried... but the user should still be fine...

But some retard thought it'd be cool to use the metal frame of the phone as an antenna... This lead to the "antenna-gate" with people losing their phone signal when holding the phone the wrong way, but that part is more funny than other. But this also mean that any invalid voltage sent to the phone connector may also reach that metallic frame and the user... With the sad consequences that you've seen here !!!

When you see electrical recommendation for electric appliances, you see that the box of an electric device should be grounded or completely insulated... Apple failed that basic recommendation... and THEY are responsible for that part.

Any phone charger can go rogue... this is even true for Apple's "official" chargers (even if risks are lower).

Comment Re:Fear... and Control... (Score 1) 396

This meant much... A good part of the strength of the dollar as money is linked from his status as "reference currency", including for Oil trading.

If Oil producers begin to make trasactions in Euro, it means that Euro get more momentum and dollar less, which could be very bad for US economy...

Irak was the first country to accept such trasactions, attacking (and ruining) Irak on false account of mass destruction weapons was also giving a strong message to other countries : don't mess with us and our "supremacy"...

Can you give any other plausible reason ? there are many other Oil producing dictatures... So, why Irak and not another one ?

Comment Why a Phone of all things (Score 2) 316

I have 4 different "compact" camera (no-name,Olympus, Fujifilm and Samsung), I've taken pictures from several phones (dumb nokia, HTC and Galaxy S2 (with a 8MP sensor)... but I will never return to these now that I've my DSLR... And if I had bought one from the start, I'd never had to buy the other one.

- less noise on low light conditions
- much better lenses which allow real zoom (not digital zoom) and such
- Much faster to take pictures (no delay which means that you take the precise image that you want)
- good continuous mode (several pictures in a row, at less than 1 sec interval which allow to pick up the best one)
- faster exposures (needed when you take picture of things which are moving, no more motion blur)
- much better battery capacity
- better sensivity on low light condition (due to larger lens opening)
and so on...

When I compage Galaxy S2 and Samsung camera (both having 8MP sensor), there is already a big difference thanks to the lens of the camera... and they both come from same manufacturer (camera is older than S2 and gives better pictures)

My guess is that they'll revert quickly to DSLR... journalism photographers have to take picture of things that are moving most of the time... that's definitively NOT the best use case for phone's cameras.

Comment Good to see someone turning to open standard (Score 1) 235

Imap and CalDAV exists for a long time... long before Google began to make Android... CardDAV is also a recognized standard. These are well known, stable and we can expect them to keep working the same way in 10 years

Exchange Active Sync is *not* a standard... it's a liability... Everyone knows that Microsoft is prone to *not* follow it's own standard... We've seen it with bad backward compatibility in the Office suite (sometimes, 3rd party word processors were doing a better job at converting Microsoft files from older to newer formats). We've seen it with ooxml (although it has been pushed through the troat of ISO, Microsoft DON'T follow it in it's office suite). Now that Microsoft has it's own smartphone environment, we see the risk of seeing some changes in EAS in order to give an advantage to WP8 over iOS and Android.

The move away from EAS and towards open standard is a good move, let's expect that Apple will do the good thing and go in the same direction... And, if everyone starts to use IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV instead of EAS, Microsoft *will* have to support them on it's outlook.com service if he don't want to become irrelevant. Eventually, it'll also help all Open Source projects who wil only have to support recognized open standard and not EAS.

About the changes in Calendar (reservable times on the calendar through appointment slots)... Well, I didn't even know these did exist... As most Google Calendar users... I guess that they had a good trace about which feature are in use and which are not in use and that they saw that nearly noone was using it...

Calendar via SMS in this time of smartphones is not a big loss... It's an US-only feature and I guess that those who were tech savvy (or addict) enough to have used that switched to a smartphone long ago...

I'm quite sure that Google knew what it was doing when he decided to axe these feature... And keep in mind that each extra (unused) feature is a potential source of bugs, takes time so slows down the development of other features and slows down the system running it... We see often people complaining about programs (or OS) who are slow, need insane computer power for what it do, ... Here, Google is taking the step needed to avoid that !!!

Comment Re:We are the 30% (Score 4, Insightful) 724

"they test and validate"...
This leads to poor security updates for applications in apple store because of the delays introduced byt the "testing and validation" procedure.

And that test is more about censorship (banning apps doing things THEY don't want to be done... like 3rd party in-app store, emulation or other 3rd langage interpreter to avoid "data as programs" which would bypass the Apple-Tax, ...). It's not about the good of the customers, it's only about their own good !!!

Slashdot Top Deals

8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss

Working...