GP poster is just trolling, with his "Eclipse, like all free IDE's, sucks" comment. You don't notice him mentioning his own environment.

The only other strong suggestion he can make is Android Studio, which instead of bundling Android SDK with Eclipse it bundles Android SDK with IDEA. Which would be fine, if it wasn't languishing in bug reports of its own, new major releases every week, breaking due to Gradle configurations that cause hair-pulling (what the fuck is Gradle and what was wrong with Ant and Maven for dependency management), etc etc. And forget trying to migrate from Eclipse with the SDK over to Android Studio. For God's sake, even when Google I/O was going on, the current builds of Android Studio on offer still didn't work any better than the Eclipse SDK. Life apparently is no better in the Mac world but I don't have experience there.

Don't get me wrong, I love Android, I have 3 Android devices, I'm interested in developing Android apps personally. I'm not knocking Java, I use it. I'm not knocking existing IDEs, I use them. What I'm knocking is the constant moving target status of Android where things change so fucking quickly their own devs can't even keep up with their own IDE bundles or their own documentation. As a potential Android developer, everything I run into is a turnoff. Look at the project and look at all the open issues with the IDE tools and the SDK (forget API and device bugs, those are all to be expected, I'm talking serious problems with the developer tools only). I don't have time to deal with that shit for fun.

Let's say you're a competent Java developer and you'd like to build an Android app. I wish you the best of luck!

First you're going to need to pick an IDE. I've always used Eclipse and hey look, there's an Android SDK for Eclipse. Perfect! Download, extract, fire it up... Errors. This version of Android SDK requires Android API version foo, you have version (foo - 9), please use the SDK manager to upgrade. The hell, the IDE bundle doesn't even launch out of the box?

Alright, so you're distributing your IDE with an outdated version of your API, I can forgive that. Run SDK Manager like it suggested, let it do its thing,. Update available for SDK tools and SDK platform tools, looks good, do it! ...And, errors. Package not found, blah blah, let's see what Google has to say about this one.

OK, apparently hundreds of other developers are having the same problem and have, after much wrangling, figured out a solution on their own. I see, I have to go into SDK Manager Settings, create a new User-Defined Add-On Site pointing to https://dl-ssl.google.com/andr... because the URL that ships with the IDE is missing the "s" in "https" and that server doesn't have the right packages available to download. That highly intuitive process would surely have been my first try anyway, but at least someone else found the fix.

SDK Manager seems to find the packages now, great! Got past that hurdle so let's do the upgrade. Wait, now what! What do you mean you can't upgrade to SDK Tools rev. 23 while SDK Platform Tools 19.0.2 is installed? I checked the boxes to upgrade them both; if Platform Tools has to hit rev. 20 before SDK Tools can be upgraded, why is the installer going in the wrong order?

If and when you finally get the actual goddamned IDE installed and working, have fun with the official developer tutorials to create your first "Hello World" app. See, the API has changed over the years^Wmonth^Wpast week and so the app architecture that the tutorial talks about isn't valid anymore. XML files that it says should be there, aren't, so there's no way to follow along in the tutorial by editing them.

I gave up on Android and won't touch it again unless I'm being paid to.

We didn't just build industry. We built the freeway system. We built the space program. We rebuilt our military to defend the world against the Russians. That was all government spending. And yes, our top tax rate was 91%. Millionaires still made buckets of money. But, they paid their taxes and shit got done.

Then, Reagan came into office and lowered that top rate. All of a sudden, the government deficits started going up and work didn't get done. Millionaires started using their new buckets of money for speculation. Now, we're in a recession as a result of Wall Street speculation and we can't fix a fucking pothole let alone pave a single new freeway.

Ah, thanks.

[cryptic response]

Hooray! Congrats!

I've never had a CFL fail. I've been replacing incandescents with CFLs whenever a bulb burns out. My oldest CFL is 7 years old and my newest is a little under 1 year old.

Many of us are still living! Just a bit dispersed here and there.

Do you mean that I can't take some age-old idea, process or system, add "on the Internet" or "with a computer" to it and patent it?

Dog-walking on the Internet sounded so promising too.

The ISPs aren't creating "slow lanes." They're simply refusing to widen the freeway until they're paid to do so.

Funny. Customers pay their ISPs for an advertised bandwidth. Content providers also pay ISPs for advertised bandwidth. Yet, ISPs are still able to turn up the speed if content providers pay them extra. It sounds like ISPs are purposefully not living up to their advertising in order to extort money from people who aren't their customers.

Provider pays to provide information, customer pays ISP for access to internet and then has to pay a per view fee to view content at reasonable speeds. So long as there's money to be extracted, the consumer will be squeezed.

This buys into the framing of the argument pushed by the ISPs. The content providers were already paying for their own connection to the internet. Now if content providers want to provide fast connections to their customers, then they not only have to pay their own ISP, but they also need to send money to every other ISP in the world. This fundamentally changes the structure of the market.

And you, as a customer, get a crappy connection to the internet unless the content providers pay. That's true regardless of what you pay your ISP for their advertised bandwidth.

If this goes too far, customers will eventually start suing their ISPs for false advertising. ISP customers are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, not a certain amount of bandwidth IF the content providers also pay.

What celebrity did this Jenny person get medical advice from?

I did manage to log in. The mobile site does not work very well. I hope that your birthday was a good day.

I don't know about that. I mean, we try our best, but I wouldn't say we're good at it.