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Comment Re:Still behind iOS and Android (Score 1) 151

It's not a technical limitation...but they'll fix that non limitation in WP8? Am I reading you right?

It is *absolutely* a technical limitation. Microsoft used iOS as the baseline that they emulated, only once they got where iOS was, it had moved long down the road (now supporting Android-like multitasking).

Further it is a bit humorous seeing WP boosters constantly using Android as the punching bag to elevate WP features. Only the Lumia 900 has rather terrible battery life.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5724/nokia-lumia-900-review-supersized-with-lte/3

I'm not really feeling the advantages. But if we just wait until the next version...

Comment Re:Dear Harper (Score 1) 561

I would strongly sanction what they wrote. The sore loser "change the rules because we lost the game" knee-jerk reaction is an embarrassment.

It's worth noting that Dion basically imploded the Liberal government with their "green shift" plans. If the Liberals didn't backtrack and try for another direction, the Conservatives would have had a much, much larger majority. Kyoto has not sold in Canada at all, and the tiresome "fuck you Harper!" tirades on her do not mirror actual sentiment in Canada.

Comment Re:More detailed explanation (Score 1) 561

That comment is, pardon the expression, horse shit. It is fundamentally wrong on virtually every level.

While Canada does, like pretty much every jurisdiction, have levels of government with their own responsibilities, in most matters the federal government reigns supreme. There have been a number of false starts at federal legislation to achieve Kyoto, but they were abandoned because they were politically untenable.

The two most populace provinces -- Quebec and Ontario -- have actually been taking substantial action on greenhouse gases. Ontario gets little credit, but we've been shutting down coal plants while hugely expanding renewable resources.

Comment Re:We could learn a thing or two.... (Score 1) 561

the Conservative Party of Canada who currently form the Government of Canada tend to base their views on what's "best" for Alberta

Score:5? Seriously?

Quick question to see how much you really know: How much does Alberta and the oil industry contribute the federal government coffers?

The entirety of this nation has been propped up by the oil sands, like it or not.

Comment Re:useless (Score 4, Informative) 185

" I do not believe that local dialects and pronunciation is the issue"

I have been using the voice input functionality since it came out, and have been shocked at the startling accuracy of it. It is almost never wrong, and is eminently useful for navigation, making calls (by number or by name), or for voice dictation in a message. I use it frequently and it is shockingly rare that it isn't dead on.

I'm talking about just general voice to text, not about translate which adds another language to language issue, however Google has the voice recognition thing DOWN. I imagine there are some accents and manners of speech that present it difficulty however.

Comment Re:Bad news for Android makers (Score 1) 205

I see that you're getting talking points from the internet's biggest misinformed windbag, Fleurian Miller (seriously, that guy is just a stream of baseless, misinformed bullshit. How he gets linked by anyone is a marvel).

Nokia sued over GSM patents, as clearly Nokia had a pretty good lead in that area. Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and others already license those patents. Apple refused. Nokia litigated and won. Those are the breaks.

So....no. Every single person who pulls the "Now they're going after Android" bit is just ignorant of basically everything about this lawsuit.

Comment Re:A really nasty trick (Score 1) 765

An expert on codecs is not an expert on patents. The mere idea is ludicrous. His analysis in no way was based upon the specific claims of the patents, but instead was just broadly claiming that they do similar things.

A lot of very smart people have looked at the patents and completely disagree with him. Further, Google is available for all of their lawsuit target needs, yet the silence is deafening.

The best part is that licensing h.264 in no way protects you from patents either -- at any point in the future anyone can come forward and sue every user of h.264, and there is no protection offered by the consortium: They simply protect you from their own patents.

Comment Re:People are missing the other side of this. (Score 1) 336

This has HUGE ramifications since IE 9 is not slated to support Web-M - which would mean IE 9 would not work with HTML 5 YouTube, while every other browser did.

IE supports plug-ins. Adding a Web-M plug-in is non-difficult, and really I wouldn't be surprised to see Google themselves provide one.

Comment Re:A really nasty trick (Score 0) 765

Hey look, it's all of the "I wave the Apple flag and therefore adopt all of the same positions" talking points conveniently collected into one post. That is mighty helpful of you.

Whatever my opinion on this (though your post is absolutely dripping with stunning ignorance and outright lies), what really makes me laugh is the continual references to a x264 developer -- who has a very strong incentive to defend the knowledge he has -- as an "expert" on patents. That really is the delightful cherry on the top of the cake.

Comment Re:Too late. (Score 1) 480

Yes, it should be interesting to see what effect this has on marketshare. I recall that in the months leading up the iPhone 4's release, all of the talk was that Android's advances were only temporary, all just waiting for the iPhone 4. Of course that turned out to be utter bunk. So then everyone moved onto the Verizon ruse.

People dedicated to getting an iPhone have long moved to AT&T (which paid off handsomely for AT&T, which is why they paid heavily for exclusivity). For all of the anti-AT&T chatter, in most empirical tests it has a faster network, it uses global bands, and it has better support. Now instead people are supposed to rush to a company with worse support, slower real world speeds, a network that works on one provider in one country on the planet, and no simultaneous data and voice, to get a phone to be replaced in mere months?

Give me a break. In two months you and others breathing the same nonsense will have to somehow find some new spin. Ah yes -- it's just the calm before the iPhone 5 storm!

Note also that AT&T, in losing their exclusivity, is suddenly becoming far less enamored with the iPhone. Not only are they getting some premiere devices like the Atrix, they're actually starting to promote them. They might even stop gimping them quite as much.

This is big news for a couple of days because it was so anticipated for so long. Yet it really is too-little, too-late. If Apple makes a killer iPhone5, which is entirely possible, then the game changes, but for this it's just the pent up nature that has so much hoopla. Once people sober up I think the reality will set in.

Security

Submission + - People Reuse Passwords. Minimize the Risk. (yafla.com)

ergo98 writes: Users reuse passwords, likely to a greater degree than they admit.

It clearly isn't going to change: This story has played out time and time again as password databases are compromised and accounts are exploited. While those attacks get the loudest attention, it seems likely that there are much quieter misuse of credentials by the people who you trust with them. If you used the same password for iTunes or PayPal that you used for some random site, for instance, it seems obvious that the rolls of the dice will yield a compromise at some point. Even if they carefully scrypt your password before putting it in their database, there are zero guarantees that the sites themselves aren't doing other things with it.

So what is the solution? A better input type="password"? OpenId, OpenAuth, or Facebook Connect, putting more eggs in one basket? Two-factor authentication (widely usable now with OATH implementations of HOTP/TOTP in smartphone apps)?

Something needs to improve because the same story keeps playing out.

Comment Re:In reality, not a whole lot... (Score 1) 202

Gaming on the Android platform has generally been terrible because of frequent, experience-killing pauses, and generally poor performance. The concurrent garbage collector offers to improve the former (including every existing game), while the latter is being dealt with by a much wider gamut of usability from the NDK, with optimized, efficient, lifetime-controlled native code that has the ability to manage and capture events, handle sound, etc.

Those two things are HUGE, and will help make up for the massive quality gap between Android gaming and entertainment relative to the iPhone. I seldom pull up a game on my Nexus One, but when I do it is generally a disappointment. Gingerbread will start the change away from that.

Comment Re:Any benefit ? (Score 1) 171

The success of Android has been driven by the fact that Apple held onto their exclusive deal with AT&T too long.

Oh bulllllshit.

Android has seem similar gains around the world, where the whole weak AT&T excuse (you know, a carrier that covers virtually 100% of the US population) has no relevance. In Canada the iPhone had a brief period where it shone, but now the Android devices are coming on very strong.

However comparing Linux/Windows on the desktop iOS/Android on smartphones is asinine. Windows was never locked down or exclusionary even remotely to the degree that iOS is. It was an open, free market for virtually everyone.

Comment Re:Choice (Score 1) 657

why add support for something that's going to cause a bad user experience?

Just wait until the dogpile forming on the Flash->HTML5 conversion toolkits have their way on the net. Soon your iPad will be grinding to a halt trying to running a bunch of evading monkeys.

No, seriously, it will. If you think HTML5 can drag your machine to the depths of hell, enjoy some of the HTML5 showcase apps. Of course, don't try the games because most of them rely upon keyboard inputs. Try that new Arcade Fire HTML5 video and see how that works out for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9jfdltkUU

There's my quick and ugly Flash demo. There are speed slowdowns of videos encoded to target desktops (which are most Flash videos, while most HTML5 videos, knowing that the target is primarily iOS devices, target much lower complexity profiles and bitrates), and it is not an elegant experience, but I enjoy having the option of enabling it whenever I want to.

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