I have a brand new Galaxy Nexus which I switched too just over a month ago from an iPhone 3GS. My biggest diappointment with Android is that the BBC iPlayer app is not available for the GN still! :( It doesn't even appear in the Android market as it is "incompatible". I can watch it view the iPlayer website (if I request the "full" site not the mobile version) but performance is not great and it eats thru the battery. It sucks as the GN has such a beautiful big screen. Yes the iPhone has newer apps (mostly games from my experience) that required an iPhone 4 or 4S due to graphical performance but I am yet to find a "general app" that does not work on my 3GS. The fragmentation on iOS is there but very minor however on Android it is pretty awful. Not to mention stock Android not coming with what I would consider to be "standard" features (such as a timer or notebook app, I was shocked to find I had to get third party apps for such things, especially when the phone comes with things like Google+, you would think Google would have been able to write a couple of simple apps that iOS had at v1).

Buy him a copy of C Primer Plus (5th Ed) by Stephen Prata and work through it with him. In my opinion it is one of the best introduction to C books available, if not the best and very friendly to first time programmers. Another option is Java: A Beginner's Guide (4th Ed) by Herbert Schildt.

I too believe that learning the lower level things such as memory allocation is the best way to make yourself a better life long programmer so I would advise C over Java however I know a lot of people who only know Java (or C#) and do just fine however they knew next to nothing about what I consider to be "real" programming. Everything they do is drag and drop then writing some logic to handle an event and letting the runtime deal with the "nitty gritty" stuff.

Microsoft WHQL certify crappy drivers ergo MS take some of the blame.

I saw some movies worse than that! This dude keeps kidnapping people and hooking them up to machines that they can't escape from. The only way to survive is to admit something about yourself and sacrifice part of yourself or do some kind of other horrible act like cut the key out of somebody elses stomach. The worst one for me was a reverse bear trap on somebodies head which ripped their head in half when the timer went off. Needless to say I don't think anybody actually ever survived any of it.

Oh yeah these movies were called Saw. And I saw it in the cinema. The realism and gore was extreme. If these people were put away for making similar movies and selling them on the net then how can Amazon and Play.com sell the Saw movies? Surely every horror movie should be illegal and the directors and distributors arrested?

While I understand Google's problems with Theora quality it is surprising for them to be against it (which is what I assume is their official position for Theora support in the video tag?). By the time HTML5 is all finished I am sure Theora will be good enough and if they are unsure that it will be why can't they help it along with a few $$ or directly helping with development for it?

But Mozilla already have supported it with Firefox 3.5??

I agree. Mozilla have supported Ogg Vorbis and Theora as of 3.5 and it works pretty good from the demos I have used. The W3C needs to ignore everyone and push forward with Ogg support in the spec. If hardware acceleration is a problem then work with companies to get it supported in hardware. I know it won't be easy but saying "ugh that is gonna be too hard, lets just drop it from the spec" is stupid, work with Nvidia and ATI and Intel, etc. to get h/w support for Ogg. I am not a specialist so I have no idea how hard it would be to get h/w support for Ogg up and running but I know that my iRiver H10 mp3 player had Ogg support back in 2003 or so, so I am sure it is possible without _too_ much work.

Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.

THANK YOU!

I am getting fed up with all the BS about Windows 7 being posted on /. A few years ago the MS bashing was valid due to what they were actually doing however now people just posted a load of crap that they half read on some blog 6 weeks ago and can't remember 90% of it anyway so just make it up.

So thank you for posting that :)

Microsoft are trying to "do the right thing" by listening to customers but when they do everybody changes the topic from the good (the removal of the crappy 3 app limit) to limitations which are there because it is designed for a netbook (i.e why have DVD playback on a netbook when not one netbook has a DVD drive?!, also DVD playback isn't free, if you want DVD playback get VLC not that hard). Windows 7 is looking to be a pretty decent upgrade. I am still not that crazy about the taskbar in 7 but Homegroups are really nice and the other UI changes like desktop peek are great.

Anyway I just wanted to say thanks :) have a good weekend!

I see believing the earth is flat as no more crazy than believing some supreme being create the universe and everything in it in 6 days with no evidence what so ever*

*No the bible is not evidence. It is a collection of stories which cannot be validated as real. It is like saying, in 2000 years, that Harry Potter is "the truth".