Gingerbread is version 2.3. Ice Cream Sandwich is version 4.0. Most devices won't ever see the 3.0 updates and instead will just jump to 4.0.

This whole article is a non-issue - Google has said several times that the source would be released along with the new Galaxy Nexus. From http://groups.google.com/group/android-building/msg/c73c14f9b0dcd15a :

They had some decent reasons for not releasing the Honeycomb source. Perhaps their reasons weren't good enough to make up for not releasing it at all, but their promises to release the 4.0 source have kept devs happy for a few months now. I see 4.0 as the update to 3.x that cleans up the source properly, and has the added benefit of no longer dividing between phones and tablets. Devs can finally get back to writing one app that works on everything.

I can count on one hand the number of devices I own that use AA batteries anymore. At the moment it's just my wireless mouse / keyboard, a calculator, and a one or two other small things - everything else has rechargeable batteries (phone, laptop, etc).

Compare that to about 5 years ago when I had more than a dozen separate things requiring them, most of which have since been replaced by my phone or rechargeable alternatives. For the most part I'd say I'm better off, but sometimes you can't beat the accessibility of replacement AA batteries on long trips without backup power. I've come to appreciate my AA powered devices a lot more in that regard, always having an easy fix for a dead battery.

That's pretty much exactly it.

I'm in a pretty similar situation - I know quite a few teachers who, having just been given some new tech, take it and thrive. Optimistically I'd say that the tech does at least as well as the "old methods" in 90% of cases, and most of the time is an improvement. Every now and then, though, it's just done plain wrong. One teacher I recently worked with had just been given the so-called "full setup", consisting of about $3000 of classroom tech. This teacher was laid off at the end of the year, and while working with their replacement, we discovered that absolutely none of it had been so much as touched during the year.

On the other end of the spectrum, some teachers take the time to fully integrate things into their curriculum, and it really does improve the classroom - students are far more engaged and responsive, and their test scores (among other things, obviously) reflected it. But in the middle of the spectrum, the majority of teachers barely use it to displace the 25-year-old overhead projectors.

The issue is that, while some teachers actively want to embrace the tech, the rest lack any sort of direction in doing so, either doing the absolute minimum, or ignoring it completely. I'd say that in many cases, the funding is there, as is the tech and the software. But without solid planning, training, and support, it just doesn't get used to anywhere near its full potential.

Their speeds aren't the best, but they don't restrict usage at all. I can tether my (rooted) 4G android phone for free with no data caps or throttling (as far as I can tell), and on occasion I've used nearly ten gigs over a WiMAX connection while on vacation without any issue. I've rarely needed customer service as downtime and issues in general are virtually nonexistent, but it's there when needed and is pretty good.

As for price, though, the smaller/contractless providers like Virgin Mobile may be your best bet. I've heard they're far cheaper than any of the "big three" and make good on their "unlimited" promises. Even so, I can't vouch for their quality, having never used one myself.

For the record, TFA is only referring to the Email app (often called Email.apk) which is just a normal app. Unlike Apple's apps it has no special access to system APIs, keychains, or the like. On top of that, it isn't even included on many Android devices. HTC uses their own which could very well handle things differently, and I'm pretty sure other manufacturers do the same. On my CM7 device I don't even use it in favor of the dedicated Gmail app, which seems to take security quite a bit more seriously. Call me crazy for actually reading TFA but an Android dev made a very helpful comment on the situation:

And as demonstrated by many others here, the keychain is not actually the be-all, end-all solution to the problem, as it either leaves the decryption key elsewhere on the disk, making it useless, or requires the user to constantly enter a password, making it annoying. Android leaves it up to the app to handle passwords (as does iOS in most cases, I believe), and in this case the Email app doesn't really have a choice. Asking the user to enter their keychain password every time the Email app wants to grab new emails would get annoying quickly, and the protocols that it needs to support can't use the more secure token-based systems. Unfortunately there's no other feasible way to do it, and this debate is ignoring the real issue: mail servers that don't support secure authentication.

tl;dr: Article is not about "Android", only one app, and said app doesn't have much of a choice.

I've worked pretty extensively with mechanum wheels - essentially omniwheels with the smaller wheels at a 45 degree angle to the main wheel. Arranging four of them provides the same degrees of freedom as the example shown with two of these HOG wheels. Mechanum wheels work well and move quite fast, and I've yet to see a surface where they don't work - but they're costly, heavy, and wear quickly, not to mention the pretty enormous power requirements. Because of these limitations, for hobbyist robotics, they're simply not practical.

For many of the smaller projects I've done, traditional drive systems were slow and not nearly as useful as an omnidirectional (3 DOF) system - and without the ability to easily use something like omniwheels or mechanum wheels due to various constraints, HOG wheels would be a godsend. They provide most of the benefits of the traditional omnidirectional drive systems with very few hitches - and you'd be surprised how often the hard and flat surface requirement isn't an issue (or, in many cases, applies to traditional drive systems as well).

As an Android developer, this information is extremely useful to me - I now have a testimonial from another small developer which could certainly influence future decisions. Knowing this, I'll think twice before trying to publish my apps with Amazon. And the same could likely be said for other Slashdot readers - I've read plenty of posts by developers here who are also likely to benefit from this information.

On the other hand, there's also plenty of normal users reading Slashdot. They likely decide that this information isn't pertinent and move on to another article. Problem solved, no?

Running Chrome 13.0.772.0, both Bookmarks and History are accessible directly via the tools menu, no settings panel needed. I guess I could perhaps see putting a history or bookmarks button on the toolbar but personally I prefer it slightly (i.e. one extra button click) out of the way as I don't use either all that often.

As for searching, Ctrl+T, type query, [enter] opens up a search in a new page quite quickly. Even using the mouse goes pretty fast for the same purpose. Ctrl+L -> Type query -> [enter] is also pretty quick to search on the same page. For mouse users, a triple click in the address (in Linux, I believe it's just a single click in Windows) selects all text, and you can just type from there. I believe Firefox works mostly the same way, I've never known its search box to open a new tab by default.

For bookmarks, though it's not the best solution, you can drag the tab opened off the tab bar pretty easily, effectively achieving the same thing. And looking at the Print option now (for the OP), I have to say I love the new integrated Print and Preview, it's much more intuitive (IMO) than the Firefox alternative. And it also seems to be laying out pages far better (e.g. no overlapping elements on this page) but the complaint about a higher page count seems to be valid (24 vs 19 for Firefox).

Overall I think Chrome could certainly be more customizable, as the default behavior isn't a perfect fit for most users. But usually the interface will let you do what you want regardless of some of its behavior.

Just being picky, but... depending on the plan, Sprint's data can actually be really unlimited. Any device with the extra $10/m 4G addon gives you real unlimited 3G/4G data.

Midori is really lightweight and fast. It tends to outperform Chrome on older computers in my experience. Plus it runs in XFCE, so you're set for a lightweight environment.

The "tax" is just for Sprint's 4G phones, but even then, it gives you truly unlimited data (as in, no 5GB/month limit or anything of the sort) that their standard plans don't get. I went on a trip a couple of weeks ago and was tethered to my 4G phone almost the entire time, probably downloading more than 10 GB of data without a single complaint from Sprint. I don't pay for their tethering plan, either. I'm happy to pay the extra $10/month for that benefit.

I still have to hold in a laugh when some friends of mine who are stuck with AT&T complain about their tiny download caps and crappy limitations on their phones, and now with T-Mobile going the same way... From how I see it, Sprint is one of the only sane providers left. Here's to hoping they stay that way.

Seconded. Swing is (despite what many people around here would like to believe) a very capable GUI library. It's by far the best object oriented GUI library I've come across, with a much more logical API than SWT, Qt, or GTK. Plus, Java2D for raw drawing is incredibly easy to use and it automatically gets hardware acceleration (OpenGL on *NIX systems) so the performance is good. Swing does have a bit of a learning curve, but there's excellent GUI builders for it (e.g. NetBeans) and the API really makes a lot of sense when you learn it.
If Java isn't your thing, Qt would probably be the way to go. I find the API a bit clumsier than Swing, but the major features (hardware accel, powerful 2D, and cross platform) are there. On the other hand, raw OpenGL has a comparatively huge learning curve and wouldn't have any sort of system look and feel. It would likely be the best performance-wise, though.