I've seen the same on xda-developers. Reports indicate it still doesn't work in Canada... Netflix knows where you are (probably by the type of account, not just IP location)... thanks though, I'll probably give it a try anyway just to see :)

You don't need to root the phone. As I and Locutus already pointed out, you should already have 2.3 Gingerbread if you have a Nexus S. It came with that from the moment it was available to the public. If there's a 2.2.1 available for it, it would already be a rooted custom firmware. Google never made firmware less than 2.3 for the Nexus S.

At my work we have the option of getting issued a phone (a Blackberry.. ugh) or using a personal phone and being compensated monthly for it. I use my personal Nexus One because it's superior to a Blackberry (for me, anyway. Give me Android or iOS over Blackberry any day. I don't mean that in general for everyone, though. To each their own, whatever works for you, etc.) ... but I really don't like that Android 2.2.1 forced Exchange policies on my phone... ie. the admin can now remotely wipe my phone through Exchange if they want. However, my boss and I happen to be the admins, so it's not really a problem. I told him if he wipes my phone, I'll do evil things to our servers, then quit :)

I should note that my boss and I are friends and he took that as the joke it was meant to be, and I have no concerns that he'll ever wipe my phone on me... though even if he did, that's why I keep regular nandroid backups!

The Nexus S only ever came with 2.3. How can you have 2.2.1? Did you employer root your device and downgrade it?

I was excited by this... my Nexus One is on the list! So I clicked the Market link... and... "This item cannot be installed in your device's country." ... damnit! Netflix is available in Canada, why can't they make the app available? I use the Boxee Netflix app just fine here... sigh...

That will prevent the Java binary from loading the JVM and running, but leaves libjvm accessible to other apps that might want to load and start the JVM. A much better way would be to find the location of your installed JRE/JDK and "chmod 000 /path/to/jre" ... that's if you don't want to just uninstall it. But you're right with the chmod trick, it's nice in that you can undo it later if you do want to run a Java app.

You don't enable or disable Java. If it's installed on your system, it's available to use. You can, however, enable or disable the Java applet plugin for your web browsers, which is probably what you're talking about and isn't necessarily what this is about (TFA didn't mention applets or browsers). Java applications (not applets) can run on your system as long as you have Java installed, regardless of whether you have the browser plugins enabled or not, just like how you can open a PDF if Adobe Reader is installed, regardless of whether you have the Adobe Reader browser plugin enabled or not. So in theory, if they found an attack vector for your OS, having the Java plugin disabled wouldn't stop this from running on your system at all.

Getting it onto your system is the trick, though. If they found a hole in the Java plugin's sandbox, they could potentially exploit that using an applet and get the code onto your system. Disabling the plugin prevents that possibility, but if they were trying to push this via browsers there are lots of other plugins and holes are found in browsers all the time.

That being said, I don't bother with the Java plugin either, because applets are crap and I have no use for them and agree with you about sites requiring them (and I'm a full-time Java developer)

Agreed... and I always give new things a good chance.

When they moved the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the left side of the windows, I gave it a try, and found that going to one side instead of the other really didn't have any actual impact on my life so I was happy to use that, and I still do. It's really not a life-changing thing for me, I got used to it in about 2 minutes and I don't really care.

But Unity? I tried it. I really did. And it sucked like a tornado. Taking up useless space on the left side of my screen with icons in seemingly random order? I much prefer my tiny and thin bars at the top and bottom of the screen that show me useful, realtime information that I want, and give me very quick access to everything I need.

I don't hate things because they're different or because I'm ignorant of them. I hate them after I really give them a chance and learn about them and they still just do not work for me. I use Ubuntu as my OS on my daily workstation at my job, so I need things to be quick, efficient, and work the way I work. Unity doesn't do that for me at all, even after I tried.

If Ubuntu drops Gnome completely and makes it a pain in the ass (and/or unsupported) to install... I'll be moving to Kubuntu or Xubuntu. I've used both before, and unless they've completely changed into something else, either would work just fine for me. Maybe Unity is very good for some people... I'm just not one of them.

They demoed this at CES months ago... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ces-microsoft-shows-off-windows-8-on-arm/8339

Damnit. You're right of course :)

I love my netbook as a compliment to my desktop. I don't want a full-powered laptop, because it's not expandable enough for me and the really powerful ones with lots of screen real estate are often quite huge. My netbook makes for a nice very portable device that's great for remote work.

I don't want to replace a netbook with a tablet because I use it for real work (and I don't mean you can't use a tablet for real work... depends on the work, of course), and I see a tablet as a consumer device that does a lot of things very well that previously only computers could do. I'd still have a tablet, for sure, but not to replace my netbook or my desktop computer. And I'd still have my Android phone to have in my pocket anywhere I go.

For me, each device serves a specific purpose very well... I'd really miss my netbook, even if I had a tablet, since for me they are different devices that are each very good at different things.

I've actually had the opposite experience. At work, we've standardized on WRT54GLs for our wireless access points (using DD-WRT) and remote VPN routers (using OpenWRT + OpenVPN). We've had excellent results. We have 15+ in use, and have maybe had 2 of them go bad (one was after years of use, and the other was a refurb anyway that we'd picked up on sale).

Everyone seems to have different experiences with wireless equipment. For example, I feel about D-Link the same as you feel about Linksys, based on my experience with them. I don't think anyone would bother lying about their experience, so I find it interesting that so many people have so many different results with different brands. Based on my experience, I always recommend Linksys to friends and family, and tell them to avoid D-Link.

We'll keep on using the Linksys WRT54GLs here, because they continue to be excellent for our needs.

If those things cause your application to collapse under unmanageable complexity, then those things probably weren't the right tool for the job, or you didn't know how to use them.

It sounds like you don't understand dependency injection or beans, so you're very likely to end up hating it all and losing control of your project. If you do understand those things, then you know when they are appropriate to use and when not to, so you don't end up hating something without a valid reason simply because you didn't understand how to use it.

This really simple application of making informed, logical decisions applies to all areas of programming (in any language) and most other things in life. You'll learn that as you mature.

Sounds like the API version problem that would affect any language. If the API changes, you have no choice but to use a specific version that matches your app (without modifying/recompiling the app, that is). Java is the same, and Java apps can specify jar dependencies and versions of those.

But what we're talking about here isn't even that. We're talking about just one application (the app server) that runs multiple, sandboxed pieces of code (by "sandboxed" here I mean keeping these pieces of code separate from each other and potential conflicts, not running in a security-restricted area). You'd have to sandbox this in C or anything else too if it's all running in the same process. What happens if Apache mod_a requires libfoo 1.5 but Apache mod_b requires a more recent and incompatible libfoo 2.0? It's all in the same process. The OS's linker isn't going to just load multiple (potentially conflicting) versions of the same thing into the same process. If you're sharing libs, you'd still have to sandbox the modules within your runtime environment so that the right module hooked up to the right library code and didn't interfere with other modules.

(Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here and operating systems have evolved the ability to automatically know what parts of your code are "pluggable" and need to be sandboxed, or if multiple conflicting libraries can be loaded into a single process with no conflicts... I haven't done systems programming for a few years)

Basically, what you're saying applies to applications using shared libraries, and it's not much different in Java, other than the fact that Java ClassLoaders do the work instead of the OS's shared library subsystem. And when you're talking about one application that loads multiple modules/plugins/applets/whatever you'll have to sandbox them since it's still all running in the same process. This is where OSGi comes in.

(disclaimer: this isn't a Java vs. anything post... just trying to describe why OSGi is useful and why that fact doesn't necessarily mean anything good or bad about Java itself... as for the imports... yep, the language wasn't designed to support "import ... as ..." ... I don't mind that though, since I can count on one hand the number of times it would've been useful to me in my 12 years of Java development... ymmv)

OpenVPN uses standard UDP (or TCP) on any port you want, so it's very difficult for anyone to block. Android (using CyanogenMod firmware) supports this through the standard VPN GUI, and it could probably be set up on the Nokia N900 and maybe WebOS with some command line work. My carrier does block IPsec and PPTP for VPN unless you pay extra, but I have successfully used OpenVPN with no trouble.

Yeah, it sucks for your average user who has no idea where to even start setting any of that up. But it's still what I'll be doing if my carrier ever starts this crap.