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Comment Re:For business users, Android is far superior (Score 1) 137

I agree that Android has a better system (from a design and technical perspective), but functionally it doesn't really matter that much. If your iPhone is enterprise managed then typically all the of the corporate data is locked away in enterprise managed apps (i.e. Outlook, OneDrive etc.). So the company has the ability to lock that data from access independently of whatever personal apps/data you have on the phone. The only condition under which a company would ever wipe your device would be if your device is stolen or lost, which would be a loss to any local personal data as well. Since pretty much everything is synced online, wiping data is much less of an issue today.

Comment Re:Such a surprise (Score 1) 163

I think there's another reason as well. A lot of companies are losing their corporate culture because of remote work. I know not everyone cares about corporate culture, I certainly don't at this stage of my career. But earlier in my career I worked at companies that had great corporate culture that fostered innovation and knowledge sharing. I forged a lot of important relationships with people that wouldn't have been possible if everyone was working from home.

In general I think we just need to recognize that different people will prefer different ways of working. Young single people may prefer to work in person as they have more time and prefer to socialize. Introverts/parents with young children etc. may prefer to work remotely. Empty nesters may prefer to come back to the office. Whatever the case may be, offices should adapt to cater to this model instead of fighting against it.

Comment Re:Clever strategy (Score 1) 27

Do you really think Stadia is going to get swept out of the way? I’ve tried PS Now, xCloud, Steam Link and OnLive. Stadia blows them all out of the water. Even Steam Link locally doesn’t perform as well as Stadia which is insane. Stadia is the only service that I would consider as a suitable replacement for local play. All the other services are too laggy or the visual fidelity is not as good. It would be a shame for Stadia (or at least the technology) to not succeed.

Comment Git and Super Flexible File Synchronizer (Score 1) 153

Someone had suggested using Git and I was going to suggest the same. If you are only backing up documents then it should be easy enough to create repos on the USB HDD, Laptop and USB drive. You can then commit/merge changes between repos to keep in sync, perhaps use some shell scripts to ease administration. Also, I use a product called Super Flexible File Synchronizer to sync a subfolder on my laptop's filesystem with a WebDAV server. It's got lots of features and supports Linux, Windows and Mac. http://www.superflexible.com/

Comment Re:Lack of filesystem cripples the iPad/iPad2 (Score 1) 375

First of all I complete understand your point. It's annoying that applications are run in a sandbox and can't access other areas of the filesystem. But on the other hand I'm sure you recognize that there is a big security risk with applications being able to access any location (or even a shared one) in the filesystem. I'm sure Apple could come up with a secure way for different applications to have some shared space but I guess it's not a priority. Have you tried Papers (http://itunes.apple.com/app/papers/id304655618?mt=8)? It's an iPad application for managing academic papers and other PDFs. It also has a desktop version for Mac OS X which it can sync with. It supports annotations as well as searching within your library. It even integrates with major sources like ACM, ADS, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, JSTORE, and PubMed so you can download directly to the device. It imports all kinds of metadata for you. I don't know if this will solve your problem but it certainly did for me (being able to carry around my library of papers and annotate them).

Comment Re:iOS Short Term, Android Long Term (Score 2, Insightful) 410

IMHO the big fight for Android is brand recognition/differentiation. When I look around my large extended family almost all of them are using iPods and iPhones. Even my elderly father knows about iPhone and iPod and has been asking me questions about these devices. Although I haven't, I'm pretty sure that if I asked one of my family members about Android they wouldn't know what I'm talking about. At best they might know it's made by Google. They certainly wouldn't know why Android is better. Even when I speak to people who have Android devices, the usual reasons they give me for Android being better is that the device and app stores are not locked down. Neither of these reasons really make any difference to most people since it's usually very niche apps that get rejected from the app store. Try telling a kid he has a limited device while play Plant vs Zombies, or GTA China Town Wars. I believe that until Android can become a household name it will struggle to dominate market. In fact I think that the recent surge of Android sales is really just filling the void of potential smartphone users who didn't want to go with Apple. Once this void fills up I think sales are going to slow down again.

Comment Re:Control (Score 1) 417

So much for all us geeks who like to play around with the hardware and learn things. If everything back in the day was as closed as Steve Jobs wants it to be now, do you think we geeks could have learned so much ourself? Just to code some simple hello world application you would have needed to buy a "coding" license from Apple. Not really feasible for a 10 year old kid who is just starting to learn programming.

You must be looking at how Apple controls mobile devices and not desktops. A license is not required to develop Mac software (or even iOS software as long as you don't intend deploy it to the device). To look at how Jobs controls access to mobile devices and to extend that same logic to the desktop is a little naive. A desktop computer that wasn't open to creating new content or building software etc. would be pretty useless and nobody would use it. Unlike mobile devices which really are for communicating and content consumption.

PC Games (Games)

Is Crowdsourcing the Next Big Thing In Game Design? 47

An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard about user-generated content for games that have fixed toolsets — but this interesting piece on Develop has got me thinking about the idea of games production being opened to a community before development finishes. A new iPhone game (Aztec Odyssey) did that with its soundtrack; could someone do it with the game's art assets? Or level design? A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!"

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