Android vs iPhone does not make sense at all. These platforms are so different. Android takes jabs at Apple because it will get them headlines and free advertising. But as to Android vs iPhone just don't cut it.
For one, Android is not a platform, it is an operating system with awful development environment, it sells to OEM's for $0.00 and anyone can make a device, though not everyone can use Android Market (archos for one). You have easily 4 versions of Android out there, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and now 2.2 (frozen yogurt), then you have HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and many others, each with at least 3 different types of phones, different screen sizes, memory size, cpu speed, storage and with or without physical keyboards.
Then as for the awful development environment, you will never get the apps as iPhone has, EA will never make their games for Android while they have to re-write the whole thing in (shudders) Java. If they could have a C based development you would really have an all out war.
Phone is a phone and it makes calls, simple. What the iPhone is, is not the best phone, but the best platform. It has good operating system and the whole thing feels solid, but what the killer app for the iPhone is, it is all the apps, not any one in particular, but the 100.000 apps, where even the simplest most awful app is still classes better than anything on Android.
What Android is after is not Apple, it should be Microsoft but as they are out of here it is not. What Android is (or should be) after is Nokia. Nokia sells 160 million phones while apple sells 10 million and android a few thousand. But Nokia has minimum 20-30 totally different models out there, running 2-3 different operating systems and almost all of them are incompatible with each other. Still Nokia advertises strongly that they play music and have thousands of apps (when they mean web sites). Nokia along with Microsoft has lost it.
But if Google said we are going after Nokia, we will kill Nokia, then no one would care. Practically the only time in 10 years that Nokia has been in the news in Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Danmark) was when their CEO got the biggest speeding ticket ever (as it is calculated towards how rich you are).
So this all out war, is a war of apples and oranges, it is just headline hunting. There is no way you get engadget.com and gizmondo or osnews.com or anyone else pondering over when Android will overtake Nokia.
Apple is quite happy where they are now. They could never become the next Nokia any more than they could become the next Microsoft. They can never own 95% of any market, that is not their business. But making 95% of the total profit in any segment, there you go.
Google makes $0 for every phone sold, probably pays every OEM partner a bundle to have google as the default search engine and so forth. You can't say Google is in this segment to make money per se, but they are the only ones who can and will overtake Nokia. They just need to get their update services running.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Android phone for a day
I did try out an android phone for 1 day. I could see no reason to do more days.
First and foremost. The Android OS is actually much better than I thought. Even on an old phone it actually was almost smooth. All the phone operations were great. The reception for the gsm network was excellent. Dialling and speaking into the phone, holding it to the ear and the sound quality was excellent. So as a phone, Android kicks Nokias behind, hands down much better at being a phone than Nokia. HTC makes good phones.
But for everything else. I did not become faster typer with the keyboard than on the screen keyboard. It was nice to have the whole screen while typing, something that I miss quite often on my iPhone.
Now for the rest. Doing the settings on the phone, change ring tone, warning tone, timezone and all that. Pretty straight forward but not easy, not at all. The whole idea that sometimes I must press the menu button and sometimes not is quite confusing. Changing timezones was really bad, you need to have more cities in the list.
The media player was kind of "what were they thinking". Not a very good product to say the least. Songs would not play in the album view. But once the song played it was good. I did not try audiobooks, I must try that one day.
I downloaded a few software titles. For the sakes of the author I will not list them or speak their names. They were so bad. One ping pong game had graphics like the 1970's pong. Just two squares at the top and you control one of them and the phone the other. Then there is a small ball that bounces. This was awful. Even though the graphics were quite minimal the game felt awful and slow and the animation flickered quite a lot.
The photo application was ok, even though it could have been quite a lot better, easily.
The camera literally took 30 seconds to take a picture. This could have something to do with the lens being scratched. I tried taking pictures of my kids (3 and 5) with no luck, they could not stay put for that long.
I did try some other games and apps but none of the apps had any good quality to it. Almost all of the apps are free, but some have very badly done advertisements, and make you feel annoyed.
As a phone for a technical person it was ok, but I would never actually tell anyone to buy one unless he/she really were technical.
Just being fair, I did not try out twitter or facebook or any voip software. I know these run in the back and are always up to date, but I just can't shake the feeling that it would still not make the phone any better.
To finish this off, I had a little interest in doing some development for the phone but it went out the window. It looks to me that programmers don't get the tools they need.
The phone I used was an old G1 phone with 1.5 android system. I have heard that things have become quite a lot better and I will try to test one of the latest ones. If I was Nokia, I would be really scared as Sony Ericsson, HTC, Motorola and others are all coming out with Android phones, and they are so much better than anything Nokia has (I have not tried the N900).
I will try to get my hands on a 2.1 android phone as I really want to get a non Apple phone that I could like.
First and foremost. The Android OS is actually much better than I thought. Even on an old phone it actually was almost smooth. All the phone operations were great. The reception for the gsm network was excellent. Dialling and speaking into the phone, holding it to the ear and the sound quality was excellent. So as a phone, Android kicks Nokias behind, hands down much better at being a phone than Nokia. HTC makes good phones.
But for everything else. I did not become faster typer with the keyboard than on the screen keyboard. It was nice to have the whole screen while typing, something that I miss quite often on my iPhone.
Now for the rest. Doing the settings on the phone, change ring tone, warning tone, timezone and all that. Pretty straight forward but not easy, not at all. The whole idea that sometimes I must press the menu button and sometimes not is quite confusing. Changing timezones was really bad, you need to have more cities in the list.
The media player was kind of "what were they thinking". Not a very good product to say the least. Songs would not play in the album view. But once the song played it was good. I did not try audiobooks, I must try that one day.
I downloaded a few software titles. For the sakes of the author I will not list them or speak their names. They were so bad. One ping pong game had graphics like the 1970's pong. Just two squares at the top and you control one of them and the phone the other. Then there is a small ball that bounces. This was awful. Even though the graphics were quite minimal the game felt awful and slow and the animation flickered quite a lot.
The photo application was ok, even though it could have been quite a lot better, easily.
The camera literally took 30 seconds to take a picture. This could have something to do with the lens being scratched. I tried taking pictures of my kids (3 and 5) with no luck, they could not stay put for that long.
I did try some other games and apps but none of the apps had any good quality to it. Almost all of the apps are free, but some have very badly done advertisements, and make you feel annoyed.
As a phone for a technical person it was ok, but I would never actually tell anyone to buy one unless he/she really were technical.
Just being fair, I did not try out twitter or facebook or any voip software. I know these run in the back and are always up to date, but I just can't shake the feeling that it would still not make the phone any better.
To finish this off, I had a little interest in doing some development for the phone but it went out the window. It looks to me that programmers don't get the tools they need.
The phone I used was an old G1 phone with 1.5 android system. I have heard that things have become quite a lot better and I will try to test one of the latest ones. If I was Nokia, I would be really scared as Sony Ericsson, HTC, Motorola and others are all coming out with Android phones, and they are so much better than anything Nokia has (I have not tried the N900).
I will try to get my hands on a 2.1 android phone as I really want to get a non Apple phone that I could like.
According to the last post
The ruby bug was not a bug but to explain this in short.
The delete function deletes ANY CHARACTER that is in the substring. So "trausti".delete("tr") would delete both t's and the r.
This actually makes the delete function more powerful in my eyes but dangerous.
Any how, this is now corrected
The delete function deletes ANY CHARACTER that is in the substring. So "trausti".delete("tr") would delete both t's and the r.
This actually makes the delete function more powerful in my eyes but dangerous.
Any how, this is now corrected
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Most funny but annoying ruby bug
Ruby is one of my favorite programming languages. Up until today I have never had any issues with it except to find work where I can code in ruby, so I started my own and the jury is still out on how that is working out.
Anyway, I just so happened to find a bug inside a major compiler, my 2nd bug ever found in near 30 years of fiddling with computers (I am 35 just for the record). My only other bug was in Delphi and was easily circumvented. My bug with ruby is an interesting one and I have been doing analyzes all day on it, and I can't see why this bug happens, there is nothing there to trigger it and ruby is open source and well hardened language.
Ahh before I go on, I perhaps should tell you what the bug is. It is extremely simple. Create an SKU like string
ph = "no.405.week"
then create a new variable like
b = ph+"5"
and b becomes rightfully "no.405.week5". Now do this :
b.delete ph
This above under normal situation would leave you "5", but it doesn't, it returns an empty string. No try
b = ph+"4" and do b.delete ph again and it will return 4. try with any number and it will work fine, except for 5 and 55 and 555 and so forth. Any other number will work. I tested this on a run loop and found for example that the number "55543" will return only 4.
Just to be certain that this is a bug with ruby delete function, I tried many other functions like gsub and all other functions work and now you know. I did try many other reverse domain names and unless the domain is just numbers everything works as it should.
ph = "com.blogpost.week"
b = ph+"5"
b.delete ph returns 5.
Anyway, I just so happened to find a bug inside a major compiler, my 2nd bug ever found in near 30 years of fiddling with computers (I am 35 just for the record). My only other bug was in Delphi and was easily circumvented. My bug with ruby is an interesting one and I have been doing analyzes all day on it, and I can't see why this bug happens, there is nothing there to trigger it and ruby is open source and well hardened language.
Ahh before I go on, I perhaps should tell you what the bug is. It is extremely simple. Create an SKU like string
ph = "no.405.week"
then create a new variable like
b = ph+"5"
and b becomes rightfully "no.405.week5". Now do this :
b.delete ph
This above under normal situation would leave you "5", but it doesn't, it returns an empty string. No try
b = ph+"4" and do b.delete ph again and it will return 4. try with any number and it will work fine, except for 5 and 55 and 555 and so forth. Any other number will work. I tested this on a run loop and found for example that the number "55543" will return only 4.
Just to be certain that this is a bug with ruby delete function, I tried many other functions like gsub and all other functions work and now you know. I did try many other reverse domain names and unless the domain is just numbers everything works as it should.
ph = "com.blogpost.week"
b = ph+"5"
b.delete ph returns 5.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Icelandic debt write off
Anyone that can read now knows that a few guys, 4-5, have managed to put a whole nation on the street. A whole nation is now on the streets asking foreign countries for loans, and surprisingly no one is answering the call except for Poland and Faroeisland.
That companies and most young people are loosing everything and declaring one self concourse is the better alternative of two to get out of this mess is in parts self made and is parts peer pressure. But why does it seem that a few individuals are getting a "free out of jail" cards handed out ? Why not everyone ? If Gordon Brown wants his money back from the Icelandic people he does not have to go far to get them, most of these criminals behind the worlds biggest bank heist all live in London. Sigurdur Einarsson and his friends are all living happily away in London not paying taxes or their dues. Gordon, go fetch.... Good dog...
Who would be interested in what is happening in Iceland now ? All the "viking cowboys" are getting their debt written off even though it caused the economic crash of a whole nation. Jon Asgeir, owner of Bonus and used to own Donna Karan, House of Fraiser and more owes the Icelandic banks 116 billion kroner, and now only needs to cough up 7 billion to be debt free.
This is just the tip of the Iceberg. One other guy owed 1 billion and said to the media after the debt was cleared (by paying 0 kr) that it was not the right thing to do to pay the debt, as it was lost money.
After a huge and successful marketing of foreign currency loans, most people my age (25-40) have such a loan after almost being forced by the banks (calling one stupid if he did not take such a loan), either he owns a car that used to cost like 200.000 nokr but now he owes 500.000, you can just imagine how much mortage loans have risen.
No normal person is getting his/hers loans written off. Just the sum that Jon Asgeir got written off could easily pay most if not all loans people have in the country.
Then you might say that who benefits from making these guys concurs, the banks. The banks are now owned by the government and it would benefit. Bonus has had 60-80% of the daily market in Iceland for the last 10-15 years, still they owe this much.
By not allowing these crooks to keep their money and treating them as everyone else is just fair, no worse, no better, just the same. Fair is fair
That companies and most young people are loosing everything and declaring one self concourse is the better alternative of two to get out of this mess is in parts self made and is parts peer pressure. But why does it seem that a few individuals are getting a "free out of jail" cards handed out ? Why not everyone ? If Gordon Brown wants his money back from the Icelandic people he does not have to go far to get them, most of these criminals behind the worlds biggest bank heist all live in London. Sigurdur Einarsson and his friends are all living happily away in London not paying taxes or their dues. Gordon, go fetch.... Good dog...
Who would be interested in what is happening in Iceland now ? All the "viking cowboys" are getting their debt written off even though it caused the economic crash of a whole nation. Jon Asgeir, owner of Bonus and used to own Donna Karan, House of Fraiser and more owes the Icelandic banks 116 billion kroner, and now only needs to cough up 7 billion to be debt free.
This is just the tip of the Iceberg. One other guy owed 1 billion and said to the media after the debt was cleared (by paying 0 kr) that it was not the right thing to do to pay the debt, as it was lost money.
After a huge and successful marketing of foreign currency loans, most people my age (25-40) have such a loan after almost being forced by the banks (calling one stupid if he did not take such a loan), either he owns a car that used to cost like 200.000 nokr but now he owes 500.000, you can just imagine how much mortage loans have risen.
No normal person is getting his/hers loans written off. Just the sum that Jon Asgeir got written off could easily pay most if not all loans people have in the country.
Then you might say that who benefits from making these guys concurs, the banks. The banks are now owned by the government and it would benefit. Bonus has had 60-80% of the daily market in Iceland for the last 10-15 years, still they owe this much.
By not allowing these crooks to keep their money and treating them as everyone else is just fair, no worse, no better, just the same. Fair is fair
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Installing ruby and RMagic on Centos 5.2
I will write a little more about this. But I just installed a centos 5.2 box, ruby-enterprise, the fantastic ruby implementation by phusion.nl along with passenger, made by the same people. Everyone should support them, I have.
But when I installed the awesome plugin RMagick, things started to go wrong.
First it complained that I had to old ImageMagick installed. That is easy to fix. I removed the package with rpm -e, then downloaded the lastest source code and compiled and installed. Simple so far.
Then I tried to install RMagick. It installs fine, but crashes in start. Once you launch console, and type 'Require 'RMagick'' crash.
But I found the solution on this blog
http://www.semanticpool.de/cannot-open-shared-object-file-no-such-file-or-directory/
Simple to fix. You just add /usr/local/lib to your lib directories with ldconfig /usr/local/lib
And now everything works as it should.
But when I installed the awesome plugin RMagick, things started to go wrong.
First it complained that I had to old ImageMagick installed. That is easy to fix. I removed the package with rpm -e, then downloaded the lastest source code and compiled and installed. Simple so far.
Then I tried to install RMagick. It installs fine, but crashes in start. Once you launch console, and type 'Require 'RMagick'' crash.
But I found the solution on this blog
http://www.semanticpool.de/cannot-open-shared-object-file-no-such-file-or-directory/
Simple to fix. You just add /usr/local/lib to your lib directories with ldconfig /usr/local/lib
And now everything works as it should.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
More posts
I have been really bad writing this blog, but if someone is reading this blog, I promise to be better.
But I might stop using blogspot as it does nothing for me, at least I don't know that it does, and I want to do my own stuff.
But I might stop using blogspot as it does nothing for me, at least I don't know that it does, and I want to do my own stuff.
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