Posts by Random_Walk

You could, but...

...considering that coding in anything else is quite likely to not work so hot (at least not without a ton of shims, home-built call emulations, or outright hacks)? Probably.

That's why the maker says they'll only support certain languages in the first place... they already know it'll get messy in a hurry if you use something else.

This in turn could easily mean a bad customer experience, which reflects more on them (and the carrier) than on you, even if world+dog knew that your app was coded in Ada and using a homemade runtime environment lashed together in .NET just to run it. (or pick yer own improbable-but-somehow-possible combination).

Mind that on a 'real' computer this is not really a big deal, since you can almost always make it up in CPU cycles, runtime environments, and/or extra RAM demands, and if all else fails, Moore's Law can (eventually) save you. Mobile phones OTOH work a bit different - mainly because you don't have a lot of room to play in. CPU, RAM, storage... you simply don't get much of those (yes, a mobile phone can store, oh hell, a multi-gigabyte app if you want it to, but your actual executable bits can only be so big before you run out of space - see also Android's app storage limits, and the fact that your app has to share that same space with everyone else's apps).

To top that off, the desktop (and especially server) user already knows and expects that apps will take a bit of time to warm up and get ready... mobile phone users OTOH want their app up, running and ready before their finger even relaxes pressure on the touchscreen.

Long story short, if you use anything other than the officially supported/blessed? You either get extremely lucky and it works, or you end up with something that is bloated beyond belief and will make life hard on the user, maker, carrier, and (eventually) you. Either way, there's a good chance that it will likely break come the next OS update/refresh anyway.

I doubt it...

...unless you're the type to look askance on the term "public proxy", that is.

That said, I think I know now where that 30% miss rate of their came from.

Not so sure you want that...

Nexus: shows website bogged down with flash ads, pop-overs, pop-unders, etc

iPhone: shows the same site w/o ads, LSO's, "take this survey now!" pop-overs, those irritating-as-frig double-line fake-links, etc.

Depends...

On the Linux front: Ubuntu has something similar (though with free-as-in-beer binaries), where you can click and get. You can do the same in Fedora Core and RHEL by typing "sudo yum -y install {whatever you want/need}*" Other distros have similar bits.

Microsoft does have "Games Explorer" in Windows 7, where you get taken to the web and dropped off in a small marketplace to buy/download games and such. You can also buy upgrades to pricier versions of Windows (e.g. Pro -> Ultimate and the like) from some versions of Windows 7.

On the OSX front, most long-time users (disclosure - including me) just go to versiontracker.com and do our looking around there for free and paid-for (via demo) stuff.

Apple could make a killing off of putting up an App Store for Macs, but minus the walled garden approach... problem is, the tech 'press' doesn't seem interested in exploring this angle (not as dramatic, etc).

Mine's the one with pockets chock-full of burned CDs and DVDs...

* Dunno if Fedora or RHEL has a GUI utility for YUM, since I rarely run it with X turned on.

They likely have that covered

Ends, Means, Justification, plenty of rot like that tends to pop up when facts get in the way of ideology.

Yes, no, and maybe.

On one hand, I agree that yes, bits of Microsoft are reaching out to open standards, interoperability, etc... but only because in those areas, they don't have a frickin' choice.

Microsoft is being all friendly with open web standards now, because they've seen Internet Explorer's market share drop like a rock (in spite of dominance), with little indication of slowing down the free-fall. They've been watching more and more users install Firefox, Chrome, (and yes, even) Opera, etc. Even Safari has a substantial bit now. They're watching an increasing mobile market that has no use for IE-specific rigging at all. Now contrast all this with 2002, where IE was pretty much the only browser left standing, with something like 96-98% of the market. Now they're down to just under 60%, and again, still dropping.

Now contrast this with their antics in the Office realm, where they still own the market. The whole ODF drama (among similar) is a solid indication of Microsoft at its best shade of evil. They can afford to be evil here because... well, what exactly are you going to do about it? Sell your privacy and soul to Google Docs? Try and scrape by on OpenOffice? Puh-leeze. They know you're stuck with MS Office, and so do you. To that end, they've been leveraging the unholy crap out of it - expanding Exchange, latching on dependencies with SharePoint and OCS... and you'll find damned little reaching-out to the open source / open standards realm (unless they absolutely have to, as the presence of the half-compliant ODF plugin for MS Office has evidenced).

Long story short - unless it is obviously threatening their dominance in a given area, or they never had dominance, they'll stick to type.

Sun-Oracle, oh yes I can agree with you on. If there is one person capable on this Earth of being a greater C*nt than Steve Ballmer, it's Larry Ellison. 'nuff said about that, methinks.

On the Linux side, though - there's far too many companies (in a general sense) betting their futures on the thing - IBM, RedHat, even Cisco nowadays (guess what IOS is getting replaced with if the new Nexus and Mars product lines are any indication?) And that's just a top-of the head list...

Actually, yep.

You're looking at GIMP, but ignoring the pile of commercial apps already out there.

Also, Adobe couldn't simply pull P-Shop off the market for OSX and leave a vacuum... it would take at least another version, which in turn takes years. This is time that, say, a company with $40bn USD in the bank could use to build up a viable alternative, or simply buy an existing alternative and bolster it up.

Indeed...

Cue scene in Adobe HQ boardroom:

CxO #1: "Hey guys! I have this awesome way to get back at Apple - let's cut off CS and make Apple beg for mercy!"

CxO #2: "Err, that would cut off about 25% or so of our income, plus it opens a gargantuan hole for competitors to create a market in. Even Apple could build something."

CxO #1: "Umm, err, umm..." (taps into email: "Dear Flash evangelists: please relay to the world that Steve Jobs is a poopyhead! Kindly put in the usual disclaimers about it not being our official position, etc.") There - problem solved!

Yup

He's not out of touch with reality... insofar as Nokia is concerned (note that the model you linked to is a Samsung... ;) ).

Que?

You're right, though I suspect that it would be the same smug grin amongst *nix users that happens whenever someone (not necessarily you, but someone) cries "A-ha! See!? Macs Get infected too!", ...then points to a convoluted trojan which requires an inordinate amount of user stupidity to actually work.

(Mind you, I'm typing this from a Win7 box, with half a dozen PuTTY SSH sessions open to various Linux and FreeBSD servers, and not a single Mac in sight...)

Personally, I'd wait to call it parity until we start seeing drive-by attacks happen on OSX, Linux, or etc.