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Though it has long heralded Android as 'open,' Google has recently taken other steps to gain control of its mobile platform. Just last week, it was revealed that the company had closed availability of the source code of Android 3.0 Honeycomb, a tablet-specific version of its platform.
There's a new-ish mode of engagement with open source that's open source once we're done with it. This allows people thinking about adopting the packages to vet everything fairly well and to mitigate the dangers of being unsupported in the future if, here, Google's support for Android died. But what it allows the provider to do is to retain rights to every bit of code, and fork into a proprietary branch their future development.
That is to say, if you release a package you've written completely by yourself under the GPL and never accepted patches, you could then release version 2 based on the same code as a copyrighted, proprietary, closed source piece of software. That's what Google's doing with Android.
You initially get more adoption than a closed platform because the source is out there for anyone to maintain if they need to so that they can keep selling hardware, but once enough folk use it (initially for that but later for other reasons, like broad adoption), BAM, close up shop. You've gotten the adoption benefits of open source with the later benefits of proprietary lock-in thanks to planned obsolescence driven by consumer capitalism.
It's sort of the issue with BSD for me. BSD really isn't Free Software, precisely because it's too freely (little "f") exploited. OS X is here thanks to FreeBSD's overly unrestrictive license. We'll never see tons of the changes Apple made to the codebase, and are lucky to have gotten anything from Apple via Darwin. Similar with KHTML and Safari, though there Apple has been great about giving back with WebKit. Up until now, at least. Because the software's not properly protected (and here I include LGPL v2), Apple owes us nothing. What good is it if your work only creates a standard for Square One? You want to ensure the future versions enabled by your continues to be an open standard and a force for *cough* good.
Neither of these modes of producing open software, BSD or open after we're done with it, are really "open" in spirit. Both are waiting for conventional modes of production to exploit their resources right back into a closed situation. Bless their hearts.
Only certain apps can be installed to the SD card. The developer of the app controls this, not the OS. This is not a backup mechanism, it's for performance & clearing space on the internal storage. That said, many apps will actually experience a performance drop if moved to the SD card do to the slower speeds.
Nice. My Optimus V won't stop yelling at me about its internal memory card being full -- all of 31 megs from its 180 are left. Nevermind the 12 gigs I've got open on the SD card. That's not cool.
So let me reiterate. This phone only has 180 megs that can host popular, fully featured apps. Apps that require internal storage include...
New York Times Google Reader Facebook DoubleTwist RunKeeper Amazon Appstore Amazon mp3 Twitter
Wow. Apparently the SD card was initially only for media file storage. With Android 2.2, you could start putting some apps on SD. That's a serious limitation. If I was paying a typical price for monthly service, there's no way I'd put up with this. (For $130 and $25 a month, well, I can live with some pain.)
/sigh
This isn't as smooth as an iPhone, that's for sure.
I grabbed an LG Optimus V Android phone on Virgin Mobile's prepay plan, and it's pretty impressive. It's only $25 a month for unlimited data and 300 minutes. I'd been Tracfoning for a couple of years, keeping an iPod touch in my pocket for sort of a poor man's smartphone. I didn't think I'd appreciate 3G internet so much, but I am.
One of the best parts of Android is the ability to use mini-SDHC cards rather than paying Apple's $70 for going from 8 to 32 or $100 for 16 to 32. The downside is that the tether-paradigm Apple's got, where you basically manage your phone inside and out in iTunes.
With iTunes, when I lost my first iPod touch and got another, I lost nothing. All the apps, music, podcasts were all on iTunes, and sync'd right back over without a hitch.
With Android, swapping cards can be a real pain. If you've got apps on the card, you can't, apparently, just copy data over and onto the new card. Somehow, the apps forget they're apps on the way over. Instead, you have to move apps from SDHC to the phone's internal storage -- and on the Optimus V, that's paltry -- and then to the new SDHC. That's not fun. One swap to figure it out. One swap to move apps from SDHC-old to phone to SDHC-new, and then a second rigamarole to get the rest. It's not smooth.
I guess the lesson is that you should buy an SDHC card, the largest your phone will hold, with the phone. Don't use the one that comes with it (mine had 2 gigs). Save yourself a little trouble.
Just caught the "Memorable Status Updates" widget on Facebook as I replied to a message, sitting there on the right side of the page. A quick Google gave this...
Facebook appears to be testing a reincarnation of memorable stories, which appeared a couple of times on the site and then disappeared.
The feature first showed up on December 16 for only about an hour, came back on January 12 and vanished at some point thereafter.
Now it’s back and this time around, the feature has the label memorable status updates, and instead of showing you some of your own content, instead you see something from one of your friends. ... And perhaps I got an odd selection, but relative to each friend shown, the status updates weren’t the ones they’d consider most memorable. And they weren’t ones that got the most likes nor comments. (emphasis mine)
The disconcerting thing to me is that my list was of a friend who was telling of her mother going off of life support, "ready to see jesus" (I think that's, if anything, more of that incredibly personal narrative than I should be sharing). Good heavens, really? What is Facebook trying to do here? What are the metrics for a "memorable" update?
I might guess that it's based on the number of people who went to your profile page after reading the update. One thing that this certainly tells you is that Facebook is measuring everything, and constantly trying to figure out new ways of processing what it means to be human through back-end algorithms.
Wow, some of the comments to the above article are just as interesting.
I want to block my own past status updates. The past no longer matters. I hope this is an option.
Yes. Just noticed it. Was a little disconcerted because the first friend whose "memorable status updates" I saw is in very ill health and for a minute I was worried he had died and this was some sort of memorial feature.
Yep - not memorable ... and most importantly, did not include anything to do with "me". It's in the past, has nothing to do with me, and is totally random. cannot see benefit.
How do I turn it off????
Don't like it - the people they put on my page I haven't really interacted with much...
Agree with several folks - past is NOT relevant and should not be dredged up. We should have an option to block our past posts from appearing.
They need to give us a way to control whose updates we are seeing. I don't want to see the statuses of people I've hidden in my feed. That's the whole point of hiding them.
There's a group (linked to by that last comment) that's asking that Facebook "lose memorable stories or give us control". Ten likes.
Honestly, that people are wrapped up in the "me" and "now" and don't realize that everything you do on Facebook, even what you erase, is probably in a giant RDBMS farm somewhere (with couples doubles on tape and another server or 10) forever isn't quite down with the FB.
(apologies for not quite getting the "couples doubles" clip from Bedazzled. It comes a few minutes after the stables quote.)
Note: The code examples below are out of date. Currently, the code itself is the best resource for understanding the API. In particular, search for “new Zotero.Item” and “Zotero.Items.get()” to learn how to create and update items, respectively.
... you don't really have documentation at all. For heaven's sake, people. If you pretend to have a popular open source project, keep your docs up to date. Nothing better than being forced to [psycho-]analyze the cyborg with only the cybernetic parts available for view.
Take. The. Worthless. Docs. Down. (PLS!)
All in all, a really inauspicious start to my Zotero coding project.
posted by ruffin
at 3/04/2011 05:14:00 PM
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