Since I've been jumping up and down on the community dead horse for a while, I thought I'd correct/comment on some of this.
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Kurt <[email protected]> wrote: > > First, some good things Google's done for android: > > * Gave us root. It's not a mistake, and it's not unintentional. Nobody > at Google makes as silly of a as passing through keystrokes to a root > console (yeah, root) while at the same time "accidentally" running a > telnet daemon as root, too. Every bit of the code was picked over > with a fine tooth comb from what I can tell, but somehow two glaring, > no-skill-needed-at-all security holes were left open? Please. Its not a "telnet daemon that runs as root". Its a root shell. ANYTHING you run from a root shell runs as root. Shipping telnetd was an oversight, but I doubt either was intentional. Their security across the board has been .... subpar at best. (And where do you get the "fine toothed comb" bit? In cursory glances several of us have found pretty obvious security problems. And they did what, 3 immediate, emergency releases when it was first in the wild? That doesn't make it sound like it got a decent audit..) * Give everyone the ability to execute native code en masse. You have > linux; let people use it. You'd be surprised what will come out as a > result. This should have been the number one priority far before > dalvik, and it needs to be spelled out very slowly to your carriers. > My guess is that all of this must have been in the making since before > iPHone was released-- back when midlets were the only things that > roamed the mda world. The mistake was in not adapting once iPhone > came on the scene. Everyone-- *everyone*--- *FREAKING EVERYONE* knows > that truly talented developers prefer c[++] wayyy over java; newbie > developers love java because that's what retarded schools teach CS > majors-- a crap language for people who can't figure out the > "difficult" tasks of memory management and avoiding buffer overflows. > Nobody wants to port c to java, because it's a *downgrade*. > Lots of people here say otherwise. I guess they don't "freak" so they don't count? Dalvik is reasonably fast, and there are reportly a lot of simple changes that can be made to make it faster. (And thats even before you talk to the JIT-or-death crowd.) Also, that ability is already there. JNI works. It works -great-. And the NDK is being built. (Feel that strongly? Join the android-ndk group and help out.) By the way, in case it wasn't emphasized enough: VMs seem to *always* > be inherently inferior to native code in the eyes of good coders. > ...again, I think you have a sample selection bias here. > That's why they got and developed for iPhones. It's all the greatness > Right, it had nothing at all to do with the fact that it was first to market with a new type of phone, driven by huge marketing and worldwide availability? Elsewhere you list all those reasons..... > * Find a way to market the differences; find (or create) some things > that everyone will go, "whoh" to. An example: currently, the fact > that you restrict the Maps licensing to explicitly not be used for > realtime navigation is one of the biggest mistakes you could possibly > be making on a mobile platform like android when you have such a > strong advantage on the playing field. If you don't realize that > and nothing's even planned to be done about it, then, well, I'm > speechless. Absolutely freaking speechless. > How much do you want to pay, per device, for your relicensing of the map data? The ONLY google product that can do 'live' navigation is the old commercial update to google earth. The data google maps uses is licensed to them -specifically- with a "no navigation" clause. Changing that affects -everyone- who uses it - the website goes commercial, android devices get more expensive, etc. And you talk as if it were an android-only oversight here - that is true on every single platform they ship maps for, from the lowliest j2me flip to the iphone and upcoming pre. > * Be more visible and develop a greater community-- both of users and > developers. The one thing google has always sucked at is > communities. Am I actually posting to a mailing list, by the way? > How 90s. {random unrelated ranting cut} > Cuz of course apache, linux kernel, debian, *bsd all use official forums and boards and wikis instead of mailing lists for their primary discussions..? Er, wait, no, actually, they look a lot like android does right now - a couple of vendor-specific forums (eg tmobile), "back-end" acces to developers through irc, 3rd party support communities (xda-dev) and 3rd party wikis, discussions, etc (andblogs, android-dls wiki..) > So back to Android. Where's the Wiki like every open source project has? Where are the forums? The feature requests? Please point me to the official linux kernel wiki and forums. (And lemme help you out, since you failed to try google: the wiki is at android-dls.com/wiki, there are forums at xda-dev and androidcommunity.com, and b.android.com hosts the official bug/feature request tracker.) > I see practically zero > Google employees actively enthusiastic about / supporting the > platform / encouraging new ideas through forums/lists/whatever. Clearly, again, that is a failure on your part to look around. Google empoyees are mostly the -only- people who are out there being cheerleaders. (Even when their situation requires them to say patently stupid or incorrect things.) > No response from google, but someone > was more than happy to tell me why that's a waste of Google's time and > money(?) That's fine if my idea's crap, but on an allegedly open > source platform, I'm not entirely convinced that it is. > OOOh neat, now the community shooting down your idea is somehow a sign that its not an open source platform? Help me follow you here, please explain how that works. > No response from Google? Really? Was it in the FAQ somewhere? Oh > wait, no user-editable FAQs... there's that community thing again.... > ...see above. > You've gotta give a response. Otherwise, people start formulating > their own thoughts, because their imaginations run wild. When you're > #2; the only way you'll get to #1 is by, at the very least, "smiling > and nodding." > Your imagination does in fact seem to have run wild, yes. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. 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