Google Awards Android Dev Prizes, Introduces App Store 52
An anonymous reader writes "A group of Canadian engineering students was one of 10 teams to win a $275,000 prize from internet search giant Google Inc. Their program, Ecorio, gives users the ability to reduce their environmental footprint with tools that provide transit options for trips, invest in carbon reduction projects, and share their tips with other users. Other winners included a taxi location app, a price comparison app, and a settings manager than changes your settings based on your location."
Google has also started talking about their plans for Android Market, which is similar to the App store used for the iPhone. Ars Technica's coverage points out a blog post by Google's Eric Chu which notes that early handsets running Android will have a beta version of Android Market enabled.
First app... (Score:2, Funny)
Hey, it's not like we've seen Android either...
Re:First app... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, at least from what I understand, we have...or at least I have, on my N810 [talkandroid.com]
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Anyone can download it and run the emulator, develop for it, play with it...
Wow, all that computational power... (Score:1, Offtopic)
and all that creativity, and they couldn't find "Slap a big enough tax on carbon, and move on to the next problem." I think they're putting the metaphorical cart before the metaphorical horse.
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While we're at it, why don't we have the UN tax genocides too. And that's only the beginning. Just think of all the problems we can solve this way!
</sarcasm>
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That's not a very creative solution at all. Even if there was an increased carbon tax, then carbon-reduction advice for individuals would still be in demand (even more so).
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Not if -- as is probably the case -- the top 90% most efficient ways to reduce carbon emission occur before any end user ("consumer") actually makes a decision. (Tide shipping more concentrated solutions, Walmart reducing drag on trucks, products being shipped less distance, factories recycling waste heat and energy ...) And I guarantee that the stuff this device iunds isn't in the top 90%.
Global warming alarmism has always been a rationale for micromanaging people's lives, not for finding the most efficie
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Carbon coaches would be like life coaches. "Use less fuel." instead of "Go to work everyday." and "Buy the less expensive product." instead of "Don't spend more than your income."
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Cathedral to APTs bazaar? (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA talks a lot about the cathedral vs bazaar model, which I find to be sort of funny. Android supports downloading applications (.apk files) from wherever you want, although it's intended that the market be the primary place you get them. In this sense it's every bit as open as a Linux distribution.
But wait. A typical Linux distribution doesn't actually support you adding other repositories or downloading packages from the web. Sure it might be technically possible, but you're going to encounter a lot of glitches, and if you ask the distro about that they'll just shrug and say it's your own fault for not using the official repositories.
In fact, given that the Android Market is planned to support for-pay software as well as free-beer software, that makes it technically more open than a typical Linux distro, in which the only reliable way of getting your software to end users is to get the distributors to do it for you, and they usually insist on particular kinds of licensing. Doing it yourself is a good way to find yourself in distro-compatibility hell.
(disclaimer: am a googler, but have no more info than the average slashdotter does on this)
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So what you have, is people trying to install any old rpm on any rpm based distro and complaining it doesn't work or is not supported.
The only difference here is going to be popularity.
Re:Cathedral to APTs bazaar? (Score:5, Interesting)
No they don't support it. I've had many, many conversations with distributors over the years about this topic. It "works" simply because of the way the tools are constructed. But they provide absolutely no guarantees that your app won't break tomorrow with some update they push, and are completely unwilling to make any such guarantees. In fact it's even possible for you to break peoples systems by distributing software on your own.
Trivial example of how things can go wrong, there's no namespacing in Linux. Let's say I make a game and call it Epiphany [sourceforge.net], then start distributing it outside the framework of the distributions. What sort of things could happen? Well, somebody else might make a web browser called Epiphany [gnome.org], which then might become a part of the base set of packages. What happens when the user tries to upgrade their distribution? Anything might happen, because you have two packages with the same name (or which both try to provide /usr/bin/epiphany).
In the best case the upgrade will just break and the user will be stuck having to choose one of the two packages. But they can't have both.
In the worst case, I decided not to fuck about with 10 different but somehow identical package management systems and used an autopackage or a Loki Installer. Almost all commercial software for Linux does this sort of thing. Now the package manager will just silently overwrite my game files with the web browser. It won't notify the user it's going to do this - it'll just uncleanly corrupt the game.
So what's the solution? Back when I was involved in distribution of apps for Linux, the usual proposal was to put third party software in /usr/local rather than /usr. Unfortunately no distributor properly supports this prefix, and besides, it just moves the problem around rather than solve it. Sadly there actually isn't a solution for this on UNIX - it's fundamental to the design.
You'll notice that Android doesn't use UNIX style directory trees or package management ... and this is probably one of the reasons why.
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Oh boy, here comes a rant.
NOBODY does. There's not a single OS vendor that does that, because it's impossible. If this is really what you're after, send me an e-mail when you buy that flying car.
Like viruses? Why did you even type this sentence?
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Hi, Twitter. Forgot your login password or something?
What you ignore is that most OS vendors give you fairly good guarantees on a stable API/ABI. That is, they are not going to rip out the current sound API because someone went all "Oooh shiny! Pulseaudio rawks!".
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That's not true. Distributions guarantee that they will support certain standards in terms of having a minimum number of common dependencies installed in specific locations --
Re:Cathedral to APTs bazaar? (Score:4, Informative)
They guarantee a stable ABI for the lifetime of a particular release of their OS. That's useless, if there are 5 distros you want to support, and each one has 3 versions in common use (pretty conservative estimate) then that's 15 different builds of your program you need to produce, test and distribute. This is completely absurd and is one of the major reasons only the truly dedicated try to distribute binary software on Linux.
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15 different builds? That is, indeed, completely absurd... if it were actually the case in practice.
Those who are not "truly dedicated", as you put it, generally t
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Different purposes.
Unix style directory trees are designed to operate efficiently over a lan. If you have a very limited number of applications and can guarantee that there will be no network hops involved, other structures can be used.
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But they provide absolutely no guarantees that your app won't break tomorrow with some update they push, and are completely unwilling to make any such guarantees.
They give no guarantee that when they upgrade one pice of software, other software they distribute won't break either. Distributions are pretty dodgy in the best case; the best you can do is use a so-called stable distribution for a months or years in the case of Debian, until it's no longer supported. God help you if the stable distribution doesn'
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Why should anyone support software that is entirely outside of (distro) standards ? Glitches mainly show up when repository maintainers don't do their job correctly.
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libflashsupport is a problem of the communities own making. There's absolutely no reason why the existing sound APIs (eg, libasound) can't be made to support the needed features but somebody decided to create yet another sound daemon. The fact that the Flash developers have better things to do with their lives than support this weeks sound daemon shouldn't surprise anybody, and has nothing to do with open vs closed source. It has to do with immature platform management. Open source apps will have the same p
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The real story is that Google is introducing a new consumer-oriented platform with no software distribution security in place, particularly a problem on a mobile platform. It had a great opportunity to develop something that was both secure and open, and blew it. By taking the easy route, it also blew any chance of competing with Apple.
The iPhone has a strict, secured Apps Store and a DIY-at your own risk jailbreak community. Google only has an official DIY-AYOR model for distribution based on YouTube. The
Let's hear it for Eco-Friendly! (Score:4, Funny)
I invented a diesel engine that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days per week and plays an airhorn reminding people to turn out their lights when not in use. I'm now seriously considering throwing out my current cell phone so I can buy an Android-enabled phone so I can run Ecorio and find out how I can be more environmentally responsible.
Google says to Apple "Gimmee Some-o-dat!" (Score:2, Insightful)
As a marketing consultant, I can appreciate how easy the App Store relieves people of their burdensome credit. Just fire up the App Store on the iPhone, select one of the thousands of apps, and press the BUY button. Voila, your pre-authorized credit card is charged with a sale. And you get emailed an in
Skynet (Score:1)
APT Repos, Not "App Stores" (Score:4, Insightful)
Android software would be much more available if it were served to machines from Debian (or Ubuntu) style APT [wikipedia.org] repositories, rather than Apple style "App Stores". Not just because free software is basically more popular and available than $pay software. But also because anyone can set up an APT repo, and anyone can point their machine at it. The machines ship with a list of tested/approved repos, but the machine's admins can easily add/delete from that list. They can even make their own local repo, or one shared among a user group or developer group, or a website of fanboys.
These repos make SW deployment trivial, even with complex interdependencies (though with some exceptions when the repos and packages are managed badly). Simple, reliable SW management is perhaps Debian-style OS'es best feature, and even more important on something like a mobile "phone", that's supposed to be super-simple for even the lightest weight users to master without thinking too hard.
Since Android is supposed to be a major OSS platform, I hope it quickly gets a F/OSS repo system that all its users can easily use if they want. Because that would kill the "all-proprietary only" SW model that phones now support.
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This is exactly how Cydia works on the iPhone.
It is an iPhone front-end to APT, and a much better alternative to the closed-source Installer.app.
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I should keep up with my tech slang (Score:2, Funny)
Android vs. App Store (Score:1)
Androbuntu ? (Score:1)
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Androbuntu? Like, Ubuntu but for real men? Now that's probably an untapped market (although there is Debian).
No, Ubuntroid. Although, actually, that sounds more like some kind of medical condition.
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Aww, man... (Score:2)
You know if I ever open a store (Score:2)
that sells androids, or leases them for housework and menial tasks such as xenomorph elimination, offworld mining and/or colonization, or act as overlords (with whip and monocle to match) for some particular breed of basement dweller, my lawyers would have to meet with Google's about other names that Google could come up with, to name their application.
Great (Score:2)
Now we just need a decent phone to run them on.
[OT] Recent Google Search Changes SUCK! Etc. (Score:1)
Google SMS
==========
* [lowes in 11219] -> Google SMS had formerly understood a search request *within* a specific neighborhood in NYC. It spat out appropriate guesses like: If you meant Lowe's near Brooklyn NY here are results 1, 2 and 3 over two SMS messages. It was fuzzy and accurate. It worked