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.
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 invoice from Apple a few days later. I've done it myself, with purchases of up to $20 in fact. Steve must know how media starved and spend-easy us iPhone users are
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.
Carbon, green, ecological, AGW, am I the only one? (Score:0, Insightful)
Am I really the only one getting sick and tired of this goody-goody save-the-planet doublethink bollocks? It seems everywhere you turn, someone is jumping on the bandwagon, ignoring the obvious problems the "approved solutions" pose, usually to end up sitting on the side of said wagon with palm outstretched to remove more and more money from us, not to mention frowning, for example, that we're not using CFLs instead of tungsten filament lamps.
Heads up: CFLs do NOT last longer in a typical TFL environment like a kitchen or bathroom where they're switched on and off a lot, they cost more in both energy and material to produce and are rather difficult to dispose of when they go titsup, all for a saving of 75% of the *lighting* energy consumption in your home, which equates to a mere fraction of what you use in total and is unlikely to offset the amount of CO2 emitted to produce the thing in the first place. Like everything else to do with this greenrush, it's a con and a deliberate blinkered view of the technology involved. The fact that the Goog are involved is icing on the cake.
Fine, cover your roof in photovoltaic cells. Just let me know a) if you make ROI in 25 years time when the fuckers need replacing, b) if you offset the amount of carbon emitted to make those panels *including* that used to extract/process the raw materials used and c) what we in the Northern latitudes are supposed to do when some cunt in Sunnyvale tells us, in the most annoying self-righteous manner possible, that we should be using PV. Don't say micro-generation using wind: Anything other than a terribly inefficient Savonius Rotor is useless in the turbulence around built-up areas and, if you haven't noticed, more people now live in urban areas than rural. Of course, if you could get a few green campaigners standing in front of your turbine, the hot air alone would generate megawatts...
Nuclear is a nice, carbon neutral source, but they're against this as well. Want to tell me how many people have died due to well-designed, not modified for military extraction of plutonium compromising the core containment, reactors? Now tell me how many Chinese people are going to die when these PV cells get replaced and the poor bastards have to reclaim the precious (and highly toxic) materials in the old ones.
You want tips on going green? Here's a tip: Wait until these idiots know their arse from their elbow. Until such time, ignore them as they're just contributing to global warming by dint of the amount of shit they emit. Methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2, you know. So is water vapour, although back in the days when we had particulates in the atmosphere, due to the fact that we've been burning shit for eons, the resultant cloud cover raised the planetary albedo, the one factor absolutely proven beyond doubt to make a difference to GMST. Remember WWII? The amount of crap that was burned and the particulate count back then was far beyond anything we have in recent times, yet what were the winters of '46 and '47 like?
Oh shit! Carbon bad, particulates bad! Stop burning coal and diesel! Slam filters on EVERYTHING! Oh FUCK! Now we've got another feedback loop that was worse than the one we thought we'd seen due to CO2. Pissup. Brewery. Couldn't run one.
Re:Cathedral to APTs bazaar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cathedral to APTs bazaar? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 problem is, YouTube doesn't distribute executable code, only media. You can't broadly infect a million users with a malicious YouTube clip, or automatically send out paid SMS or spy on them. Mobile apps need more than a freaking YouTube. What the hell was Google thinking?
And even worse, why is the media so complacently ignorant in not calling out Google on this criminally negligent cop out? It's Windows XP all over again, except that Google should have the benefit of hindsight working for it.
Google's Android Market Guarantees Problems for Users [roughlydrafted.com]