Database Info

And suddenly a heavy silence flashed our...

...sullen curved heads.
And the larger part of us sadly realized that we all have been submitted to a deeply manipulative plan aimed solely to maximize profits under the solaceous umbrella of the motto "greed is good", (R. Reagan) and the previous generous ground, the rich cornucopia of freeware, of simple direct links to downloads with
no strings attached grew bare and dry, prompting only the fruits of defaced unshamed methods of soliciting pay, pay, PAY (there are various simple, easy forms of payment: paypal, payfoe, credit card indebted card and the lot.
And the usual real life-deprived sons of beaches continued to launch their worms, and virus, and trojan horses and the like and the younger generation begun to use the net just as a date database tool, ignoring and despising the manifolded worlds it also produces for those who have the persistence to surf in orderly sequence... And a large slice of them young blokes gave up and started to look back in anger and search for other skills and entertainment.
Too much of a good thing seems to be too much for our generation to cope with. Hèlas!...
Well, there was a time for M$ to use and abuse its followers, then big develloping companies discovered telecommunications and entered it, inspired by the very same spirit: You will buy our products, and use them the way we constrain you to, and you'll mantain this status as long as we make good profits -- now and then we will keep you under scrutiny and tight surveillance with
tools such as all the KBs and service packs and upgrades and then our net.frameworks basis will provide support to devellopers and other enlightned individuals, while at the same time sending back to our premises individual informations about uses and contents you poor retarded intend to make use of, against our directions, and we will send bsod to your little machines, which today you proudly boast about, but tomorrow we will obsoletize and push you
to spend again your good nickels on some more mhz, or fpm, or any tremendously important benchmark "new" value...whatever we find a good target to aim at.
Then appeared Google and looked sideways and realized there was a good trunk almost unexplored: Linux. And then Android and the promise of stable flexibility and a load of luring applications to market and sell, sell,SELL. You will buy the device we advertise and will pay not only for your phone calls. The minute you activate it, the countdown clock begins to run deducting cents over cents from your meager deposits...
And as time goes by they all begun to weight if their joy of users, consumers in fact, so expensive as it was becoming, if really balanced the economic sacrifice it entailed -- and little, by little started to fold their tends and silently flying away.
And then the masters realized: « That was a funny and profitable game, now we have to find another!...Keep them smiling, keep them distracted with their long hi-tech references and... keep them spending, of course!».
And one of us left his ecstasy and Solomon-like dictated: «Symbian what?! and Android which?! Ah, come on people, 'Rasbadas' is the way! The only one, the best!!! I am buying the "Zhark GT Xanadu 3000": the champion device!!!»..
I'm sorry to occupy your space. Erase it if you will. Regards, HN

How do we engage women in mobile computing?

Recently a long overdue debate has started to arise, on how we humans engage with information and communication technologies on a daily basis and how we need to strengthen our basic understanding of how those complex electronic infrastructures around us do actually work.
This is much more urgent after we've seen the incredible expansion of the mobile side of computing, which will bring us quite soon to the astonishing fact that there will be more working telephone lines than people living in the Earth. Moreover, an unstoppably growing portion of those phones are "smartphones" which are computers with more and more functions every year, with the same or more capabilities as the traditional desktop or laptop computer
Every single one of those computers, just like every computer, runs through a certain software. Operative system, applications, low-level programs... And since software is so present in our lives, it's fair to ask who designed it and who it was designed for.
Whatever criteria we use to answer the first question, the answer almost always has a common point: it was made mostly by men, and mostly with men in mind. Whether it's a big software project inside a corporation or a modest project like an Android ROM, it's men who are in charge and who are the target towards which the software is directed.
Is this suboptimal? It certainly is. Developing software has a creative component, not unlike literature and other arts. Until very recent times, women were deemed unsuited to read and write, and only recently (in historical terms) have we seen women count in the literary field. Developing software may very well be the new skill which, like literature in the past, shapes our world. Isn't it high time to engage women so that this new world-shaping takes them into account too, unlike the former ones? And how should we do it?
Swypesation

There are actually a large number of female developers/programmers and it's increasing all the time. I don't think there needs to be a ton of active recruiting.

Logseman said:
How do we engage women in mobile computing?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wrap things up in pink ribbons, call it Unicorn instead of Android.
i think woman wil and need to grow with and in to it.
Like my own wife she's a user not a developer.
In our world it is not what a device can do, What can it do more , where is not designed for.
think it will take a lot of years until programming en coding is natural to women.
When they realize what they are missing they will come around.
And then where screwed...........

threads like this should do it.

MissionImprobable said:
There are actually a large number of female developers/programmers and it's increasing all the time. I don't think there needs to be a ton of active recruiting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Research shows that only a minority, as in 10% or less of the whole collective, work directly in programming (management and other matters that are related in different degrees with programming are different things). And open source projects have an even lower proportion of women, like less than 2%. Since open source is the most desirable direction in which we want software to get going, it is of the utmost importance that women take their place there, otherwise we'll be replicating the mistakes of the past.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/pr...der-gap-where-are-the-female-programmers/2386
Curiously enough, in places where computing took off much later, e.g. developing countries like India, the proportion of women in the field is much higher than in the US and Europe.

idk, Most of the programmers and IT professionals I know are women. Maybe it's cause I work in Health care, not sure.

i am 32 and grew up with computers or the things we called it then.
(commodore 64, Atari 1040, Amiga's) i loved it playing with these machines.
My sister didn't even look at it, she like to play a game once in a year thats it.
My two daugthers of nine have way more interest in computers then women my age have.
use of computers/interactive screens by them is natural, give them a device, in five minutes they know what it can do how it works.
there will be more women in the IT-Sector. we just have to wait.

[Q] Things that irritate about phones in general

Although the subject is rather troll like I hope I can do it in a non troll way.
There's a number of things that are really hacking me off about phones these days. I thought I'd have a major slam out to let off steam with the off-chance that someone might say "Ah but if you try X you can avoid that".
...some of the challenges in the mobile phone area these days...
1) Battery capacities aren't good enough as we all know. Getting through a single day is really the basics for me. Why not have hot swappable batteries? For me I expect to be able to go for 3-4 days. I don't know why... I just kind of expect that kind of efficiency.
2) Samsung Galaxy series... seems amazing but the batteries overheat, no?
3) So many people are ignorant of security to the point that most people are walking around with devices and apps that can just completely own you. Yeah there's sandboxing but it doesn't really work, it's been sidestepped. The iPhone just hides what's going on, rarely fixing the issues.
4) Licensing, all that stuff. Companies reinventing the wheel, fighting, all the rest. You can't buy a phone that does X and Y because company X won't license tech X to company Y
5) Trying to get everything perfect in one device... it's a bit of an ask but needed for portability. If things were separate we could have the better of most worlds, but that doesn't seem possible
6) Closed source. Just a bit irritating to see the inefficiency of it all in general. Bit of a hash moan but for those who can imagine better it seems like the dark ages in some areas still.
7) Closed source binary blobs. See Replicant on Samsung phones as the best we can do... the modem is arranged such messily and it's just not true a solution because of that. Kind of irritates me that there is no phone that can really guarantee it's not recording my phone numbers, conversations and credit cards because it's fully open source. Certainly an issue for companies. Companies in general are happy to rely on the word of Blackberry for thier integrity but for those of us who can imagine a solution that is secure by design it's not the best.
8) App whitelisting. Similar to the reactive rather than proactive security we tend to see as the trend in general. Manually checking all apps in the app store, trying to block and check them all.... doesn't seem the best. We've also had censorship. There are alternative stores, that's good.
9) Wakelocks. The Dalvik VM not managing or helping us track them down. Further, it's hard to tell if the app that you want to use is going to shaft your battery... once installed it's hard to tell if the app is ruining your battery too. It's messy.
10) IMEI security is a pain in the butt. It slows down the criminals but it also slows down everyone more so. In the case of Turkey it's another way to screw people with tax. Again, imperfect design.
11) As a man, if you have a phone at waist level that reduces your sperm count. Almost nobody notices or cares.
12) Just the usual society things... people looking at phones rather than each other. Can't really complain about that... the interface of looking at a screen is a bit basic. I've had speech recognition available to me... but I don't use it because there's always people around me and I'd rather be quiet... just one of those funny inventions
13) Screen don't work in bright sunlight still. We've got Motheye coming though which is great but we've had eink for ages and still no eink phone. Further, it can't be hacked onto an existing phone. Some of us aren't interested in games and movies and are focussed on getting stuff done. I feel Mirasol & PixelQi are being blocked or delayed as they try to slow things down until the point we've run out of ideas to make things better so only then does that tech get deployed.
14) Networks interfering with phones. I always go prepay because it's cheaper if you do the maths in many countries and also it allows for freer trade. Networks are always trying to get thier fingers into the mobile phone pies. Thank you Samsung for helping get against that, and also custom ROMs.
15) Apple are great but it's not clear what's going on behind the scenes.
16) eink displays would help battery life. A NookTouch can last for a month. How much would that help a phone on standby? Yet no eink display or anything like that.
17) Great to see the back of proprietary connectors but they still come back sometimes.
18) I hate the way things are made to break. Watch out for this. There's usually one thing on a phone that is designed to break. Sometimes it's a moveable part, like a ribbon cable in a slide phone. Sometimes its the USB connector. You can't buy port savers. When they fail you're screwed. Mitigate against this if you can. Try to figure out what the weak spot on your phone is.
19) Lock in software. I have an old backup phone... but I still have to keep the sync software... bit annoying. One day it probably won't work on Windows9 or whatever. People say throw it away but that's just it, throw away society. No, fix it, get it to work and be in control.
All of these things can be mitigated against. But you have to think about these things when you select your new phone.
If the commercialisation of the industry, cut throat tactics and so on aren't good enough as they are for me one thing you can do is buy a slightly older, but popular phone. In my case I never buy a new phone and instead go for something that I already know is popular with the hacking community. I know you guys can give me an insight into what I'm really looking for in life. As an example my last phone was a Galaxy S i9000. Way out of date in a sense. That's the way I find the best way to go. Go with something popular. That way you have some real support like a real man able to handle things yourself, not AppleCare and a 1 year limit. A philosophy for life. You can't have it all but with a bit of thought you can do a lot to get a bit closer to it all.

The Next Big Thing?

Hopefully this is the correct forum for this...
This is right up the XDA alley. Here's a cool new application for innovative developers. It could change the world for consumers, retailers, various industries, police depts, the military... It's a quiet, tiny, robotic dragonfly with HD cameras and numerous sensors. Pretty exciting stuff and has the potential for several new industries and many new jobs.
It can be used for gaming, to guard your home (inside or outside), keep an eye on your crazy neighbor, monitor your child's bike ride to school, real estate agents, auto dealerships, etc. The applications are almost endless. Apparently your android or iphone smartphone controls it.
They're selling various prototypes starting at $119. A software developer kit is available to create your own application. They plan to use the money to make it even better (smaller, lighter, quieter, faster, more efficient). No doubt there will be a huge # of applications in the consumer market in the years to come.
I purchased one and can't wait to start playing with it. Unfortunately there's only a few more remaining...
http://www.indiegogo.com/robotdragonfly

Interesting. Is this legit ?
Sent from my Nexus 7 using xda app-developers app

Yeah, good luck with that. Consider it a tax write-off lmao.
Even to really get one, I'd imagine it wouldn't last long before a bird took it out.....or the gust from a strong fart blew it into the side of the house. You be better off mouthing s tiny camera in a tree somewhere.
If it was easy you'd of hired the guy at Home Depot to to it.

I'm bothered by the idea that it's being promoted as something to invade civilian privacy. Security is one thing, actively going out of your way to invade the privacy and property of others is different.
At 6", I can't believe it's not going to be noticed - wouldn't you notice an unusually large, weird-looking bug ? It's really the size of a bird if you watch it.
I can't imagine people not noticing and not calling the police over it - or simply destroying it if someone decided to use it for that purpose.
Commendable and interesting otherwise, though I also have concerns about flight abilities and stability and such - but would be interested to know more about its capabilities in that regard.

help
Just got the S3, should I have waited for the S4!

Wow that looks so cool but I would love to see it follow me down a downhill track without hitting a tree but still really cool I may think of getting one
skydragon team

i want one

When I want an app to fly I'll make sure to keep this in mind lol

Trick me - body language

Truth or lie? What does your partner really think? Which signs can reveal the lie? These and many other questions will be answered in our application about body language “Trick me”
You can meet both lie and truth in your life. It is easy to meet a lie on the streets, in shops or on television watching your morning breaking news.
Scientists suppose every human lies up to 20 times per day and often they don’t even realise it. This app will help you better understand yourself through teaching you non-verbal actions.
Download from Google Play
Nowadays for recognition of deception some professionals use lie detector (polygraph). Unfortunately you can’t take a polygraph at the date with your beloved and it also would be odd to use it with your business partners. Even in relationships between parents and children this device looks unappropriate. And even more - it’s accuracy, according to some resources, is under 80%.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Are you sure you really want to know when people are lying to you? Even your closest ones. Using knowledge of body language you can find out a lot of new about people in your environment. Did you know that 98% of teenagers lie to their parents and 80% of people tell the white lie every day? Lie theory - is the very wide topic, but you should just accept this fact - everybody lies.
The methods from this apllication “lie to me" are used in a lot of fields of actions: by police, security services, psychiatric consultants, NLPrs and so on.
This app is useful for head managers, scholars, students and everybody who wants to be knowledgeable in psychology of lying and better understand people.
A person both thinks and talks with his or her the whole body. For recognition signs of lie in this application we use a lot of kinds of body language, like:
Gaze direction
Touching of lips
Types of handshakes
Position of legs
Lie by telephone