It's strange that pricing is only available to customers (for now?). There are three plans, starter, pro and elite and they all include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, unlimited employees (users) and e-mail support.
There's no mention that I can see whether Basecamp includes time tracking (available only on the $49 and higher Basecamp plans) or how much, if any, conference call minutes are included with Campfire.
Please do so sooner than later as something like the limit of simultaneous chatters in Campfire has been an issue for us in the past. I've got our HR guy looking into upgrading but we've got little in terms of comparisons to go on.
1. to the utmost or most absolute extent or degree; absolutely; completely : it's quite out of the question | are you quite certain about this? | this is quite a different problem | I quite agree | quite frankly, I don't blame you.
• very; really (used as an intensifier) : “You've no intention of coming back?” “I'm quite sorry, but no, I have not.”
2. to a certain or fairly significant extent or degree; fairly : it's quite warm outside | I was quite embarrassed, actually | she did quite well at school | he's quite an attractive man.
It'd be great to see an Xserve-inspired 1U kit that'd let you mount a couple of Mac minis side by side (or a 5U kit that let you mount a dozen Mac minis Xserve RAID style).
The Mac Mini is highly underrated, btw. That may be neither here nor there, but it's an extremely versatile and relatively inexpensive solution to quite a few non-obvious use cases.
- To do mega-project: car install as all-purpose media server/center (though I have read that there are kinks in this sort of setup, especially as concerns audio)
- Home security setup / server for video feed
I should disclose that I own more of these little buggers than is probably warranted or advisable.
I've been considering picking up one. I'd like to see a home security/automation thread. Can I ask what you have set up? I'm really interested in a rig that can log entry.
I took most of my initial cues from Alan Graham / BoingBoing, though I will freely admit that I haven't gone as far down the home automation rabbit hole as he has. I should also mention that he's now advocating iPads for home automation (I still prefer Minis for various reasons, especially storage capacity for things like video feed and logging).
Some of these links are practically ancient, but they're where I started, and they are good jumping-off points:
Let's be honest: the reason I don't go as far on home automation as he does is a) I'm not really interested in being a power user of some of the home auto features he advocates; b) I am too lazy/occupied to write a custom UI that would theoretically be foolproof enough for guests...let alone myself first thing in the morning before coffee. :)
Dislaimer 2: Alan is very much a kitchen-sink approach kind of guy (as is evident in the pics of his rather ungainly and uber-comprehensive UI), whereas I am a minimalist.
A Mac Mini with 1-2-3 external drives connected using Light Peak will be more than sufficient for most small companies, and this will be much cheaper than an Xserve with the same amount of redundant disk space.
I know that Android's OS versions are more fragmented, because they're controlled by Google, handset manufacturers AND carriers (in contrast to the iPhone being solely controlled by Apple), but I always thought hardware, not software, fragmentation was the big issue.
There are about 80 different Android smartphones that have been released according to Wikipedia. That is more than what RIM have released in the last 15 years, including their pagers and carrier-specific versions, and a lot more than the 4 iPhones and 5 webOS smartphones.
I can't speak much about consumer-side of things, but as a developer, I can tell you that developing for iOS and webOS is easier and cheaper because there are less devices. I test on every iOS and webOS device, but on less than 10% of the available Android devices, because of the cost caused by so many devices.
In theory this is no big deal.
For most apps the only difference you would take care of is screen resolution and this is handled pretty good by Android.
You would have to check in source code for different capabilities of course (if you can read the location from GPS/Wifi or not, for example). But that's also no big deal.
One thing to worry about though, is that it is possible that different hardware uses different drivers. I've read about one game that did run very poor on a particular Samsung device, because the OpenGL driver had a bug or missing feature.
The framework does a pretty good job for abstracting the different capabilities and supporting different hardware (on a phone). When manufacturers produce buggy hardware drivers, that's where you need to dig deep.
In practice you do run into cross-device issues, though. For instance, the ConnectBot SSH client has a glitch that makes it impossible to type the pipe character with the custom Sense virtual keyboard on the HTC Incredible. But it works fine on stock Android.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there always is."
I was doing iPhone development back when there was only 2 generations of iPod Touch and 1 generation of iPhone. In theory, they ran the same platform. In practice, there were several subtle differences between the hardware capabilities and resources on each permutation -- and that was assuming you were running the exact same OS version, which, in the wild, is not always true. A game that looked and worked perfectly on say my iPhone would have a weird glitch on a Touch. And so it had to be tested and tweaked to run well on each. Since then, they've added several more hardware generations of Touch and iPhone, and now also the iPad, and now there are more OS versions in the wild too. Yes, thankfully, Apple allows you to build your app so it officially only supports a narrow subset of these platform permutations. But in practice, your clients/employers often want you to support a wider set. Re-enter fragmentation pain. And this is in the iOS ecosystem, which should be less fragmented than Android.
I did write "in theory" more because i've not developed for Android in a long time, and only know from the beginnings of Android that they did a pretty good job in supporting different devices. At that time there only was the HTC Dream and the emulator, so i can't speak of experience with such a big range of Android phones nowadays. I only know that the apps i've written back then should "in theory" also run on the Nexus One without problems.
As you are talking about games, i can imagine that this is much harder on Android as you can't rely on the built-in UI-Framework and have to handle different resolutions yourself.
ICANN don't maintain the .cn TLD. If China's attitude to copyright, trademark and other IP infringement is anything to go by, I don't think CNNIC is going to do much.
I'd say it's like searching in a needle in a needle stack. The amount of unidentifiable junk that ends up in ocean gyres from planes, boats and cars (!) is astounding.
