I think the tech media built these devices up a bit too much to the general consumer public. They are really a learning tool that you can tinker with, not a 'cheap pc' like they were built up to be. So many people got theirs after the pre-order wait and immediately complained about the performance. Think of them as a beefed up Arduino style device and you'll love it, think of it as a cheap computer for consumer use and you'll obviously be unhappy.
It's not that simple. The device has the potential to be an easy to use pc for the general public, but the community hasn't finished the software yet. The media reported the potential not the reality (there isn't a large quantity and it's just a little debian box).
As for the people who have one (like me) a large portion of the complaints aren't about the total performance capability, but it's the stability.. mine crashes all the time. There's some talk about fixing a bug in the USB driver that'll solve the issue (everything hangs up for 2-4 minutes every 20 minutes on average) but until that's finished it's rather unusable.
It sounds like using one like an Arduino involves a lot of extra work, like installing Linux. With an AVR or ARM microcontroller, all you have to do is flash your program, everything else is pretty much burned on the chip forever.
The Foundation have recently released a new distro, based on Raspbian, that gives better performance and is now their recommendation. Hardware floating point and better use of the ARM's instructions. X11 graphics performance still to be improved. http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1605
I recently made a very small jquery mobile web app. It still feels like alpha software, I was on an extremely tight deadline so I persevered with it, the end result worked out ok. I would be interested in other javascript framework recommendations that perform better, however from my research they all seemed to be at a similar stage to Jquery Mobile, either that or they were abandoned. If I was spending a lot of time on a mobile web app I'd probably invest the time into writing it without the layer of abstraction.
Two big tips:
1. Turn off the transitions, they perform poorly and look out of place on most devices.
2. Don't use the navbar, it just doesn't work properly on all devices, I wasted so much time trying to work out the issues with it before changing my navigation scheme.
Many Australian universities have a 'Bachelor of Information Technology' instead of of a 'Bachelor of Computer Science'. The one I did was a 3 year degree, it still did most of the CS subjects that I've seen elsewhere, though it didn't have any compulsory Maths (I think an extra semester of Maths should be added).
I did the degree part time whilst working full time and once I was done I started the interview process for a position at Google. I was told that they don't usually hire anyone unless they have a bachelor of computer science, but that they'd make an exception seeing as I've been working (effectively had 4 years experience at that time). I ended up getting a non-grad job elsewhere even before my second phone interview, but it seems to me that if they only hire BSc students, the university system is not setup to suit them.
I've never met anyone from Queensland (my home state) that has done a BSc, its either called Bachelor of IT or Software Engineering. That doesn't mean they aren't capable of being great employees for Google.
I'm in the same situation at the moment, having just begun a Bachelor of Information Technology through RMIT and Open Universities Australia, which for international readers, is a distance education organization involving several large Australian universities. I am also working full time, although not in IT, unfortunately.
I'm not in a financial position to fund my studies myself, so I'm making use of the federal government 'FEE-HELP' system, which basically means I don't begin repaying my loan(s) until I reach a certain income threshold. I also live in a 'regional' area on the NSW Mid North Coast, and despite living within an hour of a local university, the courses and degrees I've enrolled in aren't offered in this area.
I can understand that there are most likely different factors that determine whether or not a particular degree is covered by FEE-HELP, but it's a shame that it seems like a proper CS degree is still only viable for somebody living in a large capital city, with the finances available to self-fund their studies.
As you've mentioned, a Bachelor of IT does offer certain fundamental units that you'd encounter in a CS degree, but none of the advanced maths units seem to be offered.
If the National Broadband Network actually gets finished one day, hopefully more long distance education providers might be able to offer degrees such as CS, with the aid of fast, reliable internet connectivity to help solve the locale problem.
I too completed a Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) though I more than completed the equivalent of a Bachelor of Computer Science & Technology (BCST). BIT at my university is a BCST Advanced with Honours thrown in (a year of research where you produce a thesis on a novel topic).
I interned at Google and know many people who work there -- whilst their interview process takes forever they wouldn't mind what your degree is if they have enough ticks from the Google interviewers.
Essentially Google are just slow to trust. It's easier for them to turn down a promising candidate than remove a candidate who showed promise but couldn't live up to their potential. The best suggestion is to have a friend on the inside recommend you -- internal recommendations feature a lot more klout.
App Inventor looks cool -- but in terms of interface and usability it just isn't HyperCard. It's honestly amazing to me that since 1987 nothing much has come out to top it in terms of ease of use. I really LOVED that program...
The reason we still use these old icons is because every single icon requires people to think about and learn what it represents. The only icons that don't require the user to think are ones they see all the time. If you've never seen an icon before you can only really guess what it means, the shorter the time it takes to guess, the better the icon is. It's for this reason that I don't like icon-only user interfaces, they require too much thinking and guessing from the user.
What on earth do they mean? I've been using ICS since January and I still don't know what they do except for the cut one. Because there's no way for them to show tooltips on hovering the only way to learn is to press it and try and work out what it just did.
Well, the first one has multiple identical squares, so it seems to me intuitive that it means 'copy'. For exclusion (and resemblance to the folder+sheet on, e.g. MS Office) the last one has to be 'paste'.
Oh, I never used ICS, so it's not because I tried them.
