Anyone into Android programming?

[bennyboy]

Your new computer, of course.

[emjay]

Your new computer, of course.

Well it was a risk. I got it from a seller on Amazon for about £390 but I asked them a lot of questions first and only bought it when I was confident in their refurbishing process. It only has a three month warranty and they could only guarantee the battery to last an hour - but I have tested it and it lasted about five hours so that's a good sign It's a Lenovo Thinkpad and even has a fingerprint scanner which I didn't even know about when I bought it but makes it seem even more futuristic  The main reasons I bought it in particular were for the ergonomic keyboard it has (I suffer from RSI and it has an old style keyboard that is much more comfortable to touch type on than these new essentially flat keyboards), for the processor, and for the SSD. The way I figure it is if normal hard drives keep getting bigger according to whoever-it-was' law there comes a time when it's pointless: who needs a TB hard drive? I don't. I'd much rather have small, fast storage and store anything big on external drives. And I'm very very happy with the SSD so far, and the whole thing boots up in less than a minute so I think I've struck gold. Just got to hope that it goes the distance but early indications are that it will  

[bennyboy]

Yeah, SSD rules. But it does fail, so make sure you keep backups.

[emjay]

Yeah, SSD rules.  But it does fail, so make sure you keep backups.

Yeah, that was a similar concern for me to the battery - in that this is a refurbished business laptop that could have had a lot of use, or not... no way to know. But the fact that the battery lasted so long does suggest to me that it possibly hasn't had that much use, and therefore that there might be a fair bit of life left in the SSD. I've got a TB external drive and the first thing I did when getting the laptop was create an image of the initial state onto that so I can at least revert back to factory settings as it were if I want to. I might do another now that I've got Unity on. But I still need Visual Studio, and possibly Android Studio just so that I can make Android games with Unity (it seems to need the Android SDK installed?). So a few more big programs to put on before I make my next image. But yeah, I do need to do normal data backups as well. Do you know much about SSDs? I take it they're not quite the same as say an SD card, in that a SD card has a limited number of writes until it become read only but an SSD sounds different from what I've read in that sectors will start to fail? Though it is suggested that there will be software in place to warn you of that way before it actually happens?

[bennyboy]

Yeah, SSD rules.  But it does fail, so make sure you keep backups.

Yeah, that was a similar concern for me to the battery - in that this is a refurbished business laptop that could have had a lot of use, or not... no way to know. But the fact that the battery lasted so long does suggest to me that it possibly hasn't had that much use, and therefore that there might be a fair bit of life left in the SSD. I've got a TB external drive and the first thing I did when getting the laptop was create an image of the initial state onto that so I can at least revert back to factory settings as it were if I want to. I might do another now that I've got Unity on. But I still need Visual Studio, and possibly Android Studio just so that I can make Android games with Unity (it seems to need the Android SDK installed?). So a few more big programs to put on before I make my next image. But yeah, I do need to do normal data backups as well. Do you know much about SSDs? I take it they're not quite the same as say an SD card, in that a SD card has a limited number of writes until it become read only but an SSD sounds different from what I've read in that sectors will start to fail? Though it is suggested that there will be software in place to warn you of that way before it actually happens?

You don't need Visual Studio at all, only the Android SDK.  You CAN get a plugin to use Visual Studio as your editor for Unity, but unless you really use VS a lot, I just can't see that this is necessary.

I've heard that writes to SSD are limited and do eventually damage the drive.  However, that might be from the early days of SSD, which weren't that long ago.  There's so much misinformation out there, but a sensible system of backups and safeguards saves all.

[emjay]

Yeah, that was a similar concern for me to the battery - in that this is a refurbished business laptop that could have had a lot of use, or not... no way to know. But the fact that the battery lasted so long does suggest to me that it possibly hasn't had that much use, and therefore that there might be a fair bit of life left in the SSD. I've got a TB external drive and the first thing I did when getting the laptop was create an image of the initial state onto that so I can at least revert back to factory settings as it were if I want to. I might do another now that I've got Unity on. But I still need Visual Studio, and possibly Android Studio just so that I can make Android games with Unity (it seems to need the Android SDK installed?). So a few more big programs to put on before I make my next image. But yeah, I do need to do normal data backups as well. Do you know much about SSDs? I take it they're not quite the same as say an SD card, in that a SD card has a limited number of writes until it become read only but an SSD sounds different from what I've read in that sectors will start to fail? Though it is suggested that there will be software in place to warn you of that way before it actually happens?

You don't need Visual Studio at all, only the Android SDK.  You CAN get a plugin to use Visual Studio as your editor for Unity, but unless you really use VS a lot, I just can't see that this is necessary.

I've heard that writes to SSD are limited and do eventually damage the drive.  However, that might be from the early days of SSD, which weren't that long ago.  There's so much misinformation out there, but a sensible system of backups and safeguards saves all.

Nah, I just meant Visual Studio as separate from Unity, just to have VB and C# alone again, but thanks for saying I only need the SDK as I wasn't sure if I also needed Eclipse or Android Studio, its replacement (which I've never used because I've never had a computer powerful enough to run it until now  ).

Thankfully I don't have much to backup these days because I spend most of my time on this forum (though you wouldn't think it to look at my post count  ), so keeping my data backed up should be quite a simple process.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Guys,look at this lol:

[dyresand]

Guys,look at this lol:

c - your basic multi tool


C++ - your "basic" omni tool

[LastPoet]

And C#, your basic pile of shit.

[bennyboy]

And C#, your basic pile of shit.

Yeah, who needs all that high-level stuff when you can crash your clients' computers all on your own with just a pointer?

Anyway, what does ANY flavor of C have to do with Android programming, anyway?