You make it sound as if it were no big deal to remove the GIL. It has been tried, and Python got 2x slower, so that attempt was abandoned. Python 3.2 gained a different implementation of the GIL, and that fixed some problems, but other problems still occur.
As noted in the above referenced blog, you can use Jython or IronPython to avoid the GIL; PyPy will be using Software Transactional Memory to avoid the GIL; and you can use the multiprocessing module to use multiple cores without GIL problems. You do have options other than just using CPython.
If removing the GIL was as easy as you seem to think, it would be gone now, at least in a fork of CPython. Yet still it remains.
no.... If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop FREE educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.
Sure. They give away all the software they write already, and I assumed that they would give away any Android software they write. It seemed so obvious that I didn't feel the need to put in the word "free" but I guess I should have. Thanks for the comment.
one of the largest problems is that there are not a lot of books printed in the languages of 3rd world countries. and absolutely no advanced education texts.
I agree. IMHO that is the "killer app" for the OLPC devices, or for Android tablets. It's great that they can run software, but it's essential that they serve as textbook reading devices.
I think the ultimate educational tool for developing countries would be a ruggedized Android tablet with an e-ink screen. Color is a nice-to-have rather than essential, and the dramatic increase in battery life would be the win.
This suggests another idea for OLPC's future: they could make a deal with Amazon and ship a customized Kindle e-ink reader. Or maybe make a deal to ship a customized Nook. But either way, ride the coattails of a company that already spent the R&D and focus just on adding educational software.
I disagree with your analogy in which you compare stealing a car with patent grabbing.
Um, no. I said that stealing a car with the keys inside is still stealing; despite the fact that the car owner "enabled" the theft by being careless with the keys.
In the same way, being a jerk with patents is being a jerk, despite the fact that the USPTO "enables" patent jerks by granting patents that should not be granted.
Even if Apple were to have freed every one of their smartphone inventions, there would still be lawyers arguing that those inventions are not comprehensive, that their client has patents that fall between the gaps.
Your language loads the question here. You presuppose that Apple "invented" everything that they patented; I think some of it has prior art, some of it is obvious (like the patent on dialing a number by touching the number on the touchscreen), and some of it is probably genuinely new and interesting but by now I'm predisposed to assume Apple is a jerk.
And as for your main point, you are simply mistaken. If Apple had not patented anything, but just made a public demo of the iPhone, nobody would be able to file a patent after that and use the patent to hammer Apple. Apple's iPhone would now be prior art. If you disagree, please post some sort of reference to any example that would disprove this idea.
I work at an IP company, and it has been hammered into me not to disclose anything that might be patentable, because once the idea has been publicly disclosed, it becomes not patentable. I'm not a lawyer of course.
the analogy here is a defense system vs having weapons of your own.
I understand the possible use of patents as a defense. For example, Google: I am not aware of any case where Google tried to shut down a competitor using patents. This despite the fact that they own many patents.
However, Apple has been trying to use patents to prevent Samsung from selling phones. I have a problem with that.
you can't blame one company for doing it in a world in which everyone has the bomb.
Um, the whole point of my comment is that I do blame one company for doing this. I blame Apple, I blame Microsoft, I blame any company that is getting egregiously bad patents and enforcing them.
If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.
You can buy "white box" Android tablets at amazingly cheap prices because they are mass-produced in China. While these tablets fall short of the ideal devices imagined by OLPC, there is absolutely no way for OLPC to get their costs down to match.
You can buy at least three Android tablets for the cost of one OLPC device. You could bundle tablets with a keyboard, a carrying case, and maybe a solar panel, and still massively undercut the OLPC's custom hardware.
Cheap Android tablet's don't have great battery life. But I bought one of the original XO-1 laptops and it only had a few hours of battery life, so clearly OLPC must consider even the limited battery life of a cheap tablet to be sufficient.
One of the nifty things about the OLPC custom design is that it's easy to repair. But with the massive cost advantage of a generic Android tablet, whole spare tablets could be shipped.
The promise of Sugar never was realized. For example, one of the reasons I bought an XO-1 laptop was that I was excited by the thought of the "show source" key, where you were supposed to be able to go anywhere in the system, hit the "show source" key, and find some kind of editable Python source code you could tweak. I never did find any source to tweak before I gave away my laptop. (It's in India now!)
Another part of the OLPC custom hardware was the "mesh" networking, which aimed to make it possible for multiple students to cooperatively share limited networking resources. Did that ever actually get used? All the photos I have seen show students in classrooms, and if the classroom has WiFi then an Android tablet would work fine. If the "mesh" networking is valuable, then maybe OLPC should invest in a one-off gadget that just does that, and plugs into the USB port on an Android tablet.
If you leave your car with the keys in the ignition, then it is partially your fault when someone climbs in and drives away. However, the person who stole the car is also to blame. It's not a valid defense to say "He left his keys in the car so it wasn't stealing."
If all Apple wanted was to make sure nobody else got patents on all this UI stuff, they simply could have fully published the details of how their phone worked, and nobody filing after that would be able to claim to have invented it. And I'm not a lawyer but I think Steve Jobs's public "one more thing" demos would have sufficed to make all those UI features unpatentable by anyone else.
But that wasn't enough for Apple. "Patented!" crowed Steve Jobs. Apple patented everything they thought they could get away with, including totally obvious stuff like squishing your fingers together to make things get smaller on the screen, and spreading your fingers wide to make things get bigger on the screen. Come on, that is totally obvious and there even was prior art on it. So we return to where we started: the USPTO is a problem because it let Apple patent obvious stuff, but Apple is part of the problem for trying to patent obvious stuff. (Fortunately the "pinch-to-zoom" patent was in fact invalidated, due to Samsung winning in court against Apple!)
Samsung is going to go scorched earth on this new lawsuit. Millions for defense and not one cent for tribute. And Samsung has the millions. I hope Samsung wins big and invalidates all of Apple's patents.
And the news on the web site is that they will give away 10,000 of these to people who volunteer to test them. If you think you could do a good job of testing, maybe you should sign up.
To me, the most impressive part is that he claims they have very accurate focusing. I believe he said "micron" focusing. I'm not sure how that works, but the paper is cut to a very accurate shape (the video showed some sort of computer-controlled cutter, it might even have been a laser cutter). By moving a tab I guess the paper can be made to flex predictably to focus the lens?
The biggest part of this story is that it is now easier to make a trojanized version of a legit app. But it has been possible from day one.
Android apps are written in Java, and Java bytecodes can be decompiled into something remarkably similar to the original source code. Then the source code can be edited and complied back to an app. Hey presto, you have a hacked up version of the app.
But -- and this is important -- the person using this attack has no way to sign the malware with the same signing key as the upstream source of the original, legit app. This means that it is much harder to trick someone into running the malware.
So, if you get an app from the Google Play store, and later someone tries to overwrite your app with a new build that is malware-infected, Android will refuse to install the new app, because the signing key isn't identical.
So, if a user gets an email with an attached "free" version of an app that normally costs money, and that user has not previously installed the legit version of the app, and that user sideloads the malware version, then that user will have malware on his/her Android device.
So, as usual, it's easy to protect yourself: get apps from the Google Play store, and don't sideload apps unless you are certain they are clean.
For that matter, if you are browsing the Google Play store and you see an app that has only been up for a day, and claims to be a miraculously free version of a payware app... just say no.
If once you start down the Microsoft path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will...
Seriously, Microsoft is in decline, and already has a bunch of people trained up in it. You should consider learning mobile development for Android, iOS, or both. If you want to learn server-side stuff I would learn the open stack: Linux, MySQL and/or Postgres, maybe Hadoop.
explain the lack of similar quantities of malware for iOS between 2007 and 2012?
Because of Apple's "walled garden". The only way to get apps for iOS is from Apple's store, and Apple tries to keep the malware out.
Apple always charges $100 to put an app in the store, so malware has to make at least $100 before it is discovered or the person who put the malware on the store loses money.
The "walled garden" does have advantages.
Personally, I like having a device where I can install anything I want... but I pretty much just get stuff from the Google Play store. If I need an SSH app, and I see one with over 30,000 votes rating it 4 or 5 stars, I'm pretty sure it won't be malware when I download it.
And according to TFA, almost all of the malware was side-loaded. Almost none of the malware came from the Google Play store. Thus, Android gives me the advantage of the walled garden, while still being more free than iOS.
P.S. The reason I went with Android rather than iOS was Apple's policy of no interpreters and no emulators. I wanted Python and games emulators. Apple has since then unbent a bit, but Android has always allowed you to install whatever sorts of apps you prefer.
Thus I am able to install interpreters and emulators, without rooting my phone, and getting them from the Google Play store. Why wouldn't I want this?
I'm guessing that the chip in the pod tailors the brewing cycle for the coffee (or tea) in the pod for the best possible quality.
That's not enough to make people embrace the lock-in, I don't think. To anyone who is already okay with these single-serving machines, that won't make a difference.
So, they have their choice: stop making the old machines to try to force everyone to upgrade, or have people not care about the upgrade.
P.S. Nespresso machines read a bar code on the pod, which customizes the brewing. So custom brewing isn't even a new idea in single-serving coffee makers.
The article is mainly about using telepresence and computers to pilot a ship. But other than piloting, what else do humans do, and how automatable is it?
For example, how often do people have to repair ships while under way? During a storm, do people ever have to run around fixing chains that are working loose, or fix a leaking seal and set up pumps to pump out a flooded compartment?
I don't know the answers to the above questions, by the way. I don't know much about cargo ships.
Even if we still need humans for some tasks on a cargo ship, perhaps not too far in the future, we might have telepresence robots that can do the tasks.
Now I feel silly. In my P.S. I said he missed my biggest peeve, when actually he started his rant there. By the time I reached the end of his rant, I guess my tiny brain had already forgotten it.
So feel free to point at me and laugh. Sorry about that.
There's an old saying: To gain knowledge, add something every day; to gain wisdom, get rid of something every day. I'm not sure exactly how that is supposed to work (where does the wisdom come from?), but clearly you can choke your life if you accumulate too much stuff.
And that's really true for mobile apps, which can choke your phone. Two years ago my wife's phone (Android 2.x) became unusable, and I discovered that she had installed five or six dozen free apps, and many of them had installed service daemons. (Why do workout tracking apps, cookbook apps, or lightweight games need daemons?) She made an effort to purge down to just the apps she needs.
Even if you assume that the phone can handle all the apps, they still add chaff for you to sort when you are looking for the app you actually want to run.
P.S. Jeff Atwood's rant was good, but he missed one of my pet peeves: I will click on a news story link in a blog or Slashdot or something, and the linked site will pop up a banner: Hey! Don't you want to install and use our mobile app? Why no, web site I have never heard of before, I really don't want to download and install your app. I just want to read the one story, and at the moment I'm reconsidering even that.
I'm not a video expert, but I did write an H.261 codec once.
I don't think it's practical in a VP9 decoder to save time by cutting quality. The Huffman decoding stuff all needs to be bit-exact. The DCT is pretty standard; you would just get a fast implementation of DCT and use that.
I suppose you could sleaze the mixing and filtering steps but the results would probably be so horrible that nobody would want to see it... part of how video decoding works is to refer back to previously-decoded images. The way "motion compensation" works is to say "this block is like this other block over here, but moved over by x pixels horizontally and y pixels vertically and with a few pixels updated". This means that if you sleaze the decode, it can have an effect on later frames.
(H.261 could only do motion compensation that referenced the previous frame. VP9 has 8 different reference buffers and any one frame can encode references to up to three of them! And they'd all better contain properly decoded images.)
So, my guess is that they just did a great job of tuning their code and the quality is good.
Also, the spec says that VP9 was deliberately designed to enable parallel decoding; maybe the FFMPEG implementation takes advantage of that. See section 3.2.1, "Frame-Level Parallelism".
I didn't think it was really strange, but a while back I saw some desktop computers running Firefox on Ubuntu in a coffee shop. This was the old GNOME 2 desktop, so it worked almost exactly like Windows, and the customers in the coffee shop just used the computers and it wasn't any big deal.
I have set up multiple family members, including both of my parents, with Linux computers. I seem to be the guy who gets called when a computer melts down with malware, so I'm motivated to get people off of Windows and onto something else.
These days my go-to distro is Linux Mint with MATE. I might switch back to Ubuntu once MATEbuntu is available... on the other hand, I have hopes for Cinnamon, so maybe in the future I'll be using Linux Mint with Cinnamon.
But for non-geek users, I definitely don't want a poor rip-off of Mac OS X (i.e. Unity) and I definitely don't want the desktop that is just different from anything else ever made (GNOME Shell).
The MATE desktop has the smooth polish of man person-years of work and the input of usability studies, and it's IMHO the best choice for non-geek users.
According to TFA, this will be a huge photovoltaic plant. But as I understand it, solar thermal is more efficient, and for a large centralized project like that, I would have expected solar thermal.
Does anyone know why they are going photovoltaic for this project?
Photovoltaic certainly does have some pluses: it's simple, no moving parts. But for a project of this capacity I should think they would go for the most efficient solution.
Plus a thermal solution with molton salt would provide a nontrivial amount of storage, for power after dark.
So, what am I missing? Does India have lots of factories making photovoltaic cells or something?
John Carmack has talked, in the past, about the insane difficulty of packaging games for Linux. There are so many distros out there. Well, SteamOS solves that problem.
I predict that game developers who support SteamOS will not accept bug reports filed against any other distro; instead they will tell the user "it runs fine on SteamOS, so tell your distro it needs to get compatible."
I am fine with the above, as long as SteamOS is free and open. Well, it is. So I think this is the best possible news for Linux gaming.
This consists of the GNU GPL plus a special statement giving blanket permission to link with non-free software. As a result, it is not a strong copyleft, and it is compatible with the GNU GPL. We recommend it for special circumstances only--much the same circumstances where you might consider using the LGPL[1].
So nobody pitied your choice to agree to prevent users from controlling their computers ("I once worked on a project where part of the technology stack came with a legal requirement to take steps to prevent customers from reverse-engineering").
Well, it's not as if I asked for pity from anyone, including you.
I worked on a consumer-electronics device that happened to have a cheap embedded computer inside it. One feature was to play DVDs. So yes, my soul must forever bear the black stain of having worked on a DVD player that legally licensed the technology to unscramble the CSS protecting DVDs. (You know, the dark secret you can buy on a T-shirt. But go figure, large companies would rather sign a legal license than be sued.)
And nobody pitied you complaining that you couldn't find developers who were willing to be taken advantage of themselvesâ"giving you code in exchange for nothing ("so LGPL was just as radioactive as GPL").
There's that "pity" word again. Where did you get the idea I was looking for some?
We couldn't use LGPL code. So we didn't use the LGPL code. We used something else. I'm not crying about it. I'm sorry that I seem to have upset you so badly.
Or perhaps it was your namecalling (code licensed to not let you hurt others is "radioactive") that helped drive them away.
I apologize for not writing dry, lifeless prose that is inoffensive to all. But I don't apologize very much. I think most people understand that "radioactive" is just a metaphor that means, in this case, "must be avoided".
So, a question: in your mind, selling a DVD player to a customer is "hurting" the customer?
Tell me, I'm curious. Microwave ovens contain embedded computers. Modern cars and digital watches and pocket calculators all contain embedded computers. Do you have source code for all of those embedded computers in your life? If not, do you only drive cars from the 1970s or older, only use a slide rule and an abacus, only wear mechanical watches? In fact, do you own a device that can play DVDs?
Do you feel that the guys who wrote the embedded software in these things should feel guilty over all the "hurting others" they have done?
Do you think that I should feel guilty for working on a DVD player?
But isn't that why libraries are (or should) be licensed under the LGPL, so that there are no "viral" issues? You're not even allowed to link to an LGPL library?
RMS doesn't really like the LGPL. The first L used to stand for "Library" but these days it stands for "Lesser" to indicate its proper place. RMS would rather all libraries be GPL. (Of course, RMS would rather all software of any sort be GPL.)
LGPL actually contains some strange provisions that can be a deal breaker. For example, LGPL requires that you take no steps to prevent your customers from reverse-engineering your software. I once worked on a project where part of the technology stack came with a legal requirement to take steps to prevent customers from reverse-engineering, so LGPL was just as radioactive as GPL.
IMHO, LGPL is not a good license and should go away. It should be replaced by the GUILE license, which is simply GPL with an exception: linking the library does not in any way invoke the viral GPL features. So, if you fix bugs or add features in the library, you must share your code so other users of the library gain the benefit; but you are free to link the library with proprietary software if you wish.
The above will not happen, as RMS and the FSF consider the viral aspects of GPL to be a feature.
For software, the marginal cost of distributing the extra features disabled is pretty close to zero. It's all just bits being copied.
For a car, the car maker is still paying for the seat heaters, still paying factory workers to install those heaters, but not always being paid back by the end-user. Makes no sense.
And as a consumer, I want a simple and reliable car. I don't want my seat heaters to have a "DRM AUTHORIZATION FAILURE" error message and refuse to work when I need them.
My impression is that the most expensive part of the car are the batteries (probably costing more alone than a low end Honda)
As I understand it, yeah, the most expensive part is the battery. Electric motors are not that expensive.
I'm pretty confident that battery costs will come down significantly. Even if no significant technology advances come along to help, battery costs should come down as demand picks up and production scales up.
An electric car has a major up-front cost, but then low cost of operation (electricity is cheaper than gasoline) and low cost of maintenance (electric cars are simpler than conventional cars: no transmission, no radiator, etc.). If fracking hadn't driven the cost of gasoline down, electric cars might be in higher demand right now. Especially where I live, because we have cheap hydro electric power.
Tesla cars are really expensive, but they keep doing things like this. "Worried about the battery catching on fire? Okay, we will insure you against that for no additional charge. Worried about your garage charger catching on fire? Okay, we will give you an upgraded charger for free."
Anyone with a Tesla car is an early adopter, and paying a lot for the privilege. But Tesla really is doing their part to take care of the early adopter customers.
And this is why their overall strategy is brilliant. Start at the high end of the market, make money while building technology and infrastructure, and then come out with a new-gen car that costs less. Meanwhile they have fewer customers to take care of when issues like this pop up, and they have the money to just deal with it.
I can't wait until Tesla hits the Ford/Honda price level.
The important figure of merit here is price per kWh of storage.
I agree. I asked about density because I assume that, if the energy density is low, that it will be prohibitively expensive. If a battery that can provide power to a city needs a city-sized tank of liquid, that would be expensive (in real estate cost if nothing else). But you are right, I don't actually care about the density, I care about whether this "pencils out" economically.
As long as it can provide grid-level power at a reasonable cost, it's interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound as if it were no big deal to remove the GIL. It has been tried, and Python got 2x slower, so that attempt was abandoned. Python 3.2 gained a different implementation of the GIL, and that fixed some problems, but other problems still occur.
The GIL is Python's hardest problem.
https://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2012/03/31/pythons-hardest-problem/
https://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2013/06/30/pythons-hardest-problem-revisited/
As noted in the above referenced blog, you can use Jython or IronPython to avoid the GIL; PyPy will be using Software Transactional Memory to avoid the GIL; and you can use the multiprocessing module to use multiple cores without GIL problems. You do have options other than just using CPython.
If removing the GIL was as easy as you seem to think, it would be gone now, at least in a fork of CPython. Yet still it remains.
no....
If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop FREE educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.
Sure. They give away all the software they write already, and I assumed that they would give away any Android software they write. It seemed so obvious that I didn't feel the need to put in the word "free" but I guess I should have. Thanks for the comment.
one of the largest problems is that there are not a lot of books printed in the languages of 3rd world countries. and absolutely no advanced education texts.
I agree. IMHO that is the "killer app" for the OLPC devices, or for Android tablets. It's great that they can run software, but it's essential that they serve as textbook reading devices.
I think the ultimate educational tool for developing countries would be a ruggedized Android tablet with an e-ink screen. Color is a nice-to-have rather than essential, and the dramatic increase in battery life would be the win.
This suggests another idea for OLPC's future: they could make a deal with Amazon and ship a customized Kindle e-ink reader. Or maybe make a deal to ship a customized Nook. But either way, ride the coattails of a company that already spent the R&D and focus just on adding educational software.
I disagree with your analogy in which you compare stealing a car with patent grabbing.
Um, no. I said that stealing a car with the keys inside is still stealing; despite the fact that the car owner "enabled" the theft by being careless with the keys.
In the same way, being a jerk with patents is being a jerk, despite the fact that the USPTO "enables" patent jerks by granting patents that should not be granted.
Even if Apple were to have freed every one of their smartphone inventions, there would still be lawyers arguing that those inventions are not comprehensive, that their client has patents that fall between the gaps.
Your language loads the question here. You presuppose that Apple "invented" everything that they patented; I think some of it has prior art, some of it is obvious (like the patent on dialing a number by touching the number on the touchscreen), and some of it is probably genuinely new and interesting but by now I'm predisposed to assume Apple is a jerk.
And as for your main point, you are simply mistaken. If Apple had not patented anything, but just made a public demo of the iPhone, nobody would be able to file a patent after that and use the patent to hammer Apple. Apple's iPhone would now be prior art. If you disagree, please post some sort of reference to any example that would disprove this idea.
I work at an IP company, and it has been hammered into me not to disclose anything that might be patentable, because once the idea has been publicly disclosed, it becomes not patentable. I'm not a lawyer of course.
the analogy here is a defense system vs having weapons of your own.
I understand the possible use of patents as a defense. For example, Google: I am not aware of any case where Google tried to shut down a competitor using patents. This despite the fact that they own many patents.
However, Apple has been trying to use patents to prevent Samsung from selling phones. I have a problem with that.
you can't blame one company for doing it in a world in which everyone has the bomb.
Um, the whole point of my comment is that I do blame one company for doing this. I blame Apple, I blame Microsoft, I blame any company that is getting egregiously bad patents and enforcing them.
I agree.
If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.
You can buy "white box" Android tablets at amazingly cheap prices because they are mass-produced in China. While these tablets fall short of the ideal devices imagined by OLPC, there is absolutely no way for OLPC to get their costs down to match.
You can buy at least three Android tablets for the cost of one OLPC device. You could bundle tablets with a keyboard, a carrying case, and maybe a solar panel, and still massively undercut the OLPC's custom hardware.
Cheap Android tablet's don't have great battery life. But I bought one of the original XO-1 laptops and it only had a few hours of battery life, so clearly OLPC must consider even the limited battery life of a cheap tablet to be sufficient.
One of the nifty things about the OLPC custom design is that it's easy to repair. But with the massive cost advantage of a generic Android tablet, whole spare tablets could be shipped.
The promise of Sugar never was realized. For example, one of the reasons I bought an XO-1 laptop was that I was excited by the thought of the "show source" key, where you were supposed to be able to go anywhere in the system, hit the "show source" key, and find some kind of editable Python source code you could tweak. I never did find any source to tweak before I gave away my laptop. (It's in India now!)
Another part of the OLPC custom hardware was the "mesh" networking, which aimed to make it possible for multiple students to cooperatively share limited networking resources. Did that ever actually get used? All the photos I have seen show students in classrooms, and if the classroom has WiFi then an Android tablet would work fine. If the "mesh" networking is valuable, then maybe OLPC should invest in a one-off gadget that just does that, and plugs into the USB port on an Android tablet.
Apple is not the problem. The patent system is.
Can't we agree that both are?
If you leave your car with the keys in the ignition, then it is partially your fault when someone climbs in and drives away. However, the person who stole the car is also to blame. It's not a valid defense to say "He left his keys in the car so it wasn't stealing."
If all Apple wanted was to make sure nobody else got patents on all this UI stuff, they simply could have fully published the details of how their phone worked, and nobody filing after that would be able to claim to have invented it. And I'm not a lawyer but I think Steve Jobs's public "one more thing" demos would have sufficed to make all those UI features unpatentable by anyone else.
But that wasn't enough for Apple. "Patented!" crowed Steve Jobs. Apple patented everything they thought they could get away with, including totally obvious stuff like squishing your fingers together to make things get smaller on the screen, and spreading your fingers wide to make things get bigger on the screen. Come on, that is totally obvious and there even was prior art on it. So we return to where we started: the USPTO is a problem because it let Apple patent obvious stuff, but Apple is part of the problem for trying to patent obvious stuff. (Fortunately the "pinch-to-zoom" patent was in fact invalidated, due to Samsung winning in court against Apple!)
Samsung is going to go scorched earth on this new lawsuit. Millions for defense and not one cent for tribute. And Samsung has the millions. I hope Samsung wins big and invalidates all of Apple's patents.
(And then, as long as I'm dreaming, Samsung can go invalidate Microsoft's mobile patents next.)
They have a website devoted to this:
http://www.foldscope.com/
And the news on the web site is that they will give away 10,000 of these to people who volunteer to test them. If you think you could do a good job of testing, maybe you should sign up.
http://www.foldscope.com/#/10ksignup/
To me, the most impressive part is that he claims they have very accurate focusing. I believe he said "micron" focusing. I'm not sure how that works, but the paper is cut to a very accurate shape (the video showed some sort of computer-controlled cutter, it might even have been a laser cutter). By moving a tab I guess the paper can be made to flex predictably to focus the lens?
The biggest part of this story is that it is now easier to make a trojanized version of a legit app. But it has been possible from day one.
Android apps are written in Java, and Java bytecodes can be decompiled into something remarkably similar to the original source code. Then the source code can be edited and complied back to an app. Hey presto, you have a hacked up version of the app.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12370326/decompile-an-apk-modify-it-and-then-recompile-it
But -- and this is important -- the person using this attack has no way to sign the malware with the same signing key as the upstream source of the original, legit app. This means that it is much harder to trick someone into running the malware.
So, if you get an app from the Google Play store, and later someone tries to overwrite your app with a new build that is malware-infected, Android will refuse to install the new app, because the signing key isn't identical.
http://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/app-signing.html
So, if a user gets an email with an attached "free" version of an app that normally costs money, and that user has not previously installed the legit version of the app, and that user sideloads the malware version, then that user will have malware on his/her Android device.
So, as usual, it's easy to protect yourself: get apps from the Google Play store, and don't sideload apps unless you are certain they are clean.
For that matter, if you are browsing the Google Play store and you see an app that has only been up for a day, and claims to be a miraculously free version of a payware app... just say no.
If once you start down the Microsoft path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will...
Seriously, Microsoft is in decline, and already has a bunch of people trained up in it. You should consider learning mobile development for Android, iOS, or both. If you want to learn server-side stuff I would learn the open stack: Linux, MySQL and/or Postgres, maybe Hadoop.
explain the lack of similar quantities of malware for iOS between 2007 and 2012?
Because of Apple's "walled garden". The only way to get apps for iOS is from Apple's store, and Apple tries to keep the malware out.
Apple always charges $100 to put an app in the store, so malware has to make at least $100 before it is discovered or the person who put the malware on the store loses money.
The "walled garden" does have advantages.
Personally, I like having a device where I can install anything I want... but I pretty much just get stuff from the Google Play store. If I need an SSH app, and I see one with over 30,000 votes rating it 4 or 5 stars, I'm pretty sure it won't be malware when I download it.
And according to TFA, almost all of the malware was side-loaded. Almost none of the malware came from the Google Play store. Thus, Android gives me the advantage of the walled garden, while still being more free than iOS.
P.S. The reason I went with Android rather than iOS was Apple's policy of no interpreters and no emulators. I wanted Python and games emulators. Apple has since then unbent a bit, but Android has always allowed you to install whatever sorts of apps you prefer.
Thus I am able to install interpreters and emulators, without rooting my phone, and getting them from the Google Play store. Why wouldn't I want this?
I'm guessing that the chip in the pod tailors the brewing cycle for the coffee (or tea) in the pod for the best possible quality.
That's not enough to make people embrace the lock-in, I don't think. To anyone who is already okay with these single-serving machines, that won't make a difference.
So, they have their choice: stop making the old machines to try to force everyone to upgrade, or have people not care about the upgrade.
P.S. Nespresso machines read a bar code on the pod, which customizes the brewing. So custom brewing isn't even a new idea in single-serving coffee makers.
The article is mainly about using telepresence and computers to pilot a ship. But other than piloting, what else do humans do, and how automatable is it?
For example, how often do people have to repair ships while under way? During a storm, do people ever have to run around fixing chains that are working loose, or fix a leaking seal and set up pumps to pump out a flooded compartment?
I don't know the answers to the above questions, by the way. I don't know much about cargo ships.
Even if we still need humans for some tasks on a cargo ship, perhaps not too far in the future, we might have telepresence robots that can do the tasks.
Now I feel silly. In my P.S. I said he missed my biggest peeve, when actually he started his rant there. By the time I reached the end of his rant, I guess my tiny brain had already forgotten it.
So feel free to point at me and laugh. Sorry about that.
There's an old saying: To gain knowledge, add something every day; to gain wisdom, get rid of something every day. I'm not sure exactly how that is supposed to work (where does the wisdom come from?), but clearly you can choke your life if you accumulate too much stuff.
And that's really true for mobile apps, which can choke your phone. Two years ago my wife's phone (Android 2.x) became unusable, and I discovered that she had installed five or six dozen free apps, and many of them had installed service daemons. (Why do workout tracking apps, cookbook apps, or lightweight games need daemons?) She made an effort to purge down to just the apps she needs.
Even if you assume that the phone can handle all the apps, they still add chaff for you to sort when you are looking for the app you actually want to run.
P.S. Jeff Atwood's rant was good, but he missed one of my pet peeves: I will click on a news story link in a blog or Slashdot or something, and the linked site will pop up a banner: Hey! Don't you want to install and use our mobile app? Why no, web site I have never heard of before, I really don't want to download and install your app. I just want to read the one story, and at the moment I'm reconsidering even that.
I'm not a video expert, but I did write an H.261 codec once.
I don't think it's practical in a VP9 decoder to save time by cutting quality. The Huffman decoding stuff all needs to be bit-exact. The DCT is pretty standard; you would just get a fast implementation of DCT and use that.
I suppose you could sleaze the mixing and filtering steps but the results would probably be so horrible that nobody would want to see it... part of how video decoding works is to refer back to previously-decoded images. The way "motion compensation" works is to say "this block is like this other block over here, but moved over by x pixels horizontally and y pixels vertically and with a few pixels updated". This means that if you sleaze the decode, it can have an effect on later frames.
(H.261 could only do motion compensation that referenced the previous frame. VP9 has 8 different reference buffers and any one frame can encode references to up to three of them! And they'd all better contain properly decoded images.)
So, my guess is that they just did a great job of tuning their code and the quality is good.
Also, the spec says that VP9 was deliberately designed to enable parallel decoding; maybe the FFMPEG implementation takes advantage of that. See section 3.2.1, "Frame-Level Parallelism".
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-grange-vp9-bitstream-00
I didn't think it was really strange, but a while back I saw some desktop computers running Firefox on Ubuntu in a coffee shop. This was the old GNOME 2 desktop, so it worked almost exactly like Windows, and the customers in the coffee shop just used the computers and it wasn't any big deal.
I have set up multiple family members, including both of my parents, with Linux computers. I seem to be the guy who gets called when a computer melts down with malware, so I'm motivated to get people off of Windows and onto something else.
These days my go-to distro is Linux Mint with MATE. I might switch back to Ubuntu once MATEbuntu is available... on the other hand, I have hopes for Cinnamon, so maybe in the future I'll be using Linux Mint with Cinnamon.
But for non-geek users, I definitely don't want a poor rip-off of Mac OS X (i.e. Unity) and I definitely don't want the desktop that is just different from anything else ever made (GNOME Shell).
The MATE desktop has the smooth polish of man person-years of work and the input of usability studies, and it's IMHO the best choice for non-geek users.
According to TFA, this will be a huge photovoltaic plant. But as I understand it, solar thermal is more efficient, and for a large centralized project like that, I would have expected solar thermal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Does anyone know why they are going photovoltaic for this project?
Photovoltaic certainly does have some pluses: it's simple, no moving parts. But for a project of this capacity I should think they would go for the most efficient solution.
Plus a thermal solution with molton salt would provide a nontrivial amount of storage, for power after dark.
So, what am I missing? Does India have lots of factories making photovoltaic cells or something?
Linux still needs a baseline distro for developers to target.
I think Linux has one now; it's called SteamOS. I've said this before:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4252825&cid=44926779
John Carmack has talked, in the past, about the insane difficulty of packaging games for Linux. There are so many distros out there. Well, SteamOS solves that problem.
I predict that game developers who support SteamOS will not accept bug reports filed against any other distro; instead they will tell the user "it runs fine on SteamOS, so tell your distro it needs to get compatible."
I am fine with the above, as long as SteamOS is free and open. Well, it is. So I think this is the best possible news for Linux gaming.
Using the "wayback machine" feature at archive.org, we can look at old GNU web pages.
Here is a link to a January 2007 version of a GNU web page that describes the "License of Guile".
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
[1] In the original, the word LGPL links to a page called "Why not LGPL". Here is an archive.org link that goes to that page as it was in January 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070105122245/http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
So nobody pitied your choice to agree to prevent users from controlling their computers ("I once worked on a project where part of the technology stack came with a legal requirement to take steps to prevent customers from reverse-engineering").
Well, it's not as if I asked for pity from anyone, including you.
I worked on a consumer-electronics device that happened to have a cheap embedded computer inside it. One feature was to play DVDs. So yes, my soul must forever bear the black stain of having worked on a DVD player that legally licensed the technology to unscramble the CSS protecting DVDs. (You know, the dark secret you can buy on a T-shirt. But go figure, large companies would rather sign a legal license than be sued.)
And nobody pitied you complaining that you couldn't find developers who were willing to be taken advantage of themselvesâ"giving you code in exchange for nothing ("so LGPL was just as radioactive as GPL").
There's that "pity" word again. Where did you get the idea I was looking for some?
We couldn't use LGPL code. So we didn't use the LGPL code. We used something else. I'm not crying about it. I'm sorry that I seem to have upset you so badly.
Or perhaps it was your namecalling (code licensed to not let you hurt others is "radioactive") that helped drive them away.
I apologize for not writing dry, lifeless prose that is inoffensive to all. But I don't apologize very much. I think most people understand that "radioactive" is just a metaphor that means, in this case, "must be avoided".
So, a question: in your mind, selling a DVD player to a customer is "hurting" the customer?
Tell me, I'm curious. Microwave ovens contain embedded computers. Modern cars and digital watches and pocket calculators all contain embedded computers. Do you have source code for all of those embedded computers in your life? If not, do you only drive cars from the 1970s or older, only use a slide rule and an abacus, only wear mechanical watches? In fact, do you own a device that can play DVDs?
Do you feel that the guys who wrote the embedded software in these things should feel guilty over all the "hurting others" they have done?
Do you think that I should feel guilty for working on a DVD player?
It appears that the Guile license situation has been simplified: Guile is now LGPLv3.
In the past, Guile was GPL with a "linking exception". I found a Wikipedia page about this, which still mentions Guile as an example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception
But isn't that why libraries are (or should) be licensed under the LGPL, so that there are no "viral" issues? You're not even allowed to link to an LGPL library?
RMS doesn't really like the LGPL. The first L used to stand for "Library" but these days it stands for "Lesser" to indicate its proper place. RMS would rather all libraries be GPL. (Of course, RMS would rather all software of any sort be GPL.)
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
LGPL actually contains some strange provisions that can be a deal breaker. For example, LGPL requires that you take no steps to prevent your customers from reverse-engineering your software. I once worked on a project where part of the technology stack came with a legal requirement to take steps to prevent customers from reverse-engineering, so LGPL was just as radioactive as GPL.
IMHO, LGPL is not a good license and should go away. It should be replaced by the GUILE license, which is simply GPL with an exception: linking the library does not in any way invoke the viral GPL features. So, if you fix bugs or add features in the library, you must share your code so other users of the library gain the benefit; but you are free to link the library with proprietary software if you wish.
The above will not happen, as RMS and the FSF consider the viral aspects of GPL to be a feature.
For software, the marginal cost of distributing the extra features disabled is pretty close to zero. It's all just bits being copied.
For a car, the car maker is still paying for the seat heaters, still paying factory workers to install those heaters, but not always being paid back by the end-user. Makes no sense.
And as a consumer, I want a simple and reliable car. I don't want my seat heaters to have a "DRM AUTHORIZATION FAILURE" error message and refuse to work when I need them.
My impression is that the most expensive part of the car are the batteries (probably costing more alone than a low end Honda)
As I understand it, yeah, the most expensive part is the battery. Electric motors are not that expensive.
I'm pretty confident that battery costs will come down significantly. Even if no significant technology advances come along to help, battery costs should come down as demand picks up and production scales up.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/04/electric-car-batteries/
An electric car has a major up-front cost, but then low cost of operation (electricity is cheaper than gasoline) and low cost of maintenance (electric cars are simpler than conventional cars: no transmission, no radiator, etc.). If fracking hadn't driven the cost of gasoline down, electric cars might be in higher demand right now. Especially where I live, because we have cheap hydro electric power.
Tesla cars are really expensive, but they keep doing things like this. "Worried about the battery catching on fire? Okay, we will insure you against that for no additional charge. Worried about your garage charger catching on fire? Okay, we will give you an upgraded charger for free."
Anyone with a Tesla car is an early adopter, and paying a lot for the privilege. But Tesla really is doing their part to take care of the early adopter customers.
And this is why their overall strategy is brilliant. Start at the high end of the market, make money while building technology and infrastructure, and then come out with a new-gen car that costs less. Meanwhile they have fewer customers to take care of when issues like this pop up, and they have the money to just deal with it.
I can't wait until Tesla hits the Ford/Honda price level.
The important figure of merit here is price per kWh of storage.
I agree. I asked about density because I assume that, if the energy density is low, that it will be prohibitively expensive. If a battery that can provide power to a city needs a city-sized tank of liquid, that would be expensive (in real estate cost if nothing else). But you are right, I don't actually care about the density, I care about whether this "pencils out" economically.
As long as it can provide grid-level power at a reasonable cost, it's interesting.