No, for the same reason that game developers target consoles when Windows is technically a larger market. One new device per year, with each a superset of the previous, is a much more attractive target than several dozen models each with their own unique hardware (and their own tweaked versions of Android). Do you want to make sure your app works equally well on all of these?
Google is doing a good job of raising the baseline for the phone OS, but they need to start putting limits on the hardware they license it for...unless they want Android to become the next Symbian or WinMo.
Yeah, this is how I always understood voicemail to work. Blame users for not having proper passwords, and blame phone companies for being hopelessly inept at security. Caller ID is useless for authentication; it dates to the early 1970s, when AT&T still assumed the entire phone network was trusted (and thus black/blue boxes were becoming the rage).
Of course, now Google has to play whack-a-mole locking out these apps for much the same reason Apple locks their handhelds: No matter who's really at fault, they get the bad press.
Actually, the reason why wireless providers are able to get away with it is because the useful wireless spectrum is limited and thus governments require exorbitant fees to license it. Wireless is not an example of a free market but state-sponsored oligopoly.
Then again, concepts like "free market" and "socialism" are nothing but vague, idealistic theories that sound great on paper but never survive contact with the real world—especialy the human capacity for corruption.
On Safari 5 on my Mac it displays cached static pages instantly when I go back and forward. Images and all. Dynamic pages load piece by piece, of course, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference watching pages load on Safari 5 vs. Chrome 5. Content shifting as a page is being loaded is a sign that the html and css didn't explicitly state the size of graphics, so the browser has to re-layout the page as it loads the images. It happens in any browser, including Chrome.
Works perfectly in Safari 4.0.5 / OS X 10.6.3 here. Curiously, Chrome 5.0.375.55 on OS X has the pixel-positioning bug. It's actually more noticeable to me if I keep the default settings and text, turn on the shadow, and watch the letters jump around as I slowly rotate the text.
It's pretty minor compared to some of the glitches I've seen in Flash rendering, however, and Google tends to fix Chrome glitches pretty quickly.
Not that odd, really. Developers want to bang on things until they break. End users just want things to work. Ergo, the dev site lets you try the demos in any browser, while the end user site makes sure you have a browser that supports the demos 100%.
Why this is a story I have no idea. Mozilla, Google, and the WebKit team have been adding non-standard features and making tech demos that only work on specific versions of their own browser for years, but no one thinks they're trying to fragment the industry. Apple puts a browser detect on a page to ensure an end user demo works without a hiccup and geeks everywhere are up in arms. Go figure.
Should a customer exceed 2 GB during a billing cycle, they will receive an additional 1 GB of data for $10 for use in the cycle
While it would be nicer if they billed in smaller chunks, they charge you 0.0100 dollars per megabyte over. The overage actually costs less than the first two gigabytes.
Though even that seems impossibly high for bandwidth in the middle of a city. Who would pay $1 to watch a clip on YouTube, or $5 to watch a video on Hulu? Who would pay $30 a month to listen to Pandora for an hour a day? Cheap or unlimited data plans spur the invention of new services. They expand the boundaries of the Internet. AT&T is sending users back into the dark ages.
Today wasn't the best day to become the highest-valued IT company in the world - edging out MSFT (219.18B) by having a market cap of 222.07B.
That also gives Apple the second largest market cap period, behind only Exxon Mobil (278.64B). Rather incredible, since Apple only nudged into the top five last quarter and the top ten the quarter before that.
The United States is not a dictatorship and one person cannot, by law, rule unilaterally. Obama tapped Julius Genachowski to head the FCC, and thus had done more than anyone reading this thread to promote network neutrality. When you consider the myriad issues facing the USA, and how intractable most of them are, it's remarkable a single person is expected to fix even a fraction of them.
Indeed, it's a miracle that politicians accomplish anything at all considering the electoral minefield they enter every time they attempt anything of consequence. Many of these people entered politics with dreams of saving the world, then learned that votes come not from sound policies but from hyperbolic promises and expensive ad campaigns. They learn that trying to do their jobs right garners nothing but controversy, disapproval, and well-funded enemies; play-acting for the cameras, pork-barrel projects, screwing the future for short-term gain, and funding their campaigns with corporate-sponsored bills are the secret to staying in office.
And for that, the blame can squarely be laid upon the people. It's called a representative democracy for a reason: The quality of the government reflects the quality of the voters. The voters by and large are ignorant masses that vote for whatever politician promises the world and asks for no sacrifices in return. Later, when the politician fails to deliver on the impossible promises—the ones he had to make to get elected in the first place—the voters toss him out in favor of the next guy with fancy TV commercials and exactly the same promises.
If you want to change the representatives, you need to change the voters. Start a campaign to educate your community about the truth behind important issues. Get them to ask tough questions and to expect real answers instead of sound bites. Get them to vote not for the candidate with the biggest promises but the one who offers detailed policies. Explain the federal budget and where tax monies really go, and how it might be fixed. Explain the issues that matter most to you. And if you can't find anyone to represent your views in congress, run for office yourself.
But if you can't be arsed to do anything but make hollow demands, expect your representatives to do nothing but make hollow promises.
Is this PS3 game incredibly popular among Slashdotters, or related to nerd culture or current events in any way? Other than the quick aside about 3D (which isn't new in games) I can't figure out why this is on Slashdot at all.
Great post, but I think organized religion is more a symptom than a cause.
Humans have a set of fundamental tribal instincts that exist regardless of high-level social structures. It's easy to see where they came from. If you wanted to be chieftain, you had to be dominant; you had to convey unquestionable authority. Intimidation and xenophobia were effective means of keeping everyone united and under your control—even begging you for protection. Strange events and coincidences could be spun as signs of your greatness and wisdom. If your people had some specific histories or beliefs, they could also be twisted into supporting your rule. And if others couldn't understand your reasoning, you could just call it mystic knowledge that only you and chosen believers can comprehend.
Civilization has come a long way, but if you peel back the veneer of religion and politics you'll find we're still a bunch of savages looking for tribal identity. Whether you call yourself an evangelical Christian pastor, a fundamentalist Imam, or a member of the Communist Party of China, you still use the same tactics of intimidation against free thought and fear of foreigners, infidels, or minorities. You still use propaganda to twist events to your interpretations. You still hardly care about your group's beliefs except to turn them into justifications. And you still create a ruling caste that claims greater enlightenment than the masses.
Religion's flaw is that it, like race or color or political party or organization, divides people. It delineates "is" and "is not". Whenever you define a group, you invite that chieftain element who prey on tribal instincts. As people look to the chieftain for direction, they care less and less about what their beliefs and values originally meant and begin to only see them as a justification for the same attitude of fear and hatred every chieftain preaches. And the tribe more and more resembles every other, especially the ones its people are told to hate and fear.
The people sometimes deemed "liberal" or "freethinking" or "secular" are those who suppress that protective tribal instinct, and are less moved by the promises and threats of their chieftain. But freethinkers are a group like any other, and blaming religions or political parties or any other group just feeds the tribal instinct. Many have broken away, only to form their own tribes—and now embody everything they once fought against. Only when the majority of us can leave our tribal thinking behind and stop thinking of every grouping and delineation as a tribal boundary will the chieftains among us lose their voice. Only when we can stop fearing and hating that which makes others different will we be able to understand who anyone really is.
Slashdot Mirror
No, for the same reason that game developers target consoles when Windows is technically a larger market. One new device per year, with each a superset of the previous, is a much more attractive target than several dozen models each with their own unique hardware (and their own tweaked versions of Android). Do you want to make sure your app works equally well on all of these?
Google is doing a good job of raising the baseline for the phone OS, but they need to start putting limits on the hardware they license it for...unless they want Android to become the next Symbian or WinMo.
Yeah, this is how I always understood voicemail to work. Blame users for not having proper passwords, and blame phone companies for being hopelessly inept at security. Caller ID is useless for authentication; it dates to the early 1970s, when AT&T still assumed the entire phone network was trusted (and thus black/blue boxes were becoming the rage).
Of course, now Google has to play whack-a-mole locking out these apps for much the same reason Apple locks their handhelds: No matter who's really at fault, they get the bad press.
They could probably duplicate the hardware, but I doubt Cisco could make anything like iOS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#Universal_Service_Obligation_and_monopoly_status
NASA researches space with experimental hardware.
Companies want to commercialize space with commoditized hardware.
Experimental hardware is great for solving problems and learning new things, but it will never be as cheap or reliable as commoditized hardware.
Actually, the reason why wireless providers are able to get away with it is because the useful wireless spectrum is limited and thus governments require exorbitant fees to license it. Wireless is not an example of a free market but state-sponsored oligopoly.
Then again, concepts like "free market" and "socialism" are nothing but vague, idealistic theories that sound great on paper but never survive contact with the real world—especialy the human capacity for corruption.
Or just lots of iron! What could possibly go wrong?
Perhaps you could pay someone to solder in a new MAC address...
The cartoon-loving part of me desperately wants one.
On Safari 5 on my Mac it displays cached static pages instantly when I go back and forward. Images and all. Dynamic pages load piece by piece, of course, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference watching pages load on Safari 5 vs. Chrome 5. Content shifting as a page is being loaded is a sign that the html and css didn't explicitly state the size of graphics, so the browser has to re-layout the page as it loads the images. It happens in any browser, including Chrome.
What fun is there being stuck in the nineteenth century without it?
Works perfectly in Safari 4.0.5 / OS X 10.6.3 here. Curiously, Chrome 5.0.375.55 on OS X has the pixel-positioning bug. It's actually more noticeable to me if I keep the default settings and text, turn on the shadow, and watch the letters jump around as I slowly rotate the text.
It's pretty minor compared to some of the glitches I've seen in Flash rendering, however, and Google tends to fix Chrome glitches pretty quickly.
Not that odd, really. Developers want to bang on things until they break. End users just want things to work. Ergo, the dev site lets you try the demos in any browser, while the end user site makes sure you have a browser that supports the demos 100%.
Why this is a story I have no idea. Mozilla, Google, and the WebKit team have been adding non-standard features and making tech demos that only work on specific versions of their own browser for years, but no one thinks they're trying to fragment the industry. Apple puts a browser detect on a page to ensure an end user demo works without a hiccup and geeks everywhere are up in arms. Go figure.
Per the ToS:
Should a customer exceed 2 GB during a billing cycle, they will receive an additional 1 GB of data for $10 for use in the cycle
While it would be nicer if they billed in smaller chunks, they charge you 0.0100 dollars per megabyte over. The overage actually costs less than the first two gigabytes.
Though even that seems impossibly high for bandwidth in the middle of a city. Who would pay $1 to watch a clip on YouTube, or $5 to watch a video on Hulu? Who would pay $30 a month to listen to Pandora for an hour a day? Cheap or unlimited data plans spur the invention of new services. They expand the boundaries of the Internet. AT&T is sending users back into the dark ages.
Runs fine for me (OS X 10.6.3/Safari 4.0.5).
CPU usage averages 15% (of one core) on the Strong Bad demo, except during the first bit with the Cheat, where it spikes to ~40%.
Using Flash 10, CPU usage averages 8-9%, but during the same scene jumps to ~30%.
Which is pretty damn impressive for an emulator. And proves that there's really nothing Flash can do that HTML 5 can't.
THIS BELONGS IN MY STOMACH!
Okay, that is officially the best job description ever.
I wouldn't put odds on Jobs unless his new liver came from a radioactive spider.
Not really sure what an OS extremist would do, though.
This comes to mind.
SCIGen is becoming more convincing all the time.
perpetual growth is impossible to achieve in a finite universe.
Technically, you only need to improve until everyone is happy. In other words, when we invent Soma. Or holosuites.
Whether that's reassuring or terrifying is left as an exercise to the reader.
Today wasn't the best day to become the highest-valued IT company in the world - edging out MSFT (219.18B) by having a market cap of 222.07B.
That also gives Apple the second largest market cap period, behind only Exxon Mobil (278.64B). Rather incredible, since Apple only nudged into the top five last quarter and the top ten the quarter before that.
The United States is not a dictatorship and one person cannot, by law, rule unilaterally. Obama tapped Julius Genachowski to head the FCC, and thus had done more than anyone reading this thread to promote network neutrality. When you consider the myriad issues facing the USA, and how intractable most of them are, it's remarkable a single person is expected to fix even a fraction of them.
Indeed, it's a miracle that politicians accomplish anything at all considering the electoral minefield they enter every time they attempt anything of consequence. Many of these people entered politics with dreams of saving the world, then learned that votes come not from sound policies but from hyperbolic promises and expensive ad campaigns. They learn that trying to do their jobs right garners nothing but controversy, disapproval, and well-funded enemies; play-acting for the cameras, pork-barrel projects, screwing the future for short-term gain, and funding their campaigns with corporate-sponsored bills are the secret to staying in office.
And for that, the blame can squarely be laid upon the people. It's called a representative democracy for a reason: The quality of the government reflects the quality of the voters. The voters by and large are ignorant masses that vote for whatever politician promises the world and asks for no sacrifices in return. Later, when the politician fails to deliver on the impossible promises—the ones he had to make to get elected in the first place—the voters toss him out in favor of the next guy with fancy TV commercials and exactly the same promises.
If you want to change the representatives, you need to change the voters. Start a campaign to educate your community about the truth behind important issues. Get them to ask tough questions and to expect real answers instead of sound bites. Get them to vote not for the candidate with the biggest promises but the one who offers detailed policies. Explain the federal budget and where tax monies really go, and how it might be fixed. Explain the issues that matter most to you. And if you can't find anyone to represent your views in congress, run for office yourself.
But if you can't be arsed to do anything but make hollow demands, expect your representatives to do nothing but make hollow promises.
Is this PS3 game incredibly popular among Slashdotters, or related to nerd culture or current events in any way? Other than the quick aside about 3D (which isn't new in games) I can't figure out why this is on Slashdot at all.
Great post, but I think organized religion is more a symptom than a cause.
Humans have a set of fundamental tribal instincts that exist regardless of high-level social structures. It's easy to see where they came from. If you wanted to be chieftain, you had to be dominant; you had to convey unquestionable authority. Intimidation and xenophobia were effective means of keeping everyone united and under your control—even begging you for protection. Strange events and coincidences could be spun as signs of your greatness and wisdom. If your people had some specific histories or beliefs, they could also be twisted into supporting your rule. And if others couldn't understand your reasoning, you could just call it mystic knowledge that only you and chosen believers can comprehend.
Civilization has come a long way, but if you peel back the veneer of religion and politics you'll find we're still a bunch of savages looking for tribal identity. Whether you call yourself an evangelical Christian pastor, a fundamentalist Imam, or a member of the Communist Party of China, you still use the same tactics of intimidation against free thought and fear of foreigners, infidels, or minorities. You still use propaganda to twist events to your interpretations. You still hardly care about your group's beliefs except to turn them into justifications. And you still create a ruling caste that claims greater enlightenment than the masses.
Religion's flaw is that it, like race or color or political party or organization, divides people. It delineates "is" and "is not". Whenever you define a group, you invite that chieftain element who prey on tribal instincts. As people look to the chieftain for direction, they care less and less about what their beliefs and values originally meant and begin to only see them as a justification for the same attitude of fear and hatred every chieftain preaches. And the tribe more and more resembles every other, especially the ones its people are told to hate and fear.
The people sometimes deemed "liberal" or "freethinking" or "secular" are those who suppress that protective tribal instinct, and are less moved by the promises and threats of their chieftain. But freethinkers are a group like any other, and blaming religions or political parties or any other group just feeds the tribal instinct. Many have broken away, only to form their own tribes—and now embody everything they once fought against. Only when the majority of us can leave our tribal thinking behind and stop thinking of every grouping and delineation as a tribal boundary will the chieftains among us lose their voice. Only when we can stop fearing and hating that which makes others different will we be able to understand who anyone really is.
Ourselves most of all.