You mean those phones that look exactly like an iPhone yet cost half price and run Android instead? If you have a good one they may even have tweaked the interface to look just like an iPhone.
GEMA - yet another association which has failed to adapt to newer technology and now is clawing at air while it sinks into fiscal bankruptcy.
You really don't appear to know what you're talking about.
GEMA is not a record company, it's a statutory organisation. Yes it's in private hands, but that doesn't mean it's a normal business. These organisations have been appointed (possibly set up even) by the government to collect royalties, amounts and manner as prescribed in certain laws. They may be a dinosaur from another age, that doesn't mean they're clinging to an old business model. They don't have a business model other than "implementing a law". It's not GEMA that has to change: it's the law that governs GEMA. So it's also not GEMA you have to complain to, it's the government you have to complain to, as that's where the change has to be made. Even if GEMA would want to change, they can not change by themselves, as it's the government that sets their activities.
In most countries, courts would not come in the picture very quickly. If there is an unpaid invoice, they would most likely first hire a debt collector. This debt collector could then go to the court, say "here we have an unpaid bill and debtor is not answering to us" and if the court thinks the bill is legit (highly likely in this case, there was a party, there was music, and GEMA has been appointed to collect royalties) they can have the debtors assets confiscated. That can be nasty. Collection cost will also be added to the amount the debtor has to pay.
Not sure what debtor can do against it, but I do have the feeling that it will take more than "we don't need to pay this". After all it appears to me GEMA has the law on their side (whether we think said law is reasonable or fair, is not the point here).
I criticised him for installing for a friend a system that he had never tried out himself, and subsequently ran into serious problems that could have been prevented by giving the system a test run (and, in this case, choosing something else instead). It happened to be KDE but that's not the point.
In this case the difference between throwing your mouse pointer in the right-top corner, and making two accurately aimed clicks. Big difference in usability. This to get the expose-like window overview, in where you can click the window you want to the foreground.
The alternative that I have in Gnome is also a window list at the bottom of the screen. A single aimed click to get back my window. That convenient overview is completely gone in Unity, simply no easy way to change windows. And that sucks.
I was thinking similar, but then in a different approach. Many great discoveries these days are teamwork, with dozens to thousands of scientists working on a single problem, everyone doing a little bit. And it's generally the head of that group that receives all the credit.
Managing such an organisation isn't easy, and requires a lot of experience in both the scientific work and the management work. These scientists are probably more manager than that they are experimentalist, and naturally they are getting older due to the career that goes ahead of reaching such a position.
Also I wouldn't be surprised if many of the scientists doing the grunt work (the actual experiments, the equipment design and construction, the calculations) are still the younger guys, doing their PhD or post-doc work. And maybe making their first steps towards moving up in the organisation, to end up on top some 20, 30 years later, receiving all the credit of the work the group has done.
Nothing wrong with tablet-friendly UI's - on tablets.
The problem is that they are put on desktops.
Basically the same problem the earlier tablets had, but then the other way around: they tried to mold the mouse-and-keyboard interface of Windows into a touch environment, and that went wrong. For whatever reason several OS vendors make the same mistake the other way around now.
When iOS and the first iPhone came out, one of the things many people here realised is that it worked so well because from the ground up it had been designed for a touch interface and small screens. The same accounts for Android. The two ways to interact (touch vs. mouse and keyboard) are just too different to merge into a single UI.
it all installed: i ran it, logged them in... and could i understand what the fuck was going on? not a chance. it was incredibly embarrassing. i spent 15 minutes _failing_ to do something as simple as set their background image. first we couldn't find it - i had to log in at the console and use "find . | xargs grep {filename}". then we couldn't find how to even _change_ the background image. on standard desktops, it's right-mouse, click "set background". done.>
So, if I understand your story well, you're trying to give your friend a computing solution that you have never even looked at before yourself? No wonder you're running into trouble.
I have tried many - KDE, Gnome, E. Loved the Gnome1+E combination. Later Gnome2 with Metacity or Compiz or whatever it's called. Mandriva put it together, it worked well. Each change took some getting used to, but nevertheless it was OK. I generally stuck to Gnome over KDE, that's just a preference, wouldn't call KDE to suck or anything at all.
The only one so far (as in >20 years of computing and experimenting) that I have dumped in disgust is Unity. It has some nice ideas but overall it sucks. If ever I get my hands on a Linux-capable tablet I may try it again, but as the first part of that is unlikely it will probably never happen. Still running Ubuntu, but in Gnome3 mode.
I recently upgraded Ubuntu 10.4 to 11.10. Wow. Shock, horror: it suddenly started to look like EasyPeasy that I have on my EEE 701 (recently broken, unfortunately). I loved the idea on the EEEPC, albeit at the time with quite some rough edges - it really works fine that way on a small screen. And then actually EasyPeasy had the organisation better than Unity: cleaner, less clutter, yet less hidden behind too many clicks.
But on the big screen, it gets in the way. Three clicks to get an overview of the open windows - no simple window list at the bottom of the screen. I really had an issue switching windows, choosing the correct one. I like how they put the menu bar Apple-style on top, I also have an iBook and liked it there too. I know many people don't agree on this point. It's a preference.
It always tries to maximise my windows. That sucks even more: if only because it takes away control from me, and I have to correct this time and again by unmaximising the window.
So soon after switched to the classic Gnome, now Gnome3. Not too bad, it does the job, doesn't get in the way, very similar to Gnome2 really. Got my application menu back (much easier to search through than those huge screens from Unity), got my window lists back, I'm happy.
For a netbook or tablet with touch screen, well sure Unity may do really well. It seems to be designed for that. Too bad that Ubuntu's main market still seems to be desktops, so they piss off heaps of desktop users, and make many (like me) think about other distros in the market.
Stuxnet managed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear facilities. There is no reason to believe security there is less stringent than it is in the US, Iran is possibly even more paranoid than the US is. There is also of course no reason to believe that Iranian scientists are harder to "social engineer" into sticking an infected USB key in a secure system than US scientists are - and that was the way the internal system got infected to begin with. Prison guards are probably easier to handle that way than scientists.
I think the universe simply evolved until it reached some good values. It adopted to its environment, allowing it to survive, and in that way it gave rise to life as we know it. But what we obviously completely missed, is that the universe itself is alive. It evolves, fine tunes, improves on itself, trying to reach the best possible values.
Yet the vast majority of the world's population does not talk in English in daily life. Chinese is probably the most widely spoken language, but then you still have the many different dialects.
I wonder how technologies like Siri manage the various versions of English, with sometimes opposite meanings to very similar expressions. Not to mention the varying accents.
The blog posting by Coyne was, at least to me, also not very trustworthy. It was so full of mudslinging and name calling that he really lost credibility to me in this matter.
Having read Coyne's blog post linked to the previous/. post, I almost start to fully believe remarks like
I have had wonderful conversations with many scientific skeptics over
the years, but my meeting with you was exceptionally dismaying and unproductive.
by Haught. I haven't watched the video, and have no intention to do so, as both parties and actually mostly Coyne have not given me the idea that this would be a really interesting debate where people would respect one another's viewpoints, listen to them, and reply to them rationally. And that's the impression that I got from Coyne's blog post. Which was, as a whole, totally unprofessional, and using language and arguments that I would not expect from a good debater.
You're trying to compare a repellent method using light, with one using sound. Totally different medium (light vs sound), totally different method (chasing away vs. setting up a barrier).
And I may assume Bill Gates is smart enough to have some people evaluate these projects for him. Note that TFA mentions that this is the second grant this project receives; and that many other projects did get first grant, but no second. That means they have been evaluating, and have concluded this one has merit.
They still make sense to me. OK/usr is nowadays not often nfs mounted or so, but there are good reasons to have a few directories to sort things out. Dumping everything in one directory is also not the best thing to do, imho. It's not broken, no reason to fix it.
And very useful is the/usr/local path: distros tend to not use it (they install all there stuff in/usr/bin or/usr/lib) but I use it for my own software. Mostly little scripts that I wrote myself, and need to have available system wide for cron jobs and so. A directory to mess around in without having to be afraid of breaking the system, and still having it available system wide, is just great.
I wonder what would happen if say Google would go dark for a day, US only: replace the standard search page with a page "this is what you will see if the PROTECT-IP act becomes law". It seems, from the face of it, that this is basically the only thing Google can do to survive under such an act. Let the country feel how it would be, to do without their favourite search engine. Have Bing and Yahoo cooperate in this - all out for a day in the US, not a holiday or so, no a normal weekday - and the outcry should be sufficient. And it would give a good idea on the economic losses this bill could cause.
And in the meantime of course they would continue to provide services as usual in jurisdictions that are not affected, i.e. the rest of the world.
If that doesn't get the message home, nothing would, and the US is doomed.
Thanks to Unity and Ubuntu 11.10 I'm in the market for a new distro. I dumped Unity and it's horrible invasive and irritating maximise-everything behaviour, switched to Gnome3, which is far better but a step backwards from Gnome2 unfortunately. Maybe back to good old Mandriva. Not sure yet. No time to actually do something about it, but seriously considering. And that's a big change from 10.4LTS which I use for my office machines and which I actually really like. But then this Ubuntu plays 10-bit mkv video. That's important to me. Unity may be nice for netbooks, but somehow I have my doubts about that too.
No, it has to do with the idea that one state of memory has a higher energy than the other state, and that storing an e-book (or any data for that sake) on a non-volatile memory increases the energy state of that memory. And since energy is mass according to Einstein, the mass of the memory increases.
You can not just increase the number of electrons on a device, as that would result in a net negative charge. Same for batteries: there are no electrons added, just electrons are moved from one atom to another while charging, and moved back when discharging. With the same reasoning one could argue that batteries increase in mass when charged as they take up energy - a probably much larger quantity of mass as the energies involved are so much greater.
That the quality of the knock-off will be lower I didn't mention because to me that's implied already. Knock-offs tend to be lower quality than the real thing; that's why they can knock off so much of the price too. Again the problem is the knock-off producer doesn't have their own brand, so effectively no merit to compete on, only price is left. And the retailers (and consumers) will then go for the lowest priced product.
Markets differ... Apple has always been strong in their home market. Here it's all Windows that I see in the shops. Not counting tablets of course, but laptops and desktops.
Now for the numbers and statistics. Wikipedia mentions a market share of just under 11% for Apple in the US. netmarketshare.com and statcounter.com give about 6.5% worldwide for Apple. And about 1% for Linux. The rest, 92.5%, belongs to Windows.
No it's not late 90s anymore, and Windows is down from some 96-98% back then, but this is still well into monopoly territory. It seems also that your sampling is not representative for the market as a whole.
I live in the most developed part of China: Hong Kong. I may be a westerner, but that remark really echoes what many people around here say about Chinese, particularly mainlanders of course. You even hear it on the mainland.
And have seen first-hand time and again that they love to copy things. The iPad had barely hit the shelves, and cheap Android based lookalikes were offered already (advertised as "7-inch iPad").
Mainlanders really have a love for fake stuff, they even have a "miss plastic surgery" election: a miss election but then for women that had plastic surgery. Everything is copied there, or faked. Internationally known is of course the milk powder scandal, and probably also the char-siu-bau that were filled with cardboard - but in that case the news report itself was faked. Even fake chicken eggs have been found in Hong Kong (they can bounce after boiling them - really interesting in a way - as I understand they actually came complete with thin rigid shell and liquid content that becomes hard when boiling).
When you buy something in a shop in mainland you'd best assume it's fake, unless you're really sure it isn't (the price is often a giveaway). Just that a shop looks like an Apple shop doesn't necessarily mean it's an Apple shop. And that's no joke. It's a disaster.
In how far has this surveillance helped Firefox and other browsers to gain foothold over IE? Over the years IE has always been the default browser on Windows installs. Yet FF is doing quite well now.
That's going to be hard, as in case of rampant copying a lot of innovation isn't even begun with in the first place because no-one wants to risk investing so much. And that's now part of China's mind set too.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean those phones that look exactly like an iPhone yet cost half price and run Android instead? If you have a good one they may even have tweaked the interface to look just like an iPhone.
GEMA - yet another association which has failed to adapt to newer technology and now is clawing at air while it sinks into fiscal bankruptcy.
You really don't appear to know what you're talking about.
GEMA is not a record company, it's a statutory organisation. Yes it's in private hands, but that doesn't mean it's a normal business. These organisations have been appointed (possibly set up even) by the government to collect royalties, amounts and manner as prescribed in certain laws. They may be a dinosaur from another age, that doesn't mean they're clinging to an old business model. They don't have a business model other than "implementing a law". It's not GEMA that has to change: it's the law that governs GEMA. So it's also not GEMA you have to complain to, it's the government you have to complain to, as that's where the change has to be made. Even if GEMA would want to change, they can not change by themselves, as it's the government that sets their activities.
In most countries, courts would not come in the picture very quickly. If there is an unpaid invoice, they would most likely first hire a debt collector. This debt collector could then go to the court, say "here we have an unpaid bill and debtor is not answering to us" and if the court thinks the bill is legit (highly likely in this case, there was a party, there was music, and GEMA has been appointed to collect royalties) they can have the debtors assets confiscated. That can be nasty. Collection cost will also be added to the amount the debtor has to pay.
Not sure what debtor can do against it, but I do have the feeling that it will take more than "we don't need to pay this". After all it appears to me GEMA has the law on their side (whether we think said law is reasonable or fair, is not the point here).
Troll, learn to read.
I criticised him for installing for a friend a system that he had never tried out himself, and subsequently ran into serious problems that could have been prevented by giving the system a test run (and, in this case, choosing something else instead). It happened to be KDE but that's not the point.
In this case the difference between throwing your mouse pointer in the right-top corner, and making two accurately aimed clicks. Big difference in usability. This to get the expose-like window overview, in where you can click the window you want to the foreground.
The alternative that I have in Gnome is also a window list at the bottom of the screen. A single aimed click to get back my window. That convenient overview is completely gone in Unity, simply no easy way to change windows. And that sucks.
I was thinking similar, but then in a different approach. Many great discoveries these days are teamwork, with dozens to thousands of scientists working on a single problem, everyone doing a little bit. And it's generally the head of that group that receives all the credit.
Managing such an organisation isn't easy, and requires a lot of experience in both the scientific work and the management work. These scientists are probably more manager than that they are experimentalist, and naturally they are getting older due to the career that goes ahead of reaching such a position.
Also I wouldn't be surprised if many of the scientists doing the grunt work (the actual experiments, the equipment design and construction, the calculations) are still the younger guys, doing their PhD or post-doc work. And maybe making their first steps towards moving up in the organisation, to end up on top some 20, 30 years later, receiving all the credit of the work the group has done.
Nothing wrong with tablet-friendly UI's - on tablets.
The problem is that they are put on desktops.
Basically the same problem the earlier tablets had, but then the other way around: they tried to mold the mouse-and-keyboard interface of Windows into a touch environment, and that went wrong. For whatever reason several OS vendors make the same mistake the other way around now.
When iOS and the first iPhone came out, one of the things many people here realised is that it worked so well because from the ground up it had been designed for a touch interface and small screens. The same accounts for Android. The two ways to interact (touch vs. mouse and keyboard) are just too different to merge into a single UI.
>
it all installed: i ran it, logged them in... and could i understand what the fuck was going on? not a chance. it was incredibly embarrassing. i spent 15 minutes _failing_ to do something as simple as set their background image. first we couldn't find it - i had to log in at the console and use "find . | xargs grep {filename}". then we couldn't find how to even _change_ the background image. on standard desktops, it's right-mouse, click "set background". done.>
So, if I understand your story well, you're trying to give your friend a computing solution that you have never even looked at before yourself? No wonder you're running into trouble.
I have tried many - KDE, Gnome, E. Loved the Gnome1+E combination. Later Gnome2 with Metacity or Compiz or whatever it's called. Mandriva put it together, it worked well. Each change took some getting used to, but nevertheless it was OK. I generally stuck to Gnome over KDE, that's just a preference, wouldn't call KDE to suck or anything at all.
The only one so far (as in >20 years of computing and experimenting) that I have dumped in disgust is Unity. It has some nice ideas but overall it sucks. If ever I get my hands on a Linux-capable tablet I may try it again, but as the first part of that is unlikely it will probably never happen. Still running Ubuntu, but in Gnome3 mode.
I recently upgraded Ubuntu 10.4 to 11.10. Wow. Shock, horror: it suddenly started to look like EasyPeasy that I have on my EEE 701 (recently broken, unfortunately). I loved the idea on the EEEPC, albeit at the time with quite some rough edges - it really works fine that way on a small screen. And then actually EasyPeasy had the organisation better than Unity: cleaner, less clutter, yet less hidden behind too many clicks.
But on the big screen, it gets in the way. Three clicks to get an overview of the open windows - no simple window list at the bottom of the screen. I really had an issue switching windows, choosing the correct one. I like how they put the menu bar Apple-style on top, I also have an iBook and liked it there too. I know many people don't agree on this point. It's a preference.
It always tries to maximise my windows. That sucks even more: if only because it takes away control from me, and I have to correct this time and again by unmaximising the window.
So soon after switched to the classic Gnome, now Gnome3. Not too bad, it does the job, doesn't get in the way, very similar to Gnome2 really. Got my application menu back (much easier to search through than those huge screens from Unity), got my window lists back, I'm happy.
For a netbook or tablet with touch screen, well sure Unity may do really well. It seems to be designed for that. Too bad that Ubuntu's main market still seems to be desktops, so they piss off heaps of desktop users, and make many (like me) think about other distros in the market.
Stuxnet managed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear facilities. There is no reason to believe security there is less stringent than it is in the US, Iran is possibly even more paranoid than the US is. There is also of course no reason to believe that Iranian scientists are harder to "social engineer" into sticking an infected USB key in a secure system than US scientists are - and that was the way the internal system got infected to begin with. Prison guards are probably easier to handle that way than scientists.
I think the universe simply evolved until it reached some good values. It adopted to its environment, allowing it to survive, and in that way it gave rise to life as we know it. But what we obviously completely missed, is that the universe itself is alive. It evolves, fine tunes, improves on itself, trying to reach the best possible values.
It seems Siri is English-only.
Yet the vast majority of the world's population does not talk in English in daily life. Chinese is probably the most widely spoken language, but then you still have the many different dialects.
I wonder how technologies like Siri manage the various versions of English, with sometimes opposite meanings to very similar expressions. Not to mention the varying accents.
The blog posting by Coyne was, at least to me, also not very trustworthy. It was so full of mudslinging and name calling that he really lost credibility to me in this matter.
Having read Coyne's blog post linked to the previous /. post, I almost start to fully believe remarks like
I have had wonderful conversations with many scientific skeptics over the years, but my meeting with you was exceptionally dismaying and unproductive.
by Haught. I haven't watched the video, and have no intention to do so, as both parties and actually mostly Coyne have not given me the idea that this would be a really interesting debate where people would respect one another's viewpoints, listen to them, and reply to them rationally. And that's the impression that I got from Coyne's blog post. Which was, as a whole, totally unprofessional, and using language and arguments that I would not expect from a good debater.
You're trying to compare a repellent method using light, with one using sound. Totally different medium (light vs sound), totally different method (chasing away vs. setting up a barrier).
And I may assume Bill Gates is smart enough to have some people evaluate these projects for him. Note that TFA mentions that this is the second grant this project receives; and that many other projects did get first grant, but no second. That means they have been evaluating, and have concluded this one has merit.
They still make sense to me. OK /usr is nowadays not often nfs mounted or so, but there are good reasons to have a few directories to sort things out. Dumping everything in one directory is also not the best thing to do, imho. It's not broken, no reason to fix it.
And very useful is the /usr/local path: distros tend to not use it (they install all there stuff in /usr/bin or /usr/lib) but I use it for my own software. Mostly little scripts that I wrote myself, and need to have available system wide for cron jobs and so. A directory to mess around in without having to be afraid of breaking the system, and still having it available system wide, is just great.
I wonder what would happen if say Google would go dark for a day, US only: replace the standard search page with a page "this is what you will see if the PROTECT-IP act becomes law". It seems, from the face of it, that this is basically the only thing Google can do to survive under such an act. Let the country feel how it would be, to do without their favourite search engine. Have Bing and Yahoo cooperate in this - all out for a day in the US, not a holiday or so, no a normal weekday - and the outcry should be sufficient. And it would give a good idea on the economic losses this bill could cause.
And in the meantime of course they would continue to provide services as usual in jurisdictions that are not affected, i.e. the rest of the world.
If that doesn't get the message home, nothing would, and the US is doomed.
Thanks to Unity and Ubuntu 11.10 I'm in the market for a new distro. I dumped Unity and it's horrible invasive and irritating maximise-everything behaviour, switched to Gnome3, which is far better but a step backwards from Gnome2 unfortunately. Maybe back to good old Mandriva. Not sure yet. No time to actually do something about it, but seriously considering. And that's a big change from 10.4LTS which I use for my office machines and which I actually really like. But then this Ubuntu plays 10-bit mkv video. That's important to me. Unity may be nice for netbooks, but somehow I have my doubts about that too.
And how about the evil bit? How much does that weigh?
No, it has to do with the idea that one state of memory has a higher energy than the other state, and that storing an e-book (or any data for that sake) on a non-volatile memory increases the energy state of that memory. And since energy is mass according to Einstein, the mass of the memory increases.
You can not just increase the number of electrons on a device, as that would result in a net negative charge. Same for batteries: there are no electrons added, just electrons are moved from one atom to another while charging, and moved back when discharging. With the same reasoning one could argue that batteries increase in mass when charged as they take up energy - a probably much larger quantity of mass as the energies involved are so much greater.
That the quality of the knock-off will be lower I didn't mention because to me that's implied already. Knock-offs tend to be lower quality than the real thing; that's why they can knock off so much of the price too. Again the problem is the knock-off producer doesn't have their own brand, so effectively no merit to compete on, only price is left. And the retailers (and consumers) will then go for the lowest priced product.
Markets differ... Apple has always been strong in their home market. Here it's all Windows that I see in the shops. Not counting tablets of course, but laptops and desktops.
Now for the numbers and statistics. Wikipedia mentions a market share of just under 11% for Apple in the US. netmarketshare.com and statcounter.com give about 6.5% worldwide for Apple. And about 1% for Linux. The rest, 92.5%, belongs to Windows.
No it's not late 90s anymore, and Windows is down from some 96-98% back then, but this is still well into monopoly territory. It seems also that your sampling is not representative for the market as a whole.
I live in the most developed part of China: Hong Kong. I may be a westerner, but that remark really echoes what many people around here say about Chinese, particularly mainlanders of course. You even hear it on the mainland.
And have seen first-hand time and again that they love to copy things. The iPad had barely hit the shelves, and cheap Android based lookalikes were offered already (advertised as "7-inch iPad").
Mainlanders really have a love for fake stuff, they even have a "miss plastic surgery" election: a miss election but then for women that had plastic surgery. Everything is copied there, or faked. Internationally known is of course the milk powder scandal, and probably also the char-siu-bau that were filled with cardboard - but in that case the news report itself was faked. Even fake chicken eggs have been found in Hong Kong (they can bounce after boiling them - really interesting in a way - as I understand they actually came complete with thin rigid shell and liquid content that becomes hard when boiling).
When you buy something in a shop in mainland you'd best assume it's fake, unless you're really sure it isn't (the price is often a giveaway). Just that a shop looks like an Apple shop doesn't necessarily mean it's an Apple shop. And that's no joke. It's a disaster.
In how far has this surveillance helped Firefox and other browsers to gain foothold over IE? Over the years IE has always been the default browser on Windows installs. Yet FF is doing quite well now.
That's going to be hard, as in case of rampant copying a lot of innovation isn't even begun with in the first place because no-one wants to risk investing so much. And that's now part of China's mind set too.