Really? In what way? If anything, Google keeps demonstrating that one can build enormously scalable and highly reliable web services completely without Sun hardware.
So unless Google certifies their implementation, it cannot be called Java,
And it is not called "Java", it is called "Android". What Google is saying is that you can use Sun's Java environment to create applications for Android, which is completely correct.
Sun doesn't take bastardization of Java lightly!
No, Sun prefers to do all the Java bastardization themselves (Java 1.6, what a p.o.s.).
while over looking the fact that Sun has GPLed Java
Releasing software under the GPL wouldn't give Google patent rights, since Google is not basing their software on Sun's.
and that other groups have produced versions of Java with out getting sued
Quite to the contrary: all conforming Java implementations that have ever been produced are produced under license from Sun, and Sun has used legal threats to ensure that.
There are a bunch of non-conforming implementations where Sun has chosen not to press the issue yet, but that doesn't tell you that Sun doesn't have the patents or doesn't enforce them. And, if you look at USPTO, you'll see that Sun has dozens of Java-related patents, some of them on fundamental aspects of the platform like bytecode verification.
OTOH, I suspect Google was careful about this, and this is one of the reasons Google didn't use a standard JVM. In the end, all Android shares with Sun Java is a fairly generic programming language and some fairly generic core APIs.
The idea of recording one's entire life has been around for decades, and people have been doing this on and off for at least a decade before Microsoft got in on the act. It's really mostly a question of cost, (electrical) power, and privacy, not any particularly fancy technology.
It can be, by sticking it into a breeder reactor. The problem is that people don't do that. Instead, the high-level waste is encapsulated for disposal, which makes it only slightly less dangerous, but completely useless.
It is often very hard to find / prove an explicit formula, but for me, if data looks random, it's probably because of a bug.
Oh, come on, something as simple as a list IQ scores for 1 million people is almost completely random data (the distribution isn't uniform, it's normal, but that's still almost completely random).
And so what if it is a bug? If I screw up my statistical analysis and have a bunch of 500M files of random junk on my disk, should the government be able to accuse me of hiding illegal data just because I can't demonstrate the bug that generate the junk data? I don't think so.
You keep big files of random numbers on your machine, and you're calling the *cop* stupid?
Most scientific research involves keeping large amounts of random numbers around (raw experimental results). Often, these are literally huge files of binary random numbers with not even a header.
In the United States, you could never be compelled to turn over an encryption key as that is a violation of the 5th amendment
I wouldn't be so sure. The 5th amendment only protects against self-incrimination, but the search may be for evidence against a third party, in which case you may be compelled to comply.
It's also not clear that giving up your encryption keys would be considered "testimonial", so it might not be protected under the 5th amendment according to US courts. See here (somewhat outdated in other aspects, but an accurate reflection of US policy on the legal hair splitting):
Can't a court order someone to provide a physical key as part of a subpoena or a warrant?
Yes. And if you say "sorry, I don't have it", they just break it open. Afterwards, the issue is resolved. No big deal.
Why does law treat encryption keys differently?
They try to treat it the same, and that's the problem. If you lose your encryption keys, there really is no practical way to force it and resolve the question. And if you say "that's not encrypted data" or "that's not my encrypted data", there is no way for you to prove your innocence. It seems that under RIPA, if the police merely suspect that some bits on your disk are encrypted data, you're subject to punishment, with no way of even proving your innocence.
The difference is that with a physical object, all these things are pretty clear-cut: either there is a safe or there isn't, either it contains drugs or counterfeit money or it doesn't. And if you insist that you forgot the combo to the safe, no big deal, they will simply force it open, and that will settle the matter.
With encryption, you can't even tell whether there is a safe there. I might well keep big files of random numbers on my machine, and just because a UK cop with a two digit IQ is incapable of figuring out why and suspects some nefarious purpose, that shouldn't be illegal. Furthermore, with encryption, the government simply cannot force the issue: in general, they just can't decrypt the data.
If Apple should ever get significant market share in the US, I, for one, don't welcome our shiny overlords from Cupertino. I think Apple is simply not a nice company.
We could have clear nuclear power by using breeder reactors: efficient usage of fuel and little left-over radioactivity. However, the kind of nuclear power plants we have right now are incredibly wasteful of the nuclear fuel (only a few percent of the energy are extracted), and they leave a highly radioactive and dangerous nuclear waste that we have no way of disposing of. The irresponsibility of burning coal pales in comparison to the irresponsibility of burning nuclear fuel in the kinds of reactors we have today.
Why don't we have breeder reactors? Mostly because of US concerns about proliferation. Breeder reactors can theoretically be used for turning non-weapons grade uranium into weapons-grade plutonium. It would really be practical, but there you have it anyway.
So, the write-up for this article is extremely biased. Nuclear technology, as we have it right now, is not "clean"; rather, it leaves us with a huge unsolved waste disposal problem. Until people start building breeder reactors or other types of reactors that use nuclear fuel efficiently and leave little high-level waste, nuclear power is environmentally unacceptable.
Overall, however, it is still not clear why you would even want nuclear power. Wind, solar, water, geothermal, and ocean power are abundant and can satisfy our energy needs many times over.
I really like the concept of Miro/DemocracyPlayer, but I found the software largely unusable on both Linux and OS X in practice: it's just flaky and locks up during playback and/or downloading.
That's great news; I think there's a lot of prior art in there for supposedly modern inventions.
Getting this up and running shouldn't be all that hard; people have written emulators for all sorts of older architectures. Given the speed and memory of modern hardware, you can, for example, just emulate the 36 bit words using 64 bit words and not worry about the wasted 30 bits.
How serious Motorola is about Android when they have just made an serious investment into an Symbian company?
Motorola is already shipping lots of Linux phones (far more than Symbian), but they have almost no developer community. Android might be the answer to their problems.
Motorola just bought half of UIQ from Sony-Ericsson
I think UIQ is a short-term fix for them. I also don't think UIQ is going to make it in the long term. For Symbian, Series 60 is going to be the de facto standard.
Hey, but that's just me (and thousand of co-workers here), but please, feel free to use what you want. Only don't preach, please..
Why not? Does your weak ego feel threatened?
Microsoft is "preaching" to the tune of billions of dollars a year, complete with fake testimonials, astro-turfing, psychological manipulation, and FUD campaigns.
A little heart-felt preaching by real grass-roots movements shouldn't hurt.
Office for students cost 99 USD, and if your college/university has the Campus agreement, it costs USD 45. For me, as an uiversiy worker with the Select agreement, it cost USD 25. So I rathere pay (hell, even USD200 if needed) but I rather use MS office with all integration between it's parts than OO even if it's free.
Well, aren't you lucky. But once you enter the real world, it stops being so cheap.
Well, in the early 1980's, this was state of the art and obvious. But with the influx of PHP-writing barristas and C programming college drop-outs into the computer industry, standards have clearly gone down to the point that it now meets standards for patentability.
unfortunately Android apps are indeed intended to be written in Java. (as opposed to, say, something like a C/C++ toolkit with bindings
It seems like a little of both: they are intended to be written in Java, but all the important toolkits seem to be callable from C/C++ (the green stuff). So, there is hope.
Apple, Microsoft, and Nokia should have no trouble putting Android on top of their kernels. What they can't easily do is have the Android UI and their native UIs co-exist.
whatever small speed difference you might gain by writing some C code
The difference might be quite large; Android does not have the same JIT as the desktop Java runtime (if it has a JIT at all). And even on the desktop, there are some things at which Java is really bad compared to native code.
will be dwarfed by the extra development time
On the other hand, the inability to reuse existing C libraries may add many man-years to your pure Java project.
and the fact that few developers will be interested in working with the API.
Standard Linux C/C++ desktop APIs vs. new Android Java APIs? Don't be so sure.
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Sun and Google are good partners
Really? In what way? If anything, Google keeps demonstrating that one can build enormously scalable and highly reliable web services completely without Sun hardware.
So unless Google certifies their implementation, it cannot be called Java,
And it is not called "Java", it is called "Android". What Google is saying is that you can use Sun's Java environment to create applications for Android, which is completely correct.
Sun doesn't take bastardization of Java lightly!
No, Sun prefers to do all the Java bastardization themselves (Java 1.6, what a p.o.s.).
I know Java just fine, I just can't get my work done in it.
Fortunately, it looks like Android also supports C and C++; Java is only needed for the PIM-like apps, and for that it's sufficient.
while over looking the fact that Sun has GPLed Java
Releasing software under the GPL wouldn't give Google patent rights, since Google is not basing their software on Sun's.
and that other groups have produced versions of Java with out getting sued
Quite to the contrary: all conforming Java implementations that have ever been produced are produced under license from Sun, and Sun has used legal threats to ensure that.
There are a bunch of non-conforming implementations where Sun has chosen not to press the issue yet, but that doesn't tell you that Sun doesn't have the patents or doesn't enforce them. And, if you look at USPTO, you'll see that Sun has dozens of Java-related patents, some of them on fundamental aspects of the platform like bytecode verification.
OTOH, I suspect Google was careful about this, and this is one of the reasons Google didn't use a standard JVM. In the end, all Android shares with Sun Java is a fairly generic programming language and some fairly generic core APIs.
The idea of recording one's entire life has been around for decades, and people have been doing this on and off for at least a decade before Microsoft got in on the act. It's really mostly a question of cost, (electrical) power, and privacy, not any particularly fancy technology.
why this energy couldn't be extracted peacefully
It can be, by sticking it into a breeder reactor. The problem is that people don't do that. Instead, the high-level waste is encapsulated for disposal, which makes it only slightly less dangerous, but completely useless.
It is often very hard to find / prove an explicit formula, but for me, if data looks random, it's probably because of a bug.
Oh, come on, something as simple as a list IQ scores for 1 million people is almost completely random data (the distribution isn't uniform, it's normal, but that's still almost completely random).
And so what if it is a bug? If I screw up my statistical analysis and have a bunch of 500M files of random junk on my disk, should the government be able to accuse me of hiding illegal data just because I can't demonstrate the bug that generate the junk data? I don't think so.
You keep big files of random numbers on your machine, and you're calling the *cop* stupid?
Most scientific research involves keeping large amounts of random numbers around (raw experimental results). Often, these are literally huge files of binary random numbers with not even a header.
In the United States, you could never be compelled to turn over an encryption key as that is a violation of the 5th amendment
I wouldn't be so sure. The 5th amendment only protects against self-incrimination, but the search may be for evidence against a third party, in which case you may be compelled to comply.
It's also not clear that giving up your encryption keys would be considered "testimonial", so it might not be protected under the 5th amendment according to US courts. See here (somewhat outdated in other aspects, but an accurate reflection of US policy on the legal hair splitting):
http://www.cybercrime.gov/cryptfaq.htm
Can't a court order someone to provide a physical key as part of a subpoena or a warrant?
Yes. And if you say "sorry, I don't have it", they just break it open. Afterwards, the issue is resolved. No big deal.
Why does law treat encryption keys differently?
They try to treat it the same, and that's the problem. If you lose your encryption keys, there really is no practical way to force it and resolve the question. And if you say "that's not encrypted data" or "that's not my encrypted data", there is no way for you to prove your innocence. It seems that under RIPA, if the police merely suspect that some bits on your disk are encrypted data, you're subject to punishment, with no way of even proving your innocence.
The difference is that with a physical object, all these things are pretty clear-cut: either there is a safe or there isn't, either it contains drugs or counterfeit money or it doesn't. And if you insist that you forgot the combo to the safe, no big deal, they will simply force it open, and that will settle the matter.
With encryption, you can't even tell whether there is a safe there. I might well keep big files of random numbers on my machine, and just because a UK cop with a two digit IQ is incapable of figuring out why and suspects some nefarious purpose, that shouldn't be illegal. Furthermore, with encryption, the government simply cannot force the issue: in general, they just can't decrypt the data.
If Apple should ever get significant market share in the US, I, for one, don't welcome our shiny overlords from Cupertino. I think Apple is simply not a nice company.
We could have clear nuclear power by using breeder reactors: efficient usage of fuel and little left-over radioactivity. However, the kind of nuclear power plants we have right now are incredibly wasteful of the nuclear fuel (only a few percent of the energy are extracted), and they leave a highly radioactive and dangerous nuclear waste that we have no way of disposing of. The irresponsibility of burning coal pales in comparison to the irresponsibility of burning nuclear fuel in the kinds of reactors we have today.
Why don't we have breeder reactors? Mostly because of US concerns about proliferation. Breeder reactors can theoretically be used for turning non-weapons grade uranium into weapons-grade plutonium. It would really be practical, but there you have it anyway.
So, the write-up for this article is extremely biased. Nuclear technology, as we have it right now, is not "clean"; rather, it leaves us with a huge unsolved waste disposal problem. Until people start building breeder reactors or other types of reactors that use nuclear fuel efficiently and leave little high-level waste, nuclear power is environmentally unacceptable.
Overall, however, it is still not clear why you would even want nuclear power. Wind, solar, water, geothermal, and ocean power are abundant and can satisfy our energy needs many times over.
Now that Ballmer has f*cking killed Google, he is going to f*cking kill Flickr, right?
I really like the concept of Miro/DemocracyPlayer, but I found the software largely unusable on both Linux and OS X in practice: it's just flaky and locks up during playback and/or downloading.
That's great news; I think there's a lot of prior art in there for supposedly modern inventions.
Getting this up and running shouldn't be all that hard; people have written emulators for all sorts of older architectures. Given the speed and memory of modern hardware, you can, for example, just emulate the 36 bit words using 64 bit words and not worry about the wasted 30 bits.
How serious Motorola is about Android when they have just made an serious investment into an Symbian company?
Motorola is already shipping lots of Linux phones (far more than Symbian), but they have almost no developer community. Android might be the answer to their problems.
Motorola just bought half of UIQ from Sony-Ericsson
I think UIQ is a short-term fix for them. I also don't think UIQ is going to make it in the long term. For Symbian, Series 60 is going to be the de facto standard.
the impression that the people at Google are a bunch of idiots who just didn't do any basic research
They did do research, which is why they replaced most of the Sun bloat with native C libraries.
they'd know that Java is slow, has 10^6 different versions
They know that; it's one of the reasons they created Android in the first place.
Java is slow
They know that, too, which is why only the high-level apps are written in Java and why they replaced the JVM with Dalvik.
Hey, but that's just me (and thousand of co-workers here), but please, feel free to use what you want. Only don't preach, please..
/university has the Campus agreement, it costs USD 45. For me, as an uiversiy worker with the Select agreement, it cost USD 25. So I rathere pay (hell, even USD200 if needed) but I rather use MS office with all integration between it's parts than OO even if it's free.
Why not? Does your weak ego feel threatened?
Microsoft is "preaching" to the tune of billions of dollars a year, complete with fake testimonials, astro-turfing, psychological manipulation, and FUD campaigns.
A little heart-felt preaching by real grass-roots movements shouldn't hurt.
Office for students cost 99 USD, and if your college
Well, aren't you lucky. But once you enter the real world, it stops being so cheap.
Well, in the early 1980's, this was state of the art and obvious. But with the influx of PHP-writing barristas and C programming college drop-outs into the computer industry, standards have clearly gone down to the point that it now meets standards for patentability.
but you have the option of including a compiled version of the code.
Unfortunately, that's only half of the problem. The other is that the Java language just has some performance bottlenecks.
So I just installed and tried out Android with the emulator. Pretty neat stuff, hope they get some diversity in the languages.
Same here.
Personally, I wish they just fix Java by adding a few C#-like extensions to it (backwards compatible).
No, those cover the Soviet Union pretty well.
unfortunately Android apps are indeed intended to be written in Java. (as opposed to, say, something like a C/C++ toolkit with bindings
It seems like a little of both: they are intended to be written in Java, but all the important toolkits seem to be callable from C/C++ (the green stuff). So, there is hope.
Apple, Microsoft, and Nokia should have no trouble putting Android on top of their kernels. What they can't easily do is have the Android UI and their native UIs co-exist.
whatever small speed difference you might gain by writing some C code
The difference might be quite large; Android does not have the same JIT as the desktop Java runtime (if it has a JIT at all). And even on the desktop, there are some things at which Java is really bad compared to native code.
will be dwarfed by the extra development time
On the other hand, the inability to reuse existing C libraries may add many man-years to your pure Java project.
and the fact that few developers will be interested in working with the API.
Standard Linux C/C++ desktop APIs vs. new Android Java APIs? Don't be so sure.
The vast majority of smart phones in the world run WebKit... because it's Nokia's standard browser, and has been for several years.