The UK adopting 1800 MHz LTE is awesome news for Australians, since it means we're more likely to see compatible devices coming out earlier rather than later.
iPad 3, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S III... these are all LTE devices, but not in Australia. It'll be nice when the manufacturers are now much more likely to deliver 1800 MHz versions much earlier in the product cycle.
According to TFA, they're shifting strategy to make fewer devices, which I hope will be better than the things they've been churning out.. I suppose this is Apple's strategy, which has certainly worked well for them.
Hopefully a smaller product range will also allow for better after-market support. My phone is an Atrix, and I liked the hardware, but the software support has been lacklustre to say the least.
I see a lot of praise for the "paperback" size 7" tablet form factor. I can see why it would be pretty awesome for reading novels etc, as well as the gameplaying/web/movies task load. Although if I had an unlimited gadget budget, if I wanted something to specifically to replace paperback books, I'd get a specialist device with an eInk screen.
However, what I would personally love is a tablet with more than a 10" screen. I play a lot of tabletop RPGs, and the iPad 3 is fantastic for reading RPG-type PDFs. These are books laid out for printing in a 8.5x11 or A4 page size, with multi-column text layout, embedded illustrations, tables & charts, and often in full colour. I also read business documents with similar characteristics (design documents, specifications etc).
On a 7" tablet, you would have your choice of unreadably small text or having to scroll within a page (urgh). The iPad 3's ridiculously awesome 2046x1536 screen has enough pixels that you can get a very readable full-page view of any single page of books with this kind of content. And the 4:3 aspect ratio fits very neatly in the gap between 8.5x11 aspect ratio and A4 aspect ratio, so there's very few wasted pixels for electronic versions of either common paper format. (Unlike the Android tablets, which are almost entirely 16:9, and therefore suck for paper-like layouts in portrait mode).
However, the 10" diagonal measurement means that even though the text is quite sharp, it's still a little on the small side compared to a hardcopy of the same book. In landscape mode, viewing two pages at a time, the text is still incredibly sharp (I love that screen so much) but is basically too small to comfortably read at all. Since a 7" tablet is about half the size of the iPad, that means it's not gonna be very usable for reading full-page document layouts.
I would absolutely jump at the chance to order a table with the same or better pixel count and 4:3 aspect ratio as the iPad 3, but with a diagonal measurement similar to a standard sheet of paper (say, approximately 13"-14"). That would be an awesome device. I know it's far too large for pocketability, but it would slip into a briefcase or carry bag very nicely since it would be the same size as standard documents. And if it ran Android 4+ rather than iOS.... it would be perfection. (iOS's approach to file management drives me f'in crazy.)
Since almost all LCD displays only refresh at 60Hz, no matter how frequently the graphics card's framebuffer is being redrawn, the only thing a higher framerate would get you is the ability to turn off vsync and buffering without having any tearing issues. So you might get slightly better latencies maybe?
People with 120 Hz 3d LCDs could benefit from higher frame rates, though. But I don't think it's likely that _anyone_ is gaming on a display that's actually capable of showing >250 FPS. Maybe such displays exist, but I doubt there are many people using them for mere shooters!
If you have the time, I'd love to hear which were your favourite SoCs and which were the worst to work with - especially if you can comment on what were the distinguishing factors that made them a joy or pain to work with.
Yeah, my comment about Apple's head start was _intended_ to draw attention to the way the summary was castigating Google's alleged tardiness, when in reality they're only a handful of months behind their major competition in _mobile_ OS's. I thought the article summary was quite trollish when it was talking about how Google has "finally implemented an industry standard defence" and I was trying to point that out - I wasn't trying to troll myself!
I appear to have been widely misinterpreted, unfortunately. I definitely need to use sarcasm tags more when posting on Slashdot.
I certainly think ASLR is a great thing to have in a widely-deployed OS that tends to hold a lot of valuable user data, and which has a lot of exposure to the web. I'm still curious to know whether BB OS and Windows Phone have any ASLR capability, but it appears that no-one who knows has seen these posts.
For what it's worth, I've done 5 minutes of Googling and haven't found any evidence that WP7 or BBOS _do_ have ASLR. So I'm kind of assuming that they don't (which makes a bit of a mockery of the claim that ASLR is an industry standard). Still, good job Google (and Apple) for actually applying serious security improvements to mobile OS's.
However, I was more interested in Android's direct competitors, i.e. other mobile operating systems. I am certainly aware that desktop/server OSs have had ASLR for quite a while. (Although I don't think MULTICS would have had it... I read that ASLR was only invented in 2001. Maybe it existed earlier but not under that name?)
So, Google has now implemented ASLR in Android. According to Wikipedia, it's been in iOS since 4.3, which came out March 2011, so that's what, a 16 month head start for Apple? Gosh, it's nice to know that Google has _finally_ caught up to such an old standard for mobile OS security! (Can I mod the article Troll?)
That said, I know that desktop Windows and OS-X have both had some kind of ASLR implementation since 2007, which is indeed quite some time ago. Wikipedia suggests that OS-X's ASLR implementation was pretty weak sauce up until 10.7, though.
Apparently Linux kernels have had some weak ASLR protection since 2.6.12. Would this provide any useful protection to Android at all, or does the Dalvik Java-esque stack not benefit from the layout randomisation provided by the kernel?
I can't find any information on whether BlackBerry's OS(s) and Windows Phone implement ASLR at all. Does anyone know?
Outside the US, free-to-air television is still ubiquitous and generally more popular than pay/cable TV.
In Australia, for example, I believe cable TV only has a penetration of about 30-40%. I don't think it's very popular in the UK either, since anyone in the UK with a television set is supposed to buy a BBC licence... and if you're already getting BBC delivered by RF broadcast, I think cable/satellite TV would be a pretty hard sell.
Yes. Write down the same text in, say, the top 10 major modern languages and writing systems (let's say, English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, French, Russian, Japanese etc).
Maybe include a concise dictionary of each language as well.
That way, even if the thing doesn't end up being useful for its designated purpose as a nuclear site marker, it may one day in the far future serve as a Rosetta Stone for the languages and writing systems of our era.
Good question. I looked at the linked article and it took me a while to figure out.
x64 CPUs aren't just x86 CPUs with larger memory addresses. They also have more registers, and are guaranteed to support certain additional instructions that aren't necessarily available in an x86 CPU (e.g. SSE). "x32" mode exploits the additional registers & instructions, without actually using 64-bit memory addressing. I think the idea is that it's supposed to allow for most of the benefits of the x64 instruction set without incurring the caching penalties of larger pointers. Honestly I'm not sure how useful that really is.
Not everything protected by copyright is the work of a single artist or small band.
Yes, there will always be new songs (and YouTube videos), even in a post-copyright world. But it takes a bit more capital and organisation to produce the Lord of the Rings films. Copyleft has worked great for software systems where you can develop iteratively, but it's not exactly making Hollywood quake in its boots due to the storm of theatrical-quality copyleft movies & TV shows. And copyleft only works because of the protection offered by copyright.
Personally, I like the fundamental benefit of copyright: It makes it (relatively) easy to amortize the cost of a gigantic, complex production across the pool of people who would be interested in enjoying the results. What's the alternative in a world without copyright? Kickstarter? Personally I'm not so enthusiastic about the idea of prepaying for a movie years before it comes out, especially if it turns out to be a stinker...
I know the music industry sucks, and I certainly agree that copyright terms are excessively long, but there's a lot more to the copyright-enabled creative industries than rock bands and authors.
I mostly agree with you, but a seven-day-no-questions-asked returns policy for content which can be completely experienced in the space of less than three hours (e.g., most movies) is a bit over the top. I'm definitely in favour of more consumer rights but that policy is just asking for trouble. Would you expect to get a refund at a cinema just because you ask for one?
Facebook may die. But their dataset will live on. If Facebook goes bankrupt, the data (which is valuable) will most definitely be sold to *someone* in order to pay off Facebook's creditors...
There needs to be a better mechanism for keeping corporations in line, anyway.
I'm not endorsing MS's attempts to weasel out of liability here (although I guess once Sony took a bite of that particular poison apple, it's only a matter of time before the other tech giants decide that class action immunity is too awesome to pass up).
But class action lawsuits never deliver anything of real value to the people who actually suffered from whatever prompted the class action suit. They often hurt the target company, a lot, but that's vengeance & retribution rather than justice - the only people who actually benefit from the "restitution" and "settlement" are the lawyers.
Really, it would probably be better all round to just have regulators & ombudsmen with real teeth rather than relying on lawyer feeding frenzy class actions to provide a punishment system for corporations. The big problem with that is regulatory capture. I don't have a solution, but I wish I did. The present state of affairs isn't really satisfactory to anyone IMO.
This looks like a tech that could be used to run a proper volumetric display. If you used glass beads of different colours, or found a way to make them fluoresce (perhaps by energizing an internal gas, or phosphor coating, or something?), you might be able to come up with something a fair bit more impressive than just "UM".
A real volumetric display would certainly have a lot of applications. I'm sure the military would love it for battlefield visualisations, etc.
Oh, one more thing: Setting aside the question of private APIs, I believe Apple's app store specifically prohibit any independent browser implementations. So everything is basically embedded Safari. Is anyone claiming that an analogous situation exists for Win 8 Metro ARM? Or is the API thing the only issue (i.e. Technical feasibility with the white-listed APIs rather than political/legal/corporate interference)
Certainly if MS is using APIs to privilege IE over other browsers, that's pretty bad behaviour. So far, though, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that it is. I would think that the onus for demonstrating bad faith would fall on the people who are complaining about the new APIs, though. If Metro IE doesn't use any secret sauce, then the other browser vendors should put up and/or shut up. And I would like to see more evidence of bad faith on Microsoft's part than "There are new APIs and we will need to write new code, wah wah wah"
Slashdot Mirror
The UK adopting 1800 MHz LTE is awesome news for Australians, since it means we're more likely to see compatible devices coming out earlier rather than later.
iPad 3, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S III... these are all LTE devices, but not in Australia. It'll be nice when the manufacturers are now much more likely to deliver 1800 MHz versions much earlier in the product cycle.
Hmm. This is the first time I've heard that the women are known to have ties to the CIA.
Got a citation for that?
According to TFA, they're shifting strategy to make fewer devices, which I hope will be better than the things they've been churning out.. I suppose this is Apple's strategy, which has certainly worked well for them.
Hopefully a smaller product range will also allow for better after-market support. My phone is an Atrix, and I liked the hardware, but the software support has been lacklustre to say the least.
I see a lot of praise for the "paperback" size 7" tablet form factor. I can see why it would be pretty awesome for reading novels etc, as well as the gameplaying/web/movies task load. Although if I had an unlimited gadget budget, if I wanted something to specifically to replace paperback books, I'd get a specialist device with an eInk screen.
However, what I would personally love is a tablet with more than a 10" screen. I play a lot of tabletop RPGs, and the iPad 3 is fantastic for reading RPG-type PDFs. These are books laid out for printing in a 8.5x11 or A4 page size, with multi-column text layout, embedded illustrations, tables & charts, and often in full colour. I also read business documents with similar characteristics (design documents, specifications etc).
On a 7" tablet, you would have your choice of unreadably small text or having to scroll within a page (urgh). The iPad 3's ridiculously awesome 2046x1536 screen has enough pixels that you can get a very readable full-page view of any single page of books with this kind of content. And the 4:3 aspect ratio fits very neatly in the gap between 8.5x11 aspect ratio and A4 aspect ratio, so there's very few wasted pixels for electronic versions of either common paper format. (Unlike the Android tablets, which are almost entirely 16:9, and therefore suck for paper-like layouts in portrait mode).
However, the 10" diagonal measurement means that even though the text is quite sharp, it's still a little on the small side compared to a hardcopy of the same book. In landscape mode, viewing two pages at a time, the text is still incredibly sharp (I love that screen so much) but is basically too small to comfortably read at all. Since a 7" tablet is about half the size of the iPad, that means it's not gonna be very usable for reading full-page document layouts.
I would absolutely jump at the chance to order a table with the same or better pixel count and 4:3 aspect ratio as the iPad 3, but with a diagonal measurement similar to a standard sheet of paper (say, approximately 13"-14"). That would be an awesome device. I know it's far too large for pocketability, but it would slip into a briefcase or carry bag very nicely since it would be the same size as standard documents. And if it ran Android 4+ rather than iOS.... it would be perfection. (iOS's approach to file management drives me f'in crazy.)
Since almost all LCD displays only refresh at 60Hz, no matter how frequently the graphics card's framebuffer is being redrawn, the only thing a higher framerate would get you is the ability to turn off vsync and buffering without having any tearing issues. So you might get slightly better latencies maybe?
People with 120 Hz 3d LCDs could benefit from higher frame rates, though. But I don't think it's likely that _anyone_ is gaming on a display that's actually capable of showing >250 FPS. Maybe such displays exist, but I doubt there are many people using them for mere shooters!
Hmm, that *is* illustrated with Cupid.
I thought "Conj. Love" might also be relevant. It's adjacent to amativeness anyway!
That's interesting!
If you have the time, I'd love to hear which were your favourite SoCs and which were the worst to work with - especially if you can comment on what were the distinguishing factors that made them a joy or pain to work with.
Hey hey, no original research!
I'd be interested to know which product you're talking about (especially since you say you can play the basic game for free)...
Yeah, my comment about Apple's head start was _intended_ to draw attention to the way the summary was castigating Google's alleged tardiness, when in reality they're only a handful of months behind their major competition in _mobile_ OS's. I thought the article summary was quite trollish when it was talking about how Google has "finally implemented an industry standard defence" and I was trying to point that out - I wasn't trying to troll myself!
I appear to have been widely misinterpreted, unfortunately. I definitely need to use sarcasm tags more when posting on Slashdot.
I certainly think ASLR is a great thing to have in a widely-deployed OS that tends to hold a lot of valuable user data, and which has a lot of exposure to the web. I'm still curious to know whether BB OS and Windows Phone have any ASLR capability, but it appears that no-one who knows has seen these posts.
For what it's worth, I've done 5 minutes of Googling and haven't found any evidence that WP7 or BBOS _do_ have ASLR. So I'm kind of assuming that they don't (which makes a bit of a mockery of the claim that ASLR is an industry standard). Still, good job Google (and Apple) for actually applying serious security improvements to mobile OS's.
Thanks for the pointers.
However, I was more interested in Android's direct competitors, i.e. other mobile operating systems. I am certainly aware that desktop/server OSs have had ASLR for quite a while. (Although I don't think MULTICS would have had it... I read that ASLR was only invented in 2001. Maybe it existed earlier but not under that name?)
So, Google has now implemented ASLR in Android. According to Wikipedia, it's been in iOS since 4.3, which came out March 2011, so that's what, a 16 month head start for Apple? Gosh, it's nice to know that Google has _finally_ caught up to such an old standard for mobile OS security! (Can I mod the article Troll?)
That said, I know that desktop Windows and OS-X have both had some kind of ASLR implementation since 2007, which is indeed quite some time ago. Wikipedia suggests that OS-X's ASLR implementation was pretty weak sauce up until 10.7, though.
Apparently Linux kernels have had some weak ASLR protection since 2.6.12. Would this provide any useful protection to Android at all, or does the Dalvik Java-esque stack not benefit from the layout randomisation provided by the kernel?
I can't find any information on whether BlackBerry's OS(s) and Windows Phone implement ASLR at all. Does anyone know?
Outside the US, free-to-air television is still ubiquitous and generally more popular than pay/cable TV.
In Australia, for example, I believe cable TV only has a penetration of about 30-40%. I don't think it's very popular in the UK either, since anyone in the UK with a television set is supposed to buy a BBC licence... and if you're already getting BBC delivered by RF broadcast, I think cable/satellite TV would be a pretty hard sell.
Yes. Write down the same text in, say, the top 10 major modern languages and writing systems (let's say, English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, French, Russian, Japanese etc).
Maybe include a concise dictionary of each language as well.
That way, even if the thing doesn't end up being useful for its designated purpose as a nuclear site marker, it may one day in the far future serve as a Rosetta Stone for the languages and writing systems of our era.
Good question. I looked at the linked article and it took me a while to figure out.
x64 CPUs aren't just x86 CPUs with larger memory addresses. They also have more registers, and are guaranteed to support certain additional instructions that aren't necessarily available in an x86 CPU (e.g. SSE). "x32" mode exploits the additional registers & instructions, without actually using 64-bit memory addressing. I think the idea is that it's supposed to allow for most of the benefits of the x64 instruction set without incurring the caching penalties of larger pointers. Honestly I'm not sure how useful that really is.
Not everything protected by copyright is the work of a single artist or small band.
Yes, there will always be new songs (and YouTube videos), even in a post-copyright world. But it takes a bit more capital and organisation to produce the Lord of the Rings films. Copyleft has worked great for software systems where you can develop iteratively, but it's not exactly making Hollywood quake in its boots due to the storm of theatrical-quality copyleft movies & TV shows. And copyleft only works because of the protection offered by copyright.
Personally, I like the fundamental benefit of copyright: It makes it (relatively) easy to amortize the cost of a gigantic, complex production across the pool of people who would be interested in enjoying the results. What's the alternative in a world without copyright? Kickstarter? Personally I'm not so enthusiastic about the idea of prepaying for a movie years before it comes out, especially if it turns out to be a stinker...
I know the music industry sucks, and I certainly agree that copyright terms are excessively long, but there's a lot more to the copyright-enabled creative industries than rock bands and authors.
Huh. Didn't know that Linus had written a Linus kernel as well as the Linux kernel.
Gotta be careful with those regexes! :)
I mostly agree with you, but a seven-day-no-questions-asked returns policy for content which can be completely experienced in the space of less than three hours (e.g., most movies) is a bit over the top. I'm definitely in favour of more consumer rights but that policy is just asking for trouble. Would you expect to get a refund at a cinema just because you ask for one?
Facebook may die. But their dataset will live on. If Facebook goes bankrupt, the data (which is valuable) will most definitely be sold to *someone* in order to pay off Facebook's creditors...
There needs to be a better mechanism for keeping corporations in line, anyway.
I'm not endorsing MS's attempts to weasel out of liability here (although I guess once Sony took a bite of that particular poison apple, it's only a matter of time before the other tech giants decide that class action immunity is too awesome to pass up).
But class action lawsuits never deliver anything of real value to the people who actually suffered from whatever prompted the class action suit. They often hurt the target company, a lot, but that's vengeance & retribution rather than justice - the only people who actually benefit from the "restitution" and "settlement" are the lawyers.
Really, it would probably be better all round to just have regulators & ombudsmen with real teeth rather than relying on lawyer feeding frenzy class actions to provide a punishment system for corporations. The big problem with that is regulatory capture. I don't have a solution, but I wish I did. The present state of affairs isn't really satisfactory to anyone IMO.
This looks like a tech that could be used to run a proper volumetric display. If you used glass beads of different colours, or found a way to make them fluoresce (perhaps by energizing an internal gas, or phosphor coating, or something?), you might be able to come up with something a fair bit more impressive than just "UM".
A real volumetric display would certainly have a lot of applications. I'm sure the military would love it for battlefield visualisations, etc.
Oh, one more thing:
Setting aside the question of private APIs, I believe Apple's app store specifically prohibit any independent browser implementations. So everything is basically embedded Safari. Is anyone claiming that an analogous situation exists for Win 8 Metro ARM? Or is the API thing the only issue (i.e. Technical feasibility with the white-listed APIs rather than political/legal/corporate interference)
I have no particular inside information!
Certainly if MS is using APIs to privilege IE over other browsers, that's pretty bad behaviour. So far, though, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that it is. I would think that the onus for demonstrating bad faith would fall on the people who are complaining about the new APIs, though. If Metro IE doesn't use any secret sauce, then the other browser vendors should put up and/or shut up. And I would like to see more evidence of bad faith on Microsoft's part than "There are new APIs and we will need to write new code, wah wah wah"
Most non-retail businesses are closed on Saturday and Sunday already.
In countries other than the US, elections are typically held on the weekend for that reason...
And, as long as it's compatible with the WinRT APIs (same as Metro IE), there's absolutely no reason why it wouldn't run on Win 8 ARM devices.