The French need to change their attitude about photography and "privacy" in public places so US corporation can do what the fuck they want.
No. The French actually need to change these laws is so that European journalists can keep an eye on French politicians and French corporations, both of which are every bit as ruthless and dirty as their US counterparts. The EU should not tolerate these restrictions on photography in any of its member countries because they are, fundamentally, anti-democratic.
When you take pictures on the street of somebody in a window of their house that is considered private. Google does that and hence is violating the law.
If you don't put curtains on your windows, your house is no more a "private place" than Macy's shop windows.
Uh, could you explain to me how 'clearing a page' is different from updating all the pixels (pixel=picture element) of the page set to white??
Clearing the page is a separate process that doesn't involve pixel-by-pixel updates.
Sure, I spend all my time flipping through the page of my book when I'm reading..
For technical books, that's exactly what I'm doing: I spend a lot more time flipping around than reading.
For fiction, I don't need anything as bulky or expensive as the Iliad, I can read that comfortably on my iPod.
Perhaps, but there's still the power usage, like I wrote I would gladly exchange color reprodction for lower power usage, you're free to prefer color display of course.
Power usage on reflective LCDs is negligible.
I think all these e-book readers are DOA; the future of e-books is iPods and UMPCs.
You don't actually have permission to take photos of any faces in public.
Bullshit.
The big ethical problem is that if there aren't these controls on how your photo/voice/identity is used, then people get exploited.
The only "ethical problem" is if nitwits want to restrict the public's right to document public events in public places. That's a threat to our democracy, not because people are desperate to document your bad hair day or lack of style, but because those restrictions could be used by individuals and corporations to prevent the release of embarrassing but information of public interest on them.
In many countries, you are not even permitted to photograph the front lawn of someone's private residence, even though it is the 'public face' of his home.
Well, that may be the case in North Korea, but I can't think of any democracies where that's the case.
Not everybody wants their stuff photographed, thank you very much.
If you are in a public place in a country that doesn't specifically prohibit it, you're fair game to be photographed and published on the web; I don't give a damn if you want to or not. And if there is a compelling interest to photograph you, I'll do so even in countries where there are laws against it.
It's a matter of common decency, not just law. I hate it when people talk as though the law is the only thing we should pay any attention to.
In many countries, I have a legal right to take your picture if you are in a public place, and I also have the right to publish your picture, even against your consent (with some well-defined exceptions, like I can't maliciously and for no reason embarrass you).
I will defend that right. And even in countries where the law may attempt to restrict that right, I may deliberately ignore that law if I think it is the right thing to do, because the freedom to record and document public life and public events is one of the essential freedoms in a democracy.
The law is the law, and Google need to respect the local laws.
Yes, but that may not mean what you think it means.
French laws apparently are restrictions on publishing, not taking, pictures. So, Google can legally take those pictures, and legally take them out of French jurisdiction. And since they are not subject to French laws in the US, they can publish them in the US unedited. Google would seem to be in full compliance with all local laws at all times.
They do it in China, with their censored Google, so I can't imagine them putting up too much of a fight against French privacy laws.
Yes, and by that analogy, Google can censor French content for French viewers going to French Google servers, and everybody else can presumably see the uncensored images.
Of course, I expect Google to back down on this and censor French pictures globally, but I don't think they have any particular legal obligation to do that.
Or in this case, Paris. The law is the law, and Google need to respect the local laws.
Sure, they do. I just hope they push it as far as legally possible. The French really need to change their attitudes about photography and "privacy" in public places.
Errr. I don't see how without jumping through a lot of hoops.
There's nothing to jump through. The equivalent of an "svn commit" is a push on a distributed version control system. It's as simple and automated.
If I have n users in my software team and they each have a local repository copy and "commits" that they make are made to that local repository then it basically requires me to backup everyone's PC in order to ensure that work is not lost.
This is no different from Subversion: with Subversion, people will sit on local modifications until they are ready to commit them to the server. Relative to a DVCS, Subversion simply denies users the ability to do version control for their local modifications, so people often end up with huge commits that are hard to integrate.
I fail to see why you would bother - other than if you have a particular religious requirement to use a DVCS;-)
It's not religious. Subversion has a real and serious deficiency relative to distributed version control systems: there is important stuff it simply doesn't do. Svk is the best workaround, but it still has problems and limitations.
I disagree on that point. They have the incentive to capitalize on less competitive markets. You can spend the cash to patent an allergy medication, then are forced to advertise to carve out a small segment of that market.
That's not how it works. Drug companies will simply replace their expiring patented allergy drug with a new patented replacement, and they will use their monopoly profits to market the hell out of the replacement. The result is that they don't carve out little niches, it's that the mainstream drugs people use remain patented, even though there is no demonstrable benefit. And the reason is that the buyer simply doesn't have the information to make a rational choice, and the doctors, who advise the patient, are bought off.
Meanwhile you can create treatments for which there is no alternative and can charge the maximum the market will pay.
People have an upper limit of what they can pay for drugs and what insurance companies will pay. All things being equal, drugs treating a disease that affects 10000 people annually would need to cost 10000x as much as a disease that affects 100000000 people annually, even if the former is lethal and the latter merely inconvenient. But people simply can't pay that much.
The reason some ailments are saturated with products is because they are better understood so it's easy to create treatments.
They are better understood because (1) there are already working treatments, and (2) because the large potential market incentivizes companies to understand them, independent of their objective importance.
Alternatively government mandated research will become very focused based on the political climate and vocal special interest groups. Look at how much government spends on AIDS vaccine research vs how much of a public health threat it is.
Generally, NIH has been doing a good job in picking what to develop drugs for. And it is hard to do worse than the allocation of health dollars is under the current system. We'd probably be better off developing no new drugs against ailments related to improper diet and lack of fitness at all for the next few years (which is to say, probably the majority of drugs) and spending that money instead on anti-obesity and fitness campaigns.
Furthermore, money on AIDS research is well-spent: AIDS may not be a big threat to you or me, but the work on it has advanced medicine enormously, and the global importance of AIDS remains tremendous.
But to say that the drugs that people want to buy are the wrong ones... are you sure you wanted to say that?
Yes. That's because the drugs people want to buy are the ones (1) their doctor recommends (but their doctor gets kickbacks), or (2) what they see advertised (but they have no basis of judging the scientific data).
Market efficiency assumes that buyers can make rational, informed choices, but for medical drugs, people can't, and nobody has come up with a free market solution that works. Furthermore, people simply can't get the drugs they really want anyway because they drug companies have little incentive to develop them in the first place; someone suffering from a rare disease may be willing to pay 10000x more than someone else pays for their lifetime allotment of "me too" allergy drugs, but they simply aren't financially able to do so, so they can't provide the economic signal to drug companies to develop the drugs they actually want. In addition, drugs aren't just an individual choice, they are closely linked to public health issues, and that also makes individual choice the wrong mechanism for allocation. And the high cost of entry into the market means that companies can successfully keep out low-cost competitors (like patent-free drugs, herbs, etc.).
Medical drugs, unfortunately, are different from other goods in such a way that market mechanisms based on individual choice will lead to an objectively inefficient and far suboptimal allocation of resources. There are a bunch of ways of fixing that. Abolishing drug patents is one (which implies that most drug development is done by the government), or abolishing individual drug purchases for prescription drugs is another (drugs would be purchased in bulk, and then dispensed, by health plans). Of the two, the former strikes me as better, because it leaves free market mechanisms in place and simply removes the artificial scarcity created by drug patents.
Keep in mind that the current situation is not the natural free market solution, it was created by the high cost of regulating private drug development and drug patent system. Getting rid of them because they aren't working amounts to reducing government interference; free market and small government advocates should be happy about that.
The French are crazy when it comes to photography; it's the only place where I have ever experienced hostility towards street photography. For a country for which tourism is so important, that just seems stupid. The notion that your image is public when you're in a public location (barring a few exceptions) seems to be fine, but the French seem to assume that they can stroll along with their mistresses and be safe from accidental embarrassment.
My conclusion? Avoid France for tourism, and publish the pictures I took anyway. So sue me.
if this controler really updates 16pixel in parallel instead of 1, it could theoretically have a ~0.07s of latency which is good enough.
The problem with page flipping isn't updating the pixels, it's getting the page cleared. These new controllers are not going to substantially reduce full redraw times.
Sure for movies 16FPS sucks, we're talking about a book replacement device here..
My paper book easily gives me 60 fps for flipping through the pages, and I expect the same from a replacement device.
Furthermore, why would I want to carry around multiple boxes, each with their own wireless and sync software and user interface and chargers?
Apple and Oranges, they don't have the same usage!
But they do: people do lots of browsing and reading on their smartphones already. The notion that eBook readers are somehow different from web page readers makes no sense to me.
I don't know about OLEDs but many LCDs are awful when you're trying to look at them under a bright sunlight..
And many LCDs are very good under direct sunlight. If your smartphone uses an LCD that's bad under bright sunlight, throw it away and get a different one.
But if there is not a perceived investment opportunity, many drugs sold for high prices today (and lower prices tomorrow) would never have been developed.
It's true that companies pay a big part of drug development costs. But a big part is already paid for through grants. Now, if you look at the part that's paid for by companies, that comes from somewhere, and a lot of that actually is paid by the public again, through governmental programs. It turns out that if you grind through the math, it's cheaper to have taxpayers pay 100% for drug development and have the drugs produced generically than to give drug companies this economic incentive.
And the argument for abolishing drug patents becomes even more compelling once you realize that drug companies are incentivized to develop the most profitable drugs, not the ones for which there is the greatest need. Companies have the biggest incentive to develop tiny, patented variations of symptomatic treatments for common ailments like light allergies and colds. Other drugs are drugs that try to compensate for unhealthy living and lack of exercise. Those are not the kinds of drugs that it makes sense to develop from a public health point of view.
So, not only is the patent-based approach to drug development expensive, it also produces the wrong drugs. In different words, the patent system for drugs isn't working.
I generally like free market solutions, but for drugs, we should seriously consider going to an all publicly funded R&D model and making the results available to generic drug makers.
I think an incremental move of Subversion to a distributed model would be the best way forward. Svk shows it can be done, Subversion should just "do it right", rather than providing it as an add-on. I think if Subversion did that, it would instantly become the de-facto standard for version control, distributed or otherwise.
If Subversion doesn't move to a distributed model, I'm probably going to switch my projects incrementally over to Mercurial (Git isn't really an option).
Seriously, x86 these days is just a compression format for a kind of RISC processor. It's probably not a very good compression format, but that probably also doesn't make a big difference.
I don't think that's going to be sufficient. eInk has page refresh on the order of 1 sec right now, and most of that is clearing the previous image. With an LCD or OLED, we're talking more than 100x faster, in full color and comparable resolutions.
Except that the age of consent is actually lower in many countries, even if their age of majority is the same or higher.
So, for example, in many places in Europe, the age of majority is 18, but the age of consent is 15. Even in the US, there are state-by-state discrepancies.
I was annoyed by the page turn for about 10 minutes, and then my buffer adjusted.
That's for sequential reading. Sequential reading is easy on anything. The problem is that these devices are horrible for flipping around.
I can stare at a backlit screen for about an hour before my eyes start to burn. I can read the Kindle for hours and hours and never get the slightest eye strain.
Sure, you can multipurpose your gadgets into reading books. But the draw of the ebook reader is eInk.
eInk is what's killing these devices: it makes it impossible to put a decent interface on there, the contrast ratio sucks, it doesn't do color, and flipping pages is orders of magnitude slower than on an LCD.
If you havn't experienced eInk yourself, you're missing out. Not only is it as readable as newspaper, but the power consumption at rest is ZERO.
That's about its only advantage, but it doesn't help much since the processor in the background still needs power to wait for your input.
without trying it, you really can't say 'your' non-eInk device is better.
But with trying it, I can emphatically say that my non-eInk device is better. eInk is a useless gimmick that is giving e-books a bad name.
I've used an Iliad for a few weeks and found that it sucked: flipping pages is slow, quickly skipping around in a book is nearly impossible, the user interface is mind numbingly broken, and the much talked about contrast of the eInk display is underwhelming. The Sony didn't seem to be any better. With a better user interface, the Iliad could be tolerable despite its display technology, but even then, it wouldn't be a good device.
I think the future of electronic books is with higher resolution cell phones, media players, and tablets, not these kinds of special purpose devices.
This company is typical for Myhrvold. Read about Myhrvold's "cool idea for image compression" here. Trouble is: he hadn't done his homework, and this stuff had been invented several times before. But, hey, he is a physics Ph.D. who studied with Hawking, he must be so much smarter than everybody else that it isn't necessary to do his homework, right?
His patent troll company is likely to do the same thing: reinvent a lot of stuff that people already know, and get a bunch of patents that nobody who actually knows the field would have even considered patenting.
Besides which it probably cost them more to implement it than MS since I bet they had to hire an entire Engineering staff, at least one FTE plus support folks.
Are you kidding? Getting Windows to run on a new piece of hardware is a shitload of work. Among other things, out of the box, Windows lacks a lot of drivers.
Standard Linux distributions basically just boots on the Eee PC (I installed Ubuntu on mine) with essentially no extra work or customization, and installing it is a few clicks.
Different tools on linux were giving me different numbers. I used the smallest one. It wasn't something I was really testing, just something that I was surprised to see and it was on my mind as the transfer was recently.
Look, you stated publicly and clearly that OpenSolaris resulted in a reduction in memory usage from 200MB to 50MB when you knew full well that those numbers were wrong. Again, I consider that dishonest.
That may not be where they spend their money but it is where they make their money.
That is where they spend their money; they've talked about that many times. And the fact that they use Linux there tells you that the other possible choices (OpenSolaris, BSD, etc.) can't be significantly better performing or significantly more reliable.
I claimed I got better performance and memory usage in this one application. That has nothing to do with Google.
You said that performance in general was a reason for using Solaris and gave your experience as an example. Turns out you never clearly determined that Solaris performs better and neither has anybody else. You have the same kind of Voodoo approach to choosing an OS that has allowed Sun to flourish despite their lousy software: Sun engineers tell you that their system has whizbang feature X, which results in a big improvement in Y, and you believe them.
Marketing is marketing anywhere. Sun's not alone
That's not the point. The point is that Sun has a long-standing pattern of producing lousy software and making people believe that the software is what they need with a particular kind of claim of superiority that's not rooted in empirical data. And the pattern is repeating itself.
You're going to tell me that's 8 million lines of device drivers and innovation and not catching up to provide the Unix features they were saying the already had? Not knocking Linux, it's come a long way.
Of course Linux is getting better, and at some point in the past, Solaris was the superior operating system, but that was then.
And in the future, Linux certainly won't be getting better by following in Solaris's footsteps. Linux has its own approach to the problems that ZFS, DTrace, containers, etc. are trying to solve; a better approach, as far as I'm concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
The French need to change their attitude about photography and "privacy" in public places so US corporation can do what the fuck they want.
No. The French actually need to change these laws is so that European journalists can keep an eye on French politicians and French corporations, both of which are every bit as ruthless and dirty as their US counterparts. The EU should not tolerate these restrictions on photography in any of its member countries because they are, fundamentally, anti-democratic.
As a Frenchman, i may ask why ?
Because these laws are wrong.
Do you know the french privacy law in a first place ?
Look at TFA: that's what we are discussing.
When you take pictures on the street of somebody in a window of their house that is considered private. Google does that and hence is violating the law.
If you don't put curtains on your windows, your house is no more a "private place" than Macy's shop windows.
Uh, could you explain to me how 'clearing a page' is different from updating all the pixels (pixel=picture element) of the page set to white??
Clearing the page is a separate process that doesn't involve pixel-by-pixel updates.
Sure, I spend all my time flipping through the page of my book when I'm reading..
For technical books, that's exactly what I'm doing: I spend a lot more time flipping around than reading.
For fiction, I don't need anything as bulky or expensive as the Iliad, I can read that comfortably on my iPod.
Perhaps, but there's still the power usage, like I wrote I would gladly exchange color reprodction for lower power usage, you're free to prefer color display of course.
Power usage on reflective LCDs is negligible.
I think all these e-book readers are DOA; the future of e-books is iPods and UMPCs.
You don't actually have permission to take photos of any faces in public.
Bullshit.
The big ethical problem is that if there aren't these controls on how your photo/voice/identity is used, then people get exploited.
The only "ethical problem" is if nitwits want to restrict the public's right to document public events in public places. That's a threat to our democracy, not because people are desperate to document your bad hair day or lack of style, but because those restrictions could be used by individuals and corporations to prevent the release of embarrassing but information of public interest on them.
In many countries, you are not even permitted to photograph the front lawn of someone's private residence, even though it is the 'public face' of his home.
Well, that may be the case in North Korea, but I can't think of any democracies where that's the case.
Not everybody wants their stuff photographed, thank you very much.
If you are in a public place in a country that doesn't specifically prohibit it, you're fair game to be photographed and published on the web; I don't give a damn if you want to or not. And if there is a compelling interest to photograph you, I'll do so even in countries where there are laws against it.
It's a matter of common decency, not just law. I hate it when people talk as though the law is the only thing we should pay any attention to.
In many countries, I have a legal right to take your picture if you are in a public place, and I also have the right to publish your picture, even against your consent (with some well-defined exceptions, like I can't maliciously and for no reason embarrass you).
I will defend that right. And even in countries where the law may attempt to restrict that right, I may deliberately ignore that law if I think it is the right thing to do, because the freedom to record and document public life and public events is one of the essential freedoms in a democracy.
The law is the law, and Google need to respect the local laws.
Yes, but that may not mean what you think it means.
French laws apparently are restrictions on publishing, not taking, pictures. So, Google can legally take those pictures, and legally take them out of French jurisdiction. And since they are not subject to French laws in the US, they can publish them in the US unedited. Google would seem to be in full compliance with all local laws at all times.
They do it in China, with their censored Google, so I can't imagine them putting up too much of a fight against French privacy laws.
Yes, and by that analogy, Google can censor French content for French viewers going to French Google servers, and everybody else can presumably see the uncensored images.
Of course, I expect Google to back down on this and censor French pictures globally, but I don't think they have any particular legal obligation to do that.
Or in this case, Paris. The law is the law, and Google need to respect the local laws.
Sure, they do. I just hope they push it as far as legally possible. The French really need to change their attitudes about photography and "privacy" in public places.
Errr. I don't see how without jumping through a lot of hoops.
;-)
There's nothing to jump through. The equivalent of an "svn commit" is a push on a distributed version control system. It's as simple and automated.
If I have n users in my software team and they each have a local repository copy and "commits" that they make are made to that local repository then it basically requires me to backup everyone's PC in order to ensure that work is not lost.
This is no different from Subversion: with Subversion, people will sit on local modifications until they are ready to commit them to the server. Relative to a DVCS, Subversion simply denies users the ability to do version control for their local modifications, so people often end up with huge commits that are hard to integrate.
I fail to see why you would bother - other than if you have a particular religious requirement to use a DVCS
It's not religious. Subversion has a real and serious deficiency relative to distributed version control systems: there is important stuff it simply doesn't do. Svk is the best workaround, but it still has problems and limitations.
I disagree on that point. They have the incentive to capitalize on less competitive markets. You can spend the cash to patent an allergy medication, then are forced to advertise to carve out a small segment of that market.
That's not how it works. Drug companies will simply replace their expiring patented allergy drug with a new patented replacement, and they will use their monopoly profits to market the hell out of the replacement. The result is that they don't carve out little niches, it's that the mainstream drugs people use remain patented, even though there is no demonstrable benefit. And the reason is that the buyer simply doesn't have the information to make a rational choice, and the doctors, who advise the patient, are bought off.
Meanwhile you can create treatments for which there is no alternative and can charge the maximum the market will pay.
People have an upper limit of what they can pay for drugs and what insurance companies will pay. All things being equal, drugs treating a disease that affects 10000 people annually would need to cost 10000x as much as a disease that affects 100000000 people annually, even if the former is lethal and the latter merely inconvenient. But people simply can't pay that much.
The reason some ailments are saturated with products is because they are better understood so it's easy to create treatments.
They are better understood because (1) there are already working treatments, and (2) because the large potential market incentivizes companies to understand them, independent of their objective importance.
Alternatively government mandated research will become very focused based on the political climate and vocal special interest groups. Look at how much government spends on AIDS vaccine research vs how much of a public health threat it is.
Generally, NIH has been doing a good job in picking what to develop drugs for. And it is hard to do worse than the allocation of health dollars is under the current system. We'd probably be better off developing no new drugs against ailments related to improper diet and lack of fitness at all for the next few years (which is to say, probably the majority of drugs) and spending that money instead on anti-obesity and fitness campaigns.
Furthermore, money on AIDS research is well-spent: AIDS may not be a big threat to you or me, but the work on it has advanced medicine enormously, and the global importance of AIDS remains tremendous.
But to say that the drugs that people want to buy are the wrong ones... are you sure you wanted to say that?
Yes. That's because the drugs people want to buy are the ones (1) their doctor recommends (but their doctor gets kickbacks), or (2) what they see advertised (but they have no basis of judging the scientific data).
Market efficiency assumes that buyers can make rational, informed choices, but for medical drugs, people can't, and nobody has come up with a free market solution that works. Furthermore, people simply can't get the drugs they really want anyway because they drug companies have little incentive to develop them in the first place; someone suffering from a rare disease may be willing to pay 10000x more than someone else pays for their lifetime allotment of "me too" allergy drugs, but they simply aren't financially able to do so, so they can't provide the economic signal to drug companies to develop the drugs they actually want. In addition, drugs aren't just an individual choice, they are closely linked to public health issues, and that also makes individual choice the wrong mechanism for allocation. And the high cost of entry into the market means that companies can successfully keep out low-cost competitors (like patent-free drugs, herbs, etc.).
Medical drugs, unfortunately, are different from other goods in such a way that market mechanisms based on individual choice will lead to an objectively inefficient and far suboptimal allocation of resources. There are a bunch of ways of fixing that. Abolishing drug patents is one (which implies that most drug development is done by the government), or abolishing individual drug purchases for prescription drugs is another (drugs would be purchased in bulk, and then dispensed, by health plans). Of the two, the former strikes me as better, because it leaves free market mechanisms in place and simply removes the artificial scarcity created by drug patents.
Keep in mind that the current situation is not the natural free market solution, it was created by the high cost of regulating private drug development and drug patent system. Getting rid of them because they aren't working amounts to reducing government interference; free market and small government advocates should be happy about that.
The French are crazy when it comes to photography; it's the only place where I have ever experienced hostility towards street photography. For a country for which tourism is so important, that just seems stupid. The notion that your image is public when you're in a public location (barring a few exceptions) seems to be fine, but the French seem to assume that they can stroll along with their mistresses and be safe from accidental embarrassment.
My conclusion? Avoid France for tourism, and publish the pictures I took anyway. So sue me.
if this controler really updates 16pixel in parallel instead of 1, it could theoretically have a ~0.07s of latency which is good enough.
The problem with page flipping isn't updating the pixels, it's getting the page cleared. These new controllers are not going to substantially reduce full redraw times.
Sure for movies 16FPS sucks, we're talking about a book replacement device here..
My paper book easily gives me 60 fps for flipping through the pages, and I expect the same from a replacement device.
Furthermore, why would I want to carry around multiple boxes, each with their own wireless and sync software and user interface and chargers?
Apple and Oranges, they don't have the same usage!
But they do: people do lots of browsing and reading on their smartphones already. The notion that eBook readers are somehow different from web page readers makes no sense to me.
I don't know about OLEDs but many LCDs are awful when you're trying to look at them under a bright sunlight..
And many LCDs are very good under direct sunlight. If your smartphone uses an LCD that's bad under bright sunlight, throw it away and get a different one.
But if there is not a perceived investment opportunity, many drugs sold for high prices today (and lower prices tomorrow) would never have been developed.
It's true that companies pay a big part of drug development costs. But a big part is already paid for through grants. Now, if you look at the part that's paid for by companies, that comes from somewhere, and a lot of that actually is paid by the public again, through governmental programs. It turns out that if you grind through the math, it's cheaper to have taxpayers pay 100% for drug development and have the drugs produced generically than to give drug companies this economic incentive.
And the argument for abolishing drug patents becomes even more compelling once you realize that drug companies are incentivized to develop the most profitable drugs, not the ones for which there is the greatest need. Companies have the biggest incentive to develop tiny, patented variations of symptomatic treatments for common ailments like light allergies and colds. Other drugs are drugs that try to compensate for unhealthy living and lack of exercise. Those are not the kinds of drugs that it makes sense to develop from a public health point of view.
So, not only is the patent-based approach to drug development expensive, it also produces the wrong drugs. In different words, the patent system for drugs isn't working.
I generally like free market solutions, but for drugs, we should seriously consider going to an all publicly funded R&D model and making the results available to generic drug makers.
I think an incremental move of Subversion to a distributed model would be the best way forward. Svk shows it can be done, Subversion should just "do it right", rather than providing it as an add-on. I think if Subversion did that, it would instantly become the de-facto standard for version control, distributed or otherwise.
If Subversion doesn't move to a distributed model, I'm probably going to switch my projects incrementally over to Mercurial (Git isn't really an option).
That's "revolution" as in "spinning in place"? :-)
Seriously, x86 these days is just a compression format for a kind of RISC processor. It's probably not a very good compression format, but that probably also doesn't make a big difference.
I don't think that's going to be sufficient. eInk has page refresh on the order of 1 sec right now, and most of that is clearing the previous image. With an LCD or OLED, we're talking more than 100x faster, in full color and comparable resolutions.
i guess the glass-half-full part of me is wondering how facebook can verify age without compromising anonymity (and convenience for that matter).
Facebook doesn't want anonymous users; they make that quite clear when you sign up.
Except that the age of consent is actually lower in many countries, even if their age of majority is the same or higher.
So, for example, in many places in Europe, the age of majority is 18, but the age of consent is 15. Even in the US, there are state-by-state discrepancies.
I was annoyed by the page turn for about 10 minutes, and then my buffer adjusted.
That's for sequential reading. Sequential reading is easy on anything. The problem is that these devices are horrible for flipping around.
I can stare at a backlit screen for about an hour before my eyes start to burn. I can read the Kindle for hours and hours and never get the slightest eye strain.
Imagination is quite powerful, isn't it?
Sure, you can multipurpose your gadgets into reading books. But the draw of the ebook reader is eInk.
eInk is what's killing these devices: it makes it impossible to put a decent interface on there, the contrast ratio sucks, it doesn't do color, and flipping pages is orders of magnitude slower than on an LCD.
If you havn't experienced eInk yourself, you're missing out. Not only is it as readable as newspaper, but the power consumption at rest is ZERO.
That's about its only advantage, but it doesn't help much since the processor in the background still needs power to wait for your input.
without trying it, you really can't say 'your' non-eInk device is better.
But with trying it, I can emphatically say that my non-eInk device is better. eInk is a useless gimmick that is giving e-books a bad name.
I've used an Iliad for a few weeks and found that it sucked: flipping pages is slow, quickly skipping around in a book is nearly impossible, the user interface is mind numbingly broken, and the much talked about contrast of the eInk display is underwhelming. The Sony didn't seem to be any better. With a better user interface, the Iliad could be tolerable despite its display technology, but even then, it wouldn't be a good device.
I think the future of electronic books is with higher resolution cell phones, media players, and tablets, not these kinds of special purpose devices.
This company is typical for Myhrvold. Read about Myhrvold's "cool idea for image compression" here. Trouble is: he hadn't done his homework, and this stuff had been invented several times before. But, hey, he is a physics Ph.D. who studied with Hawking, he must be so much smarter than everybody else that it isn't necessary to do his homework, right?
His patent troll company is likely to do the same thing: reinvent a lot of stuff that people already know, and get a bunch of patents that nobody who actually knows the field would have even considered patenting.
Besides which it probably cost them more to implement it than MS since I bet they had to hire an entire Engineering staff, at least one FTE plus support folks.
Are you kidding? Getting Windows to run on a new piece of hardware is a shitload of work. Among other things, out of the box, Windows lacks a lot of drivers.
Standard Linux distributions basically just boots on the Eee PC (I installed Ubuntu on mine) with essentially no extra work or customization, and installing it is a few clicks.
Different tools on linux were giving me different numbers. I used the smallest one. It wasn't something I was really testing, just something that I was surprised to see and it was on my mind as the transfer was recently.
Look, you stated publicly and clearly that OpenSolaris resulted in a reduction in memory usage from 200MB to 50MB when you knew full well that those numbers were wrong. Again, I consider that dishonest.
That may not be where they spend their money but it is where they make their money.
That is where they spend their money; they've talked about that many times. And the fact that they use Linux there tells you that the other possible choices (OpenSolaris, BSD, etc.) can't be significantly better performing or significantly more reliable.
I claimed I got better performance and memory usage in this one application. That has nothing to do with Google.
You said that performance in general was a reason for using Solaris and gave your experience as an example. Turns out you never clearly determined that Solaris performs better and neither has anybody else. You have the same kind of Voodoo approach to choosing an OS that has allowed Sun to flourish despite their lousy software: Sun engineers tell you that their system has whizbang feature X, which results in a big improvement in Y, and you believe them.
Marketing is marketing anywhere. Sun's not alone
That's not the point. The point is that Sun has a long-standing pattern of producing lousy software and making people believe that the software is what they need with a particular kind of claim of superiority that's not rooted in empirical data. And the pattern is repeating itself.
You're going to tell me that's 8 million lines of device drivers and innovation and not catching up to provide the Unix features they were saying the already had? Not knocking Linux, it's come a long way.
Of course Linux is getting better, and at some point in the past, Solaris was the superior operating system, but that was then.
And in the future, Linux certainly won't be getting better by following in Solaris's footsteps. Linux has its own approach to the problems that ZFS, DTrace, containers, etc. are trying to solve; a better approach, as far as I'm concerned.