An unlocked HTC dream will set you back about $300
Are you talking about the Android Dev Phone 1?. That's $399 for the phone + $25 for the developer account required. However, it's not bad if you want to avoid signing up for a service contract.
Whether or not this scheduler is better depends on what you're trying to do.
The proposed scheduler intends to work better for real-time apps, where the correctness of the algorithm depends on how timely the data gets processed. Low-latency audio is a good example of this, as a dropped or late packet of audio results in a nasty audible pop.
To be clear, if I was in that situation, I would also try to make as much money as possible from my work, like anyone else. However, I would like to avoid letting my own greed get in the way of advancing my species.
This may turn off a few cynics, but there is more to gain in life than money. I'd be proud if I came up with something that moved society forward. Who knows, you may get hired for a lucrative job developing your technology.
And no, I'm not saying that this approach is right for everyone in every situation.
The compass isn't implemented using the accelerometer, it only senses acceleration (as well as acceleration due to gravity). The compass data comes from its own dedicated magnetic sensor.
Incidentally, the G1 (HTC Dream) had compass functionality months before it was introduced in the iPhone 3GS.
But hey, the facts be damned, my (phone | OS | console | party | religion) is clearly superior to yours, and if you can't see that you must be ignorant.
If corporations could vote, that would basically open the floodgates to further abuse of the voting system.
Let's just say that Corporation X wants John Doe elected to some office. All they would need to do is establish a large amount of smaller corporations, each of which would get one vote which is cast for John doe. The result would be that corporations or their executives essentially can have an arbitrary number of votes, leaving normal individuals under-represented.
I'm not saying that you are advocating for corporate voting rights, but I think this flaw should be pointed out.
The problem with this arguement is that you apply it to monopolies as a whole, not taking into account that the internet needs to work well to be useful.
Let's just say that New York State has net neutrality in place, so an ISP in New York cannot charge a web service provider (google, slashdot, or any other site) for data transmission over those lines. Suppose that New Jersey has no such regulation, and data through those pipes has a surcharge. It's safe to assume that ISP's will get greedy, so it's plausable that they will route traffic through New Jersey and other non-neutral states to force web service providers to pay up. Traffic will go through convoluted paths to avoid the free pipes in New York. This leads to bottle necks and high costs to web service providors.
In the end, you will have a network that just doesn't work well. As a bonus, individuals and small corporations cannot reach large audiences because the cost to serve those audiences is too high.
"But wait", you say. Aren't web service providers in New York still doing ok in this situation? Not really. They still have to serve audiences in New Jersey and Virginia, so despite New York's neutrality, they would still have to pay New Jersey's ISP's in order to get their traffic through to New Jersey or Virginia residents. As you can see here, if some states are non-neutral, then effectively they all are non-neutral. Net neutrality has to be applied nationwide in order to work.
All these shenanigans would occur on pipes that taxpayers paid to subsidize. Great...
Fair competition means that there is freedom to create competing products. That is, by limiting what runs on the iPhone, Apple is promoting the free market by allowing you, the all knowing and wise developer, to move to another platform and create superior product.
My point is that the iPhone app store is not a free\fair\competitive market onto itself. Of course I'm free to use another platform, but that changes what users I can market to. No one is saying that I can't develop for another platform. However, that doesn't mean I can't point out shenanigans when I see it.
The limitations on the iPhone are well known, and well discussed.
Well discussed in tech circles like Slashdot. Joe User just doesn't have a clue about the controversy. He just knows it's a really good phone, which it is.
The reason that the google phone is not so good is because there are now two profit interests between the end user and the phone.
Google does not control anything about the experience once the phone is in a consumer's hands. Any of the phone's features can be replaced, including the home screen, contacts, email, or anything else.
I don't hate apple or the iPhone, in fact, I'm writing this post on a Macbook. It's a very nice phone, and it's very polished. But to be fair, it is apple who insists on having absolute control over the user's apps, through the approval process.
The Google, who has control over manh of the features, has a interest to maximize ad revenue. No ads, not google.
I have not seen a single ad in any of the standard applications for it. Not one ad. Some third party apps I downloaded do have ads, but that's neither here nor there.
We see the failure of the Google attempt to Googles blatant use of the FCC to hijack a market that it cannot win through fair competition. This is not the first that google has tried this.
Fair competition? If you want to talk about fair competition, they why can't I release an iPhone app that gives turn by turn directions? Why can't I release an alternative web browser or music store? Why can't I use google voice? Apple doesn't allow for competition against their services or that of their partners.
On the other hand, Google wouldn't even care if I released a web search app for Android. Apps only get removed if they get flagged as inappropriate (ie porn)
The Google app on the iPhone would be interesting, but what people do not realize is that the iPhone, as a product, does not have to have every App on it. We could instead live in a competitive environment in which products are not all low mark up commodity products, but rather a mix of commodity and differentiated high end products. In this world, consumers have an opportunity to buy a product that fits their needs rather than a product that is minimally acceptable.
Wouldn't it be better for individual users to decide for themselves, rather than some stooge at apple deciding for you?
You can pay nothing to linux authors, and have something out of date that sometimes works incredibly well, and sometimes works incredibly badly.
As a side note, the amount a Linux distro is up-to-date depends on whether you have a Rolling Release distro or not.
If you want to live on the bleeding edge of new updates, install a rolling release distro like Arch, Debian unstable, Fedora rawhide. If you prefer your software to be more tested, go with something like Ubuntu, Redhat, or Debian stable.
Your combative blanket statements show that you're more interested in a pissing contest than a real discussion. You fit elrous0's stereotype so closely that I almost wonder if you're kidding.
The mouse is a superior controller for anything that involves aiming (FPS) or pointing (RTS)
May I suggest you give Metroid Prime 3 a try?
I won't necessarily say that the Wiimote is better than a mouse for FPS games, because that is a matter of opinion and context. However, I will say that it has the best aiming and control for a Console FPS that I've ever seen.
For me, the single\dual analog stick control scheme doesn't work very well for FPS games. Let the slashdot trolls call me a noob if they want, but even after hours of play, I find it hard to quickly and reliably aim where I want with dual sticks, especially while running.
I believe he was referring to a time in the 90's and early 2000's when a large chunk of online audio\video was in Real networks' format. Thankfully, their market share has faded since then.
You are right, of course, about targeted ads being Google's real meat and potatoes. Their web applications (a category which, I think, includes Google Search) are a means to that end.
I thought that this would be obvious to most of the Slashdot crowd, so I didn't see the need to state it explicitly.
While plugins would be useful, I think you have the wrong idea about Google's motives with Chrome. Chrome is Google's bid to change the browser market to make it a better platform for their core business, web applications.
Google isn't as concerned with making Firefox users switch to chrome, because they are already using a (mostly) standards compliant browser. IE is the real target. This seems to explain why, if I browse to google.com in IE7, I'm greeted with an ad banner that invites me to give Chrome a try. Google does not do this if I browse with Firefox or Safari.
The code has been released under an acceptable OSS license, but does that guarantee protection from Patent or IP litigation? Does this protection extend to downstream distributors and users? What were the reasons for selecting GPL v2 instead of v3? These are important questions to ask.
The OSS community has been criticized in some cases of distrusting Microsoft as a knee-jerk reaction, but given Microsoft's long history of antagonistic behavior, I can't say that I blame them.
Reading your other posts, it seems you and I differ on the definition of immersion.
Correct me if I'm strawmaning you, but let me try and extrapolate your definition of immersion from your other comments in this thread. You seem to believe that to be immersed in a game, it requires photorealistic graphics at 60FPS. To achieve this, you need the latest, most powerful hardware running big-budget games. But this is a moving target, and standards for graphics change over time, and from person to person.
I imagine that, by your definition, you personally do not experience immersion playing games from two years ago, and certainly not from previous generations of consoles. However, the word 'immersion' has been used in the game industry for years. I've seen it used as a description in game magazines since before 3d graphics were even commonplace. However, I recall it commonly being used to describe the game playing experience (eg. "immersive gameplay"), as well as, to some extent, the graphics.
Was Virtua Fighter for Saturn immersive, even though you could easily count the triangles on the character's faces? It looked pretty awesome at the time. Is it now impossible for someone to be immersed in it?
I myself felt immersed in Chrono Trigger. Is this somehow invalid to you?
Will you consider your current favorite "immersive" game to be immersive after three year's time?
I would say that any game can be immersive, but only if you can get into a certain mental state while playing it: the state in which you are not distracted by anything in the real world. If the gameplay is bad, the experience will leave you flat, and no immersion will occur despite any graphical flourishes.
Gameplay aside, even the best looking games of today still look like games to me. You can tell that they're rendered, and not a photograph or a video. They just look 'better' than last year's games. Photorealism (and thus, your definition of immersion) is an asymptote that we approach as the size of resolution of the details become finer.
I'd personally take a creative graphical style over 'photo-realism' any day.
I don't think that the Linux kernel, the windowing system, hardware accelleration, or even Java (in some cases) will be relevant to an application developer for this platform. Based on the Official Google Blog, developing for this platform will not be too different from developing a web app, which may or may not run on a local web server.
For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser...
You shouldn't have had to jump through hoops and go into the registry to uninstall the first version. The registry editor is not safe for mere mortals anyhow.
The difference here is that, AFAIK, Microsoft would not have a leg to stand on in claiming some IP in GCC. They had nothing\little to do with its development or design. The danger of someone forcing the free software community to abandon it is not significant.
Mono, on the other hand, is made to be compatible with.net programs as much as possible. Microsoft created.net and holds patents associated with it. Thus, they could make legal arguments based on this which some judge\jury somewhere might agree with.
That's the danger here, not the concept of dependencies in general.
Why would anyone learn\teach assembly as a first language? It's definitely not the kind of thing I would give to a freshman who has never programmed before, partly because it's too abstract. It's architecture specific, and also, they would not learn about functional programming or good OOP practices. That aside, most programmers in the business world do not use it on a day to day basis.
What is it about visual basic that makes it a better first language than python anyhow?
I'm happy for you that you have such a strong will, but would you please justify your convictions with a reason or two?
Slashdot Mirror
In Unix, the path "./headline" would mean "where I am right now/headline".
An unlocked HTC dream will set you back about $300
Are you talking about the Android Dev Phone 1?. That's $399 for the phone + $25 for the developer account required. However, it's not bad if you want to avoid signing up for a service contract.
Whether or not this scheduler is better depends on what you're trying to do.
The proposed scheduler intends to work better for real-time apps, where the correctness of the algorithm depends on how timely the data gets processed. Low-latency audio is a good example of this, as a dropped or late packet of audio results in a nasty audible pop.
To be clear, if I was in that situation, I would also try to make as much money as possible from my work, like anyone else. However, I would like to avoid letting my own greed get in the way of advancing my species.
This may turn off a few cynics, but there is more to gain in life than money. I'd be proud if I came up with something that moved society forward. Who knows, you may get hired for a lucrative job developing your technology.
And no, I'm not saying that this approach is right for everyone in every situation.
The compass isn't implemented using the accelerometer, it only senses acceleration (as well as acceleration due to gravity). The compass data comes from its own dedicated magnetic sensor.
Incidentally, the G1 (HTC Dream) had compass functionality months before it was introduced in the iPhone 3GS.
But hey, the facts be damned, my (phone | OS | console | party | religion) is clearly superior to yours, and if you can't see that you must be ignorant.
If corporations could vote, that would basically open the floodgates to further abuse of the voting system.
Let's just say that Corporation X wants John Doe elected to some office. All they would need to do is establish a large amount of smaller corporations, each of which would get one vote which is cast for John doe. The result would be that corporations or their executives essentially can have an arbitrary number of votes, leaving normal individuals under-represented.
I'm not saying that you are advocating for corporate voting rights, but I think this flaw should be pointed out.
The problem with this arguement is that you apply it to monopolies as a whole, not taking into account that the internet needs to work well to be useful.
Let's just say that New York State has net neutrality in place, so an ISP in New York cannot charge a web service provider (google, slashdot, or any other site) for data transmission over those lines. Suppose that New Jersey has no such regulation, and data through those pipes has a surcharge. It's safe to assume that ISP's will get greedy, so it's plausable that they will route traffic through New Jersey and other non-neutral states to force web service providers to pay up. Traffic will go through convoluted paths to avoid the free pipes in New York. This leads to bottle necks and high costs to web service providors.
In the end, you will have a network that just doesn't work well. As a bonus, individuals and small corporations cannot reach large audiences because the cost to serve those audiences is too high.
"But wait", you say. Aren't web service providers in New York still doing ok in this situation? Not really. They still have to serve audiences in New Jersey and Virginia, so despite New York's neutrality, they would still have to pay New Jersey's ISP's in order to get their traffic through to New Jersey or Virginia residents. As you can see here, if some states are non-neutral, then effectively they all are non-neutral. Net neutrality has to be applied nationwide in order to work.
All these shenanigans would occur on pipes that taxpayers paid to subsidize. Great...
Fair competition means that there is freedom to create competing products. That is, by limiting what runs on the iPhone, Apple is promoting the free market by allowing you, the all knowing and wise developer, to move to another platform and create superior product.
My point is that the iPhone app store is not a free\fair\competitive market onto itself. Of course I'm free to use another platform, but that changes what users I can market to. No one is saying that I can't develop for another platform. However, that doesn't mean I can't point out shenanigans when I see it.
The limitations on the iPhone are well known, and well discussed.
Well discussed in tech circles like Slashdot. Joe User just doesn't have a clue about the controversy. He just knows it's a really good phone, which it is.
The reason that the google phone is not so good is because there are now two profit interests between the end user and the phone.
Google does not control anything about the experience once the phone is in a consumer's hands. Any of the phone's features can be replaced, including the home screen, contacts, email, or anything else.
I don't hate apple or the iPhone, in fact, I'm writing this post on a Macbook. It's a very nice phone, and it's very polished. But to be fair, it is apple who insists on having absolute control over the user's apps, through the approval process.
The Google, who has control over manh of the features, has a interest to maximize ad revenue. No ads, not google.
I have not seen a single ad in any of the standard applications for it. Not one ad. Some third party apps I downloaded do have ads, but that's neither here nor there.
We see the failure of the Google attempt to Googles blatant use of the FCC to hijack a market that it cannot win through fair competition. This is not the first that google has tried this.
Fair competition? If you want to talk about fair competition, they why can't I release an iPhone app that gives turn by turn directions? Why can't I release an alternative web browser or music store? Why can't I use google voice? Apple doesn't allow for competition against their services or that of their partners.
On the other hand, Google wouldn't even care if I released a web search app for Android. Apps only get removed if they get flagged as inappropriate (ie porn)
The Google app on the iPhone would be interesting, but what people do not realize is that the iPhone, as a product, does not have to have every App on it. We could instead live in a competitive environment in which products are not all low mark up commodity products, but rather a mix of commodity and differentiated high end products. In this world, consumers have an opportunity to buy a product that fits their needs rather than a product that is minimally acceptable.
Wouldn't it be better for individual users to decide for themselves, rather than some stooge at apple deciding for you?
FYI, my Android Dev Phone 1 is quad band and can work with at&t or theoretically any other GSM provider. Related Wikipedia article
I can't speak for the vanilla G1, but I don't think it's capable of this.
You can pay nothing to linux authors, and have something out of date that sometimes works incredibly well, and sometimes works incredibly badly.
As a side note, the amount a Linux distro is up-to-date depends on whether you have a Rolling Release distro or not.
If you want to live on the bleeding edge of new updates, install a rolling release distro like Arch, Debian unstable, Fedora rawhide. If you prefer your software to be more tested, go with something like Ubuntu, Redhat, or Debian stable.
Your combative blanket statements show that you're more interested in a pissing contest than a real discussion. You fit elrous0's stereotype so closely that I almost wonder if you're kidding.
The mouse is a superior controller for anything that involves aiming (FPS) or pointing (RTS)
May I suggest you give Metroid Prime 3 a try?
I won't necessarily say that the Wiimote is better than a mouse for FPS games, because that is a matter of opinion and context. However, I will say that it has the best aiming and control for a Console FPS that I've ever seen.
For me, the single\dual analog stick control scheme doesn't work very well for FPS games. Let the slashdot trolls call me a noob if they want, but even after hours of play, I find it hard to quickly and reliably aim where I want with dual sticks, especially while running.
I believe he was referring to a time in the 90's and early 2000's when a large chunk of online audio\video was in Real networks' format. Thankfully, their market share has faded since then.
You are right, of course, about targeted ads being Google's real meat and potatoes. Their web applications (a category which, I think, includes Google Search) are a means to that end.
I thought that this would be obvious to most of the Slashdot crowd, so I didn't see the need to state it explicitly.
While plugins would be useful, I think you have the wrong idea about Google's motives with Chrome. Chrome is Google's bid to change the browser market to make it a better platform for their core business, web applications.
Google isn't as concerned with making Firefox users switch to chrome, because they are already using a (mostly) standards compliant browser. IE is the real target. This seems to explain why, if I browse to google.com in IE7, I'm greeted with an ad banner that invites me to give Chrome a try. Google does not do this if I browse with Firefox or Safari.
The code has been released under an acceptable OSS license, but does that guarantee protection from Patent or IP litigation? Does this protection extend to downstream distributors and users? What were the reasons for selecting GPL v2 instead of v3? These are important questions to ask.
The OSS community has been criticized in some cases of distrusting Microsoft as a knee-jerk reaction, but given Microsoft's long history of antagonistic behavior, I can't say that I blame them.
Reading your other posts, it seems you and I differ on the definition of immersion.
Correct me if I'm strawmaning you, but let me try and extrapolate your definition of immersion from your other comments in this thread. You seem to believe that to be immersed in a game, it requires photorealistic graphics at 60FPS. To achieve this, you need the latest, most powerful hardware running big-budget games. But this is a moving target, and standards for graphics change over time, and from person to person.
I imagine that, by your definition, you personally do not experience immersion playing games from two years ago, and certainly not from previous generations of consoles. However, the word 'immersion' has been used in the game industry for years. I've seen it used as a description in game magazines since before 3d graphics were even commonplace. However, I recall it commonly being used to describe the game playing experience (eg. "immersive gameplay"), as well as, to some extent, the graphics.
Was Virtua Fighter for Saturn immersive, even though you could easily count the triangles on the character's faces? It looked pretty awesome at the time. Is it now impossible for someone to be immersed in it?
I myself felt immersed in Chrono Trigger. Is this somehow invalid to you?
Will you consider your current favorite "immersive" game to be immersive after three year's time?
I would say that any game can be immersive, but only if you can get into a certain mental state while playing it: the state in which you are not distracted by anything in the real world. If the gameplay is bad, the experience will leave you flat, and no immersion will occur despite any graphical flourishes.
Gameplay aside, even the best looking games of today still look like games to me. You can tell that they're rendered, and not a photograph or a video. They just look 'better' than last year's games. Photorealism (and thus, your definition of immersion) is an asymptote that we approach as the size of resolution of the details become finer.
I'd personally take a creative graphical style over 'photo-realism' any day.
X-Com isn't 3D, therefore no immersion.
I call bullshit on this statement.
For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser...
You shouldn't have had to jump through hoops and go into the registry to uninstall the first version. The registry editor is not safe for mere mortals anyhow.
The difference here is that, AFAIK, Microsoft would not have a leg to stand on in claiming some IP in GCC. They had nothing\little to do with its development or design. The danger of someone forcing the free software community to abandon it is not significant.
.net programs as much as possible. Microsoft created .net and holds patents associated with it. Thus, they could make legal arguments based on this which some judge\jury somewhere might agree with.
Mono, on the other hand, is made to be compatible with
That's the danger here, not the concept of dependencies in general.
If you do cut the cable, the traffic will try to route around the damage, clogging the "tubes" elsewhere and disrupting a lot of services.
Why would anyone learn\teach assembly as a first language? It's definitely not the kind of thing I would give to a freshman who has never programmed before, partly because it's too abstract. It's architecture specific, and also, they would not learn about functional programming or good OOP practices. That aside, most programmers in the business world do not use it on a day to day basis.
What is it about visual basic that makes it a better first language than python anyhow?
I'm happy for you that you have such a strong will, but would you please justify your convictions with a reason or two?