Someone should invent a flexible strip with numbered markings on it that could be wrapped around a waist to obtain this measurement. I'm cautiously hopeful that one day science will develop such a thing.
A more cynical person might believe this is just a way for Microsoft to stick it to Google, Facebook etc, especially in tablet land. I'm sure the terms and conditions mean MS / Bing services are not so impeded by what it may or may not do with user data.
The source code to SCO Unix must be worth something to somebody. There must be a lot of point of sale devices and servers dotted around running it that still need some kind of support.
Many of the changes in OpenGL of late have been designed so as much work as possible can be offloaded from the CPU onto the GPU through shaders. Failing to keep up with the standard limits what developers can do to make their game as optimal as possible. It's in Apple's own interest to keep up with the spec because developers may increasingly disable advanced shaders or conditionally disable some optimizations simply because the APIs don't support them.
Aside from that, there are games which do need more powerful hardware. Some people may be content to play Plants vs Zombies or other casual titles. Others want to play Skyrim or something else which does tax the hardware. If the hardware is capable of supporting a later version of OpenGL then it makes no sense that the OS should fail to provide access to it.
Kindle DX, and iPad. you really need the big screen.
More importantly you need a responsive screen. PDFs more than other formats require pinch to zoom, pan etc. to work reasonably because they often don't fit in a screen well or contain detail that necessitates zooming in to see.
It's nice to have Steam on Linux but it's a small market and it doesn't make huge sense for Valve to support it except in the context of either a) Getting leverage to compell Microsoft to open up Windows 8 more, or b) Cloud gaming, e.g. porting games to Linux may lighten their costs if they offered hosted titles in the cloud.
7" tablets are also more useful in some ways than their 10" brethren and certainly a lot cheaper. I don't think I'd savour typing anything more a 2 line email on them but they're fine for playing games, watching videos and browsing in bed or on the couch.
The biggest issue I'd have with the Nexus 7 is the lack of external SD and the small amount of internal storage is a cynical attempt to make people pay $50 more for a lousy 16GB more storage. I own a $80 tablet which manages to include both an SD slot and an HDMI out. It's obviously poorer in other ways but it makes me wonder why the Nexus 7 couldn't have thrown in these ports.
OpenGL sits over the top of DirectX on Windows so just using it would incur a penalty. I'm fairly certain that anyone porting a DirectX game to Linux using winelib or some commercial derivative would incur a penalty in the other direction.
Tesla are going to stick a 17 inch (!) tablet in the middle of their Model S. This is the most reckless sounding idea I've ever heard of. I assume Tesla haven't completely lost their minds and will put limits on what the tablet can do while the vehicle is in motion. But some functionality will have to remain - satnav, call handling, hands free, weather, radio, music etc. Packing so many distractions behind in a flat glass interface that can only be operated by looking directly at it is a recipe for disaster.
Performance is going to be in line with a very slow smart phone running the latest Android 4. I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. I've use raspbian on the Pi and while it works the experience is definitely in line with the specs of the device - very slow. I see the Pi more useful for embedded applications where there is only one or two application processes running so the context switching is minimized and best use can be made of the hardware. Rasbmc works fairly well on the Pi because the hardware decoder takes care of the mp4, but I could see it buckling if it has to use software decoding for anything.
Lots of MP3 files are watermarked so they are unique to the person who bought them. Services like Amazon, Apple, Napster, Walmart and others all embed uniquely identifiable information in the mp3. If you share those files with friends or upload them to p2p and that file appears on the same cloud in multiple accounts they can find out.
Even personally encoded files may leave enough differences from one run and one machine to the next that even with the default settings they produce different files. I think it likely that any commercial encoder, e.g. the one in iTunes or Windows Media Player is bound to stuff some identifier in the file somewhere. Even innocuous mp3s could be so distinct by virtue of the contents of their ID3 tag.
If uniqueness is a property of a legitimately owned copy then non-uniqueness is going to ring alarm bells. Amazon and Apple could even seed p2p with booby trapped mp3s and also look for copyright infringers on their clouds.
So I think it's entirely feasible they could use tools to catch people. It would be even easier with books and videos.
Glibc is bloaty enough that most embedded Linux runtimes don't use it at all. They'll use uClibc instead which is mostly API compatible but is modular so it can compiled down to a small footprint so stuff like math library can be dumped on the floor.
BIONIC would be similar to that, implementing the most common Posix stuff but in a reduced form to support the OS and no more. Android userland is BSD based otherwise they'd probably have used uClibc too.
It took me about 7 weeks from ordering to get one. Now that I have it I'm still wondering what to do with it, though probably I'll end up using it to run XBMC or something similar of an embedded nature.
It doesn't use Java. It uses a register based virtual machine called Dalvik. It has been designed to be as lightweight as possible. The Android OS also uses a cut down user land and a cut down C runtime called BIONIC. It can run on low memory devices but I doubt Android 4.0 was ever envisaged to run on such a tight setup and I doubt the performance will be great.
That Raspberry Pi supports Android should not come as surprise to anyone.
I doubt there are many Android 4.0 devices which as little as 224-128MB of RAM which is what the Pi would have to work with. Also most Android 4.0 devices would have a higher clocked CPU, possibly with multiple cores to help it. So I wouldn't hold out much hope for the performance. It'll be very quick to kill apps because they exhaust memory or when they go into the background.
To put it in context, you can buy a gumstick style device containing a 1Ghz Allwinner CPU, 1GB RAM and 4-8GB storage running Android 4 or Google TV for $70 or less on places like Ebay. Even the performance of these devices can suck when too much multitasking or flash storage access is going on.
A more pertinent reason not to use them is Amazon know which music you own and a pretty good idea of what music you *don't* own just by its similarity to other instances of the same file residing on their server. Same for books, movies etc.
There's nothing to stop them repeating it or the highlights later. But to delay it even when it's on live in virtually every other country, chop bits out of it and then put inane comment over the top is what annoys some people.
Printing a plastic widget which holds the metal bits of a gun together is slightly different from printing a gun. Not that it would be hugely impressive to print an entire gun anyway given the thing would probably be destroyed or rendered unusable within a few shots. Doesn't help much either if you can't print the ammunition.
If only it were a matter of hiring some obj-c programmers. I'd like to see your mental state after have 10 million lines of shit dumped on you with with non-trivial task of porting it to a completely disparate operating system and then maintaining both systems annually. I've ported a large amount of ERP code from OS/2 to Win32 during a 30 day crunch and I was ready to kill somebody by the end of it. I expect porting Quickbooks or Quicken would be close to an 18 month job and would involve 20-30 engineers plus 20 QA staff plus project managers etc at least.
What you do quite simply is set the terms that the broadcast rights are offered under. Make it mandatory that the opening / closing ceremonies be broadcast in full with a maximum time delay of (for example) 15 minutes, put time delay limits on other sporting events, put clear rules in place for the boundaries of acceptable / unacceptable commentary & coverage (e.g. of treating other nations respectfully), put limits on where and with what frequency advertising breaks may happen and generally strive to ensure the winning bid offers an optimal viewing experience.
If NBC doesn't want to bid under those terms it doesn't have to. Some other channel most surely would though.
Though I'm a fan of Android, the support for physical keyboards and pointing devices is pretty bloody awful. I have an Asus Transformer and I run into a shocking number of issues with focus, with text selection, with clipboard behaviour, with tab order (or not) and with the mouse.
A trivial issue with the problems with the mouse - fire up a web browser and cursor over a link. Does the link change shape? Of course not. Does the transformer offer any tools to change the sensitivity of the trackpad to prevent inadvertent brushing from changing focus? Of course not. Is there any consistency at all from one app to the next in this stuff? Nope.
While I would see no reason to use a Windows RT / Windows 8 on a tablet for the time being I think it will have vastly superior mouse and keyboard support due to its heritage.
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Someone should invent a flexible strip with numbered markings on it that could be wrapped around a waist to obtain this measurement. I'm cautiously hopeful that one day science will develop such a thing.
Well they've certainly done that time and again in their marketplace.
A more cynical person might believe this is just a way for Microsoft to stick it to Google, Facebook etc, especially in tablet land. I'm sure the terms and conditions mean MS / Bing services are not so impeded by what it may or may not do with user data.
The source code to SCO Unix must be worth something to somebody. There must be a lot of point of sale devices and servers dotted around running it that still need some kind of support.
Aside from that, there are games which do need more powerful hardware. Some people may be content to play Plants vs Zombies or other casual titles. Others want to play Skyrim or something else which does tax the hardware. If the hardware is capable of supporting a later version of OpenGL then it makes no sense that the OS should fail to provide access to it.
Kindle DX, and iPad. you really need the big screen.
More importantly you need a responsive screen. PDFs more than other formats require pinch to zoom, pan etc. to work reasonably because they often don't fit in a screen well or contain detail that necessitates zooming in to see.
It's nice to have Steam on Linux but it's a small market and it doesn't make huge sense for Valve to support it except in the context of either a) Getting leverage to compell Microsoft to open up Windows 8 more, or b) Cloud gaming, e.g. porting games to Linux may lighten their costs if they offered hosted titles in the cloud.
The biggest issue I'd have with the Nexus 7 is the lack of external SD and the small amount of internal storage is a cynical attempt to make people pay $50 more for a lousy 16GB more storage. I own a $80 tablet which manages to include both an SD slot and an HDMI out. It's obviously poorer in other ways but it makes me wonder why the Nexus 7 couldn't have thrown in these ports.
OpenGL sits over the top of DirectX on Windows so just using it would incur a penalty. I'm fairly certain that anyone porting a DirectX game to Linux using winelib or some commercial derivative would incur a penalty in the other direction.
Tesla are going to stick a 17 inch (!) tablet in the middle of their Model S. This is the most reckless sounding idea I've ever heard of. I assume Tesla haven't completely lost their minds and will put limits on what the tablet can do while the vehicle is in motion. But some functionality will have to remain - satnav, call handling, hands free, weather, radio, music etc. Packing so many distractions behind in a flat glass interface that can only be operated by looking directly at it is a recipe for disaster.
Performance is going to be in line with a very slow smart phone running the latest Android 4. I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. I've use raspbian on the Pi and while it works the experience is definitely in line with the specs of the device - very slow. I see the Pi more useful for embedded applications where there is only one or two application processes running so the context switching is minimized and best use can be made of the hardware. Rasbmc works fairly well on the Pi because the hardware decoder takes care of the mp4, but I could see it buckling if it has to use software decoding for anything.
Well yes that would be sensible, but better yet would be not to use these services at all.
Even personally encoded files may leave enough differences from one run and one machine to the next that even with the default settings they produce different files. I think it likely that any commercial encoder, e.g. the one in iTunes or Windows Media Player is bound to stuff some identifier in the file somewhere. Even innocuous mp3s could be so distinct by virtue of the contents of their ID3 tag.
If uniqueness is a property of a legitimately owned copy then non-uniqueness is going to ring alarm bells. Amazon and Apple could even seed p2p with booby trapped mp3s and also look for copyright infringers on their clouds.
So I think it's entirely feasible they could use tools to catch people. It would be even easier with books and videos.
BIONIC would be similar to that, implementing the most common Posix stuff but in a reduced form to support the OS and no more. Android userland is BSD based otherwise they'd probably have used uClibc too.
It took me about 7 weeks from ordering to get one. Now that I have it I'm still wondering what to do with it, though probably I'll end up using it to run XBMC or something similar of an embedded nature.
It doesn't use Java. It uses a register based virtual machine called Dalvik. It has been designed to be as lightweight as possible. The Android OS also uses a cut down user land and a cut down C runtime called BIONIC. It can run on low memory devices but I doubt Android 4.0 was ever envisaged to run on such a tight setup and I doubt the performance will be great.
That Raspberry Pi supports Android should not come as surprise to anyone.
I doubt there are many Android 4.0 devices which as little as 224-128MB of RAM which is what the Pi would have to work with. Also most Android 4.0 devices would have a higher clocked CPU, possibly with multiple cores to help it. So I wouldn't hold out much hope for the performance. It'll be very quick to kill apps because they exhaust memory or when they go into the background.
To put it in context, you can buy a gumstick style device containing a 1Ghz Allwinner CPU, 1GB RAM and 4-8GB storage running Android 4 or Google TV for $70 or less on places like Ebay. Even the performance of these devices can suck when too much multitasking or flash storage access is going on.
A more pertinent reason not to use them is Amazon know which music you own and a pretty good idea of what music you *don't* own just by its similarity to other instances of the same file residing on their server. Same for books, movies etc.
Dinosaurs and unicorns simply didn't make it onto the ark. That's all you need to know.
There's nothing to stop them repeating it or the highlights later. But to delay it even when it's on live in virtually every other country, chop bits out of it and then put inane comment over the top is what annoys some people.
Printing a plastic widget which holds the metal bits of a gun together is slightly different from printing a gun. Not that it would be hugely impressive to print an entire gun anyway given the thing would probably be destroyed or rendered unusable within a few shots. Doesn't help much either if you can't print the ammunition.
If only it were a matter of hiring some obj-c programmers. I'd like to see your mental state after have 10 million lines of shit dumped on you with with non-trivial task of porting it to a completely disparate operating system and then maintaining both systems annually. I've ported a large amount of ERP code from OS/2 to Win32 during a 30 day crunch and I was ready to kill somebody by the end of it. I expect porting Quickbooks or Quicken would be close to an 18 month job and would involve 20-30 engineers plus 20 QA staff plus project managers etc at least.
If NBC doesn't want to bid under those terms it doesn't have to. Some other channel most surely would though.
A trivial issue with the problems with the mouse - fire up a web browser and cursor over a link. Does the link change shape? Of course not. Does the transformer offer any tools to change the sensitivity of the trackpad to prevent inadvertent brushing from changing focus? Of course not. Is there any consistency at all from one app to the next in this stuff? Nope.
While I would see no reason to use a Windows RT / Windows 8 on a tablet for the time being I think it will have vastly superior mouse and keyboard support due to its heritage.
Any tablet can run Linux assuming you can circumvent whatever bootloader protections are there to stop you changing the image.