To be pedant, you can perfectly sample a < 22 kHz sine wave with a 44 kHz sampling rate if
- you can store the samples with infinite precision, which CDs can't do;
- you recreate the original waveform by summing infinite sinc()s, which CDs can't do.
CDs can clip audio pretty aggressively resulting in distortion if the music is improperly mastered. There's no clipping in vinyl since it's an analog format, a lot of records do end up sounding better than CDs.
Because vinyl has an infinite dynamic range? Truth is, if vinyl was still mainstream these days, then records would be produced by the very same people who make bad CDs today, and they would only have disadvantages over their digital counterparts. Terparts. Terparts. Terparts. *thud*:-)
Hmmm, the CDMA standard for the 1900 MHz band was published in 1995, and the first GSM network operating in the 1900 MHz band was launched in the USA in the same year.
WCDMA is a completely different standard than USA's CDMA standard. They are developed by different entities and only are similar in the fact that their physical layers are both based on the CDMA access method.
If someone has a personal vendetta against you, and they use information to blackmail you or whatever, there are already laws in place you can use to sue them
But suing them after they've ruined my reputation / job / family / whatever can be a meager consolation. I'd rather not enable them to get that information too easily, or at least not without me knowing.
principle collectors of this kind of information (governments and banks) will be largely immune from it
Are they immune? I often need to fill privacy consent forms when I request services from banks or public offices. Granted, most people will just fill them without even reading them, or might not have the choice not to sign them at all.
Which is bad because then they'd be able to try to sell you stuff you might actually want, rather than a bunch of stupid crap you don't care about?
No, it's bad because an "advertiser" can be just anyone, including somebody who is interested in obtaining my personal information instead of selling me stuff, or some company who won't protect at all my personal data against misuse, for example by one of their own employees who has something against me.
So, if you have something and you want to keep it private, the only way to do that is to keep it to yourself.
Fine, but then I need to be aware of all the data a company is collecting about me, so that I can then make an informed decision about keeping that data for myself.
To make just one example, I for one was not aware that, when doing a Google search in a browser tab after I had logged into GMail in another tab, all my searches would be stored into Google's servers forever. Ditto for the YouTube view history. And the page to access and delete that information is very hard to find.
Enabling people to know exactly what data about them the corporations are storing, is what the EU laws are all about.
Is it OK to you for any entity (government, facebook, google) to have a file about you containing:
- your name
- your phone number, and the names and phone numbers of all your contacts
- your web history
- your web search history
- your past and current email
- your gps position, its history, and the places you "starred"
- the pictures you take with your phone
- your wifi passwords
- the music you bought online
- the books you read online
- your investments portfolio
- the office documents you're working on
- everything you "liked" on the web, be it apps, music, cuisine or politics
under just the promise that they'll never be doing anything bad with that data, except "targeted advertising"?
Even their ability to sell some of that data, purged of personal identifications, is "bad" enough for me. If advertisers get to know where you work and what you like, that's enough to understand who you are in many cases.
We bombed Afghanistan because people weren't free to take photos there, as they believed that pictures would take people's soul away or something like that.
We ended up in the same situation at home, since now we can't shoot certain photos because it would take some economic entity's imaginary property away.
This is the obvious result of starting to grant rights to people over imaginary things: there's no limit to imagination!
On a side note, I hope the UK will start publishing official, government-approved books containing all the photos ever made, so that photographers can consult them every time they're about to take a picture, to be sure that they won't be sued by someone who happened to take the same photo some decade before.
I wonder if, in the future, having to buy hardware that is "designed for Linux", and is therefore in a market aside from the one of mainstream desktop PCs, could reduce the economic advantage of such operations.
I have consoles from the late 70s that still work.
I grew up using consoles and home computers in the 80s, and often they didn't work reliably even when they were new. Take off your rose-tinted glasses and remember the erratic behaviour of the C64 when it heated up, the failure rate of floppies and cassettes, and the fun with the contacts of cartridges on Nintendo consoles.
They should manage to leave out some features that are currently offered by similarly designed extensible game consoles that are currently on the market:
- new games run at 10fps as soon as your extensible console gets two months old;
- the controls of game x look terribly counterintuitive because the programmers hadn't your controller model in mind when they developed the game;
- the graphics option of your extensible console costs as much as a whole non-extensible console;
- game x looks awful because its developers tested it on graphics option mark Foo, while you own graphics option mark Bar;
- game x looks awful because you haven't updated the drivers of your graphics option this month;
- you get a random blue screen on startup becuse you *have* updated the drivers of your graphics option this month;
- the combined noise from the fans of your system, your graphics option(s) and your power supply are loud enough to wake up your neighbours at night and harm your hearing;
- "game x stopped working and will be terminated, but before doing so it crapped over your savegame and you'll need to start playing from the beginning: look for a solution online".
Google wants to use Java trademark and wants everyone to see their implementation as The Java?
No, they provide an extended subset of the Java language that results in their applications not being compatible with the Java platform. Which is what Microsoft had done at the time. People were aware that J++ applications would only run on Windows.
It's deficiencies/conventions of ES that leave people dissatisfied and make them develop stuff like CoffeeScript or GWT.
I thought the point of GWT was to allow developers of Java applications to keep using their skills and tools on both sides (server / client) of web applications. That is, not to force them to learn a new programming language.
There are high-level frameworks in plain Javascript too, e.g. the highly successful JQuery.
Yes, to claim you're implementing Java you need JVM and JRE and you need them compliant. Why do you need them to use Java the language?
To call it "Java language". The java language specification only covers some specific core classes.
You don't think this, you're just concerned and try hard to find parallels. Right.
I just try to observe facts and build my own opinion with no reverential respect towards any of the actors involved.
Debian and CentOS run plain Linux userspace applications, that run unmodified on both OSes or on every other Linux distribution. Android only runs heavily specialized Android applications that won't run on Linux; and even its "kernelspace" is incompatible with Linux, as many Android device drivers cannot be used on Linux unmodified due to the wakelock code.
Debian and CentOS merge the enhancements they do to the kernel and to the userspace into upstream projects, whereas Google developers publicly stated that they do not have any interest in doing so.
Name had nothing to do with this - they claimed it to be "Java compatible" when it was in fact not, that was the point of the lawsuit.
It was the post I was replying to who claimed it was a question of naming. Now you're agreeing with me, it is a question of lack of compatibility, which is required to use the Java trademark. Google has the same problem.
Yes, because "Java" is Java language plus Java VM and Java Runtime Environment. Java language is not bound together with VM and RE,
The Java language is strictly connected with the VM and therefore the runtime environment. Check section 12 of the Java Language Specification.
About the fact thtat the development of Javascript as a language is slow: this is not true for Javascript's bindings to HTML features, which is what is important today. Nobody cares if the Javascript language hasn't some feature-of-the-day that is seen as a must-have among computer science circles. Developers are interested in the fact that their HTML pages can obtain position and sensors information from devices, can record audio, can draw vector graphics and so on. Which is becoming possible now at a pace that I don't recall of having seen in the past.
The value of Javascript is not in the elegance of the language, it's in its universal adoption.
Really, basing your assertions that Google is just like MS on this stuff doesn't hold water.
Please note my original statement:
Now I'm not claiming that Google is the same as Microsoft, I don't think this.
Java: MS claimed their incompatible implemention _is_ Java. Google claims Dalvik is _not_ Java VM and uses same old Java language and standard javac from JDK for first stage of compilation.
MS called their incompatible implementation with a name subtly different than Java. Google calls the language you use to develop applications for Android "Java", as you can check yourself by going to the very front page of Android's developer website. The result is the same for developers, they have to learn Java and Java* and programs written for Java won't run on virtual machines for Java*.
Javascript: Please show me MS's VBScript to JS compiler.
OpenGL: You mean that same RenderScript that is basically a framework on top of OpenGL ES?
The fact that Dart and RenderScript are currently implemented over existing technologies is a technical detail that, I deem, has no relevance over this discussion. Thousands of companies and coders are investing in Javascript today, because it is seen as the cross platform, vendor neutral language for the intelligence of web pages. There is an established ongoing process of standardization of the language. If Dart is to replace Javascript, people will have to replay those investments both in software and training once again for the new, Google-controlled language. In this I see no difference with what MS could have obtained if they tried to use their market power to replace Javascript with VBScript (and succeeded).
The same things can be said for RenderScript.
The OS reinstall overwrites the "boot sector", obviously wiping the virus. So what you say is simply not true.
Moreover, there was a time when boot sector viruses were really common, and back then nobody would dream of reinstalling the OS to remove them. People got rid of them by using an antivirus program, just like they would do for any other virus.
This story has nothing to do with WHQL drivers. What article did you read? This is about Microsoft locking down UEFI on ARM boards (and not in the "soft" way they chose a couple of months ago for x86, when MS spin doctors were trying hard to make us believe that MS were doing that to protect us from malware).
They collect personal information in the same ways as what I would have called "spyware" in the 90s (and the data they collect is more personal, and their coverage is... global); now they're even caught doing MS-like business practices (or worse, as I seem to understand that what they did might even be illegal).
They still have credit to me for all the good they do for open source (summer of code, open protocols, webm, patents, android...), but they're starting to look a bit like the company of Scorpio in that famous Simpsons episode.
...not to use DOS code pages anymore? It's no longer 1992, and people might not want to add win32-specific boilerplate code to every console program just to prevent it from mangling any non-ASCII character that comes from the keyboard or goes to the screen.
Also, they should implement getline(). It's useful and it has been standard since 2008.
A Nokia employee and, apparently, another from Microsoft have been caught posting anonymous comments boosting their product on a review of the new Nokia Lumia 800 phone using Microsoft's new Windows Phone software.
Another company that made agreements with MS bites the dust.
Too bad, Nokia were the most free-software friendly CE company ever. I don't think there will be others like them anytime soon, seeing how the tides are turning.
They could have shown the way to other manufacturers about how to make really open hardware, and about effectively contributing to upstream projects.
Instead, they ended up on the exactly opposite side of the spectrum of freedom, and their end will be forever associated with... Windows Phone. What a letdown. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
To be pedant, you can perfectly sample a < 22 kHz sine wave with a 44 kHz sampling rate if
- you can store the samples with infinite precision, which CDs can't do;
- you recreate the original waveform by summing infinite sinc()s, which CDs can't do.
CDs can clip audio pretty aggressively resulting in distortion if the music is improperly mastered. There's no clipping in vinyl since it's an analog format, a lot of records do end up sounding better than CDs.
Because vinyl has an infinite dynamic range? Truth is, if vinyl was still mainstream these days, then records would be produced by the very same people who make bad CDs today, and they would only have disadvantages over their digital counterparts. Terparts. Terparts. Terparts. *thud* :-)
Hmmm, the CDMA standard for the 1900 MHz band was published in 1995, and the first GSM network operating in the 1900 MHz band was launched in the USA in the same year.
WCDMA is a completely different standard than USA's CDMA standard. They are developed by different entities and only are similar in the fact that their physical layers are both based on the CDMA access method.
Russia is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, they standardized on GSM, and they're doing just fine.
But suing them after they've ruined my reputation / job / family / whatever can be a meager consolation. I'd rather not enable them to get that information too easily, or at least not without me knowing.
Are they immune? I often need to fill privacy consent forms when I request services from banks or public offices. Granted, most people will just fill them without even reading them, or might not have the choice not to sign them at all.
No, it's bad because an "advertiser" can be just anyone, including somebody who is interested in obtaining my personal information instead of selling me stuff, or some company who won't protect at all my personal data against misuse, for example by one of their own employees who has something against me.
Fine, but then I need to be aware of all the data a company is collecting about me, so that I can then make an informed decision about keeping that data for myself. To make just one example, I for one was not aware that, when doing a Google search in a browser tab after I had logged into GMail in another tab, all my searches would be stored into Google's servers forever. Ditto for the YouTube view history. And the page to access and delete that information is very hard to find.
Enabling people to know exactly what data about them the corporations are storing, is what the EU laws are all about.
- your name
- your phone number, and the names and phone numbers of all your contacts
- your web history
- your web search history
- your past and current email
- your gps position, its history, and the places you "starred"
- the pictures you take with your phone
- your wifi passwords
- the music you bought online
- the books you read online
- your investments portfolio
- the office documents you're working on
- everything you "liked" on the web, be it apps, music, cuisine or politics
under just the promise that they'll never be doing anything bad with that data, except "targeted advertising"?
Even their ability to sell some of that data, purged of personal identifications, is "bad" enough for me. If advertisers get to know where you work and what you like, that's enough to understand who you are in many cases.
Was this summary explicitly written in trollspeak to ignite yet another US vs Europe flamewar on /. ?
We ended up in the same situation at home, since now we can't shoot certain photos because it would take some economic entity's imaginary property away.
This is the obvious result of starting to grant rights to people over imaginary things: there's no limit to imagination!
On a side note, I hope the UK will start publishing official, government-approved books containing all the photos ever made, so that photographers can consult them every time they're about to take a picture, to be sure that they won't be sued by someone who happened to take the same photo some decade before.
I wonder if, in the future, having to buy hardware that is "designed for Linux", and is therefore in a market aside from the one of mainstream desktop PCs, could reduce the economic advantage of such operations.
As a workaround, you can turn it off manually by long-pushing the PS button and choosing "turn off the controller" from the menu.
I grew up using consoles and home computers in the 80s, and often they didn't work reliably even when they were new. Take off your rose-tinted glasses and remember the erratic behaviour of the C64 when it heated up, the failure rate of floppies and cassettes, and the fun with the contacts of cartridges on Nintendo consoles.
They should manage to leave out some features that are currently offered by similarly designed extensible game consoles that are currently on the market:
- new games run at 10fps as soon as your extensible console gets two months old;
- the controls of game x look terribly counterintuitive because the programmers hadn't your controller model in mind when they developed the game;
- the graphics option of your extensible console costs as much as a whole non-extensible console;
- game x looks awful because its developers tested it on graphics option mark Foo, while you own graphics option mark Bar;
- game x looks awful because you haven't updated the drivers of your graphics option this month;
- you get a random blue screen on startup becuse you *have* updated the drivers of your graphics option this month;
- the combined noise from the fans of your system, your graphics option(s) and your power supply are loud enough to wake up your neighbours at night and harm your hearing;
- "game x stopped working and will be terminated, but before doing so it crapped over your savegame and you'll need to start playing from the beginning: look for a solution online".
No, they provide an extended subset of the Java language that results in their applications not being compatible with the Java platform. Which is what Microsoft had done at the time. People were aware that J++ applications would only run on Windows.
I thought the point of GWT was to allow developers of Java applications to keep using their skills and tools on both sides (server / client) of web applications. That is, not to force them to learn a new programming language.
There are high-level frameworks in plain Javascript too, e.g. the highly successful JQuery.
To call it "Java language". The java language specification only covers some specific core classes.
I just try to observe facts and build my own opinion with no reverential respect towards any of the actors involved.
Debian and CentOS merge the enhancements they do to the kernel and to the userspace into upstream projects, whereas Google developers publicly stated that they do not have any interest in doing so.
It was the post I was replying to who claimed it was a question of naming. Now you're agreeing with me, it is a question of lack of compatibility, which is required to use the Java trademark. Google has the same problem.
The Java language is strictly connected with the VM and therefore the runtime environment. Check section 12 of the Java Language Specification.
About the fact thtat the development of Javascript as a language is slow: this is not true for Javascript's bindings to HTML features, which is what is important today. Nobody cares if the Javascript language hasn't some feature-of-the-day that is seen as a must-have among computer science circles. Developers are interested in the fact that their HTML pages can obtain position and sensors information from devices, can record audio, can draw vector graphics and so on. Which is becoming possible now at a pace that I don't recall of having seen in the past.
The value of Javascript is not in the elegance of the language, it's in its universal adoption.
Please note my original statement:
Java: MS claimed their incompatible implemention _is_ Java. Google claims Dalvik is _not_ Java VM and uses same old Java language and standard javac from JDK for first stage of compilation.
MS called their incompatible implementation with a name subtly different than Java. Google calls the language you use to develop applications for Android "Java", as you can check yourself by going to the very front page of Android's developer website. The result is the same for developers, they have to learn Java and Java* and programs written for Java won't run on virtual machines for Java*.
Javascript: Please show me MS's VBScript to JS compiler.
OpenGL: You mean that same RenderScript that is basically a framework on top of OpenGL ES?
The fact that Dart and RenderScript are currently implemented over existing technologies is a technical detail that, I deem, has no relevance over this discussion. Thousands of companies and coders are investing in Javascript today, because it is seen as the cross platform, vendor neutral language for the intelligence of web pages. There is an established ongoing process of standardization of the language. If Dart is to replace Javascript, people will have to replay those investments both in software and training once again for the new, Google-controlled language. In this I see no difference with what MS could have obtained if they tried to use their market power to replace Javascript with VBScript (and succeeded).
The same things can be said for RenderScript.
And then
java: dalvik <=> j++
javascript: dart <=> vbscript
html: nacl <=> activex
opengl: renderscript <=> directx
Now I'm not claiming that Google is the same as Microsoft, I don't think this. But honestly, I still have some concerns.
Moreover, there was a time when boot sector viruses were really common, and back then nobody would dream of reinstalling the OS to remove them. People got rid of them by using an antivirus program, just like they would do for any other virus.
This story has nothing to do with WHQL drivers. What article did you read? This is about Microsoft locking down UEFI on ARM boards (and not in the "soft" way they chose a couple of months ago for x86, when MS spin doctors were trying hard to make us believe that MS were doing that to protect us from malware).
They still have credit to me for all the good they do for open source (summer of code, open protocols, webm, patents, android...), but they're starting to look a bit like the company of Scorpio in that famous Simpsons episode.
Also, they should implement getline(). It's useful and it has been standard since 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/dec/19/nokia-microsoft-lumia-comments
Too bad, Nokia were the most free-software friendly CE company ever. I don't think there will be others like them anytime soon, seeing how the tides are turning.
They could have shown the way to other manufacturers about how to make really open hardware, and about effectively contributing to upstream projects.
Instead, they ended up on the exactly opposite side of the spectrum of freedom, and their end will be forever associated with... Windows Phone. What a letdown. Sigh.