It seems like the vetting process for third party accessories is about as porous and subject to reviewer whimsy as their iTunes app process.
Apple makes a lot of revenue from the accessories licenses - they aren't going to mess with that. Marketing FUD and settling out of court is always cheaper than actually fixing problems.
We'll be plugging our cheap Apple TV boxes into our Google-TV enabled HDTVs. The article misses the point that TVs will come with Google's offering built in, where Apple is too selfish to partner with anybody, ever, unless they eventually have their own Apple HDTV range. For a long time now HDTV makers have been putting more and more in to their TVs with DLNA, USB media, Streaming, YouTube etc, partly because consumer lounges already have too many boxes with blinking LEDs a pile of remotes and a tangle of cables back there. Apple kinda understood this by making their box as small as they could.
Google actually getting their kit *IN* Sony HDTVs is kind of a game over for Apple
Somehow Apple will still ten million boxes, but yet again they'll fail to rule the earth.
Manurfacturers rule in a huge TV industry, Google respects that, Apple doesn't realise just what it's up against.
This is the value of the App Store that geeks/developers consistently underrate. Apple's walled garden provides a barrier to entry that helps to reduce the risk of ending up with a fart app that's also downloading your private banking information to China.
This could also lead to a false sense of security, which is also massively underrated. Apple can't possibly catch all software flaws. Indeed iOS4 was jailbreaked by a vulnerability in PDF code, leading to a simple website visit to gain root access to your phone. Which was a little scary to think what might have happend if that vulnerbaility was in the hands of a malicious party.
Android won't need anti-virus because it is very robust security model. It is linux after all, which is largely virus and malware free. The design of the OS is even more robust than desktop linux. With the exception of rooted phones, viruses would find it very difficult to propogate let alone do any real damage.
The occasional malicious app that steals some userdata is about all that can go wrong. For now.
The value of the Apple App store is Apple has done some of the thinking for you. Unfortunately this means iOS users will install everything without ever stopping to consider security. This is dangerous to have a user base completely ignorant of security matters and Apple is demonstrably guilty of keeping it's users in the dark as much as possible. Androids prompt for permissions is a rather good way of making people stop and think about the app you are about to install, and I believe this kind of thing is the correct initial approach. User education is 90% of the problem with security on digital platforms.
In practice, both iOS and Android have problems with malware already, and it's hard to say one has more of a problem than the other. Frankly, neither approach to app security is ideal therefore both platforms will be constantly fighting malware. Android could do with a lot more quality control - at very least stop neglecting the market, the moderation system for comments and ratings needs updating. Nothing beats weeding out bad apps by a good feedback system.
We work on the assumption that the laws of physics are perfect and complete, and we are just trying to reveal them. The laws of physics could work well enough but actually be incomplete and consistent as you point out. They could even bebe crappy, bloated and buggy with lots of missing chunks, unused bloat and even errors.
If the laws of physics emerged naturally, for example budding off from a parent universe, and subject to a process of evolution I would expect theories of everything to be 'just good enough' and barely work rather than somehow perfect and elegant and mystical. Much like the junk DNA, apendix and mens nipples that rides along with us because evolution didn't really have pressure need to get rid of them.
I would say we should by default expect a theory of everything a whole basket of seemingly clumsy unweildy theories that barely fit together - after all they only need to be just good enough for us to be here and not any better. If we expect flawless elegant unified symmetry and beauty, then we'd need to demonstrate why (without invoking God to explain etc).
Researchers have been seduced by subjectively elegant and simple equations all the way back to F=MA... these worked well enough, but were ultimately wrong, the truth was more complex and nuanced, but now we're finding the universe is fuzzy, clumsy and possibly buggy (inflation, possible variations in c, other weirdness).
Interesting. There would be a lack of tectonic activity as we know it to recycle useful elements for life through the crust (Volcanism may compensate greatly).
Extinction events do drive evolution - I think a meteor impact is good enough here.
Gliese F may have a moon like ours, which could drive tectonic activity. We can't even be sure if it's tidally locked. An impact like that which formed our moon could have imparted rotation and provided tides and some tectonic activity.
This planet could be a water world with no land surface.
Aren't Red Dwarf stars often unstable and known as flare stars? This would be a problem for life in the Gliese system? Or is Gliese more stable being larger than most of these?
Is there any meaningful insight into the balance of elements in the stellar system (from looking at the spectra of the star) that would help guess the composition of the rocky planets - would there be plenty of the right stuff for life? I ask because I read Gliese is 7-11 billion years old and older stars have less heavy elements, I'd guess that the system would not have the same abundance of metals and heavier elements.
Does the spectra of a star give any clues to the abundance of water in the star system? At least upper and lower bounds?
The age of Gliese star and therefore it's system is 7-11 Billion years, much older than our solar system at about 4.5 billion years. I hardly expect epic change in the 20 years you mention.
Even our civilisation of 10,000 years plus is a blink of an eye.
Life mucked around with single cells for several billion years and got complex on earth only around 500 million years ago.
If a planet around Gliese spawned intellegent life it could have done so many times over. If our sun wasn't about to bake us in a few billion years and was going to stick around like Gliese (which is possibly stable up to 100s of billions of years), If conditions allowed, Earth could see many more species evolve to our level.... many times over.
I just won a wager with a colleague we'd find something like this in our lifetimes. My mind is still boggling.
Science FTW. Isn't it just awesome that humanity can detect something similar to size of earth tens of light years away, with methods that are highly limited and a very tiny focus of our total scientific endeavour. Queue frenzied rush on exoplanet research.
I think Apples walled garden approach may result in more per-user spend. But that's about it. A many times larger user base, I don't see Android's market share plateauing until it is many times that of iOS. It always makes sense to target the larger user base as a starting point (but only as a crude rule of thumb of course). This is a repeat of the Mac vs PC era and again Apple is just to selfish.
However, this time the OS competing with the Apple camp is *really good* and Android is so far ahead of everything it's not funny. Apple is being forced to eat humble pie and add features that Android pioneered and thus demonstrated Apple was wrong about, it's gotta be a sign.
Oh and the Android development community is fscking awesome.
Slashdot Posting Form v0.4 BETA. Automatically creates typical slashdot post.
[ ] IANAL but ____
[ ] Obligatory XKCD ___
[ ] In soviet russia the _____'s YOU
[ ] There, fixed that for you
[ ] link to/. dupe from last year
[ ] sudo _____ >/dev/null
[ ] Queue _____ in 3.. 2..
[ ] Bitch about/.'s modding system
[ ] Get off my lawn
[ ] You insensitive clod!
[ ] RTFM
[ ] RTTFA
[x] Reuse my posting form joke
[x] Don't hide "Reuse my posting form joke" checkbox
Invoke:
[ ] Cory Doctrow
[ ] Richard Stallman
[ ] kdawson
[ ] Steve Jobs
[ ] Natalie Portman
while a diabetes ridden fat slob does have a choice not to eat at McDonalds.
I used to say this kind of thing, but take a look at drive thrus next time you cruise past, where are the healthy choices? There are healthy choices but not in the realm of convenient or fast food. Oh and go into a supermarket, try to find products that don't have HFCS.
The fact that choice exists is nice, but it says nothing of marketting, peer pressure, and simple availability. The same applies here.
I feel a great disturbance in the social networks
on
Facebook Is Down
·
· Score: 3, Funny
as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
*sigh* I don't believe that it's possible to design and build an AI. This is partly because the best and only thinking computers we know of (brains), were not designed at all, they evolved. In fact, to me at least, it seems that whatever underlying mathematical properties of our universe allow and drive evolution are actually fundamental to how consciousness arises in our brains. We think of our brain as computers, but in fact our universe is a computational system and we (and our brains) are self-replicating patterns of complex information. True thinking feeling conscious AI, must arise from the right initial conditions, it cannot be designed, or if design plays a role then it requires a huge amount of natural evolution in the process.
By making ever more complex systems trying to mimic the performance nuanced complexities of human behavior in order to try pass a Turing test or whatever, we're just making dumb rigid algorithims seem smart, by completely missing understanding and recreating the system that give rise to such performance by itself.
We need to develop tools that allow AI to evolve naturally within computational systems. With the right rules and enough iterations it'll happen by itself. Dare I say, it doing it all itself is necessary.
Most of the population has enough trouble with basic sanitation, leading to thousands of preventable cases of gastric poisoning each year. Now people are going to poison or kill themselves with home cultured algae gone wrong. At best they'll poison the local waterways & wildlife when they dump their bad algae.
The is kind of why flying cars and jet packs, although feasible, haven't really taken off, pardon the pun. Drivers can barely manage turn signals let alone handle a third dimenson. People poison themselves with DIY alcohol brewing, preserves and curing gone wrong quite frequently.
Anyone considered the disposal implications here? Many local governments would not allow you to dump this stuff via sewer or storm water.
Facebook places is only for iPhone and phones that support W3 geolocation, and only available via native application or touch.facebook.com. You also actually have to explicitly 'check in' / 'check out' of places.
It amazes the ammount of paranoid people turning it off believing it tracks their location whereever they log into face book. It's not even available worldwide completely.
From TFFBFAQ: "At this time, the Places application is available to users in the United States with mobile access to the Facebook application for iPhone or touch.facebook.com"
Even with places turned off, you only need to post "going to fiji for 6 weeks w00t" and everybody knows you're not home. It amazes me the number of people, especially young females who post "I'm home alone tonight and bored" - you can be sure I'm in contact with the really quickly to tell them how dangerous that is and if I they feel unsafe I could.... wait I'm going off topic...
I bundled a string of LED AC xmas lights to make what seems to be a 75watt equivelent light. The ~10watt LED lights were $10 in a boxing day sale bargain bin.
LED bulbs are expensive, but they can be found mass produced in other ways, and come up bargain bin electronics items that can be re-purposed.
I'm highly suprised clever geeks here haven't wired their house for DC (In some areas of world would not require you to be a registered and qualified electrician) and constructed DIY LED lighting. I could certainly purchase a box of bright white LEDs online right now and solder up something pretty cheaply.
Ultimate geek cred: Power your lighting system over the ethernet wiring you already have?
... eventually. Newton, Einstein, and one day Hawking will be. But said scientists are usually less wrong than predcessors, Galileo was merely less wrong than the Vatican.
Slashdot Mirror
They can always revoke their Made For iPhone license.
http://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi/ http://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi/cases.html
It seems like the vetting process for third party accessories is about as porous and subject to reviewer whimsy as their iTunes app process.
Apple makes a lot of revenue from the accessories licenses - they aren't going to mess with that. Marketing FUD and settling out of court is always cheaper than actually fixing problems.
We'll be plugging our cheap Apple TV boxes into our Google-TV enabled HDTVs. The article misses the point that TVs will come with Google's offering built in, where Apple is too selfish to partner with anybody, ever, unless they eventually have their own Apple HDTV range. For a long time now HDTV makers have been putting more and more in to their TVs with DLNA, USB media, Streaming, YouTube etc, partly because consumer lounges already have too many boxes with blinking LEDs a pile of remotes and a tangle of cables back there. Apple kinda understood this by making their box as small as they could.
Google actually getting their kit *IN* Sony HDTVs is kind of a game over for Apple
Somehow Apple will still ten million boxes, but yet again they'll fail to rule the earth.
Manurfacturers rule in a huge TV industry, Google respects that, Apple doesn't realise just what it's up against.
"have a robust OS like Apple's"
Thanks for the lulz.
This is the value of the App Store that geeks/developers consistently underrate. Apple's walled garden provides a barrier to entry that helps to reduce the risk of ending up with a fart app that's also downloading your private banking information to China.
This could also lead to a false sense of security, which is also massively underrated. Apple can't possibly catch all software flaws. Indeed iOS4 was jailbreaked by a vulnerability in PDF code, leading to a simple website visit to gain root access to your phone. Which was a little scary to think what might have happend if that vulnerbaility was in the hands of a malicious party.
Android won't need anti-virus because it is very robust security model. It is linux after all, which is largely virus and malware free. The design of the OS is even more robust than desktop linux. With the exception of rooted phones, viruses would find it very difficult to propogate let alone do any real damage.
The occasional malicious app that steals some userdata is about all that can go wrong. For now.
The value of the Apple App store is Apple has done some of the thinking for you. Unfortunately this means iOS users will install everything without ever stopping to consider security. This is dangerous to have a user base completely ignorant of security matters and Apple is demonstrably guilty of keeping it's users in the dark as much as possible. Androids prompt for permissions is a rather good way of making people stop and think about the app you are about to install, and I believe this kind of thing is the correct initial approach. User education is 90% of the problem with security on digital platforms.
In practice, both iOS and Android have problems with malware already, and it's hard to say one has more of a problem than the other. Frankly, neither approach to app security is ideal therefore both platforms will be constantly fighting malware. Android could do with a lot more quality control - at very least stop neglecting the market, the moderation system for comments and ratings needs updating. Nothing beats weeding out bad apps by a good feedback system.
We work on the assumption that the laws of physics are perfect and complete, and we are just trying to reveal them. The laws of physics could work well enough but actually be incomplete and consistent as you point out. They could even bebe crappy, bloated and buggy with lots of missing chunks, unused bloat and even errors.
... these worked well enough, but were ultimately wrong, the truth was more complex and nuanced, but now we're finding the universe is fuzzy, clumsy and possibly buggy (inflation, possible variations in c, other weirdness).
If the laws of physics emerged naturally, for example budding off from a parent universe, and subject to a process of evolution I would expect theories of everything to be 'just good enough' and barely work rather than somehow perfect and elegant and mystical. Much like the junk DNA, apendix and mens nipples that rides along with us because evolution didn't really have pressure need to get rid of them.
I would say we should by default expect a theory of everything a whole basket of seemingly clumsy unweildy theories that barely fit together - after all they only need to be just good enough for us to be here and not any better. If we expect flawless elegant unified symmetry and beauty, then we'd need to demonstrate why (without invoking God to explain etc).
Researchers have been seduced by subjectively elegant and simple equations all the way back to F=MA
Interesting. There would be a lack of tectonic activity as we know it to recycle useful elements for life through the crust (Volcanism may compensate greatly).
Extinction events do drive evolution - I think a meteor impact is good enough here.
Gliese F may have a moon like ours, which could drive tectonic activity. We can't even be sure if it's tidally locked. An impact like that which formed our moon could have imparted rotation and provided tides and some tectonic activity.
This planet could be a water world with no land surface.
Too much we don't know and too much possible!
Aren't Red Dwarf stars often unstable and known as flare stars? This would be a problem for life in the Gliese system? Or is Gliese more stable being larger than most of these?
Is there any meaningful insight into the balance of elements in the stellar system (from looking at the spectra of the star) that would help guess the composition of the rocky planets - would there be plenty of the right stuff for life? I ask because I read Gliese is 7-11 billion years old and older stars have less heavy elements, I'd guess that the system would not have the same abundance of metals and heavier elements.
Does the spectra of a star give any clues to the abundance of water in the star system? At least upper and lower bounds?
The age of Gliese star and therefore it's system is 7-11 Billion years, much older than our solar system at about 4.5 billion years. I hardly expect epic change in the 20 years you mention.
.... many times over.
Even our civilisation of 10,000 years plus is a blink of an eye.
Life mucked around with single cells for several billion years and got complex on earth only around 500 million years ago.
If a planet around Gliese spawned intellegent life it could have done so many times over. If our sun wasn't about to bake us in a few billion years and was going to stick around like Gliese (which is possibly stable up to 100s of billions of years), If conditions allowed, Earth could see many more species evolve to our level
I just won a wager with a colleague we'd find something like this in our lifetimes. My mind is still boggling.
Science FTW. Isn't it just awesome that humanity can detect something similar to size of earth tens of light years away, with methods that are highly limited and a very tiny focus of our total scientific endeavour. Queue frenzied rush on exoplanet research.
If RIM is targetting the corporate/office environment fart apps are essential
Just as people set their own names, birthdates and 'password', they will assuredly put their own home as their password.
This makes more sense as a optional authentication factor for password recovery than for the sole means of authentication.
I nominate Phil Plait for amabassador.
I think Apples walled garden approach may result in more per-user spend. But that's about it. A many times larger user base, I don't see Android's market share plateauing until it is many times that of iOS. It always makes sense to target the larger user base as a starting point (but only as a crude rule of thumb of course). This is a repeat of the Mac vs PC era and again Apple is just to selfish.
However, this time the OS competing with the Apple camp is *really good* and Android is so far ahead of everything it's not funny. Apple is being forced to eat humble pie and add features that Android pioneered and thus demonstrated Apple was wrong about, it's gotta be a sign.
Oh and the Android development community is fscking awesome.
Slashdot Posting Form v0.4 BETA. Automatically creates typical slashdot post.
/. dupe from last year /dev/null /.'s modding system
[ ] IANAL but ____
[ ] Obligatory XKCD ___
[ ] In soviet russia the _____'s YOU
[ ] There, fixed that for you
[ ] link to
[ ] sudo _____ >
[ ] Queue _____ in 3.. 2..
[ ] Bitch about
[ ] Get off my lawn
[ ] You insensitive clod!
[ ] RTFM
[ ] RTTFA
[x] Reuse my posting form joke
[x] Don't hide "Reuse my posting form joke" checkbox
Invoke:
[ ] Cory Doctrow
[ ] Richard Stallman
[ ] kdawson
[ ] Steve Jobs
[ ] Natalie Portman
while a diabetes ridden fat slob does have a choice not to eat at McDonalds.
I used to say this kind of thing, but take a look at drive thrus next time you cruise past, where are the healthy choices? There are healthy choices but not in the realm of convenient or fast food. Oh and go into a supermarket, try to find products that don't have HFCS. The fact that choice exists is nice, but it says nothing of marketting, peer pressure, and simple availability. The same applies here.
as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
*sigh* I don't believe that it's possible to design and build an AI. This is partly because the best and only thinking computers we know of (brains), were not designed at all, they evolved. In fact, to me at least, it seems that whatever underlying mathematical properties of our universe allow and drive evolution are actually fundamental to how consciousness arises in our brains. We think of our brain as computers, but in fact our universe is a computational system and we (and our brains) are self-replicating patterns of complex information. True thinking feeling conscious AI, must arise from the right initial conditions, it cannot be designed, or if design plays a role then it requires a huge amount of natural evolution in the process.
By making ever more complex systems trying to mimic the performance nuanced complexities of human behavior in order to try pass a Turing test or whatever, we're just making dumb rigid algorithims seem smart, by completely missing understanding and recreating the system that give rise to such performance by itself.
We need to develop tools that allow AI to evolve naturally within computational systems. With the right rules and enough iterations it'll happen by itself. Dare I say, it doing it all itself is necessary.
That memo's old, hating became too popular, so we're back to liking.
Configure your network as if your desktops don't have firewalls. Configure your desktops as if your network doesn't have a firewall.
Seriously, no spoof yet?
and pigeons literally drop packets.
Most of the population has enough trouble with basic sanitation, leading to thousands of preventable cases of gastric poisoning each year. Now people are going to poison or kill themselves with home cultured algae gone wrong. At best they'll poison the local waterways & wildlife when they dump their bad algae.
The is kind of why flying cars and jet packs, although feasible, haven't really taken off, pardon the pun. Drivers can barely manage turn signals let alone handle a third dimenson. People poison themselves with DIY alcohol brewing, preserves and curing gone wrong quite frequently.
Anyone considered the disposal implications here? Many local governments would not allow you to dump this stuff via sewer or storm water.
Facebook places is only for iPhone and phones that support W3 geolocation, and only available via native application or touch.facebook.com. You also actually have to explicitly 'check in' / 'check out' of places.
.... wait I'm going off topic...
It amazes the ammount of paranoid people turning it off believing it tracks their location whereever they log into face book. It's not even available worldwide completely.
From TFFBFAQ: "At this time, the Places application is available to users in the United States with mobile access to the Facebook application for iPhone or touch.facebook.com"
Even with places turned off, you only need to post "going to fiji for 6 weeks w00t" and everybody knows you're not home. It amazes me the number of people, especially young females who post "I'm home alone tonight and bored" - you can be sure I'm in contact with the really quickly to tell them how dangerous that is and if I they feel unsafe I could
I bundled a string of LED AC xmas lights to make what seems to be a 75watt equivelent light. The ~10watt LED lights were $10 in a boxing day sale bargain bin.
LED bulbs are expensive, but they can be found mass produced in other ways, and come up bargain bin electronics items that can be re-purposed.
I'm highly suprised clever geeks here haven't wired their house for DC (In some areas of world would not require you to be a registered and qualified electrician) and constructed DIY LED lighting. I could certainly purchase a box of bright white LEDs online right now and solder up something pretty cheaply.
Ultimate geek cred: Power your lighting system over the ethernet wiring you already have?
... eventually. Newton, Einstein, and one day Hawking will be. But said scientists are usually less wrong than predcessors, Galileo was merely less wrong than the Vatican.