So it's a content and distribution problem. The platform is just fine. I don't watch much TV but the few shows I do like take a month or more to make it to TV in my area and are usually edited to hell for extra ad breaks. I'm faced with a stark choice, break the law for a better product, or go without. Many movies do same day worldwide release, why has it not happened with TV?
I have to wait a few months for the latest Top Gear season to come to my country, or I can pirate the episodes, which happen to have an extra 15 minutes of footage and no ad breaks. It's ironic when the completely free service, with zero funding, ad hoc with no special infrastructure of it's own, offers a better service than the legit commercial product.
Porting between carriers and devices, in most cases, requires so little authentication it's rather disturbing. It does not require any meaningful ID of the person before proceeding or at least I'm not aware of a carrier that does.
I just think its a damned shame, that's what it is. When XP goes EOL there will be literally tens of millions of machines with frankly overpowered hardware that COULD be running Linux and offering low cost computing to the masses and instead me and every other system builder and repair guy will be scrambling for cheap Win 7 Starter and Home CALs simply because nobody will listen to us and give us a simple, easy to use, fiddly free Linux that Suzy the checkout girl can run without picking up "Bash and scripting for dummies". Is that REALLY so much to ask?
That's right. We really need something like that. These days linux stable fast reliable and has all the apps you need to get shit done. It's also a free download away, will never bother you about licencing, you don't even need to waste a DVD anymore, just use a spare usb stick. Infact, you can run the whole OS off a USB drive.
So anyone, even a newbie, could shove a distro boot disk in your computer, boot, install, and all your computing problems would be solved. It would be a fire-and forget fix for a virus infested old XP box (you know the kind), that doesn't take too much learning, and doesn't need micromanagement to maintain. You install it on your old aunty's PC, and walk out the door.
I can't put my finger on just what is going wrong. Your right, for a while it looked like it was going to be all ok and we would actually have the year of desktop linux. but WTF happend?
You know what is really really damning, right now there is an example of linux done right, of a mainstream graphical linux distro that's steamrolling over the competition and will become the #1 in it's market. It's Android. It's also coming to x86. Hell, I already have 3.2 it running on my netbook. It's much more capable than just a smartphone/tablet OS and it's early days of it's foray into the x86 world. Quite bizarrely, without much optimization it's a lot faster on anemic netbook than any major linux with any level of graphicial effects. It was also a stunningly small 86mb.iso download.
Frankly Canonical, Gnome and others should not be following the exerting Apple/Microsoft like control over design and manipulating end-user experience, because rubber stamping that method does not equal success. They should be taking a good look at what Google's done with Android's design.
Broad appeal? Gnome Shell would be a step back for any novice picking up Linux. The from-scratch learning curve has gone way up, there are things unique to Gnome shell that are not terribly discover-able. It thows away a lot of what they already know how to do with Windows or OSX machine, Gnome 2.x was familiar enough for anyone coming from one of those GUIs.
My aging parents have been happily using Ubuntu for some time, I'll be keeping their machine with a Gnome 2.x based LTS until Gnome Shell is fixed.
That's a 11% death rate. This is talking about 50% and in a modern world more than 27% would be exposed, I'd imagine. that's assuming it isn't anymore infectious. We were actually damn lucky swine flu wasn't more deadly.
It performs better than Gnome 2 on my netbook (dual core atom, 1gb, GMA3150). It's not necessarily more lightweight but the rendering is faster and that's worth it for a similar footprint. Gnome 2 reveals it's lagginess on low end hardware.
Aside from that it's a step back in usability on a laptop.
Mint has "fixed" a lot thats broken by design about the new Gnome. But I have a question to direct at the Gnome 3 / Unity developers. Why the sudden corporate-like totalitarian control over the UI? Is this a misguided attempt to emulate the meteoric success of iOS and Android by just copying the Apple/Google/Microsoft corporate control over how users use the desktop?
I find this another symptom of "Free" software that's open in source becoming more and more closed in run-time.
I would agree WP7 was actually very innovative and a considerable leap ahead of Andorid and iOS, it hasn't done so well largely because of a glutted market.
But until someone comes out with an actual privacy-enhanced handset, the kindg of privacy in the mobile world is a rooted Android handset.
Consider that a fair few features pioneered by the modding community for Android are now standard to many handsets (My SGS2 has tethering, direct wifi transfer, font customization, all things I was playing with on a rooted G2 years before mainstream picked them up). And trailing the back of the pack following along you have Apple quietly introducing features to iOS that Android had pioneered and had for some time. (Last straw being copying Android's notification system almost exactly. Who's slavishly copying who?).
I would add that CyanogenMod has a "incognito mode" privacy feature. I would also add nothing really beats rooted Android with a short list of tweaks for privacy. It's also not as hard as you think, there's a lot of excellent work done by the modding community to make rooting relatively straightforward and a lot of the tweaks as simple as side-loading a simple app. It's pretty cool because it makes a lot of it quite of nerdy powerful things accessible to a wider range of people.
Dare I say the modding community for Android is awesome.
The summary headline is not all that wrong. They did find a correlation. Correlation is not proof of causation, so says the standard line. But that's not actually true. Isn't absence of correlation evidence against causation?
Indeed finding a such a correlation would be the test of the hypothesis that
learning causes brain structure change. I think the scientific term the researchers would use is "duh".
By no means conclusive or accurate to say it's actually causal, but it is the mostly likely explanation?
It'd be news if the researchers found no difference in brain structure of gamers. That would be evidence against a whole raft of claims about what video games allegedly do to us. Certainly absence of correlation is evidence against causation?
How long until they figure out how to clone a phone? They already can do this:)
Besides, why would an Android user want to goto the trouble? I'm informed (rabidly and often) that Android phones already have superior features and that Siri is merely a clone with fancy marketing.
Vlingo for Android is essentially the same thing, but ultimately is free and available for some low end affordable devices. It's even better in some regards, most notably a lack of smart ass answers. But this is kind of redundant App, as Android has voice control integrated into the OS for a long time now.
Siri is nothing novel or new, nor an Apple innovation (purchased start-up), the only thing it is a masterpiece of marketing. Few people seem to be aware there alternatives.
Microsoft actually listened to it's users and fixed up a list of issues with Vista to make 7. Ultimately the bottom line speaks rather loudly to any business, even one as high and mighty as Microsoft, they HAD to make Windows 7 good, and whaddaya know if it was (yeah even if it was late, and what Vista should have been). Their users got through to them.
Canonical, doesn't have much of a bottom line, and I don't really see Unity and Gnome Shell developers ending their war on their user base.
Having had a lot of fun with XMBC, WMC, Boxee and even MythTV for my HTPC tinkering over there years I have some insight in to how such a smart TV should function, and have to point out that....
They are all absolutely getting it wrong.
In fact such smart media centre PVRs are woefully lacking. The built-in stuff in TVs is even worse. If I can get some either old and free or new and dirt cheap PC gear and shove a Live CD in it and have a better product by lots of measure then something is desperately wrong.
As always it doesn't seem any of the designers of these products have designed their product in a vacuum and not had a look at what enthusiasts are doing with their own HTPCs.
Regardless of of what everyone thinks would work or not work, we must not forget one fact: the status quo is not good enough and by a lot of measures a failure.
It's really not a big fuss down here. Since september 1st there has only been a few handfuls of notices dished out, to only high profile artists that make millions for a couple of big labels (Rhianna is signed to Sony Music OTTOMH) are getting a few notices sent out. Largely due to the $25 dollar fee to do so, which has prevented litigious rights-holders from sending thousands of notices as the would if it was like $2.
It's also only easy to track peer 2 peer that would likely invoke the infringment notices, being BitTorrent without doing terribly much to hide yourself and services like LimeWire, also rather easy to track what you are doing. So it's also only the easy targets.
I can't count the list of other ways to pirate movies and music, many much less traceable, and can confirm that people have indeed switched to these, if were not using them already.
Add to that it's only three strikes PER rightsholder, and each warning expires after 9 months. As an IT guy when people are asking for my advice, I say if your not downloading much, your downloading obscure shit and not whatever the most popular Miley Cryus torrent is on some public tracker, your very unlikely to get a notice, and when you do, just avoid that rightsholder till the notice expires.
Also if the rights-holder has no history of suing anyone, your even more unlikely to get a notice. NZ also being small fry economically, it's also not terrible lucrative to go after pirates.
By shear fortunate accident of incompetent lawmaking, it's rather neutered and not causing a huge problem... yet. It could have been worse. The whole guilt on accusation is a stilly bit shitty of course. NZers have a way of duly igorning BS laws and carrying on doing what they do.
But I worry, NZ has lost it's testicular fortitude of late. In the 80s the French showed up in the south pacific wanting to test nuclear weapons, even 3000km from New Zealand, the response from NZ was strong and we ultimately suggested an alternate location they could shove their bombs. Hence NZ passing Nuclear-Free laws. If we still had stones like that, we would have told the foreign corporates somewhere dark to keep their law, and perhaps passed a law making piracy all but legal. Shame.
We'll get rid of this stupid law when we grow some stones back.
Accuracy hard to achieve. You'd have to carefully track the latency between the webcams image and the software timestamping the video data. Not an easy coding excercise, and would require calibration with accurate timing equipment. This latency also better be stable. I don't know too much about using linux for realtime work but I have heard it has some latency issues at the kernel level that causes trouble for audio pro's.
If you want to do this with a web cam and a bit of code on a linux machine, well 30fps video gets you a lower bound of 33ms time resolution. That's before the camera feeds to the USB data channel, then any gamer will tell you USB has some latency, and then software has to process the image data. High powered laptop and a good camera might be able to do all this as low as 100ms before it can timestamp the data. Image processing for identifying the vehicle can then happen at any time. This would need to be carefully accounted for in deciding who wins a race.
Proper race timing needs to be 3 decimal places, at 200kph (124mph) a 1/1000th of a second ammounts to 6cm of difference. Races are really won and lost on as little as this and often the timing is done even finer.
If someone actually did manage to stumble in to a way to do it. Nobody would believe them. Therefore even if it is scientifically possible, a legion of crackpots have made sure mankind will never achieve it.
Worked in a start up for a brief while. It really was a whole other world compared to the average cubical farm IT office. It's a bit more than installing some retro arcade machines, designer couches and having a bar serving liqour all day. It's all about people. There was a certain kind of person in the work place and the work place was conducive to a certain kind of creative think-on-your-feet attitude. Without all the process and procedure of a corporate IT, there was a lot less paper pushing and a lot more getting stuff done for the client. The big boss even had a "making work is not making money" policy and encouraged sparing use of conventional administrative process. Everyone was motivated, stuff got done. It all was a bit of an ad hoc mess that would not scale well to a larger office with some adjustment, but it was bloody brilliant.
If you want to have your large enterprise or government as agile and efficienct as a start up you need a complete overhaul of how people think and act in your organisational culture. It's not impossible but it's bloody difficult, as you have to throw out 90% of how everything is done right now.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's a content and distribution problem. The platform is just fine. I don't watch much TV but the few shows I do like take a month or more to make it to TV in my area and are usually edited to hell for extra ad breaks. I'm faced with a stark choice, break the law for a better product, or go without. Many movies do same day worldwide release, why has it not happened with TV?
I have to wait a few months for the latest Top Gear season to come to my country, or I can pirate the episodes, which happen to have an extra 15 minutes of footage and no ad breaks. It's ironic when the completely free service, with zero funding, ad hoc with no special infrastructure of it's own, offers a better service than the legit commercial product.
Porting between carriers and devices, in most cases, requires so little authentication it's rather disturbing. It does not require any meaningful ID of the person before proceeding or at least I'm not aware of a carrier that does.
I just think its a damned shame, that's what it is. When XP goes EOL there will be literally tens of millions of machines with frankly overpowered hardware that COULD be running Linux and offering low cost computing to the masses and instead me and every other system builder and repair guy will be scrambling for cheap Win 7 Starter and Home CALs simply because nobody will listen to us and give us a simple, easy to use, fiddly free Linux that Suzy the checkout girl can run without picking up "Bash and scripting for dummies". Is that REALLY so much to ask?
That's right. We really need something like that. These days linux stable fast reliable and has all the apps you need to get shit done. It's also a free download away, will never bother you about licencing, you don't even need to waste a DVD anymore, just use a spare usb stick. Infact, you can run the whole OS off a USB drive.
.iso download.
So anyone, even a newbie, could shove a distro boot disk in your computer, boot, install, and all your computing problems would be solved. It would be a fire-and forget fix for a virus infested old XP box (you know the kind), that doesn't take too much learning, and doesn't need micromanagement to maintain. You install it on your old aunty's PC, and walk out the door.
I can't put my finger on just what is going wrong. Your right, for a while it looked like it was going to be all ok and we would actually have the year of desktop linux. but WTF happend?
You know what is really really damning, right now there is an example of linux done right, of a mainstream graphical linux distro that's steamrolling over the competition and will become the #1 in it's market. It's Android. It's also coming to x86. Hell, I already have 3.2 it running on my netbook. It's much more capable than just a smartphone/tablet OS and it's early days of it's foray into the x86 world. Quite bizarrely, without much optimization it's a lot faster on anemic netbook than any major linux with any level of graphicial effects. It was also a stunningly small 86mb
Frankly Canonical, Gnome and others should not be following the exerting Apple/Microsoft like control over design and manipulating end-user experience, because rubber stamping that method does not equal success. They should be taking a good look at what Google's done with Android's design.
Broad appeal? Gnome Shell would be a step back for any novice picking up Linux. The from-scratch learning curve has gone way up, there are things unique to Gnome shell that are not terribly discover-able. It thows away a lot of what they already know how to do with Windows or OSX machine, Gnome 2.x was familiar enough for anyone coming from one of those GUIs.
My aging parents have been happily using Ubuntu for some time, I'll be keeping their machine with a Gnome 2.x based LTS until Gnome Shell is fixed.
Don't you mean the solution to Fermi's Paradox?
That's a 11% death rate. This is talking about 50% and in a modern world more than 27% would be exposed, I'd imagine. that's assuming it isn't anymore infectious. We were actually damn lucky swine flu wasn't more deadly.
It performs better than Gnome 2 on my netbook (dual core atom, 1gb, GMA3150). It's not necessarily more lightweight but the rendering is faster and that's worth it for a similar footprint. Gnome 2 reveals it's lagginess on low end hardware.
Aside from that it's a step back in usability on a laptop.
Mint has "fixed" a lot thats broken by design about the new Gnome. But I have a question to direct at the Gnome 3 / Unity developers. Why the sudden corporate-like totalitarian control over the UI? Is this a misguided attempt to emulate the meteoric success of iOS and Android by just copying the Apple/Google/Microsoft corporate control over how users use the desktop?
I find this another symptom of "Free" software that's open in source becoming more and more closed in run-time.
Hardly good news if the best case scenario is 1.7 instead of 2.0
it's still light years beyond Android and iOS.
I would agree WP7 was actually very innovative and a considerable leap ahead of Andorid and iOS, it hasn't done so well largely because of a glutted market.
But until someone comes out with an actual privacy-enhanced handset, the kindg of privacy in the mobile world is a rooted Android handset.
Consider that a fair few features pioneered by the modding community for Android are now standard to many handsets (My SGS2 has tethering, direct wifi transfer, font customization, all things I was playing with on a rooted G2 years before mainstream picked them up). And trailing the back of the pack following along you have Apple quietly introducing features to iOS that Android had pioneered and had for some time. (Last straw being copying Android's notification system almost exactly. Who's slavishly copying who?).
I would add that CyanogenMod has a "incognito mode" privacy feature. I would also add nothing really beats rooted Android with a short list of tweaks for privacy. It's also not as hard as you think, there's a lot of excellent work done by the modding community to make rooting relatively straightforward and a lot of the tweaks as simple as side-loading a simple app. It's pretty cool because it makes a lot of it quite of nerdy powerful things accessible to a wider range of people.
Dare I say the modding community for Android is awesome.
The summary headline is not all that wrong. They did find a correlation. Correlation is not proof of causation, so says the standard line. But that's not actually true. Isn't absence of correlation evidence against causation?
Indeed finding a such a correlation would be the test of the hypothesis that learning causes brain structure change. I think the scientific term the researchers would use is "duh".
By no means conclusive or accurate to say it's actually causal, but it is the mostly likely explanation?
It'd be news if the researchers found no difference in brain structure of gamers. That would be evidence against a whole raft of claims about what video games allegedly do to us. Certainly absence of correlation is evidence against causation?
Carbon mostly. Is there anything carbon can't do?
How long until they figure out how to clone a phone? They already can do this :)
Besides, why would an Android user want to goto the trouble? I'm informed (rabidly and often) that Android phones already have superior features and that Siri is merely a clone with fancy marketing.
Vlingo for Android is essentially the same thing, but ultimately is free and available for some low end affordable devices. It's even better in some regards, most notably a lack of smart ass answers. But this is kind of redundant App, as Android has voice control integrated into the OS for a long time now.
Siri is nothing novel or new, nor an Apple innovation (purchased start-up), the only thing it is a masterpiece of marketing. Few people seem to be aware there alternatives.
Microsoft actually listened to it's users and fixed up a list of issues with Vista to make 7. Ultimately the bottom line speaks rather loudly to any business, even one as high and mighty as Microsoft, they HAD to make Windows 7 good, and whaddaya know if it was (yeah even if it was late, and what Vista should have been). Their users got through to them.
Canonical, doesn't have much of a bottom line, and I don't really see Unity and Gnome Shell developers ending their war on their user base.
Having had a lot of fun with XMBC, WMC, Boxee and even MythTV for my HTPC tinkering over there years I have some insight in to how such a smart TV should function, and have to point out that....
They are all absolutely getting it wrong.
In fact such smart media centre PVRs are woefully lacking. The built-in stuff in TVs is even worse. If I can get some either old and free or new and dirt cheap PC gear and shove a Live CD in it and have a better product by lots of measure then something is desperately wrong.
As always it doesn't seem any of the designers of these products have designed their product in a vacuum and not had a look at what enthusiasts are doing with their own HTPCs.
Still won't shut up skeptics.
Regardless of of what everyone thinks would work or not work, we must not forget one fact: the status quo is not good enough and by a lot of measures a failure.
It's really not a big fuss down here. Since september 1st there has only been a few handfuls of notices dished out, to only high profile artists that make millions for a couple of big labels (Rhianna is signed to Sony Music OTTOMH) are getting a few notices sent out. Largely due to the $25 dollar fee to do so, which has prevented litigious rights-holders from sending thousands of notices as the would if it was like $2. It's also only easy to track peer 2 peer that would likely invoke the infringment notices, being BitTorrent without doing terribly much to hide yourself and services like LimeWire, also rather easy to track what you are doing. So it's also only the easy targets.
I can't count the list of other ways to pirate movies and music, many much less traceable, and can confirm that people have indeed switched to these, if were not using them already.
Add to that it's only three strikes PER rightsholder, and each warning expires after 9 months. As an IT guy when people are asking for my advice, I say if your not downloading much, your downloading obscure shit and not whatever the most popular Miley Cryus torrent is on some public tracker, your very unlikely to get a notice, and when you do, just avoid that rightsholder till the notice expires.
Also if the rights-holder has no history of suing anyone, your even more unlikely to get a notice. NZ also being small fry economically, it's also not terrible lucrative to go after pirates.
By shear fortunate accident of incompetent lawmaking, it's rather neutered and not causing a huge problem... yet. It could have been worse. The whole guilt on accusation is a stilly bit shitty of course. NZers have a way of duly igorning BS laws and carrying on doing what they do.
But I worry, NZ has lost it's testicular fortitude of late. In the 80s the French showed up in the south pacific wanting to test nuclear weapons, even 3000km from New Zealand, the response from NZ was strong and we ultimately suggested an alternate location they could shove their bombs. Hence NZ passing Nuclear-Free laws. If we still had stones like that, we would have told the foreign corporates somewhere dark to keep their law, and perhaps passed a law making piracy all but legal. Shame.
We'll get rid of this stupid law when we grow some stones back.
Accuracy hard to achieve. You'd have to carefully track the latency between the webcams image and the software timestamping the video data. Not an easy coding excercise, and would require calibration with accurate timing equipment. This latency also better be stable. I don't know too much about using linux for realtime work but I have heard it has some latency issues at the kernel level that causes trouble for audio pro's.
If you want to do this with a web cam and a bit of code on a linux machine, well 30fps video gets you a lower bound of 33ms time resolution. That's before the camera feeds to the USB data channel, then any gamer will tell you USB has some latency, and then software has to process the image data. High powered laptop and a good camera might be able to do all this as low as 100ms before it can timestamp the data. Image processing for identifying the vehicle can then happen at any time. This would need to be carefully accounted for in deciding who wins a race.
Proper race timing needs to be 3 decimal places, at 200kph (124mph) a 1/1000th of a second ammounts to 6cm of difference. Races are really won and lost on as little as this and often the timing is done even finer.
If someone actually did manage to stumble in to a way to do it. Nobody would believe them. Therefore even if it is scientifically possible, a legion of crackpots have made sure mankind will never achieve it.
Worked in a start up for a brief while. It really was a whole other world compared to the average cubical farm IT office. It's a bit more than installing some retro arcade machines, designer couches and having a bar serving liqour all day. It's all about people. There was a certain kind of person in the work place and the work place was conducive to a certain kind of creative think-on-your-feet attitude. Without all the process and procedure of a corporate IT, there was a lot less paper pushing and a lot more getting stuff done for the client. The big boss even had a "making work is not making money" policy and encouraged sparing use of conventional administrative process. Everyone was motivated, stuff got done. It all was a bit of an ad hoc mess that would not scale well to a larger office with some adjustment, but it was bloody brilliant.
If you want to have your large enterprise or government as agile and efficienct as a start up you need a complete overhaul of how people think and act in your organisational culture. It's not impossible but it's bloody difficult, as you have to throw out 90% of how everything is done right now.
Android has had voice control since the dawn of time too. Siri is just a front end with a name and wolfram alpha search results.
You missed the point. Iris shows that Siri is nothing special. The difference between the two being polish.