Ever heard the expression "rats leaving a sinking ship"? When a program is in serious trouble, the head guy often bails just before he is fired or demoted. His departure signals the seriousness of the problems with the program. It has nothing to do with a shortage of PMs.
WinMo's market share is shrinking quickly. It's around 13% versus over 20% when the iPhone started shipping. It's losing share to Apple, Palm and RIM. The lack of an idealized phone really is a big deal. Most consumers don't care about the O/S. They care about the phone, it's features and applications and it's "coolness". Each in their own way Apple, Pre and RIM have done a better job in large part because they control the hardware design. After all, cell phone users don't go to the store to buy an O/S. They go to buy a "phone".
Interestingly, as someone else pointed out, WinMo is far more "developer friendly" than Android, Blackberry and, for the moment, Pre. Market buzz and customers willing and eager to buy apps - a market and the potential for profit - is what attracts developers first and foremost.
And don't forget the huge potential of better pre and post natal care and preventative care for children. In the U.S. our "other half" in rural areas and in big cities start life with a huge health disadvantage.
This isn't diplomacy with quid pro quo. They already know you are there. They would have done that when you arrived if that' what they were up to. Since they didn't they are trying to avoid detection either until you go away or until you step into their ambush zone.
A lot you know about counter insurgency. First of all they generally already know you are there especially if they are enemy combatants. If you approached with a lot of stealth, you wouldn't use a throwable robot if you had one that could scoot in on the ground. You could even just use fiber and peak around. Special ops guys might have that but Marines and regular soldiers aren't usually that stealthy.
Throwing means that you have an obstacle or barrier of some sort. Now, if you are one side of a wall at night and you hear voices on the other do you peak around and say "howdy!"? If they are bad guys are even a farmer with a weapon who is worried about bandits you'll get your head blown off. On the other hand if you just fling some grenades over then you might kill a room full of kids. If you throw a robot in and they are not combatants you'll find out without killing anyone. If they are combatants and throw the robot back then you just toss some grenades in return. They'd probably hope you didn't know for sure they were there so the could surprise you so they might stay very still and quiet and hope they are not detected.
The other situation is that no one is there but the place is booby trapped. Your robot may spot them or even set them off. That's much better than you or your buddies accidently setting them off. Just knowing that no one is in the room can let you to decide to bypass it or to focus on booby traps also being concerned about someone hiding there.
I didn't say that motion detection was used when stationary. Read it again.
"If you were using standard GPSs"? What do you mean? We were using Trimble GPS chip sets in ruggadized PCs with an external GPS antenna. We had 6 receivers. It didn't take a week because we used some clever software along with additional data such as digital maps. If you have a digital map and you can either position yourself on a known location or point to one with a range finder, you can get a pretty good coordinate. Add a GPS that has sat on or within range of a well known location like an intersection for 30 minutes and you would have very good accuracy. When in motion in a vehicle driving on a road marked on your digital map you can ignore locations that don't fall on the road. Combine that with motion sensors and a known starting point and again, you can also get pretty good data.
Not ALL Republicans are anything but Republicans. However, if you aren't aware that the Republican party makes a lot of noise about how bad government regulation is then you aren't paying attention. It's a key part of their platform. The clear tendency has been for the Republicans to claim to want less regulation and the Democrats to advocate more. Now I question the sincerity and consistency of most of the politicians of both parties, but if you run across Joe Sixpack and he identifies himself as a Republican, ask him what he thinks about "government regulation".
I believe that the terms accuracy and availability are correctly applied here. How long does a cell phone user or car sit in one spot waiting for a GPS reading to stabilize? They don't. The faster they can get to a reasonably accurate reading then the more accurate and reliable their subsequent position readings will be as they are in motion. Also, if you write your software correctly, you can in fact incorporate cell phone triangulation in addition to you GPS samples and what offsets your motion detection gives you.
Not exactly. There were substantial improvements in accuracy obtained in the 1990's - before SA was turned off. That was primarily due to improvements in software. Incorporating motion detection improve location accuracy in moving vehicles. I was working on such systems (for utilities) in those days. We also used laser range finders so we could position ourselves in a sunny intersection, wait until our location was stabilized and then shoot a number of targets (e.g. poles) in line of sight and record their locations. We had sub-meter accuracy doing this.
GPS works by picking up multiple GPS satellites and then calculating an approximate location. It continually samples the incoming signals. The more satellites you can pick up at one time the better. Unfortunately if you are moving or under trees , tunnels or other cover then you will pick up fewer satellites and your accuracy will plummet. By the early 90's GPS navigation on vehicles was supplemented by inertial systems (motion) in order to improve accuracy at every given point. So the system would get a really good fix at one point and then use your motion to approximate the subsequent points you'd pass through until you get another good SAT fix. In the meantime you might intermittently get inferior data from a subset of available satellites which would also contribute their two cents. Cell phone triangulation just adds to this data and improves your accuracy and availability.
The original civilian available GPS was only accurate to about 50 meters - unless you sat still in an open area for awhile. Improvements in software and inertial guidance and now cell towers have dramatically improved accuracy even while in motion.
Wrong. The iPhone 3G and 3Gs and the Pre have real GPS antennae. They are getting satellite navigation augmented by cell tower triangulation and motion for improved accuracy. It's SAT Nav alright.
Yours is a ridiculous and arrogant rebuttal. Equating changes in the definition of "open" to human rights? Were you hit in the head as a child or what? Raven's history of the definition is accurate. I'm old enough to have lived though it as an IT professional.
What is with this "old bodies"? Are you a kid? Do you think that everything older that 10 years is irrelevant? I hate to break it to you but almost everything you use in the personal computer field comes from ideas and inventions much older than 10 years. Of course it's easier if you can dismiss things as irrelevant because that means there is less you will have to learn, doesn't it?
"Dominated by corporate interests"? So who dominates the EU and the governments of Europe? Do European corporations have little or no say? Are European corporations necessarily worse than European politicians and political parties? Are technology corporations necessarily less technically astute than your average politician?
What finally gets me is your last paragraph. What an arrogant bastard! Who are you to tell the world what is or is not acceptable? Who are you to tell the world what words or definitions they can use? Who are you to summarily dismiss some 40 years of IT? Raven supported his point with a set of verifiable facts and your response is does nothing to refute anything Raven wrote.
Excuse me my good sir, but my iPod seems to have exploded? Would you be so kind as to replace it? Oh, and since I was sitting on it at the time, I'm also missing some naughty bits and it hurts when I have a bowel movement. Would Apple please consider providing me with some medical care or a band aid? Pretty please?
Gee, you must be a self made billionaire with all this business insight you have. Apple doesn't look for market share. A lot of companies such as Honda and BMW, don't. Others, like GM and Toyota do seek to maximize market share. Would you rather invest in GM or Honda? Apple looks to maximize its ROI and that in part means sustaining relatively high margins. They've been wildly successful at doing that since Jobs returned. If Apple played the same game as Dell or Microsoft, they'd not be as successful as they are. They'd be another Dell or Microsoft or they'd be out of business.
As to what is "good for the consumers". That's not what major corporations are about. Their job is to maximize profits/shareholder value. There are many strategies for accomplishing that. Microsoft and Dell have theirs and Apple has its. Doing what is "good for consumers" is sometimes a byproduct, but that is not their primary goal. It's the market and the "invisible hand" that are supposed to deliver an end result that is "good for the consumers".
Business and markets are not about morality or altruism. They are about return on investment. The theory is that this will end up being good for "everyone" and sometimes it works out that way, but it's not the responsibility of the participating concerns to forego their own economic self-interests in order to accomplish that.
Why is this flamebait? He makes a perfectly valid point. There are tens of thousands of apps and we only hear about a few that have problems getting approved. That's a fact to ponder. The vast majority of applications seem to get into the store with few if any problems and what seems to be only a few run into serious roadblocks. It provides some balance to the post. If the parent is flamebait then what does that make the post? Instead of modding it down, why don't you just respond with a relevant comment? Does someone have hard evidence (not just anecdotes) that this is a serious systemic problem?
I have an iPhone - bought a 3Gs in June - and I agree with a post below that points out the a lot of these apps are pretty poor and useless, but that's besides the point. Most apps on most platforms are pretty poor and useless. The big argument that Mac and Linux users always get from Windows aficionados is that Windows has zillions of apps and we always respond that it's quality not quantity that matters.
First of all it is you who are talking about "religionists" whatever they are supposed to be. Not me. It is you that are making sweeping generalizations about a very large group of people few of whom you've ever met, not me. So it is you that has an ideal example that I've been contradicting by saying that not all religious people are bad, intolerant, or whatever. You are committing the fallacy.
In the post to which you are responding I made a statement that in other words said that there are people who claim to believe one thing, but preach another and that you should not confuse God or the teachings of a particular prophet with what some of their so-called followers do. Christ preached love and tolerance. If someone claims to be a Christian preaches hate and intolerance then they are a fraud because they are directly contradicting the very teachings they profess to believe. That's not an indictment of religion or God, it's an indictment of some people.
The take away I get from this entire topic is that many of the posters to this thread, like yourself, would be perfectly happy living in a country that banned blasphemy or other forms of speech as long as you were the ones defining it. You are completely intolerant of any opinion about religion that isn't entirely negative.
You by your existence are evidence. The earth is evidence. The laws of physics and what we continue to learn about them are evidence. We exist now and at another time we did not. We were created. The question is how. Science continues to bring us closer to an understanding that the enormous complexity of all that we know or postulate exist can be explained by a relatively simple set of things and relationships. That is not scientific proof by any means but it is evidence. We know from our experience that creating complex and powerful things from a few simple things requires considerable intelligence on our part. So, it is plausible that the creator is intelligent beyond our comprehension. Again, it is not proof. It is evidence open to your interpretation. To say that it is more reasonable to deny the existence of an intelligent creator than it is to believe there is one is silly. Neither can be proven. One provides some sort of explanation and the other just avoids the question.
You clearly don't understand what you've read. That analogy is off. Being a Scotsman is by birth. You are or your aren't. It's not a belief system that you choose. (You may attribute qualities to Scotsmen, but that's the fallacy.) If you claim adherence to a belief system and then your consistently act contrary to it, I'd say that's good evidence that you don't really believe in what you say you do.
It's kind of like when slashdotters claim that they hate religious people because they are all intolerant bigots.
The ones who exist now are certainly overwhelmingly like this. Just look at Sarah Palin.
Are "certainly"? And your evidence is what? Opinion polls take in the U.S. show that you are wrong about the vast majority of practicing Christians and Jews. I'd bet you don't know any personally and your contact with them is limited to what you see in the media or the ones who knock on your door to offer you some of their literature.
You've provided me with plenty of evidence of your own intolerance and bigotry. What makes you better than Palin? Nothing from what I can see here.
Most agnostics I know actually believe that it is likely that God or the Creator exists. What they are not sure of is the nature of God and God's relationship (if any) with Man. Is God good, bad, or indifferent?
They are not agnostics though, they are religious.
If they were religious they would be certain that God exists. What makes them agnostic is the word "likely". Big difference.
Atheism requires at least as much faith as a belief in God. There is evidence of creation all around us and there is much evidence that can be plausibly linked to an intelligent creator. To ignore all that and say God does not exist is an act of faith. Your post reveals that you have a lot in common with the worst of the fundamentalists with your intolerance, bigotry and absolute certainty.
Most agnostics I know actually believe that it is likely that God or the Creator exists. What they are not sure of is the nature of God and God's relationship (if any) with Man. Is God good, bad, or indifferent? That seems like a reasonable position to me. It's not arrogant or intolerant either.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard the expression "rats leaving a sinking ship"? When a program is in serious trouble, the head guy often bails just before he is fired or demoted. His departure signals the seriousness of the problems with the program. It has nothing to do with a shortage of PMs.
RTFA, It does.
WinMo's market share is shrinking quickly. It's around 13% versus over 20% when the iPhone started shipping. It's losing share to Apple, Palm and RIM. The lack of an idealized phone really is a big deal. Most consumers don't care about the O/S. They care about the phone, it's features and applications and it's "coolness". Each in their own way Apple, Pre and RIM have done a better job in large part because they control the hardware design. After all, cell phone users don't go to the store to buy an O/S. They go to buy a "phone". Interestingly, as someone else pointed out, WinMo is far more "developer friendly" than Android, Blackberry and, for the moment, Pre. Market buzz and customers willing and eager to buy apps - a market and the potential for profit - is what attracts developers first and foremost.
I wish I had some mod points to give you. Spot on.
And don't forget the huge potential of better pre and post natal care and preventative care for children. In the U.S. our "other half" in rural areas and in big cities start life with a huge health disadvantage.
Yeah, and I've got 640k of ram. All I'll ever need.
This isn't diplomacy with quid pro quo. They already know you are there. They would have done that when you arrived if that' what they were up to. Since they didn't they are trying to avoid detection either until you go away or until you step into their ambush zone.
A lot you know about counter insurgency. First of all they generally already know you are there especially if they are enemy combatants. If you approached with a lot of stealth, you wouldn't use a throwable robot if you had one that could scoot in on the ground. You could even just use fiber and peak around. Special ops guys might have that but Marines and regular soldiers aren't usually that stealthy.
Throwing means that you have an obstacle or barrier of some sort. Now, if you are one side of a wall at night and you hear voices on the other do you peak around and say "howdy!"? If they are bad guys are even a farmer with a weapon who is worried about bandits you'll get your head blown off. On the other hand if you just fling some grenades over then you might kill a room full of kids. If you throw a robot in and they are not combatants you'll find out without killing anyone. If they are combatants and throw the robot back then you just toss some grenades in return. They'd probably hope you didn't know for sure they were there so the could surprise you so they might stay very still and quiet and hope they are not detected.
The other situation is that no one is there but the place is booby trapped. Your robot may spot them or even set them off. That's much better than you or your buddies accidently setting them off. Just knowing that no one is in the room can let you to decide to bypass it or to focus on booby traps also being concerned about someone hiding there.
I didn't say that motion detection was used when stationary. Read it again.
"If you were using standard GPSs"? What do you mean? We were using Trimble GPS chip sets in ruggadized PCs with an external GPS antenna. We had 6 receivers. It didn't take a week because we used some clever software along with additional data such as digital maps. If you have a digital map and you can either position yourself on a known location or point to one with a range finder, you can get a pretty good coordinate. Add a GPS that has sat on or within range of a well known location like an intersection for 30 minutes and you would have very good accuracy. When in motion in a vehicle driving on a road marked on your digital map you can ignore locations that don't fall on the road. Combine that with motion sensors and a known starting point and again, you can also get pretty good data.
Math and software are pretty powerful tools.
Not ALL Republicans are anything but Republicans. However, if you aren't aware that the Republican party makes a lot of noise about how bad government regulation is then you aren't paying attention. It's a key part of their platform. The clear tendency has been for the Republicans to claim to want less regulation and the Democrats to advocate more. Now I question the sincerity and consistency of most of the politicians of both parties, but if you run across Joe Sixpack and he identifies himself as a Republican, ask him what he thinks about "government regulation".
I believe that the terms accuracy and availability are correctly applied here. How long does a cell phone user or car sit in one spot waiting for a GPS reading to stabilize? They don't. The faster they can get to a reasonably accurate reading then the more accurate and reliable their subsequent position readings will be as they are in motion. Also, if you write your software correctly, you can in fact incorporate cell phone triangulation in addition to you GPS samples and what offsets your motion detection gives you.
Not exactly. There were substantial improvements in accuracy obtained in the 1990's - before SA was turned off. That was primarily due to improvements in software. Incorporating motion detection improve location accuracy in moving vehicles. I was working on such systems (for utilities) in those days. We also used laser range finders so we could position ourselves in a sunny intersection, wait until our location was stabilized and then shoot a number of targets (e.g. poles) in line of sight and record their locations. We had sub-meter accuracy doing this.
GPS works by picking up multiple GPS satellites and then calculating an approximate location. It continually samples the incoming signals. The more satellites you can pick up at one time the better. Unfortunately if you are moving or under trees , tunnels or other cover then you will pick up fewer satellites and your accuracy will plummet. By the early 90's GPS navigation on vehicles was supplemented by inertial systems (motion) in order to improve accuracy at every given point. So the system would get a really good fix at one point and then use your motion to approximate the subsequent points you'd pass through until you get another good SAT fix. In the meantime you might intermittently get inferior data from a subset of available satellites which would also contribute their two cents. Cell phone triangulation just adds to this data and improves your accuracy and availability.
The original civilian available GPS was only accurate to about 50 meters - unless you sat still in an open area for awhile. Improvements in software and inertial guidance and now cell towers have dramatically improved accuracy even while in motion.
Wrong. The iPhone 3G and 3Gs and the Pre have real GPS antennae. They are getting satellite navigation augmented by cell tower triangulation and motion for improved accuracy. It's SAT Nav alright.
I'm confused, I've been watching some videos and reading stories on the Onion's site. This story just fit right in.
Yours is a ridiculous and arrogant rebuttal. Equating changes in the definition of "open" to human rights? Were you hit in the head as a child or what? Raven's history of the definition is accurate. I'm old enough to have lived though it as an IT professional.
What is with this "old bodies"? Are you a kid? Do you think that everything older that 10 years is irrelevant? I hate to break it to you but almost everything you use in the personal computer field comes from ideas and inventions much older than 10 years. Of course it's easier if you can dismiss things as irrelevant because that means there is less you will have to learn, doesn't it?
"Dominated by corporate interests"? So who dominates the EU and the governments of Europe? Do European corporations have little or no say? Are European corporations necessarily worse than European politicians and political parties? Are technology corporations necessarily less technically astute than your average politician?
What finally gets me is your last paragraph. What an arrogant bastard! Who are you to tell the world what is or is not acceptable? Who are you to tell the world what words or definitions they can use? Who are you to summarily dismiss some 40 years of IT? Raven supported his point with a set of verifiable facts and your response is does nothing to refute anything Raven wrote.
Excuse me my good sir, but my iPod seems to have exploded? Would you be so kind as to replace it? Oh, and since I was sitting on it at the time, I'm also missing some naughty bits and it hurts when I have a bowel movement. Would Apple please consider providing me with some medical care or a band aid? Pretty please?
Gee, you must be a self made billionaire with all this business insight you have. Apple doesn't look for market share. A lot of companies such as Honda and BMW, don't. Others, like GM and Toyota do seek to maximize market share. Would you rather invest in GM or Honda? Apple looks to maximize its ROI and that in part means sustaining relatively high margins. They've been wildly successful at doing that since Jobs returned. If Apple played the same game as Dell or Microsoft, they'd not be as successful as they are. They'd be another Dell or Microsoft or they'd be out of business.
As to what is "good for the consumers". That's not what major corporations are about. Their job is to maximize profits/shareholder value. There are many strategies for accomplishing that. Microsoft and Dell have theirs and Apple has its. Doing what is "good for consumers" is sometimes a byproduct, but that is not their primary goal. It's the market and the "invisible hand" that are supposed to deliver an end result that is "good for the consumers".
Business and markets are not about morality or altruism. They are about return on investment. The theory is that this will end up being good for "everyone" and sometimes it works out that way, but it's not the responsibility of the participating concerns to forego their own economic self-interests in order to accomplish that.
Why is this flamebait? He makes a perfectly valid point. There are tens of thousands of apps and we only hear about a few that have problems getting approved. That's a fact to ponder. The vast majority of applications seem to get into the store with few if any problems and what seems to be only a few run into serious roadblocks. It provides some balance to the post. If the parent is flamebait then what does that make the post? Instead of modding it down, why don't you just respond with a relevant comment? Does someone have hard evidence (not just anecdotes) that this is a serious systemic problem?
I have an iPhone - bought a 3Gs in June - and I agree with a post below that points out the a lot of these apps are pretty poor and useless, but that's besides the point. Most apps on most platforms are pretty poor and useless. The big argument that Mac and Linux users always get from Windows aficionados is that Windows has zillions of apps and we always respond that it's quality not quantity that matters.
First of all it is you who are talking about "religionists" whatever they are supposed to be. Not me. It is you that are making sweeping generalizations about a very large group of people few of whom you've ever met, not me. So it is you that has an ideal example that I've been contradicting by saying that not all religious people are bad, intolerant, or whatever. You are committing the fallacy.
In the post to which you are responding I made a statement that in other words said that there are people who claim to believe one thing, but preach another and that you should not confuse God or the teachings of a particular prophet with what some of their so-called followers do. Christ preached love and tolerance. If someone claims to be a Christian preaches hate and intolerance then they are a fraud because they are directly contradicting the very teachings they profess to believe. That's not an indictment of religion or God, it's an indictment of some people.
The take away I get from this entire topic is that many of the posters to this thread, like yourself, would be perfectly happy living in a country that banned blasphemy or other forms of speech as long as you were the ones defining it. You are completely intolerant of any opinion about religion that isn't entirely negative.
You by your existence are evidence. The earth is evidence. The laws of physics and what we continue to learn about them are evidence. We exist now and at another time we did not. We were created. The question is how. Science continues to bring us closer to an understanding that the enormous complexity of all that we know or postulate exist can be explained by a relatively simple set of things and relationships. That is not scientific proof by any means but it is evidence. We know from our experience that creating complex and powerful things from a few simple things requires considerable intelligence on our part. So, it is plausible that the creator is intelligent beyond our comprehension. Again, it is not proof. It is evidence open to your interpretation. To say that it is more reasonable to deny the existence of an intelligent creator than it is to believe there is one is silly. Neither can be proven. One provides some sort of explanation and the other just avoids the question.
You clearly don't understand what you've read. That analogy is off. Being a Scotsman is by birth. You are or your aren't. It's not a belief system that you choose. (You may attribute qualities to Scotsmen, but that's the fallacy.) If you claim adherence to a belief system and then your consistently act contrary to it, I'd say that's good evidence that you don't really believe in what you say you do.
It's kind of like when slashdotters claim that they hate religious people because they are all intolerant bigots.
The ones who exist now are certainly overwhelmingly like this. Just look at Sarah Palin.
Are "certainly"? And your evidence is what? Opinion polls take in the U.S. show that you are wrong about the vast majority of practicing Christians and Jews. I'd bet you don't know any personally and your contact with them is limited to what you see in the media or the ones who knock on your door to offer you some of their literature.
You've provided me with plenty of evidence of your own intolerance and bigotry. What makes you better than Palin? Nothing from what I can see here.
Most agnostics I know actually believe that it is likely that God or the Creator exists. What they are not sure of is the nature of God and God's relationship (if any) with Man. Is God good, bad, or indifferent? They are not agnostics though, they are religious.
If they were religious they would be certain that God exists. What makes them agnostic is the word "likely". Big difference.
Atheism requires at least as much faith as a belief in God. There is evidence of creation all around us and there is much evidence that can be plausibly linked to an intelligent creator. To ignore all that and say God does not exist is an act of faith. Your post reveals that you have a lot in common with the worst of the fundamentalists with your intolerance, bigotry and absolute certainty.
Most agnostics I know actually believe that it is likely that God or the Creator exists. What they are not sure of is the nature of God and God's relationship (if any) with Man. Is God good, bad, or indifferent? That seems like a reasonable position to me. It's not arrogant or intolerant either.