Fundamentally I agree with your premise, but Archos is not a good example, because it can never be certified for Android as it lacks key components, like that pesky phone part.
However, speaking as someone who once upon a time managed a platform matrix validation lab for Windows software, I agree completely that the platform matrix for Android is unwieldy. People who say that it should be easy to support all Android *certified* devices (much less all Android devices) are simply not doing the math. Constructing and maintaining a test environment where you can check your software against all screen resolutions, API's, and peripheral selections is a huge problem with combinatorial complexity. And actually running and debugging all those test cases is hugely time consuming and expensive.
Of course, I expect to be modded down. It seems that every time I reply with *actual* *real* *world* *experience* on a topic where I know enough to have managed many people and had a six figure hardware budget, I get modded down because my actual data conflicts with peoples' religious beliefs.
But, in the end, Android will probably win despite the technical complexity of testing software. It will win because of openness, and customers will whine about how buggy the aps are because they are essentially untestable. It *is* the new Windows in that respect. I believe that strongly enough that two days ago I removed the iPhone SDK from my Macbook and installed the Android SDK.... but with eyes wide open about how nasty and alligator filled the swamp ahead actually is.
at least on a Mac. It installs stuff that is hard to get rid of and consumes too much CPU. I installed to at the request of someone I was working with... I used it for 10 minutes and decided it was outrageously evil and bad software that I wanted off my machine, and then spent the next hour trying to get right of the slosh. I also reduced my trust for that co-worker about 3 notches. Beware before trying DropBox.
Yes, well, all true. Running your own mail server gets very old after a while. Really need back up spooling, it's painful running mission-critical services on a home-based box (yes, my wife's e-mail is mission-critical to her...), etc, etc.
So... I do the middle solution. I pop mail down from my ISP every few minutes, and requeue it to my own IMAP server. No mail to me sits on an ISP's spool for more than a few minutes under normal circumstances, but I have no worries about power outages, reboots, etc. Mail simply spools at the providers (yes, multiple).
My ISP doesn't forbid running your own SMTP, but it is blocked by default. I can unblock it by clicking a button on an web page. I don't. Their outgoing SMTP does everything I need. Seems like a good policy -- if a customer system gets cracked and turned into a spam bot, it won't get out of their network. OTOH, if you are clueful and want to run an outgoing mail server, go for it -- of course, they have statistical traffic monitors, too, so they'll notice if you start doing something anti-social (intentionally or by accident).
And perfectly doable, too. And cheap. I remember shortly after the US pulled out of Viet Nam one of the items that showed up in the electronic surplus market was a vibration sensor and radio transmitter encapsulated in gen-U-wine imitation plastic ox dung. Turns out they would leave them on the road, and the vibration sensor was calibrated to transmit a signal if a heavy vehicle like a tank or troop transport went by, but not if an ox cart went by. So your scenario is pretty easy, actually. My high school civics teacher was an expert with plastic explosives, having been drafted half way through college to go blow up things in the jungle. He could have easily made your device.
Exactly! As a friend once pointed out, a movie critic who hates everything you like, and likes everything you hate, is exactly as useful as a movie critic that shares your tastes. Dvorak is a well-known nit wit, but the correlation of his ideas with reality are close enough to -1 that it is hard to argue that he is a waste of space. Unfortunately.
Sure, food you buy in a store is almost certain to not have useful seeds, either because they are an unstable hi-bred, or simply a bad cross as you point out. But my point is that it is possible to start the plants from seed if you have access to a stable varietal. See my post on preservation of heirloom varieties. Far too few people understand the perilous state of our genetic seed bank for food crops. (And feed crops, too, for that matter.) Many intrepid gardeners grow heirloom varieties from seeds that they save. It's good humor, and good for the planet's gene bank. I often wonder if the survivalists understand, or are blissfully unaware that the seeds in their bunker are unstable.
Fruit tree grafting I understand -- in his day, my great-grandfather started the largest fruit tree nursery in his county. Bananas, however, are beyond my knowledge base, the afore-mentioned county being on the Iowa-Minnesota border, I never saw a banana tree up close until I went to Borneo. As I understand it, bananas have so far been impervious to hi-bredization. And the banana plantations of the world are dangerously mono-cultural. There was a plantation variety that was quite common a generation ago that was wiped out by disease. We are not eating the same bananas that our grandparents did, because all the plantations switched over to a different variety, but have effectively become a mono-culture again. IIRC, while it is possible to start a banana plant from seed, it is devilishly difficult, I think they are propagated by cuttings outside of nature.
Most of the food plants we grow today are hi-bred seeds. As a result, many heirloom varieties are in danger of disappearing. It is import to continually plant and harvest these seeds, every 3 or 4 years or so, to keep them potent. Individual gardeners can help immensely. It is important that heirloom varieties not be grown near to other varieties or hi-breds of the same species in order to avoid contaminating the genome by cross-pollination. Yes, your back yard garden is a better place to grow an heirloom carrot than a university research station, because you have natural isolation that is immensely expensive for a university to achieve.
It is important to preserve these genomes so that various properties, for instance resistance to particular diseases, is preserved in the species' genome.
Ummmm....apples and tomatoes both contain seeds. My mother started tomatoes from seeds all the time.
Unless by "we" you were implying that you and I both are lacking in the necessary skills to start a tomato from seeds, which is true for me, at least compared to my mother.
Yes, it is cheaper, but that is mainly your housing costs and taxes. I grew up the the boonies, I live in Sili Valley. There is a reason for that -- if I moved back home I would go nuts from lack of techie people to talk to. But I would save big on housing and taxes. And I would love having some space for a workshop. Downside, I'd have to get re-acquainted with snow blowers. I've lived in the boonies, I could live in the boonies again, but for me the ability to find interesting people around every corner makes the misery and hassles of suburban life a fair trade off.
No, no. The would put out the fire and then check their books when they got back to the fire station. If you had paid your fee, no problem. If you hadn't, they would send you a bill for the full cost. I suspect they would *hope* that you hadn't paid the fee so they could put out your fire at the fully grossed-up fee.
Yes, exactly. Bill him for the full cost of putting out the fire. Then it is between him and his insurance company to sort out where the money comes from. As it is, the insurance company is going to be paying off his house and contents -- paying a fire fighting bill would have been cheaper. Also, the insurance company is now going to raise premiums on all the neighbors, regardless of whether they are up to date on their fees, because insurance companies *do* rate rural fire departments, and *do* calculate your distance to the fire station and fire hydrants in rural areas for each and every home-owner's policy they write. (I know, I used to live in a semi-rural place where that mattered. Volunteer fire department, 6 miles away, no fire hydrants. All three factors caused an up-charge in fire coverage. As they should.)
Ironically, some of those fire fighters no doubt live in the district covered by that fire station. Their fire insurance premiums are now going to go up. Karma is a bitch some times.
And where is PETA and the SPCA? The fire department let four live animals burn.
Really, the only rational answer here is to put out the fire and send a bill for the full cost. That, after all, is what the California Department of Forestry sometimes does if you do something sufficiently shtoopid and start a wild fire in the mountains.
An (enlightened) ISP I used in the past kept traffic statistics on all customers. An automated daily check would occasionally spit out an e-mail that essentially said something like: "We noticed an unusual spike in upload activity from your network on port at . If you understand why, then ignore this message. Call if you need help." This was great, because it alerted you to a problem pretty much right away, but didn't try to second-guess what you were doing. Like credit card fraud protection, it only was triggered by unusual (for you) activity. Unfortunately, this kind of e-mail isn't all that helpful for the typical grandma, but for the customer base of this particular ISP it worked reasonably well.
What? I'm supposed to take someone seriously when that person buys products from a company notorious for getting things wrong? Yes, there is a lot of that crap out there. If IPv6 plays a role in killing the crap off, outstanding!
The law about testing everything for sale to a children under 13 is totally inflexible. Much of the testing is pointless. It is horrendously expensive, and the testing labs are hugely backed up. I've seen this from the viewpoint of an embedded developer -- one of the products I worked on never made it to market because the client had to divert the tooling budget to pay for lab testing of old products. Then they chopped bunches of sku's out of their product line because the cost of testing didn't pencil out. Later, they had to sell the company.
Look, 10 year old kids don't eat the motors from their slot cars. 4 year old kids don't gnaw on their night lights. Does it matter if the streamers on a kids bicycle contain phthalates? This madness has to stop. The law is inflexible and idiotic and is doing many millions of dollars of economic harm, killing excellent products like the science kits mentioned in the article, and has very little benefit.
There need to be safety standards, sure. But the law as currently formulated is the most insane piece of work to come from our government bureaucracy in decades.
Yes and no. Early on in a process life cycle and a processor life cycle, the yield to the top bins is usually quite constrained. Over time the fab guys tune the process and the circuit and logic guys tune the mask and drive good yield to the high bins. Then somebody says, "Suppose we had a bin even higher? Could we squeak out enough yield to launch a new speed grade?" Lather, rinse. Repeat.
And then you move the processor to a new process. Or start over with a new processor.
What you say is true some of the time. But it is a gross over generalization. Yields and bin outs are a moving target with a lot of smart people continuously adjusting their aim, with management moving the goal posts on a regular basis.
... of what the electrical engineering building had where I was an undergrad. The ventilation system had weird one-way acoustics that propagated sounds from one of the men's rest rooms into the faculty lounge. One prof who let me in on the secret said that they found out exactly what their student's thought about various faculty members as the mid-afternoon poker game got under way.... "*tinkle* Gawd I can hardly stay awake in old Higgins' class. Totally incoherent. *flush*"
Not entirely. If I'm troubleshooting or looking for reference material, I'll include a distro name in the search terms to get more relevant results to rank higher. So these days I'm doing more searches including 'arch' than 'gentoo'. So it is strongly reflective of usage. I don't search for 'redhat' at all because I don't run it. Sure, the correlation is 1.0, but it is a positive correlation.
Well, that, and "dead" is a char*, so even if you had said horse == "dead" you are comparing a variable to a char* that points into the literal pool. Makes sense in some contexts, but is unusual. And if we make the reasonable assumption that horse is declared as a char*, then beat() is attempting to modify a string in the literal pool -- some compilers will complain since they treat "dead" as a const char*, some won't, some systems will raise an exception on the memory access if the literal pool is in read-only storage, on other systems.... well, modifying constants makes life interesting.
Years ago the broadcasters started digitally replacing the advertising signs in ball parks with images that they sold. I'm not sure how it came out, but I do recall that MLB and the ballpark owers were more than mildly annoyed. [CNBITL - citation needed but I'm too lazy.]
Notice, it's not just *anywhere* in Sili Valley -- it's in the city of Santa Clara. Santa Clara has a municipal power company, with cheap (some would say under priced) electricity. They would not build the same thing in Sunnyvale or San Jose, at PG&E prices.
Various members of the Stanford DARPA challenge team have spoken at the IEEE Robotics & Automation society meetings here in Sili Valley, including Sebastian Thrun. All said at one point or another that one of their secrets of success was tuning the driving algorithms to "drive like Sebastian" (direct quote) because he "is an aggressive driver" (direct quote, delivered with a tone of understatement.) Sebastian Thrun likes cars... and robots. Right now I'm wondering what his arrival in the faculty parking lot looks like.
Slashdot Mirror
Courier IMAP. I didn't research it heavily. I went with the one with a decent HowTo for my distro.
Fundamentally I agree with your premise, but Archos is not a good example, because it can never be certified for Android as it lacks key components, like that pesky phone part.
However, speaking as someone who once upon a time managed a platform matrix validation lab for Windows software, I agree completely that the platform matrix for Android is unwieldy. People who say that it should be easy to support all Android *certified* devices (much less all Android devices) are simply not doing the math. Constructing and maintaining a test environment where you can check your software against all screen resolutions, API's, and peripheral selections is a huge problem with combinatorial complexity. And actually running and debugging all those test cases is hugely time consuming and expensive.
Of course, I expect to be modded down. It seems that every time I reply with *actual* *real* *world* *experience* on a topic where I know enough to have managed many people and had a six figure hardware budget, I get modded down because my actual data conflicts with peoples' religious beliefs.
But, in the end, Android will probably win despite the technical complexity of testing software. It will win because of openness, and customers will whine about how buggy the aps are because they are essentially untestable. It *is* the new Windows in that respect. I believe that strongly enough that two days ago I removed the iPhone SDK from my Macbook and installed the Android SDK.... but with eyes wide open about how nasty and alligator filled the swamp ahead actually is.
at least on a Mac. It installs stuff that is hard to get rid of and consumes too much CPU. I installed to at the request of someone I was working with... I used it for 10 minutes and decided it was outrageously evil and bad software that I wanted off my machine, and then spent the next hour trying to get right of the slosh. I also reduced my trust for that co-worker about 3 notches. Beware before trying DropBox.
Yes, well, all true. Running your own mail server gets very old after a while. Really need back up spooling, it's painful running mission-critical services on a home-based box (yes, my wife's e-mail is mission-critical to her...), etc, etc.
So... I do the middle solution. I pop mail down from my ISP every few minutes, and requeue it to my own IMAP server. No mail to me sits on an ISP's spool for more than a few minutes under normal circumstances, but I have no worries about power outages, reboots, etc. Mail simply spools at the providers (yes, multiple).
My ISP doesn't forbid running your own SMTP, but it is blocked by default. I can unblock it by clicking a button on an web page. I don't. Their outgoing SMTP does everything I need. Seems like a good policy -- if a customer system gets cracked and turned into a spam bot, it won't get out of their network. OTOH, if you are clueful and want to run an outgoing mail server, go for it -- of course, they have statistical traffic monitors, too, so they'll notice if you start doing something anti-social (intentionally or by accident).
And perfectly doable, too. And cheap. I remember shortly after the US pulled out of Viet Nam one of the items that showed up in the electronic surplus market was a vibration sensor and radio transmitter encapsulated in gen-U-wine imitation plastic ox dung. Turns out they would leave them on the road, and the vibration sensor was calibrated to transmit a signal if a heavy vehicle like a tank or troop transport went by, but not if an ox cart went by. So your scenario is pretty easy, actually. My high school civics teacher was an expert with plastic explosives, having been drafted half way through college to go blow up things in the jungle. He could have easily made your device.
... where bacteria-laden cast concrete garden gnomes evolve intelligence.
And it's not a pretty sight.
Exactly! As a friend once pointed out, a movie critic who hates everything you like, and likes everything you hate, is exactly as useful as a movie critic that shares your tastes. Dvorak is a well-known nit wit, but the correlation of his ideas with reality are close enough to -1 that it is hard to argue that he is a waste of space. Unfortunately.
Sure, food you buy in a store is almost certain to not have useful seeds, either because they are an unstable hi-bred, or simply a bad cross as you point out. But my point is that it is possible to start the plants from seed if you have access to a stable varietal. See my post on preservation of heirloom varieties. Far too few people understand the perilous state of our genetic seed bank for food crops. (And feed crops, too, for that matter.) Many intrepid gardeners grow heirloom varieties from seeds that they save. It's good humor, and good for the planet's gene bank. I often wonder if the survivalists understand, or are blissfully unaware that the seeds in their bunker are unstable.
Fruit tree grafting I understand -- in his day, my great-grandfather started the largest fruit tree nursery in his county. Bananas, however, are beyond my knowledge base, the afore-mentioned county being on the Iowa-Minnesota border, I never saw a banana tree up close until I went to Borneo. As I understand it, bananas have so far been impervious to hi-bredization. And the banana plantations of the world are dangerously mono-cultural. There was a plantation variety that was quite common a generation ago that was wiped out by disease. We are not eating the same bananas that our grandparents did, because all the plantations switched over to a different variety, but have effectively become a mono-culture again. IIRC, while it is possible to start a banana plant from seed, it is devilishly difficult, I think they are propagated by cuttings outside of nature.
Most of the food plants we grow today are hi-bred seeds. As a result, many heirloom varieties are in danger of disappearing. It is import to continually plant and harvest these seeds, every 3 or 4 years or so, to keep them potent. Individual gardeners can help immensely. It is important that heirloom varieties not be grown near to other varieties or hi-breds of the same species in order to avoid contaminating the genome by cross-pollination. Yes, your back yard garden is a better place to grow an heirloom carrot than a university research station, because you have natural isolation that is immensely expensive for a university to achieve.
It is important to preserve these genomes so that various properties, for instance resistance to particular diseases, is preserved in the species' genome.
Ummmm....apples and tomatoes both contain seeds. My mother started tomatoes from seeds all the time.
Unless by "we" you were implying that you and I both are lacking in the necessary skills to start a tomato from seeds, which is true for me, at least compared to my mother.
Yes, it is cheaper, but that is mainly your housing costs and taxes. I grew up the the boonies, I live in Sili Valley. There is a reason for that -- if I moved back home I would go nuts from lack of techie people to talk to. But I would save big on housing and taxes. And I would love having some space for a workshop. Downside, I'd have to get re-acquainted with snow blowers. I've lived in the boonies, I could live in the boonies again, but for me the ability to find interesting people around every corner makes the misery and hassles of suburban life a fair trade off.
No, no. The would put out the fire and then check their books when they got back to the fire station. If you had paid your fee, no problem. If you hadn't, they would send you a bill for the full cost. I suspect they would *hope* that you hadn't paid the fee so they could put out your fire at the fully grossed-up fee.
Yes, exactly. Bill him for the full cost of putting out the fire. Then it is between him and his insurance company to sort out where the money comes from. As it is, the insurance company is going to be paying off his house and contents -- paying a fire fighting bill would have been cheaper. Also, the insurance company is now going to raise premiums on all the neighbors, regardless of whether they are up to date on their fees, because insurance companies *do* rate rural fire departments, and *do* calculate your distance to the fire station and fire hydrants in rural areas for each and every home-owner's policy they write. (I know, I used to live in a semi-rural place where that mattered. Volunteer fire department, 6 miles away, no fire hydrants. All three factors caused an up-charge in fire coverage. As they should.)
Ironically, some of those fire fighters no doubt live in the district covered by that fire station. Their fire insurance premiums are now going to go up. Karma is a bitch some times.
And where is PETA and the SPCA? The fire department let four live animals burn.
Really, the only rational answer here is to put out the fire and send a bill for the full cost. That, after all, is what the California Department of Forestry sometimes does if you do something sufficiently shtoopid and start a wild fire in the mountains.
An (enlightened) ISP I used in the past kept traffic statistics on all customers. An automated daily check would occasionally spit out an e-mail that essentially said something like: "We noticed an unusual spike in upload activity from your network on port at . If you understand why, then ignore this message. Call if you need help." This was great, because it alerted you to a problem pretty much right away, but didn't try to second-guess what you were doing. Like credit card fraud protection, it only was triggered by unusual (for you) activity. Unfortunately, this kind of e-mail isn't all that helpful for the typical grandma, but for the customer base of this particular ISP it worked reasonably well.
What? I'm supposed to take someone seriously when that person buys products from a company notorious for getting things wrong? Yes, there is a lot of that crap out there. If IPv6 plays a role in killing the crap off, outstanding!
The law about testing everything for sale to a children under 13 is totally inflexible. Much of the testing is pointless. It is horrendously expensive, and the testing labs are hugely backed up. I've seen this from the viewpoint of an embedded developer -- one of the products I worked on never made it to market because the client had to divert the tooling budget to pay for lab testing of old products. Then they chopped bunches of sku's out of their product line because the cost of testing didn't pencil out. Later, they had to sell the company.
Look, 10 year old kids don't eat the motors from their slot cars. 4 year old kids don't gnaw on their night lights. Does it matter if the streamers on a kids bicycle contain phthalates? This madness has to stop. The law is inflexible and idiotic and is doing many millions of dollars of economic harm, killing excellent products like the science kits mentioned in the article, and has very little benefit.
There need to be safety standards, sure. But the law as currently formulated is the most insane piece of work to come from our government bureaucracy in decades.
That's the start of your problem right there. Their products are a waste of otherwise perfectly good sand.
There's nobody else there anyway....
Yes and no. Early on in a process life cycle and a processor life cycle, the yield to the top bins is usually quite constrained. Over time the fab guys tune the process and the circuit and logic guys tune the mask and drive good yield to the high bins. Then somebody says, "Suppose we had a bin even higher? Could we squeak out enough yield to launch a new speed grade?" Lather, rinse. Repeat.
And then you move the processor to a new process. Or start over with a new processor.
What you say is true some of the time. But it is a gross over generalization. Yields and bin outs are a moving target with a lot of smart people continuously adjusting their aim, with management moving the goal posts on a regular basis.
... of what the electrical engineering building had where I was an undergrad. The ventilation system had weird one-way acoustics that propagated sounds from one of the men's rest rooms into the faculty lounge. One prof who let me in on the secret said that they found out exactly what their student's thought about various faculty members as the mid-afternoon poker game got under way.... "*tinkle* Gawd I can hardly stay awake in old Higgins' class. Totally incoherent. *flush*"
Not entirely. If I'm troubleshooting or looking for reference material, I'll include a distro name in the search terms to get more relevant results to rank higher. So these days I'm doing more searches including 'arch' than 'gentoo'. So it is strongly reflective of usage. I don't search for 'redhat' at all because I don't run it. Sure, the correlation is 1.0, but it is a positive correlation.
Well, that, and "dead" is a char*, so even if you had said horse == "dead" you are comparing a variable to a char* that points into the literal pool. Makes sense in some contexts, but is unusual. And if we make the reasonable assumption that horse is declared as a char*, then beat() is attempting to modify a string in the literal pool -- some compilers will complain since they treat "dead" as a const char*, some won't, some systems will raise an exception on the memory access if the literal pool is in read-only storage, on other systems.... well, modifying constants makes life interesting.
veritas aeternum: Don't SETQ T
Years ago the broadcasters started digitally replacing the advertising signs in ball parks with images that they sold. I'm not sure how it came out, but I do recall that MLB and the ballpark owers were more than mildly annoyed. [CNBITL - citation needed but I'm too lazy.]
Notice, it's not just *anywhere* in Sili Valley -- it's in the city of Santa Clara. Santa Clara has a municipal power company, with cheap (some would say under priced) electricity. They would not build the same thing in Sunnyvale or San Jose, at PG&E prices.
Various members of the Stanford DARPA challenge team have spoken at the IEEE Robotics & Automation society meetings here in Sili Valley, including Sebastian Thrun. All said at one point or another that one of their secrets of success was tuning the driving algorithms to "drive like Sebastian" (direct quote) because he "is an aggressive driver" (direct quote, delivered with a tone of understatement.) Sebastian Thrun likes cars... and robots. Right now I'm wondering what his arrival in the faculty parking lot looks like.