Any company trying to break into portable gaming without a 3d chipset, of any kind, is stupid, but a company that would divert resources from its core business, is just plain retarded.
On that stamp-sized display, 3d would have been as foolish as the whole concept of gaming phone... who cares about 3d there? This is not to say N-Gage was of much interest in the first place, but adding 3d wouldn't have changed anything, in grand scheme of things.
Now, as to "core business", cell phones are becoming commodity (like PCs)... there's nothing else to do with phones, except lower prices, OR go the kitchen-sink route of adding all kinds of funky new "features". There's really no huge resource need on basic phone design side. Plus, resources involved in N-Gage design weren't all that huge in the first place... hype has been much bigger, and lead many people to overestimate Nokia's efforts.
That article does not say they were elimintated from the N-Gage project specifically.
Of course not. Why would Nokia give out that specific information? The cuts are announced to please the investors; specifying any more details would have no benefit for the company.
But it's pretty obvious where the cuts are done, considering what multimedia products company is involved in, and especially lackluster sales.
You do. They're the same ministers that you vote into your own countries government.
Huh? I have yet to hear of a country where ministers are directly elected by voters. Usually people vote for the members of parliament, which then decides balance of power between parties those MPs are members of, which is the basis for goverment... but the government is generally composed by the parties (ie. collectively by groups of MPs), and this level of indirection means that ministers are rather more independent of voters' feelings than MPs.
In theory the degree of indirection (one more level of indirection) wouldn't matter: in practice it has a tremendous effect.
Consider this in the context of US politics: are you saying that someone actually voted mr. Ashcroft in?
If this planet has more people it's better for production, i.e. more farmers and more channels for distribution.
No, that's wrong. Currently tiny minority of people get their living from agriculture -- food production is in general not limited by labour pool in any way or form. Similarly for distribution (transportation) and manufacturing: majority of people of industrialized countries work in services; and the trend is the same for poorer countries as well.
Bigger population has little if any benefits at this point, but it definitely causes bigger load on non-renewable resources. As is, it'd be good if world population shrank a bit; but due to practical problems it'd be good there was just a slow decline.
I agree it's good to be sceptical about new things, and I certainly could do my own ranting about excessive framework oriented mind sets (excessive abstraction is a sign of someone that just barely passed initial bump of learning, but not yet matured to true expert), but it seems to be you are basing your reservations on "this is how these things are in general" as opposed to following up on this specific tool's progress. And if so it's bit unfair to group it generically, without considering it on its OWN merits.
In case of Subversion, I see it as a rather pragmatic project and tool (after all, it does NOT try to solve all problems for everyone, OR even try some complete different way to solve the basic SCM problems -- it's "only" improving on tried mechanisms).
And although there are obviously ambitious goals, none of those are fundamental enough that missing the goal would jeopardize usability or future of the tool.
For what it's worth, I have started 2 new projects with Subversion, and so far I'm happy with it (neither really business critical -- for those I'd get someone else to do it for me). But I'm not really an SCM power user, so it's just for basic versioning and concurrent development needs, not a culture of its own (like some projects apparently use such tools -- the Mono use case was frightening in this aspect).
Ok thanks. That looks like an interesting article/post, on problems certain kinds of projects can (and probably will) have; bigger ones that make heavy use of more advanced CVS features (and rely heavily on such less-frequently-used-in-general features).
I don't care for Subversion because it is immature.
Hmmh? Care to elaborate how is it immature? (it went to 1.0 a while ago; and I haven't seen too many problems being reported).
a whole slew of different database backends will be a source of endless problems
Well... designing modular systems make sense, and also allow for more optimal systems for specific needs. Sometimes it's useful to have simple file system based repository (easier to debug, do low-tech integration, etc), DB-based one may be more efficient, or allow more advanced integration etc. etc. And theoretically it could also allow for some level of distribution, at least on backend side, if storage space requirements are huge.
And if modularity makes sense, it's reasonable to implement 2 different backends, to make sure the interface between components is general enough, to allow for more implementations... this all assuming there are real benefits, and that no single backend is best for most common situations.
Weird. My experience has been the exact opposite -- Subversion being significantly faster (but apparently partly due to increased disk usage, using local full copies; not requiring network access for doing status etc), and that with actual source code. And with binaries... well, CVS barely even works with binaries (plus big binaries can just bring down the CVS server -- needs at least twice the size of the binary on server side, contiguous memory); whereas Subversion has no trouble whatsoever.
I can't comment on ssh part, as the repositories I use are (I guess) properly configured so I just use svn+ssh indicator and things work smooth.
I'm not sure if it's reasonable to blame scm on people don't configure it properly, however.
if you want to switch to subversion you have to retrain your development team and
Yeah, that's SUCH a HUGE effort. Instead of 'cvs update', you need to use 'svn update', instead of 'cvs commit' you do 'svn commit'... you get the picture. Subversion was specifically designed to be pretty much just drop-in replacement of CVS; its design (even beyond CLI) is pretty similar to CVS (some consider such 'compatibility' to be a bad thing, as it prevents doing some more radical improvements).
Really, from command-line perspective it's trivially easy change; the biggest caveat from 'end user' POV are probably IDEs and other more advanced integration points.
From admin/scm viewpoint there may be more issues, but just using Subversion instead of CVS, that's a breeze.
Right now, China has an awful lot of weapons pointed at Taiwan and they have yearly drills on how to invade Taiwan.
Still; it's not like Taiwan is unarmed or didn't have an army to (try to) defend itself. While obviously much smaller than the Chinese army, it's still a formidable opponent. And as such, even without US intervention, it would be a rather costly venture for China.
For one prior example of a big country attacking a much smaller (but one very much determined to defend itself), google for "winter war".
Argentina get all pissy about the Falkland Islands, which are hardly worth the trouble.
That's nothing, there was even another country that fucking declared a war against Argentina, over those same pesky islands, right after argentinians got pissy enough to occupy them!:-D
Actually, this may (should?) sound bizarre to people not aware of Sun's public strategy... but believe it or not, Sun doesn't consider JDS "linux-only". In fact, there's lots of buzz to "port" JDS to not only Solaris (somewhat kind of logical) but to AIX, HP-UX and even, yes, Windows!
(buzz mostly from Sun's sales folks; I doubt engineers can be all that excited)
If above sounds silly, yeah, join the line. I think it's based on thinking that the "sex appeal" of Linux (or open source, whatever) movement, is just that combination Gnome, Mozilla/Firefox, gcc, and that's about it. That the actual OS underneath is not all that hot. And that this supposedly cool coating can be bottled up, and smothered on top of most other kernels.
Or maybe it's just marketing speak, giving impression of grand unified solution. But whatever it is, it looks like Sun isn't thinking JDS == Linux. Which is kind of funny: it clearly has little to do with Java (from which J supposedly came from), and now not much to do with Linux (even though it's based on it for now).... so what is it? Blue cheese? Floor wax? Or both?!?
Linux is not an operating system, it's the kernel on which multiple operating systems are built.
That's a rather modern definition for me. The term companies have usually used to describe what you refer to an OS is "Operating Environment"; and leave Operating System to refer to smaller subset of functionality needed to control and abstract out the hardware for the benefit of applications.
I personally think that the (monolithic) kernel and the drivers it uses are the Operating System... but maybe Microsoft has finally managed to convince too many people that everything up to and including a web browser is part of the OS.:-/
this shouldnt be modded down, to many shallow minded mods about.
Dunno. Problem is our anonymous friend just stated a strongly worded opinion with no actual insight or facts. I'm sure there are good reasons why one could constructively suggest one to use some alternatives, but saying "don't use foobar it sux0rz!" is trolling, nothing more.
I mean, it's equivalent to saying "real DBAs don't use MS Access!", and then claiming it's not a troll but just a cold hard fact.
Well, known idiot or not, his opinions are pretty compatible with ones from ALL the current or ex HP employees (tech ones) I have ever talked to.
Carly is universally despised there; even more so than your average "CEOs suck" attitude.
Correct, however it took thousands of years. Using your analogy, the world should be under the foot of the US for another 1800 years or so.
Ok, I know this is nitpicking but although one could claim it was about 1800 years (until 1453 defeat of Byzantine, eastern Rome), in practice the full roman hegemony "only" lasted for couple of centuries (maybe from ~100BC until ~300 AD). The fall of western Rome (476?) split the empire in half, and although Byzantine did recover some land areas for a while, it never regained the same glory as pre-split, and started steady decline before crusades (triggered by the islamic expansion on 7th century AD).
Not that this really weakens your main point but...:-)
The license may well be GPL 3 compatible,
since Stallman has made noises about wanting to
clear up the patent protection stuff.
That would be nice, but I wouldn't bet on it. The number one requirement for GPL 3 is/was (I think) that it be compatible with GPL 2. And since FSF has said that current patent clauses in other Open Source licenses make them GPL (2) incompatible, there seems to be a problem?
However, I hope I'm wrong, and GPL 3 would be more compatible with other commonly used OS licenses.
And if you cannot freely reditribute your modifications to others, I -for one- question how "open" such source is.
D'oh. Did you read the summary? If Sun is submitting the license to folks who 'certify' Open Source licenses, they clearly have intention to get it through... which means that distributability does exist, similar to other approved licenses (Apache, GPL, BSD, MIT etc).
Why would they otherwise waste their time, if it didn't look and smell like an actual Open Source license?
Now, also keep in mind that many people consider GPL to NOT allow one to "freely distribute" modifications, since it does add restrictions under which distribution is allowed. At least if "freely" means in whatever shape or form. Most licenses (even Free and Open Source ones) restrict (re/sub-)licensing in some way.
His web host can't tell him how many visitors he had. Things like caching, reloads, browser bugs, network errors, etc, get in the way.
While this may well be true, problem is that it's "he said she said" situation... In the end there just isn't any concrete proof Google sent that much traffic. But that's of course a fundamental problem (flaw) in this whole click-through ad scheme; and I think the system is going to (have to) be revised completely in near future.
Like the AC above said, I trust Verizon as much or less than the elected bodies of officials.
That said, that's what encryption tools and protocols are for -- no matter who it is that has access to your bits (ISP, govt, your neighbour's 13-year old script kiddy), you shouldn't just assume they'll resist temptation to eavesdrop.
IIRC, a lot of Java stuff requires them. I prefer not to use Java if I can avoid it
Actually, it's "only" many (most) Java data-binding libraries/frameworks that require them; and even then, Objects in question are mere data containers (data transfer/access objects etc). So avoiding the whole language is bit silly, if the main reason is avoiding having to create get/set methods. Java as a programming language has no dependency on such methods.
However, I also strongly dislike the "automatic" (ie. add get/set methods for all instance variables, without any consideration) use of get/set methods many (esp. junior) java programmers do; and blame either idiots who misunderstood the whole bean idea. Beans were nothing but a simple hack to allow tools to
work around the problem of Java missing first-class properties as language constructs (C# has them, thanks to Java and beans exposing the lack in all of its gory). Now there are programmers who think that there's something more to beans than simple work-around using naming convention and reflection... and that's scary, because they really have to unlearn all that nonsense; which takes more time than learning useful things the first time.
Hmmmh. I must admit I'm not fully qualified to argue about this (I'm not a biologist, although married to one who's minor is biology, major microbiology).
Having said that, there are couple of points:
There are many smaller parts of Darwin's theories that have been proven wrong (details wrong,
although "big" theory still sound).
Specifically I thought his hereditary theories
were amongst those (this from National
Geographics article, correct me if I'm wrong).
But whether part you are referring is the same
as what NG referred to I don't know.
DNA and RNA mechanisms obviously weren't
understood during Darwin's lifetime nor
immediately afterwards; so original theories
can not really say much about those mechanisms
Although "DNA came from RNA" is (or was) one
of leading hypotheses, my understanding is
that there are some contradicting observations,
and nowadays some suggest that maybe there is
no strict/straight linear relationship between the two.
(ie. there seems to be somewhat parallel
development with two)
Now, I don't quite follow why low error rate would
speed up evolution. Intuitively it should be the exact opposite: mutations are the things capable
of causing big leaps in evolution (or, rather,
have chance of causing big "positive" changes;
although less likely than negative ones; but
latter generally get pruned out by evolutionary
process). And in fact, they are the only things
that can cause drastic changes: selection can not
really cause new distinctly different fetures,
just gradual convergence towards certain set
of properties.
But be above as it may: I would think that trying to estimate speed of evolution on large-scale is rather futile; and as such would have to be calibrated by corroborating evidence from better
understood techniques. This is not to say I'd dismiss such arguments, just that I seem to be missing something. It seems hard to quantify "size" of change, and as such, to even calculate
rate of change?
In any case, it was interesting read, and I'll see if I can find something more on this.
ps. Originally Darwin had much longer title for his work (wish I remember it exactly): he though the eventual title would be too grandiose, but publisher wanted it, as it was much catchier (which is obviously true).
That may be true; it does make sense to focus on the ends of the gaussian distribution. Good point.
In the end, though, I think tv shows do reflect some sort of general consensus amongst population, and I think there is somewhat more conservative consensus in US than in, say, Europe.
And as such, I don't see significant bias ("liberal" or otherwise) in the content.
There is certainly quite a bit of "let's hear it for the both sides"; the same thing journalists are accused of (both rightly and wrongly, IMO; it's good to be balanced, but it'd be better to also present what is considered a consensus when presenting things from scientific perspective).
So, although for some americans, shows' handling of erotic/porn movie industry, abortion and death penalty, appears like liberal bias, I don't think it has one.
Certainly, for most europeans handling would seem (at least slightly) conservative, due to different general consensus wrt these issues. And for people from more conservative countries (like most arab countries) it would probably look like typical western ultra-liberalism.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
On that stamp-sized display, 3d would have been as foolish as the whole concept of gaming phone... who cares about 3d there? This is not to say N-Gage was of much interest in the first place, but adding 3d wouldn't have changed anything, in grand scheme of things.
Now, as to "core business", cell phones are becoming commodity (like PCs)... there's nothing else to do with phones, except lower prices, OR go the kitchen-sink route of adding all kinds of funky new "features". There's really no huge resource need on basic phone design side. Plus, resources involved in N-Gage design weren't all that huge in the first place... hype has been much bigger, and lead many people to overestimate Nokia's efforts.
Of course not. Why would Nokia give out that specific information? The cuts are announced to please the investors; specifying any more details would have no benefit for the company. But it's pretty obvious where the cuts are done, considering what multimedia products company is involved in, and especially lackluster sales.
Huh? I have yet to hear of a country where ministers are directly elected by voters. Usually people vote for the members of parliament, which then decides balance of power between parties those MPs are members of, which is the basis for goverment... but the government is generally composed by the parties (ie. collectively by groups of MPs), and this level of indirection means that ministers are rather more independent of voters' feelings than MPs.
In theory the degree of indirection (one more level of indirection) wouldn't matter: in practice it has a tremendous effect.
Consider this in the context of US politics: are you saying that someone actually voted mr. Ashcroft in?
No, that's wrong. Currently tiny minority of people get their living from agriculture -- food production is in general not limited by labour pool in any way or form. Similarly for distribution (transportation) and manufacturing: majority of people of industrialized countries work in services; and the trend is the same for poorer countries as well.
Bigger population has little if any benefits at this point, but it definitely causes bigger load on non-renewable resources. As is, it'd be good if world population shrank a bit; but due to practical problems it'd be good there was just a slow decline.
In case of Subversion, I see it as a rather pragmatic project and tool (after all, it does NOT try to solve all problems for everyone, OR even try some complete different way to solve the basic SCM problems -- it's "only" improving on tried mechanisms). And although there are obviously ambitious goals, none of those are fundamental enough that missing the goal would jeopardize usability or future of the tool.
For what it's worth, I have started 2 new projects with Subversion, and so far I'm happy with it (neither really business critical -- for those I'd get someone else to do it for me). But I'm not really an SCM power user, so it's just for basic versioning and concurrent development needs, not a culture of its own (like some projects apparently use such tools -- the Mono use case was frightening in this aspect).
Ok thanks. That looks like an interesting article/post, on problems certain kinds of projects can (and probably will) have; bigger ones that make heavy use of more advanced CVS features (and rely heavily on such less-frequently-used-in-general features).
Hmmh? Care to elaborate how is it immature? (it went to 1.0 a while ago; and I haven't seen too many problems being reported).
a whole slew of different database backends will be a source of endless problems
Well... designing modular systems make sense, and also allow for more optimal systems for specific needs. Sometimes it's useful to have simple file system based repository (easier to debug, do low-tech integration, etc), DB-based one may be more efficient, or allow more advanced integration etc. etc. And theoretically it could also allow for some level of distribution, at least on backend side, if storage space requirements are huge.
And if modularity makes sense, it's reasonable to implement 2 different backends, to make sure the interface between components is general enough, to allow for more implementations... this all assuming there are real benefits, and that no single backend is best for most common situations.
Weird. My experience has been the exact opposite -- Subversion being significantly faster (but apparently partly due to increased disk usage, using local full copies; not requiring network access for doing status etc), and that with actual source code. And with binaries... well, CVS barely even works with binaries (plus big binaries can just bring down the CVS server -- needs at least twice the size of the binary on server side, contiguous memory); whereas Subversion has no trouble whatsoever.
I can't comment on ssh part, as the repositories I use are (I guess) properly configured so I just use svn+ssh indicator and things work smooth. I'm not sure if it's reasonable to blame scm on people don't configure it properly, however.
Yeah, that's SUCH a HUGE effort. Instead of 'cvs update', you need to use 'svn update', instead of 'cvs commit' you do 'svn commit'... you get the picture. Subversion was specifically designed to be pretty much just drop-in replacement of CVS; its design (even beyond CLI) is pretty similar to CVS (some consider such 'compatibility' to be a bad thing, as it prevents doing some more radical improvements).
Really, from command-line perspective it's trivially easy change; the biggest caveat from 'end user' POV are probably IDEs and other more advanced integration points.
From admin/scm viewpoint there may be more issues, but just using Subversion instead of CVS, that's a breeze.
Still; it's not like Taiwan is unarmed or didn't have an army to (try to) defend itself. While obviously much smaller than the Chinese army, it's still a formidable opponent. And as such, even without US intervention, it would be a rather costly venture for China.
For one prior example of a big country attacking a much smaller (but one very much determined to defend itself), google for "winter war".
That's nothing, there was even another country that fucking declared a war against Argentina, over those same pesky islands, right after argentinians got pissy enough to occupy them! :-D
If above sounds silly, yeah, join the line. I think it's based on thinking that the "sex appeal" of Linux (or open source, whatever) movement, is just that combination Gnome, Mozilla/Firefox, gcc, and that's about it. That the actual OS underneath is not all that hot. And that this supposedly cool coating can be bottled up, and smothered on top of most other kernels.
Or maybe it's just marketing speak, giving impression of grand unified solution. But whatever it is, it looks like Sun isn't thinking JDS == Linux. Which is kind of funny: it clearly has little to do with Java (from which J supposedly came from), and now not much to do with Linux (even though it's based on it for now).... so what is it? Blue cheese? Floor wax? Or both?!?
That's a rather modern definition for me. The term companies have usually used to describe what you refer to an OS is "Operating Environment"; and leave Operating System to refer to smaller subset of functionality needed to control and abstract out the hardware for the benefit of applications.
I personally think that the (monolithic) kernel and the drivers it uses are the Operating System... but maybe Microsoft has finally managed to convince too many people that everything up to and including a web browser is part of the OS. :-/
Dunno. Problem is our anonymous friend just stated a strongly worded opinion with no actual insight or facts. I'm sure there are good reasons why one could constructively suggest one to use some alternatives, but saying "don't use foobar it sux0rz!" is trolling, nothing more.
I mean, it's equivalent to saying "real DBAs don't use MS Access!", and then claiming it's not a troll but just a cold hard fact.
Well, known idiot or not, his opinions are pretty compatible with ones from ALL the current or ex HP employees (tech ones) I have ever talked to. Carly is universally despised there; even more so than your average "CEOs suck" attitude.
Correct, however it took thousands of years. Using your analogy, the world should be under the foot of the US for another 1800 years or so.
Ok, I know this is nitpicking but although one could claim it was about 1800 years (until 1453 defeat of Byzantine, eastern Rome), in practice the full roman hegemony "only" lasted for couple of centuries (maybe from ~100BC until ~300 AD). The fall of western Rome (476?) split the empire in half, and although Byzantine did recover some land areas for a while, it never regained the same glory as pre-split, and started steady decline before crusades (triggered by the islamic expansion on 7th century AD).
Not that this really weakens your main point but... :-)
That would be nice, but I wouldn't bet on it. The number one requirement for GPL 3 is/was (I think) that it be compatible with GPL 2. And since FSF has said that current patent clauses in other Open Source licenses make them GPL (2) incompatible, there seems to be a problem?
However, I hope I'm wrong, and GPL 3 would be more compatible with other commonly used OS licenses.
Is that similar to Apache 2.0 license's patent clauses? Wonder why they don't just use ASL 2.0, if so.
D'oh. Did you read the summary? If Sun is submitting the license to folks who 'certify' Open Source licenses, they clearly have intention to get it through... which means that distributability does exist, similar to other approved licenses (Apache, GPL, BSD, MIT etc). Why would they otherwise waste their time, if it didn't look and smell like an actual Open Source license?
Now, also keep in mind that many people consider GPL to NOT allow one to "freely distribute" modifications, since it does add restrictions under which distribution is allowed. At least if "freely" means in whatever shape or form. Most licenses (even Free and Open Source ones) restrict (re/sub-)licensing in some way.
While this may well be true, problem is that it's "he said she said" situation... In the end there just isn't any concrete proof Google sent that much traffic. But that's of course a fundamental problem (flaw) in this whole click-through ad scheme; and I think the system is going to (have to) be revised completely in near future.
That said, that's what encryption tools and protocols are for -- no matter who it is that has access to your bits (ISP, govt, your neighbour's 13-year old script kiddy), you shouldn't just assume they'll resist temptation to eavesdrop.
I think you misspelled "police"?
Actually, it's "only" many (most) Java data-binding libraries/frameworks that require them; and even then, Objects in question are mere data containers (data transfer/access objects etc). So avoiding the whole language is bit silly, if the main reason is avoiding having to create get/set methods. Java as a programming language has no dependency on such methods.
However, I also strongly dislike the "automatic" (ie. add get/set methods for all instance variables, without any consideration) use of get/set methods many (esp. junior) java programmers do; and blame either idiots who misunderstood the whole bean idea. Beans were nothing but a simple hack to allow tools to work around the problem of Java missing first-class properties as language constructs (C# has them, thanks to Java and beans exposing the lack in all of its gory). Now there are programmers who think that there's something more to beans than simple work-around using naming convention and reflection... and that's scary, because they really have to unlearn all that nonsense; which takes more time than learning useful things the first time.
Having said that, there are couple of points:
Now, I don't quite follow why low error rate would speed up evolution. Intuitively it should be the exact opposite: mutations are the things capable of causing big leaps in evolution (or, rather, have chance of causing big "positive" changes; although less likely than negative ones; but latter generally get pruned out by evolutionary process). And in fact, they are the only things that can cause drastic changes: selection can not really cause new distinctly different fetures, just gradual convergence towards certain set of properties.
But be above as it may: I would think that trying to estimate speed of evolution on large-scale is rather futile; and as such would have to be calibrated by corroborating evidence from better understood techniques. This is not to say I'd dismiss such arguments, just that I seem to be missing something. It seems hard to quantify "size" of change, and as such, to even calculate rate of change?
In any case, it was interesting read, and I'll see if I can find something more on this.
ps. Originally Darwin had much longer title for his work (wish I remember it exactly): he though the eventual title would be too grandiose, but publisher wanted it, as it was much catchier (which is obviously true).
In the end, though, I think tv shows do reflect some sort of general consensus amongst population, and I think there is somewhat more conservative consensus in US than in, say, Europe. And as such, I don't see significant bias ("liberal" or otherwise) in the content. There is certainly quite a bit of "let's hear it for the both sides"; the same thing journalists are accused of (both rightly and wrongly, IMO; it's good to be balanced, but it'd be better to also present what is considered a consensus when presenting things from scientific perspective).
So, although for some americans, shows' handling of erotic/porn movie industry, abortion and death penalty, appears like liberal bias, I don't think it has one. Certainly, for most europeans handling would seem (at least slightly) conservative, due to different general consensus wrt these issues. And for people from more conservative countries (like most arab countries) it would probably look like typical western ultra-liberalism. :-)