Slashdot also has the dubious honour of adding to the problem, simply by posting this as "news" 11 days after Eric clarified the issue and 5 days after the linked story was posted.
How is it that actual "news for nerds" takes a week or more to appear here, while everyday events like new Firefox versions are often posted before they're released?
"BTW, Apple's OSes were free (as in beer) up until maybe Mac OS 7.5? You could buy a boxed version with discs and manuals too, but you could bring floppies in to a store and get a copy that way too. (Both for Mac & Apple II OSes.)"
Well, yeeesss, strictly speaking, you're right. But that's because Apple had a stranglehold on the ROMs - the OS disks were useless without it, so giving them away was a customer service / PR boon, not a revenue-killing nightmare.
That part was the official clone program...
IIRC, (and I'm hazy on this), System 7.6 was the first one that Apple actually charged for - and that co-incided with Apple killing off the official clones (which were only licensed for System 7 anyway).
i mean ffs. the writer says CSIRO is commonly called "si-roh" it's never been called that outside of small pocket of idiots thinking CSIRO is a word rather than an acronym
Having worked alongside several current and ex CSIRO technicians & scientists, I can tell you that every single one of them has pronounced it "si-roh".
"Much as the Auzies like to thump their chest and claim to have invented WIFI...>/i>
But they're not claiming that* (although I see how people get that impression from the [flamebait] article). Hell, even though the article couches it in terms of "stunning demands" and "outsized claims", it admits that it's a novel application of existing technologies (OFDM, FEC, and interleaving) that nobody else had gotten to work and was accepted into the standards by the IEEE Working Group.
Basically, it's a flamebait article that relies a misunderstanding of the issue that has been formed through several years of poor and oversimplified reporting of the actual case(s). Ars should be bloody ashamed of itself for publishing such utter crap, though I'm not surprised that/. has.
(* Well, one that I of know does, but he's a dickhead who has also publicly claimed that CSIRO invented DTV, once claimed that MPEG-4 wasn't suitable for television broadcasts because it uses sprites & MIDI to simulate video & audio, and is currently trying to argue that an amplitude modulated carrier never varies in amplitude (hi, alanh!).)
On the other hand, being oblivious to subtext allows you to turn Gulliver's Travels into a mediocre summer blockbuster movie starring Jack Black.
(To be fair, I haven't seen the movie. It may be an incisive commentary on modern politics, ethics, society, and social mores. But I'd bet money that it isn't...)
(To be even fairer: this is not a new phenomenon. As far as I'm aware, the most commonly-read version of Gulliver's Travels is a bowdlerised version, missing half the chapters and almost all of the satire, that dates back to an 18th/19th century school reader.)
(a) heat (battery temperature & rate of rise increases with charging current, there's limited heat transfer/dissipation in a small aluminium chassis, and LiPol batteries aren't known for their immunity to thermal runaway), and (b) 10W = 5V x 2A, which is already 30% over the rating of the USB Type A connector (1.5A).
As to the actual story, the police already wander around public car parks checking to see if you've secured your car, and leave a flyer under the wiper. If the car is secure they tick the "Congratulations!" box; if not, they tick a box describing why your car is insecure. A quick Google tells me that this is also fairly common in the Good Ol' US of A.
Don't see anybody complaining about that, though. Apparently, the police knowing that somebody within a street or two has an open WiFi AP is worse than them physically touching your property and potentially building a database of who habitually doesn't lock their cars...
WTF is it with Hollywood becoming the most unoriginal and rising as the pinnacle of butchery lately with re-makes, re-takes and spin-offs of original shows or movies?
Ummm... how long exactly have you been asleep, Rumplestiltskin?
The interesting things, here in Australia, are that (a) since the contract of sale is between you and the retailer the retailer is responsible for warranty repairs, and (b) in the case of devices that are sold with the cost amortised over the length of a contract (like phones), the ACCC considers that the warranty should last at least as long as the contract.
AFAIK, all major phone dealers now abide by that - warranties that last the length of the contract are standard, except for Telstra with iPhones (and they may have fallen in line with the rest of the industry since I last looked).
There are quirks there e.g. if you bought an iPhone outright from an Apple store, you'd get the basic 1 year warranty - but if you'd bought the same phone from the same store on a contract, you'd have two years. And in the first case Apple is the retailer (your contract of sale is with them), while in the second case Apple is acting as a sales agent for the actual retailer (your contract of sale is with the telco).
I've cited wikipedia when reviewing journal papers before when someone has got a basic piece of maths wrong.
And if they resubmitted the paper with the math corrected and citing Wikipedia for their choice of method?
Yeah...
But I guess, if you're reviewing journal papers, you already knew that reviewers comments aren't 'citations' - merely pointers to the author to consider adjustment/correction/expansion/inclusion. Except the cases where said reviewer is obviously wanting to bump up their own / a colleague's citation count.
"It's pretty conclusively OSM if you look at which small features (footpaths, lanes within a car park, etc) are rendered. This data isn't present in the commercial datasets you can licence from people like TomTom, however it is in OSM (neither Navteq nor TeleAtlas have footpaths, or this kind of micro-mapping of lanes within parking areas)."
However, that level of data is evident in some cases from commercial datasets. For example, the street directory in my car (which pre-dates OSM - I should really buy a new one!) contains several similar examples of tracks marked as footpaths or streets, carparks marked with concrete barriers & lanes, and streets that never existed (e.g. subdivision plans that were changed after submission). Much of it reflects features that were extant in the 70's and 80's, but have since changed.
Interestingly, OSM contains many of the same erroneous, outdated, or over-detailed features. Personally, if I had to point the finger anywhere, I'd point it at contributors to OSM copying data from street directories wholesale without license or attribution (in my country, that data can be and is copyrighted). Now that doesn't mean Apple didn't copy it from OSM - but to me it's pretty damning evidence that OSM copied it from somewhere too.
I would rather have (minor) damage to the environment than to continue to pay Hundreds of Billions of dollars a year to people who hate our guts and will kill after we (inadvertently) burn some of their holy books (despite our president's gracious apology).
Oh, I don't think ExxonMobil, Shell, BP et al. hate your guts as such. I think they're just happy to take your money, and don't want to pay for the physical and economic costs they've managed to externalise over the past 100 years or so.
And I don't think that you could really call Theory of Political Economy a holy book...
The rivers on the east coast, where the population is? Mostly too short/small to even appear on that map.
The north & north-west? Not desert.
Pretty much everything west of the Murray-Darling? Desert. The ones marked 51-57 on the map are seasonal, and flow only every few years.
Much of central-southern NSW, between the coast & the Murray-Darling? Already irrigated through "water [piped] in from all over the region... going over mountains and through valleys". Or, more correctly, "piped through mountains".
The Murray-Darling itself? It already mostly is "just a trickle by the time it reaches the ocean". Without the 2 dredging machines that run 24/7, the mouth of the river would close up and cut it off from the sea.
Despite having an area very similar to the 48 contiguous US states, Australia has ~50% more desert area (1,350,000km^2 vs 900,000km^2) and much much much less water.
So, no, there's not much water in Australia. It's not considered "the driest continent on earth" for no reason...
True. The power law, though, is a particularly dangerous and entrancing trap to fall in to. Almost everything in nature - from pure randomness to highly structured effects - can be fitted to a power law. You often don't even need to do any transformation of the data - simply choosing the wrong set of dependent and independent variables to examine can do it.
That said, I haven't read the current paper. They might have been very careful to avoid the common traps. I won't know until I spend some time tomorrow reading it.
"How will this impact Google's support for Android and open source in general?"
Not at all, or possibly for the better?
If they didn't want people to fork Android (and, as noted above, it's debatable if this is really a fork or just replacing bundled apps / settings), they shouldn't have open sourced it.
If they get pissy and decide to close it off due to forks/mods like this, then we're still left with the previous versions of Android - and we're better off without a developer that wants to take their bat and ball and go home at the first little upset.
but don't bother to tell them that, they're never wrong and won't revert some stupid change for the sake of change because they think it's neat.
So, it's no different to Firefox?
Personally, I think losing Google's money might be the best thing for Firefox. With a bit of luck, it might force them to listen to their users rather than their developers...
Or the old joke about the American on holidays in Romania during the 80's - he was in a bar, chatting to a local, and asked him "what do you think about Ceausescu?"
The local frowned, pointed to all the people in the bar, put his finger to his lips, and motioned for the visitor to come outside.
Out in the street, the American asked again: "What do you think about Ceausescu?". The local shook his head, gestured to indicate all the people passing by on the street, and walked into a side alley.
The American followed him again, and half-way down the dark alley grabbed the local by the shoulder and hissed "Tell me what you think about Ceausescu?"
The local looked up and down the alley, and spied a shadowy figure in a long jacket standing on a balcony smoking. Shaking his head and pointing, he stepped back into a dark doorway, and gestured for the American to follow him.
The American stepped into the dark, and whispered "So, tell me what you really think about Ceausescu?"
The local took one last look around, stood up on tip-toe, and whispered into the American's ear "I like him!"
(Damned/. and its utter failure to handle extended Latin characters...)
Not to mention the fact that if an Apple executable is downloaded via browser or email, when you attempt to run it for the first time you get a message that says:
"Xxxx is an application that was [downloaded from the internet || attached to a mail message]. Are you sure you want to open it?"
And some details about when it was downloaded / received. Admin permissions or not don't even come into it.
At some point you've got to hand over responsibility from the OS (or anti-virus) babying the user's arse, and on to the user to think a bit and look after themselves. Is learning the difference between a document or data file and a program file too much to ask?
Anti-virus software is in fact starting to become part of the problem, because users have been trained to trust it so much that they never develop the skills to protect themselves from the bleedin' obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds very high.
30 of 280 Fortune 500 companies paid no federal tax in 2008-10; 26 of those paid no federal tax in 2008-11; 24 paid less than 4% federal tax in 2011 alone; 15 paid 0% or less
Apple doesn't even make the list...
Slashdot also has the dubious honour of adding to the problem, simply by posting this as "news" 11 days after Eric clarified the issue and 5 days after the linked story was posted.
How is it that actual "news for nerds" takes a week or more to appear here, while everyday events like new Firefox versions are often posted before they're released?
(And no, I'm not new here...)
'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Visa card stamped on a Kindle's face - forever.'
Well, yeeesss, strictly speaking, you're right. But that's because Apple had a stranglehold on the ROMs - the OS disks were useless without it, so giving them away was a customer service / PR boon, not a revenue-killing nightmare.
That part was the official clone program...
IIRC, (and I'm hazy on this), System 7.6 was the first one that Apple actually charged for - and that co-incided with Apple killing off the official clones (which were only licensed for System 7 anyway).
Both the OED and Macquarie (the standard dictionary of Australian English) list both -oes and -os as acceptable for the plural form.
Having worked alongside several current and ex CSIRO technicians & scientists, I can tell you that every single one of them has pronounced it "si-roh".
But they're not claiming that* (although I see how people get that impression from the [flamebait] article). Hell, even though the article couches it in terms of "stunning demands" and "outsized claims", it admits that it's a novel application of existing technologies (OFDM, FEC, and interleaving) that nobody else had gotten to work and was accepted into the standards by the IEEE Working Group.
Basically, it's a flamebait article that relies a misunderstanding of the issue that has been formed through several years of poor and oversimplified reporting of the actual case(s). Ars should be bloody ashamed of itself for publishing such utter crap, though I'm not surprised that /. has.
(* Well, one that I of know does, but he's a dickhead who has also publicly claimed that CSIRO invented DTV, once claimed that MPEG-4 wasn't suitable for television broadcasts because it uses sprites & MIDI to simulate video & audio, and is currently trying to argue that an amplitude modulated carrier never varies in amplitude (hi, alanh!).)
On the other hand, being oblivious to subtext allows you to turn Gulliver's Travels into a mediocre summer blockbuster movie starring Jack Black.
(To be fair, I haven't seen the movie. It may be an incisive commentary on modern politics, ethics, society, and social mores. But I'd bet money that it isn't...)
(To be even fairer: this is not a new phenomenon. As far as I'm aware, the most commonly-read version of Gulliver's Travels is a bowdlerised version, missing half the chapters and almost all of the satire, that dates back to an 18th/19th century school reader.)
(a) heat (battery temperature & rate of rise increases with charging current, there's limited heat transfer/dissipation in a small aluminium chassis, and LiPol batteries aren't known for their immunity to thermal runaway), and
(b) 10W = 5V x 2A, which is already 30% over the rating of the USB Type A connector (1.5A).
Bullshit.
As to the actual story, the police already wander around public car parks checking to see if you've secured your car, and leave a flyer under the wiper. If the car is secure they tick the "Congratulations!" box; if not, they tick a box describing why your car is insecure. A quick Google tells me that this is also fairly common in the Good Ol' US of A.
Don't see anybody complaining about that, though. Apparently, the police knowing that somebody within a street or two has an open WiFi AP is worse than them physically touching your property and potentially building a database of who habitually doesn't lock their cars...
Ummm... how long exactly have you been asleep, Rumplestiltskin?
The interesting things, here in Australia, are that (a) since the contract of sale is between you and the retailer the retailer is responsible for warranty repairs, and (b) in the case of devices that are sold with the cost amortised over the length of a contract (like phones), the ACCC considers that the warranty should last at least as long as the contract.
AFAIK, all major phone dealers now abide by that - warranties that last the length of the contract are standard, except for Telstra with iPhones (and they may have fallen in line with the rest of the industry since I last looked).
There are quirks there e.g. if you bought an iPhone outright from an Apple store, you'd get the basic 1 year warranty - but if you'd bought the same phone from the same store on a contract, you'd have two years. And in the first case Apple is the retailer (your contract of sale is with them), while in the second case Apple is acting as a sales agent for the actual retailer (your contract of sale is with the telco).
And if they resubmitted the paper with the math corrected and citing Wikipedia for their choice of method?
Yeah...
But I guess, if you're reviewing journal papers, you already knew that reviewers comments aren't 'citations' - merely pointers to the author to consider adjustment/correction/expansion/inclusion. Except the cases where said reviewer is obviously wanting to bump up their own / a colleague's citation count.
However, that level of data is evident in some cases from commercial datasets. For example, the street directory in my car (which pre-dates OSM - I should really buy a new one!) contains several similar examples of tracks marked as footpaths or streets, carparks marked with concrete barriers & lanes, and streets that never existed (e.g. subdivision plans that were changed after submission). Much of it reflects features that were extant in the 70's and 80's, but have since changed.
Interestingly, OSM contains many of the same erroneous, outdated, or over-detailed features. Personally, if I had to point the finger anywhere, I'd point it at contributors to OSM copying data from street directories wholesale without license or attribution (in my country, that data can be and is copyrighted). Now that doesn't mean Apple didn't copy it from OSM - but to me it's pretty damning evidence that OSM copied it from somewhere too.
Oh, I don't think ExxonMobil, Shell, BP et al. hate your guts as such. I think they're just happy to take your money, and don't want to pay for the physical and economic costs they've managed to externalise over the past 100 years or so.
And I don't think that you could really call Theory of Political Economy a holy book...
OK, that's for the CPU - now throw in the GPU, and the rest of the hardware you've conveniently forgotten about, and it's how many watts in total?
By contrast, according to the website the top-end Roku 2 XS draws "'less than 2W (typical) when streaming HD video".
It's much older than that.
Australia isn't like the US, which is criss-crossed with rivers even in the desert areas.
The rivers on the east coast, where the population is? Mostly too short/small to even appear on that map.
The north & north-west? Not desert.
Pretty much everything west of the Murray-Darling? Desert. The ones marked 51-57 on the map are seasonal, and flow only every few years.
Much of central-southern NSW, between the coast & the Murray-Darling? Already irrigated through "water [piped] in from all over the region... going over mountains and through valleys". Or, more correctly, "piped through mountains".
The Murray-Darling itself? It already mostly is "just a trickle by the time it reaches the ocean". Without the 2 dredging machines that run 24/7, the mouth of the river would close up and cut it off from the sea.
Despite having an area very similar to the 48 contiguous US states, Australia has ~50% more desert area (1,350,000km^2 vs 900,000km^2) and much much much less water.
So, no, there's not much water in Australia. It's not considered "the driest continent on earth" for no reason...
True. The power law, though, is a particularly dangerous and entrancing trap to fall in to. Almost everything in nature - from pure randomness to highly structured effects - can be fitted to a power law. You often don't even need to do any transformation of the data - simply choosing the wrong set of dependent and independent variables to examine can do it.
My favourite goto whenever this subject comes up is the essay "So You Think You Have a Power Law - Well Isn't That Special?"
That said, I haven't read the current paper. They might have been very careful to avoid the common traps. I won't know until I spend some time tomorrow reading it.
"How will this impact Google's support for Android and open source in general?"
Not at all, or possibly for the better?
If they didn't want people to fork Android (and, as noted above, it's debatable if this is really a fork or just replacing bundled apps / settings), they shouldn't have open sourced it.
If they get pissy and decide to close it off due to forks/mods like this, then we're still left with the previous versions of Android - and we're better off without a developer that wants to take their bat and ball and go home at the first little upset.
Full of mindless crap, loud noises, and giggling nerds, masquerading as intelligent science and education?
I think it's already there...
So, it's no different to Firefox?
Personally, I think losing Google's money might be the best thing for Firefox. With a bit of luck, it might force them to listen to their users rather than their developers...
Or the old joke about the American on holidays in Romania during the 80's - he was in a bar, chatting to a local, and asked him "what do you think about Ceausescu?"
The local frowned, pointed to all the people in the bar, put his finger to his lips, and motioned for the visitor to come outside.
Out in the street, the American asked again: "What do you think about Ceausescu?". The local shook his head, gestured to indicate all the people passing by on the street, and walked into a side alley.
The American followed him again, and half-way down the dark alley grabbed the local by the shoulder and hissed "Tell me what you think about Ceausescu?"
The local looked up and down the alley, and spied a shadowy figure in a long jacket standing on a balcony smoking. Shaking his head and pointing, he stepped back into a dark doorway, and gestured for the American to follow him.
The American stepped into the dark, and whispered "So, tell me what you really think about Ceausescu?"
The local took one last look around, stood up on tip-toe, and whispered into the American's ear "I like him!"
(Damned /. and its utter failure to handle extended Latin characters...)
Yes
Not to mention the fact that if an Apple executable is downloaded via browser or email, when you attempt to run it for the first time you get a message that says:
"Xxxx is an application that was [downloaded from the internet || attached to a mail message]. Are you sure you want to open it?"
And some details about when it was downloaded / received. Admin permissions or not don't even come into it.
At some point you've got to hand over responsibility from the OS (or anti-virus) babying the user's arse, and on to the user to think a bit and look after themselves. Is learning the difference between a document or data file and a program file too much to ask?
Anti-virus software is in fact starting to become part of the problem, because users have been trained to trust it so much that they never develop the skills to protect themselves from the bleedin' obvious.