Right click under computer, then select properties. Click that. Cycle the tabs and select the hardware tab. Hit the radio button for 'all users'. Click on the box for 'environment variables'. Tab to your account in the accounts pop-up and do a double-click. Now select 'touch screens' from the control panel. Do an alt-F7 for DCP. Next, enter your admin password at the fill form. Now pop back to 'properties'. Hit apply but don't close the form yet....
This was a great idea when Norman Rush wrote about it, calling for "Solar Democracy" in Botswana, in his novel MATING, for which he won the National Book Award. It would be awesome if this could drive some actual development and reform in Africa.
Hey I care, and, let me say, this was the most informative and substantial post I've seen on Slashdot in a while. I kind of think we should all care about this. But you're welcome to go back to gabbling about Flash on an iPad, and quantum encryption proofs.
The title or subtitle of this should really be; Quantum Particle Performs Thousands Of Times Faster Than Simulations of Quantum Particle.
The authors found a behavior of a particle which is useful computationally - and compared performance of that against simulations. Most simulations of anything are like that - slower than the original behavior they're meant to simulate. This is not at all surprising. But this is far different from having a general purpose computing engine, and I don't believe you could make such from purely from Fourier functions in any economical fashion. But ooh, particles are fast!
Every day here it's another hatefest for Apple's dev policy - the same thing as every day for the last half of forever. You people, you're just being intentionally dense.
The vast majority of iPad purchasers have no, zero, interest in programming flash. People WANT a walled garden. It's a feature, it's THE defining feature that makes the device dependable, fast, trustworthy, secure. If you want something else, you go get something else. No one's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to write Objective C. You can't, so far as I know, write Lisp or Forth and run it on your XBox 360 or your Blackberry either, but I swear I've never seen a byte's worth of ascii text spent complaining about those situations. I think that's a fair indication that slashdotters feel like culturally the iPad is some kind of an affront, rather than that some real injustice is being done to them. Here, I'll try it out for you "Lisp on a Blackberry! Lisp on a Blackberry! Oh, the humanity!" Meh.
If you really want something worthwhile to gripe about, I encourage you to go visit websites of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or the EFF. Get involved in something of consequence. There is plenty of real injustice in the world, but the Apple/Flash thing is not it.
Yes and Apple has stated that explicitly and repetitively. That's the deal - and for people like my wife, who are never ever going to program on it, who want a tool that they can use and trust to work reliably, it is exactly what they want. For my wife, it's a feature. It's THE critical feature of the product. People on this site, for some reason, refuse to get that. You can't have a Ferrari dump truck. Ferrari doesn't make a dump truck. If Ferrari made a dump truck, it wouldn't be a Ferrari in the conventional sense. The whole world gets it, except Slashdotters, who instead want to make a recreational sport out of complaining about it.
NO, nearly everybody in this thread is, again, missing the point. Steve had six, 6, different points or items or arguments he brought up. EVERYONE here wants to rail about openness. I get it, we all get it already. That argument would be the same whether iPad supported flash or not.
But what about security, performance, reliability? No one here has anything to say about that, and I'll take that as tacitly agreeing that Steve is right on those issues. Likewise, what about the HW vs SW argument? It's easy for code developers, some of whom I'm guessing have invested a fair about of time and training in becoming adept at flash, to just wave their arms and say "battery life is somebody else's problem". Well, yes, the hardware manufacturer's, for one. Here is a hardware manufacturer's response. Etc.
Maybe you could just post an open thread each day in which people could gripe about the App store and its closed system, instead of allowing every thread about Apple to devolve into that.
Look at the number of attacks which are enabled through Flash and pdf, both of which are Adobe products. Before everyone here goes all righteous about free software and open platform blah blah blah (whoops! Sorry, too late), consider that if Apple had just limply allowed Adobe products onto their platform, the iPhone would be just as susceptible to attack as your Windows desktop. The obvious thing here is that Apple made a business decision based on the security of the platform and statistical analysis of recent attacks. I don't think Adobe is going to win in court because all of us can go google up the statistics.
I'm sorry, I guess you're right. What could I be thinking? Nobody's ever made any money on an iPhone app.
My earlier comment still stands - before the iPhone, Moto and the rest only wanted you to buy "skins" and ringtones rather than functioning software to run on your phone. Maybe Moto execs love to buy new ringtones every month, but I'm suggesting they overlooked the notion of a phone as a platform for general 3rd party computing. The app markets for Droid and the rest only really came about as a response to the iPhone app store and resulting boom in app development. Regardless of whether individual programmers have profited from writing apps, the breadth of existing apps and the install base for them are good reasons for individuals to buy an iPhone.
Why should anyone bother to reply to this? You're not willing to admit what is pretty obvious to the rest of the world - the iPhone really created a functioning 3rd-party app marketplace, that was generally a welcoming environment for developers (approval process notwithstanding) and a lot of great software either got migrated to or created especially for this platform. Before the iPhone, Moto wanted you to personalize your phone by purchasing "skins" - colored backgrounds, ringtones, and basically doodads. And you still ended up with all the stupid third-party revenue generation junk on your front page, whether you wanted it or not. iPhone was successful because Moto and party were trying to sell consumers something they had no intent to buy or even real interest in themselves (insert some non-funny dog food reference here.) It's clear Moto had utter contempt for its own target market while Apple employees were actually looking forward to owning and using their products.
OK I'll concede the point that Woz should write something up - but Toyota should reach out to him and make it easy for him to express what he knows, or believes, on a matter that's pretty crucial to people's trust in the safety of an automobile that they're being invited to buy and put their families in. It's in Toyota's interest to investigate and respond to these kinds of claims. Also, I don't know that I could very easily specify the exact maneuvers I make in an auto for any specific instance (even, say, driving up my driveway) in a way that would be exactly reproducible. If it were me, I would have made an initial email to Toyota regarding what I'd found, and then, if nothing happened in pretty short order, I'd sell the car and buy something else. Woz has the luxury of a lot of excess time (and vehicles, probably) that most of the rest of us likely don't have.
I'm willing to give Woz the benefit of the doubt on this until his complaint is actually heard, tested and responded to by Toyota. He's generally a smart guy (if a little wacky sometimes.) And he's got a lot of time on his hands, and no obvious motive for smearing Toyota.
I guess I'm not getting what the real meat of FSF's issue is here. If you want to program for an iPad, get the SDK. If you want to put somebody else's software on it, just wait around a few weeks and someone will make a convenient way to do that. If you want to put it on somebody else's network, jailbreak it. If you want to steal content, well, it's hard to expect Apple to make all these deals with old-media companies in good faith, then make it easy for content to be stolen, right?
Just as a point of reference, I can't update, add, or modify ANY of the software on my Motorola RAZR, nor can my wife on her Nokia "smartphone". Not even to simply turn of existing features I don't want. By comparison, the App Store is a huge step forward in openness for phones.
This thing is very flat, and it's possible it could very easily get lost in my cluttered apartment. It has on odd name that could be hard to spell, with a capital later that is placed in an unorthodox location.
It has somewhat sharp edges which could present a danger to very clumsy people. Also, it's utility is going to be limited for people who are blind, deaf and also have no fingers or toes. Additionally, it won't work very well for people living underwater. In places that are very hot, like Venus, or the Sun, its durability is questionable and its battery life would be compromised. It could present a choking hazard to very large people or hungry bears. A palette full of them could easily crush someone. It would probably explode in a microwave oven.
Honestly, I have to wonder what Steve Jobs was thinking when he designed this! No thanks, Steve, what are you, trying to kill me?
Apple will sell many millions of these things. This thing is basically a hybrid between every other media-related thing you like, in a form factor that is exactly in the sweet spot of convenience and usability. The pricing alone is an indication that they intend to take over the world with this - the profit margin has got to be awfully thin. They intend to kill several other categories of device (say goodbye, Kindle, Garmin, Palm, hand-held DVD players) with this one. The form factor is durable - they're not going to shrink this any more, only continue to pack more and more features into the same carapace for the foreseeable future. Your grandchildren will be carrying around something that looks a lot like this.
Take a look at what all the red-shirts are carrying around onboard the Enterprise in Star Trek (any version). It's essentially some flavor of this device - this form factor, these kinds of features. Why is it you're willing to accept it (without even thinking about it) in your science fiction, but can't imagine anyone possibly wanting one in real life?
What you mean to say is "Apple is good, but through a lot of research and investigation, I can usually find a product that is (somewhat, in some aspects) better, at a somewhat lesser cost." Some people don't want to make a sport out of finding the very best bargain in, say, a cellphone. How many cellphones were on the market this year? Some people are willing to pay a premium for a product that is known to be good, without all the uncertainty and the shopping around, etc. My time is valuable and already has a lot of constraints on it. I just want to use the phone, and not have to answer to a lot of (annoying) arguments like "Why didn't you buy a StirrupoPhone T2100? It has higher camera resolution and is $50 cheaper."
Also there is a critical mass around Apple products now that ensures they will be supported in the future. I can put my Zune right next to my HP2100 printer and my MS "virtual locker" in the pile of "cool, fairly expensive products that are now no longer supported because they made their money and then discarded their customers, over my protests"
I bought a mac initially because I didn't want to support MS any longer, and buying more iterations of their OS and products is supporting them, by definition. They're a force for stagnation - stagnation just allows them to continue printing money basically, they have no incentive to take risks or rethink an OS and a set of office applications that has long ago made most of them rich. They have no real motivation to make anything better. Noone over there even cares that I'm not having any luck finding printer drivers or unlocking software from some "virtual locker" I bought from them six months back.
Apple has really gone out of their way to make things work in their OS, to make things work better, to experiment with new form factors for devices, with new UIs etc. Take a look at the blase, apathetic way Steve Ballmer presented his me-too tablet device at CES, and compare that with what Steve Jobs will be doing wednesday afternoon. One of them really believes, and is excited that, technology can be transformative and can make society better, the other can barely enunciate what he is up there doing.
So why does this qualify me a being some kind of shallow hipster, exactly?
My three-year-old daughter is fascinated by my Verizon Razor phone. Because of the way the menus are set up (which I haven't figured out how to change) it's almost guaranteed that she will trigger one of these data or software download functions very quickly, and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off. So basically any time she gets ahold of my phone, I can expect a $1.14 charge on my bill. I won't ever buy another Motorola phone, I assure you.
"North Carolina State University engineers have created a new material that would allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of[...]" says the NCSU news item, first line. The execrable ComputerWorld article starts out "Engineers have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold[...]" I hate this kind of lazy, irresponsible journalism!
Slashdot Mirror
Right click under computer, then select properties. Click that. Cycle the tabs and select the hardware tab. Hit the radio button for 'all users'. Click on the box for 'environment variables'. Tab to your account in the accounts pop-up and do a double-click. Now select 'touch screens' from the control panel. Do an alt-F7 for DCP. Next, enter your admin password at the fill form. Now pop back to 'properties'. Hit apply but don't close the form yet....
This was a great idea when Norman Rush wrote about it, calling for "Solar Democracy" in Botswana, in his novel MATING, for which he won the National Book Award. It would be awesome if this could drive some actual development and reform in Africa.
Hey I care, and, let me say, this was the most informative and substantial post I've seen on Slashdot in a while. I kind of think we should all care about this. But you're welcome to go back to gabbling about Flash on an iPad, and quantum encryption proofs.
Could they pick a tackier or more insensitive name?
The title or subtitle of this should really be; Quantum Particle Performs Thousands Of Times Faster Than Simulations of Quantum Particle.
The authors found a behavior of a particle which is useful computationally - and compared performance of that against simulations. Most simulations of anything are like that - slower than the original behavior they're meant to simulate. This is not at all surprising. But this is far different from having a general purpose computing engine, and I don't believe you could make such from purely from Fourier functions in any economical fashion. But ooh, particles are fast!
Every day here it's another hatefest for Apple's dev policy - the same thing as every day for the last half of forever. You people, you're just being intentionally dense.
The vast majority of iPad purchasers have no, zero, interest in programming flash. People WANT a walled garden. It's a feature, it's THE defining feature that makes the device dependable, fast, trustworthy, secure. If you want something else, you go get something else. No one's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to write Objective C. You can't, so far as I know, write Lisp or Forth and run it on your XBox 360 or your Blackberry either, but I swear I've never seen a byte's worth of ascii text spent complaining about those situations. I think that's a fair indication that slashdotters feel like culturally the iPad is some kind of an affront, rather than that some real injustice is being done to them. Here, I'll try it out for you "Lisp on a Blackberry! Lisp on a Blackberry! Oh, the humanity!" Meh.
If you really want something worthwhile to gripe about, I encourage you to go visit websites of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or the EFF. Get involved in something of consequence. There is plenty of real injustice in the world, but the Apple/Flash thing is not it.
Didn't IBM a few years ago announce a big five-year-program to crack speech recognition? Whatever came of that?
Yes and Apple has stated that explicitly and repetitively. That's the deal - and for people like my wife, who are never ever going to program on it, who want a tool that they can use and trust to work reliably, it is exactly what they want. For my wife, it's a feature. It's THE critical feature of the product. People on this site, for some reason, refuse to get that. You can't have a Ferrari dump truck. Ferrari doesn't make a dump truck. If Ferrari made a dump truck, it wouldn't be a Ferrari in the conventional sense. The whole world gets it, except Slashdotters, who instead want to make a recreational sport out of complaining about it.
NO, nearly everybody in this thread is, again, missing the point. Steve had six, 6, different points or items or arguments he brought up. EVERYONE here wants to rail about openness. I get it, we all get it already. That argument would be the same whether iPad supported flash or not. But what about security, performance, reliability? No one here has anything to say about that, and I'll take that as tacitly agreeing that Steve is right on those issues. Likewise, what about the HW vs SW argument? It's easy for code developers, some of whom I'm guessing have invested a fair about of time and training in becoming adept at flash, to just wave their arms and say "battery life is somebody else's problem". Well, yes, the hardware manufacturer's, for one. Here is a hardware manufacturer's response. Etc. Maybe you could just post an open thread each day in which people could gripe about the App store and its closed system, instead of allowing every thread about Apple to devolve into that.
Look at the number of attacks which are enabled through Flash and pdf, both of which are Adobe products. Before everyone here goes all righteous about free software and open platform blah blah blah (whoops! Sorry, too late), consider that if Apple had just limply allowed Adobe products onto their platform, the iPhone would be just as susceptible to attack as your Windows desktop. The obvious thing here is that Apple made a business decision based on the security of the platform and statistical analysis of recent attacks. I don't think Adobe is going to win in court because all of us can go google up the statistics.
I have to say, when I first read this story, I checked to make sure the dateline wasn't April 1. This is just bizarre -
I'm sorry, I guess you're right. What could I be thinking? Nobody's ever made any money on an iPhone app. My earlier comment still stands - before the iPhone, Moto and the rest only wanted you to buy "skins" and ringtones rather than functioning software to run on your phone. Maybe Moto execs love to buy new ringtones every month, but I'm suggesting they overlooked the notion of a phone as a platform for general 3rd party computing. The app markets for Droid and the rest only really came about as a response to the iPhone app store and resulting boom in app development. Regardless of whether individual programmers have profited from writing apps, the breadth of existing apps and the install base for them are good reasons for individuals to buy an iPhone.
Why should anyone bother to reply to this? You're not willing to admit what is pretty obvious to the rest of the world - the iPhone really created a functioning 3rd-party app marketplace, that was generally a welcoming environment for developers (approval process notwithstanding) and a lot of great software either got migrated to or created especially for this platform. Before the iPhone, Moto wanted you to personalize your phone by purchasing "skins" - colored backgrounds, ringtones, and basically doodads. And you still ended up with all the stupid third-party revenue generation junk on your front page, whether you wanted it or not. iPhone was successful because Moto and party were trying to sell consumers something they had no intent to buy or even real interest in themselves (insert some non-funny dog food reference here.) It's clear Moto had utter contempt for its own target market while Apple employees were actually looking forward to owning and using their products.
OK I'll concede the point that Woz should write something up - but Toyota should reach out to him and make it easy for him to express what he knows, or believes, on a matter that's pretty crucial to people's trust in the safety of an automobile that they're being invited to buy and put their families in. It's in Toyota's interest to investigate and respond to these kinds of claims. Also, I don't know that I could very easily specify the exact maneuvers I make in an auto for any specific instance (even, say, driving up my driveway) in a way that would be exactly reproducible. If it were me, I would have made an initial email to Toyota regarding what I'd found, and then, if nothing happened in pretty short order, I'd sell the car and buy something else. Woz has the luxury of a lot of excess time (and vehicles, probably) that most of the rest of us likely don't have.
I'm willing to give Woz the benefit of the doubt on this until his complaint is actually heard, tested and responded to by Toyota. He's generally a smart guy (if a little wacky sometimes.) And he's got a lot of time on his hands, and no obvious motive for smearing Toyota.
I guess I'm not getting what the real meat of FSF's issue is here. If you want to program for an iPad, get the SDK. If you want to put somebody else's software on it, just wait around a few weeks and someone will make a convenient way to do that. If you want to put it on somebody else's network, jailbreak it. If you want to steal content, well, it's hard to expect Apple to make all these deals with old-media companies in good faith, then make it easy for content to be stolen, right?
Just as a point of reference, I can't update, add, or modify ANY of the software on my Motorola RAZR, nor can my wife on her Nokia "smartphone". Not even to simply turn of existing features I don't want. By comparison, the App Store is a huge step forward in openness for phones.
This thing is very flat, and it's possible it could very easily get lost in my cluttered apartment. It has on odd name that could be hard to spell, with a capital later that is placed in an unorthodox location. It has somewhat sharp edges which could present a danger to very clumsy people. Also, it's utility is going to be limited for people who are blind, deaf and also have no fingers or toes. Additionally, it won't work very well for people living underwater. In places that are very hot, like Venus, or the Sun, its durability is questionable and its battery life would be compromised. It could present a choking hazard to very large people or hungry bears. A palette full of them could easily crush someone. It would probably explode in a microwave oven. Honestly, I have to wonder what Steve Jobs was thinking when he designed this! No thanks, Steve, what are you, trying to kill me?
Apple will sell many millions of these things. This thing is basically a hybrid between every other media-related thing you like, in a form factor that is exactly in the sweet spot of convenience and usability. The pricing alone is an indication that they intend to take over the world with this - the profit margin has got to be awfully thin. They intend to kill several other categories of device (say goodbye, Kindle, Garmin, Palm, hand-held DVD players) with this one. The form factor is durable - they're not going to shrink this any more, only continue to pack more and more features into the same carapace for the foreseeable future. Your grandchildren will be carrying around something that looks a lot like this.
Take a look at what all the red-shirts are carrying around onboard the Enterprise in Star Trek (any version). It's essentially some flavor of this device - this form factor, these kinds of features. Why is it you're willing to accept it (without even thinking about it) in your science fiction, but can't imagine anyone possibly wanting one in real life?
Yeah, and who knows when Apple will crack the impossibly-complex 'text editing' problem.
What you mean to say is "Apple is good, but through a lot of research and investigation, I can usually find a product that is (somewhat, in some aspects) better, at a somewhat lesser cost." Some people don't want to make a sport out of finding the very best bargain in, say, a cellphone. How many cellphones were on the market this year? Some people are willing to pay a premium for a product that is known to be good, without all the uncertainty and the shopping around, etc. My time is valuable and already has a lot of constraints on it. I just want to use the phone, and not have to answer to a lot of (annoying) arguments like "Why didn't you buy a StirrupoPhone T2100? It has higher camera resolution and is $50 cheaper." Also there is a critical mass around Apple products now that ensures they will be supported in the future. I can put my Zune right next to my HP2100 printer and my MS "virtual locker" in the pile of "cool, fairly expensive products that are now no longer supported because they made their money and then discarded their customers, over my protests"
I bought a mac initially because I didn't want to support MS any longer, and buying more iterations of their OS and products is supporting them, by definition. They're a force for stagnation - stagnation just allows them to continue printing money basically, they have no incentive to take risks or rethink an OS and a set of office applications that has long ago made most of them rich. They have no real motivation to make anything better. Noone over there even cares that I'm not having any luck finding printer drivers or unlocking software from some "virtual locker" I bought from them six months back. Apple has really gone out of their way to make things work in their OS, to make things work better, to experiment with new form factors for devices, with new UIs etc. Take a look at the blase, apathetic way Steve Ballmer presented his me-too tablet device at CES, and compare that with what Steve Jobs will be doing wednesday afternoon. One of them really believes, and is excited that, technology can be transformative and can make society better, the other can barely enunciate what he is up there doing. So why does this qualify me a being some kind of shallow hipster, exactly?
My three-year-old daughter is fascinated by my Verizon Razor phone. Because of the way the menus are set up (which I haven't figured out how to change) it's almost guaranteed that she will trigger one of these data or software download functions very quickly, and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off. So basically any time she gets ahold of my phone, I can expect a $1.14 charge on my bill. I won't ever buy another Motorola phone, I assure you.
"North Carolina State University engineers have created a new material that would allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of[...]" says the NCSU news item, first line. The execrable ComputerWorld article starts out "Engineers have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold[...]" I hate this kind of lazy, irresponsible journalism!