Designing and building installers. It's something many programmers hate to do, and it's so critical to the success of the project. If installation doesn't go smoothly, many people will just stop there and never start using the program. It's also quite challenging, given all the subtle differences you encounter between different OS versions and even individual computers.
Whenever a story like this is posted, about people who are trying to actually fix our broken legal system, it collects tons of comments explaining why the idea can never work: politicians won't let it, the new idea will just get subverted by entrenched interests, the public isn't really competent to write laws anyway, etc. etc. etc. And then those same people go back to complaining about how the current system is broken and just serves the wealthy and powerful.
It's time to actually do something useful. This is a group of people who have recognized the current system is broken, and are trying to actually do something about it. Will they succeed? Maybe or maybe not. Perhaps the odds are heavily against them. But they're trying. Can you say as much? If no one tries, then failure is guaranteed. If you don't like the current system, you need to do something about it. Don't tell the people who are trying that they'll never succeed and should just give up. You're wasting your time, and more importantly, you're wasting their time. If you want change, you need to work for it, not be an obstacle to it.
Exactly. Everyone seems to assume employers are unreasonable and just want to exploit you, but in my experience, many employers are quite reasonable about this sort of thing. The critical point is to be completely open about it and get everything in writing. Explain that you want to develop something on your own time, that you won't use any company resources for it, and that it doesn't compete with anything the company does. Under those circumstances, many companies will have no problem about adding an exclusion to your IP agreement. But if you try to hide what you're doing and don't tell them about it, don't be surprised if they later claim ownership under the agreement that you did, after all, sign.
It's remarkable how completely opposite his argument is to reality. Consider:
why it would be A-OK for dozens of already megarich corporations to get even richer adopting technology they did not invent or have legal permission to use, but somehow immoral for the actual creators of the technology to likewise profit[?]
So the companies that have spent years writing actual software and creating useful products "did not invent" it. No, the "actual creators of the technology" are the people who applied for a vague patent that somehow covers any sort of "interactivity" on the web, an idea which apparently no one else in the world would have thought of without them. That's what patent lawyers think it means to "invent" something. They're speaking a bizarre language that uses words to mean the exact opposite of what everyone else means by them.
Fine questions. Are you asserting that science can never answer them? If so, why do you believe that? Many scientists consider such matters as consciousness and spirituality as legitimate subjects for scientific study. And you know what? They're making progress.
i) The Way has a name; a label is not an answer.
No name required. As you say, that's just a label. But you should still be able to give an operational definition that's sufficiently precise to be able to talk about it. If you can't do that... well, see the footnote to my first post.
On the contrary, death is one of nature's greatest inventions. If you want to keep making progress, you need to constantly keep clearing away the old to make room for the new. How would you like driving if every car (and horse drawn cart, and covered wagon pulled by oxen) ever made was still on the roads? Sure, it's not so nice when you're the old thing that's getting cleared away. But do you want to sacrifice the welfare of all the countless generations to come, just because you want to stick around past your time? What if the earth were crammed to the breaking point with every pre-human and dinosaur and trilobyte that ever lived, still alive and sticking around? We each get our turn, and when it's over, we need to step aside to make room for the future.
Besides, what is "a very long time"? A year? (That's huge for a fly.) 10 years? (Incredibly long for a mouse.) 100 years? 1000 years? We're already one of the longer lived animal species on this planet, and no matter how long you live, I doubt you'll ever consider it "long enough".
It is _one_ way to acquire Truth. And like any process, it works well with certain types of inputs, and completely fails at others.
But it is NOT the _only_ process;
Ok, please name one other way to acquire Truth.* I'm having trouble thinking of one.
*that we have any reason to think actually works. That is, "I believe in X because I accept it on faith, and I refuse to question my beliefs" doesn't count.
"We're not trying to take more of your money, we're rewarding you! By generously allowing you to access content that you've already bought from us and that already belongs to you. But we don't allow you to resell that content that you bought, even though you're legally entitled to. We don't want to reward you as much as that."
The Vita, also launching in difficult times, has had a poor Japanese launch despite a really quite good launch-games lineup.
The Vita (and 3DS) have a much bigger problem than hard economic times: the explosion in smartphone gaming. Why buy a dedicated handheld gaming device when you already have a perfectly good handheld gaming device that you already carry with you everywhere you go? The Vita is a bit more powerful than most current phones, but that will stop being true once Tegra 3 based phones become widely available. About the only thing dedicated handhelds have over phones is better controls. I think the Xperia Play is a much better approach: it's a completely standard Android phone, except where some phones have slide-out keyboards, it has slide-out gaming controls. It's a better gaming experience than other phones for people who are really into games, but also works fine for all the other things you use your phone for. You still only need one device. I think that's where the future of mobile gaming is.
I just saw Unity for the first time a few weeks ago, and I really like it. Then again, I'm a long time Mac user, and it's clearly heavily influenced by OS X. Thank goodness someone other than Apple has finally gotten a clue about Fitts' Law and put the menu bar at the top of the screen! And this feature is a really obvious "borrowing" of the Search item Apple has had in the Help menu for some time.
I've used Gnome for a long time, and it just feels so clumsy and primitive. If I had to use it as my primary desktop, it would make me sad. But Unity is something I think I could actually be happy with. Well, that's my personal preference, and yours may be different. But I have the feeling a lot of the gnashing of teeth and rending of hair I've been hearing about Unity is just a gut reaction from people who object to anything that's different from what they're used to.
You may be right. That petition actually asks to set them back to what they were in 1976: 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Back when that was how copyright works, >85% of copyrights did not get renewed, because even after only 28 years, most works were no longer producing any money for their creators. That shows how absurd the current system is. And it's also a good argument for requiring copyrights to be renewed: creators know they can get a longer term if a work turns out to be a big success, but if it doesn't (as most works don't), then let it go into the public domain sooner.
You can register and sign all of them in about two minutes. There's absolutely no excuse not to, except apathy. Signing a petition may not change anything, but not signing it is guaranteed not to.
What crime are they suggesting he be investigated for? Taking campaign contributions is legal. Voting however you want, including in ways that benefit your contributors, is legal. That's how our government works, and it's what all politicians do. You can object to the fact that it works that way, and you can try to change it. But as long as it remains legal, demanding an "investigation" (whatever that means) of someone for publicly admitting that's how it works is just silly.
Not true. A discrete Fourier transform is an exact, lossless transform. Given N components in the time domain, it produces N components in the frequency domain. You can then apply the inverse transform, and you're guaranteed to get back precisely the N numbers you started with. The algorithm in this paper is not an exact transform. If you apply it, then apply the inverse transform, you will get back a different set of numbers from the ones you started with.
Here's the first sentence of the abstract: "We consider the problem of computing the k-sparse approximation to the discrete Fourier transform of an n-dimensional signal." Did you notice the word "approximation" in there? Right. This is an algorithm for calculating an approximation to the Fourier transform, not the actual Fourier transform. There are, to be sure, lots of problems where that's exactly what you want, and this algorithm could be really useful for them. There are also a lot of problems where that's not useful at all, and you need the exact transform. In any case, calling this a "Faster-Than-Fast Fourier Transform" is just wrong. It isn't a Fourier transform. It's an approximation to the Fourier transform.
So... do you have any data about this? What did the curve of weight vs. size look like 20 years ago? What does it look like now? How much of the weight increase in that time is explained by people moving along that curve toward bigger cars, and what fraction is explained by the curve shifting?
Remember, any claim that is not based on data is, at best, wild speculation. See my signature quote, which seems to be appropriate to a remarkably large number of discussions on Slashdot.:)
Exactly. As a developer, I've had very little problem with differences between devices. Sure there's a lot of variation in terms of screen resolutions and such, but the OS provides tools to deal with that. And the custom skins different vendors put on the UI really don't impact me much at all.
But it's really irritating that I still can't require anything later than Android 2.2 without excluding a large part of the potential market (and even at that I'm losing about 10% that are on 2.1 or earlier). The various companies involved really need to get their act together. They should commit to keeping all devices up to date for a reasonable period (at least a year) after they're sold, and to releasing those updates in a timely manner.
Although I agree with much of what you said, I think there are a few important points you're missing.
First, much of the demand for Windows on ARM is for servers, not consumer products. When you're running a big server farm, computation/watt is everything, and ARM is still ahead of Intel on that. And legacy apps aren't as much of an issue there. In fact, if you support nothing but a few web servers, a few databases, and Java/PHP/Python/Ruby, that's enough to open up a huge market right there. Servers are also likely to be running custom software, which the customer can compile for ARM just as easily as for Intel.
Second, don't neglect the possibilities for Android. Devices like the Asus Transformer are already starting to blur the line between tablets and laptops, just as Windows 8 aims to blur the line from the other direction. And Android has a huge base of existing software, just like Windows. It's not hard to imagine that within a couple of years, many people will consider Windows and Android equally good options for their primary computing device (and that device will be usable as a tablet, a laptop, and a desktop just by attaching or detaching an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor).
I think it's the Android marketplace and Google-provided apps they care about. Any phone without those is at a big disadvantage. They might be able to pull it off anyway, but it would be a risky move. Amazon's position was different because 1) they didn't have any existing market share to be concerned about risking, 2) they were trying to create a completely new market segment by pricing it way below most competitive tablets, and 3) they had the whole Kindle/Amazon ecosystem in place, giving users a strong reason to prefer it to other products. Samsung doesn't have the luxury of either 1 or 3, and trying to undercut everyone else on price would make the whole business even more risky.
The thing is, there's hardly any barrier to switching from a Samsung Android phone to a non-Samsung Android phone. Without a barrier, it doesn't function as a separate market. With time they could try to build up some barriers by tying users to Samsung-only services. But that would take time, and success would be far from certain. Users might just ignore their services and continue to use competing, cross platform ones. And if they tried to fork before then, it could easily drive users to leave for other vendors.
This sounds very hypothetical. Is there any indication they're actually doing this? Just because Samsung sells slightly over 50% of all Android phones, that doesn't automatically give them a huge amount of bargaining power. There are lots of other companies with competitive phones ready to grab market share if Samsung stumbles. And any attempt by Samsung to fork the OS would have a high risk of hurting their market share and giving those companies exactly the opportunity they want.
Because nobody brings up externalities unless they're trying to control it, tax it, or make an argument towards a thing or behavior they don't like.
Actually, people only talk about externalities when they're trying to correct a market failure. What do you think would be gained by a tax on breathing or going to the bathroom? It's not like you'd get people to breathe less. And it's not clear what externalities you'd even be trying to compensate for. You already pay for sewer and water service, and the only real harm you do by breathing is using energy, which you pay for when you buy food.
But there's a major market failure going on right now that could be corrected by a carbon tax. Excessive energy use is causing enormous real world damage right now: at least in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and trillions of dollars a year by some estimates. And that's happening because people have no direct incentive to do anything about it. This isn't some abstract, hypothetical problem. People are dying because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Designing and building installers. It's something many programmers hate to do, and it's so critical to the success of the project. If installation doesn't go smoothly, many people will just stop there and never start using the program. It's also quite challenging, given all the subtle differences you encounter between different OS versions and even individual computers.
Whenever a story like this is posted, about people who are trying to actually fix our broken legal system, it collects tons of comments explaining why the idea can never work: politicians won't let it, the new idea will just get subverted by entrenched interests, the public isn't really competent to write laws anyway, etc. etc. etc. And then those same people go back to complaining about how the current system is broken and just serves the wealthy and powerful.
It's time to actually do something useful. This is a group of people who have recognized the current system is broken, and are trying to actually do something about it. Will they succeed? Maybe or maybe not. Perhaps the odds are heavily against them. But they're trying. Can you say as much? If no one tries, then failure is guaranteed. If you don't like the current system, you need to do something about it. Don't tell the people who are trying that they'll never succeed and should just give up. You're wasting your time, and more importantly, you're wasting their time. If you want change, you need to work for it, not be an obstacle to it.
I was going to say exactly the same thing.
So "digital natives" have no experience with physical objects, and can never draw inspiration from things they encounter in the non-digital world?
Um, yeah.
Exactly. Everyone seems to assume employers are unreasonable and just want to exploit you, but in my experience, many employers are quite reasonable about this sort of thing. The critical point is to be completely open about it and get everything in writing. Explain that you want to develop something on your own time, that you won't use any company resources for it, and that it doesn't compete with anything the company does. Under those circumstances, many companies will have no problem about adding an exclusion to your IP agreement. But if you try to hide what you're doing and don't tell them about it, don't be surprised if they later claim ownership under the agreement that you did, after all, sign.
It's remarkable how completely opposite his argument is to reality. Consider:
why it would be A-OK for dozens of already megarich corporations to get even richer adopting technology they did not invent or have legal permission to use, but somehow immoral for the actual creators of the technology to likewise profit[?]
So the companies that have spent years writing actual software and creating useful products "did not invent" it. No, the "actual creators of the technology" are the people who applied for a vague patent that somehow covers any sort of "interactivity" on the web, an idea which apparently no one else in the world would have thought of without them. That's what patent lawyers think it means to "invent" something. They're speaking a bizarre language that uses words to mean the exact opposite of what everyone else means by them.
Fine questions. Are you asserting that science can never answer them? If so, why do you believe that? Many scientists consider such matters as consciousness and spirituality as legitimate subjects for scientific study. And you know what? They're making progress.
i) The Way has a name; a label is not an answer.
No name required. As you say, that's just a label. But you should still be able to give an operational definition that's sufficiently precise to be able to talk about it. If you can't do that... well, see the footnote to my first post.
On the contrary, death is one of nature's greatest inventions. If you want to keep making progress, you need to constantly keep clearing away the old to make room for the new. How would you like driving if every car (and horse drawn cart, and covered wagon pulled by oxen) ever made was still on the roads? Sure, it's not so nice when you're the old thing that's getting cleared away. But do you want to sacrifice the welfare of all the countless generations to come, just because you want to stick around past your time? What if the earth were crammed to the breaking point with every pre-human and dinosaur and trilobyte that ever lived, still alive and sticking around? We each get our turn, and when it's over, we need to step aside to make room for the future.
Besides, what is "a very long time"? A year? (That's huge for a fly.) 10 years? (Incredibly long for a mouse.) 100 years? 1000 years? We're already one of the longer lived animal species on this planet, and no matter how long you live, I doubt you'll ever consider it "long enough".
It is _one_ way to acquire Truth. And like any process, it works well with certain types of inputs, and completely fails at others.
But it is NOT the _only_ process;
Ok, please name one other way to acquire Truth.* I'm having trouble thinking of one.
*that we have any reason to think actually works. That is, "I believe in X because I accept it on faith, and I refuse to question my beliefs" doesn't count.
"We're not trying to take more of your money, we're rewarding you! By generously allowing you to access content that you've already bought from us and that already belongs to you. But we don't allow you to resell that content that you bought, even though you're legally entitled to. We don't want to reward you as much as that."
The Vita, also launching in difficult times, has had a poor Japanese launch despite a really quite good launch-games lineup.
The Vita (and 3DS) have a much bigger problem than hard economic times: the explosion in smartphone gaming. Why buy a dedicated handheld gaming device when you already have a perfectly good handheld gaming device that you already carry with you everywhere you go? The Vita is a bit more powerful than most current phones, but that will stop being true once Tegra 3 based phones become widely available. About the only thing dedicated handhelds have over phones is better controls. I think the Xperia Play is a much better approach: it's a completely standard Android phone, except where some phones have slide-out keyboards, it has slide-out gaming controls. It's a better gaming experience than other phones for people who are really into games, but also works fine for all the other things you use your phone for. You still only need one device. I think that's where the future of mobile gaming is.
I just saw Unity for the first time a few weeks ago, and I really like it. Then again, I'm a long time Mac user, and it's clearly heavily influenced by OS X. Thank goodness someone other than Apple has finally gotten a clue about Fitts' Law and put the menu bar at the top of the screen! And this feature is a really obvious "borrowing" of the Search item Apple has had in the Help menu for some time.
I've used Gnome for a long time, and it just feels so clumsy and primitive. If I had to use it as my primary desktop, it would make me sad. But Unity is something I think I could actually be happy with. Well, that's my personal preference, and yours may be different. But I have the feeling a lot of the gnashing of teeth and rending of hair I've been hearing about Unity is just a gut reaction from people who object to anything that's different from what they're used to.
You may be right. That petition actually asks to set them back to what they were in 1976: 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Back when that was how copyright works, >85% of copyrights did not get renewed, because even after only 28 years, most works were no longer producing any money for their creators. That shows how absurd the current system is. And it's also a good argument for requiring copyrights to be renewed: creators know they can get a longer term if a work turns out to be a big success, but if it doesn't (as most works don't), then let it go into the public domain sooner.
I used Safari and it worked for me. Strange.
Really, there are a lot of petitions on there I would think everyone on Slashdot would support. Consider these:
Restore democracy by ending corporate personhood
Reduce the term of copyrights to a maximum of 56 years
End ACTA and Protect our right to privacy on the Internet
You can register and sign all of them in about two minutes. There's absolutely no excuse not to, except apathy. Signing a petition may not change anything, but not signing it is guaranteed not to.
What crime are they suggesting he be investigated for? Taking campaign contributions is legal. Voting however you want, including in ways that benefit your contributors, is legal. That's how our government works, and it's what all politicians do. You can object to the fact that it works that way, and you can try to change it. But as long as it remains legal, demanding an "investigation" (whatever that means) of someone for publicly admitting that's how it works is just silly.
Not true. A discrete Fourier transform is an exact, lossless transform. Given N components in the time domain, it produces N components in the frequency domain. You can then apply the inverse transform, and you're guaranteed to get back precisely the N numbers you started with. The algorithm in this paper is not an exact transform. If you apply it, then apply the inverse transform, you will get back a different set of numbers from the ones you started with.
Here's the first sentence of the abstract: "We consider the problem of computing the k-sparse approximation to the discrete Fourier transform of an n-dimensional signal." Did you notice the word "approximation" in there? Right. This is an algorithm for calculating an approximation to the Fourier transform, not the actual Fourier transform. There are, to be sure, lots of problems where that's exactly what you want, and this algorithm could be really useful for them. There are also a lot of problems where that's not useful at all, and you need the exact transform. In any case, calling this a "Faster-Than-Fast Fourier Transform" is just wrong. It isn't a Fourier transform. It's an approximation to the Fourier transform.
So... do you have any data about this? What did the curve of weight vs. size look like 20 years ago? What does it look like now? How much of the weight increase in that time is explained by people moving along that curve toward bigger cars, and what fraction is explained by the curve shifting?
Remember, any claim that is not based on data is, at best, wild speculation. See my signature quote, which seems to be appropriate to a remarkably large number of discussions on Slashdot. :)
Exactly. As a developer, I've had very little problem with differences between devices. Sure there's a lot of variation in terms of screen resolutions and such, but the OS provides tools to deal with that. And the custom skins different vendors put on the UI really don't impact me much at all.
But it's really irritating that I still can't require anything later than Android 2.2 without excluding a large part of the potential market (and even at that I'm losing about 10% that are on 2.1 or earlier). The various companies involved really need to get their act together. They should commit to keeping all devices up to date for a reasonable period (at least a year) after they're sold, and to releasing those updates in a timely manner.
Although I agree with much of what you said, I think there are a few important points you're missing.
First, much of the demand for Windows on ARM is for servers, not consumer products. When you're running a big server farm, computation/watt is everything, and ARM is still ahead of Intel on that. And legacy apps aren't as much of an issue there. In fact, if you support nothing but a few web servers, a few databases, and Java/PHP/Python/Ruby, that's enough to open up a huge market right there. Servers are also likely to be running custom software, which the customer can compile for ARM just as easily as for Intel.
Second, don't neglect the possibilities for Android. Devices like the Asus Transformer are already starting to blur the line between tablets and laptops, just as Windows 8 aims to blur the line from the other direction. And Android has a huge base of existing software, just like Windows. It's not hard to imagine that within a couple of years, many people will consider Windows and Android equally good options for their primary computing device (and that device will be usable as a tablet, a laptop, and a desktop just by attaching or detaching an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor).
I think it's the Android marketplace and Google-provided apps they care about. Any phone without those is at a big disadvantage. They might be able to pull it off anyway, but it would be a risky move. Amazon's position was different because 1) they didn't have any existing market share to be concerned about risking, 2) they were trying to create a completely new market segment by pricing it way below most competitive tablets, and 3) they had the whole Kindle/Amazon ecosystem in place, giving users a strong reason to prefer it to other products. Samsung doesn't have the luxury of either 1 or 3, and trying to undercut everyone else on price would make the whole business even more risky.
The thing is, there's hardly any barrier to switching from a Samsung Android phone to a non-Samsung Android phone. Without a barrier, it doesn't function as a separate market. With time they could try to build up some barriers by tying users to Samsung-only services. But that would take time, and success would be far from certain. Users might just ignore their services and continue to use competing, cross platform ones. And if they tried to fork before then, it could easily drive users to leave for other vendors.
This sounds very hypothetical. Is there any indication they're actually doing this? Just because Samsung sells slightly over 50% of all Android phones, that doesn't automatically give them a huge amount of bargaining power. There are lots of other companies with competitive phones ready to grab market share if Samsung stumbles. And any attempt by Samsung to fork the OS would have a high risk of hurting their market share and giving those companies exactly the opportunity they want.
Because nobody brings up externalities unless they're trying to control it, tax it, or make an argument towards a thing or behavior they don't like.
Actually, people only talk about externalities when they're trying to correct a market failure. What do you think would be gained by a tax on breathing or going to the bathroom? It's not like you'd get people to breathe less. And it's not clear what externalities you'd even be trying to compensate for. You already pay for sewer and water service, and the only real harm you do by breathing is using energy, which you pay for when you buy food.
But there's a major market failure going on right now that could be corrected by a carbon tax. Excessive energy use is causing enormous real world damage right now: at least in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and trillions of dollars a year by some estimates. And that's happening because people have no direct incentive to do anything about it. This isn't some abstract, hypothetical problem. People are dying because of it.