From your description, though, I don't think you really want copy on write. You just want an object that provides read access to your data without allowing it to be modified. That's trivial to write, and the JIT will inline the accessor calls, so there's no negligible overhead.
Multiple cores isn't just about multitasking. It's about making programs run faster. One application can easily use multiple cores if it's written to do parallel work. And even if it isn't, basic libraries like OpenGL can take advantage of them.
Of course, you might ask, "Why does a phone need that much computing power?" The answer is, "It's not a phone. It's a pocket computer." We only call them "phones" for historical reasons.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that computing power depends on the number of entangled bits. The promise of quantum computers is that they can solve in O(N) time certain problems that a conventional computer would need O(exp(N)) time to solve - but only if all N bits are entangled. If you're limited to 16 entangled bits, you can't solve problems any larger than N=16 without losing the linear scaling.
Actually, I personally have three different apps in the Android market that fall into exactly this category. I wrote them with resolution independence in mind, and there is absolutely nothing I would change about them to work better on a tablet. They simply don't need it.
Changing the size of game assets has nothing to do with tablets or with using Android 3.0 features. Tablets and high end phones tend to have similar screen resolutions. For example, the iPad 2's resolution is 1024x768, only very slightly higher than the iPhone 4's 960x640. And Android games are almost never tailored to a specific size and aspect ratio, because (unlike iPhones) Android devices have varied in those aspects for a long time.
Finally, remember there have been Android tablets around for over six months. Developers have had lots of time and reason to make sure their apps work well on them. None of the things you're talking about require using Android 3.0 features.
There also are lots of apps that don't benefit from changing the layout, and simply scaling the UI up to the larger screen is exactly what you want. A lot of games, for example, are in this category. So those apps are already "optimized" for tablets, but because that optimization doesn't require any 3.0 specific features, they somehow don't count. That's just silly. In truth, a lot fewer Android apps than iOS apps need to be customized for tablets, because Android has supported resolution independence a lot longer and lots of apps already use it.
Your objections aren't really problems with OOP, just with the misuse of it.
OOP is a tool. Like any tool, it's useful for some things and not useful for others. Inheritance, polymorphism, etc. is a very, very good way to model lots of relationships that occur in lots of real programs. Any competent software engineer absolutely needs a good understanding of OOP, and needs to be comfortable using it.
But that doesn't mean it's the right tool for every purpose. There are also lots of relationship that are not modeled well in this way, and you shouldn't use it for those. But too many people learn that OOP is the "right" way to architect their code, and that you should use it for everything you do. And that, as you say, leads to messy, unmaintainable programs.
You make it all sound so rational! Alas, the CBO does not seem to be as rational as you are. The article makes it very clear that they're talking about requiring tracking devices to be installed in all cars:
"Having the devices installed as original equipment under a mandate to vehicle manufacturers would be relatively inexpensive but could lead to a long transition; requiring vehicles to be retrofitted with the devices could be faster but much more costly, and the equipment could be more susceptible to tampering than factory-installed equipment might be," CBO said.
A gasoline tax requires no new infrastructure, creates no privacy concerns, and encourages people to buy more efficient cars.
A mileage tax requires lots of expensive new infrastructure, creates serious privacy concerns, and doesn't encourage people to buy more efficient cars.
Obviously the mileage tax is a far better choice. Why does anyone even need to ask the question!:)
Sounds like you're describing a Nexus S. The only part I'm not sure about is whether you can use it as a phone in the UK. In the US, it should work fine with T-mobile's pay-as-you-go plans.
I use "reply all" much more than reply. I can't count how many times an email conversation has gotten messed up because someone accidentally hit "reply" instead of "reply all", causing their response to be sent only to whoever happened to have written the most recent message in the thread. Then they wondered why everyone was ignoring them. Or maybe they thought they had taken care of their responsibilities ("I don't have time to do X right now. Bill, can you take care of it? Thanks!"), but Bill never saw their message and so a very important task was missed. I definitely want the UI to nudge people toward "reply all", not "reply".
An interesting (and important) question will be whether Google manages to track down the people who created this malware. The Android Market may be open, but that doesn't mean it's completely unprotected. In order to post an app, you need to register as a developer. To register, you need to pay a $25 fee, which means giving Google a valid credit card. In principle, that makes it much harder to post malware and not get caught, since they can use that credit card as a lead for tracking you down. We'll have to wait and see how well that works in practice.
I hardly ever buy music anymore, and the reason has nothing to do with internet streaming. Nor does it have anything to do with piracy, or any of the other reasons they like to cite. It's simply that I already have plenty of music.
"Music" used to mean a physical object with a finite lifespan. Records wore out and needed to be replaced. Tapes wore out and needed to be replaced. But CDs changed that: you could play a CD as many times as you wanted, and the quality didn't change. You still needed to be careful not to scratch them, but ripping to computer solved even that problem. I now have my music collection on my computer, with various backups, and my music collection is now basically immortal. And once you have 100 or so CDs worth of music, you stop caring as much about continuing to expand your collection. Sure, I still get a new CD now and then when I come across something I really like, but far less often than I did 10 or 15 years ago. I have enough music now that if I wanted to, I could easily go for months without ever listening to the same recording twice.
1) Can we do anything about it?
2) If we can do something about it, SHOULD WE?
3) Is the cost of doing something about it less than the cost of mitigating the effects?
The answers, in order, are yes, yes, and yes.
Estimates of the cost of mitigation vary depending on what assumptions you make, but almost everyone agrees it's in the range of trillions of dollars a year. There are reasonable steps we can take to reduce climate change that cost only a fraction of that.
Also, mitigation is often either impossible or unrealistic. Example: If the sea level rises, causing an island nation to disappear, how do you mitigate that? You can look for somewhere to move all those people to, but most places that are equally pleasant to live are already taken. And even if you could find a comparable, uninhabited piece of land for them to move to, and pay the cost of moving the people, rebuilding their homes and businesses and infrastructure, and restarting their economy, that's still far worse than if they hadn't had to move in the first place. Another example: rising sea levels or changing rainfall patterns cause a billion people to lose their sources of drinking water. You could mitigate that by building a lot of desalination plants, but realistically this is what will actually happen: rich countries will build desalination plants, and in poor countries, a whole lot of people will die.
And another one: if it's caused by greenhouse gases, we expect the lower atmosphere to get warmer and the upper atmosphere to get cooler. (Greenhouse gases act like insulation by holding heat in. If you add insulation to your house, you expect the inside to get warmer, but the exterior walls to get cooler since less heat is escaping.) If it's caused by increased solar radiation, we expect both upper and lower atmosphere to get warmer (since both are receiving more solar radiation). Guess what? The upper atmosphere has gotten cooler at exactly the same time the lower atmosphere has gotten warmer.
That's part of the stupidity of our US EPA, declaring a gas essential to life on Earth a poison.
Did anyone at the EPA claim CO2 was poisonous? No.
Did they say CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is "harmful to human health"? Yes.
Did they explain how it is harmful? Yes.
Does their explanation have anything to do with it being poisonous? No. It has to do with it producing climate change.
So what on earth are you talking about?
There's something really ironic in complaining that modern games are all remakes or sequels, not like King's Quest... 3.:)
But really, it's not as if the 80's were a golden age of great game design. For every gem like King's Quest or Super Mario Brothers, there were a dozen games that did well enough at the time, but have since been justifiably forgotten... and another dozen games that were basically garbage. And the same is true of the games being made today. 20 years from now, most of them will have been forgotten, but people will still be playing and enjoying a handful of the best ones. By that point the technology will look hopelessly outdated, but that won't matter. They're good games and don't rely on technology to be fun. And maybe someone will remake them with more modern technology, and then they'll be even better.
As for other games that deserve to be remade: Below the Root. Arguably the very first "action adventure" game ever made. I recently replayed it on an emulator, and it was just as fun as ever.
Re:It Doesn't Matter if it's Humiliating
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
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· Score: 1
Clearly, their OS strategy was failing. They needed to give up on it and adopt someone else's OS. There were two viable choices: Android or WP7.
Now, how could they choose between them... Android is thriving, with rapidly growing market share and a vibrant software ecosystem. WP7 is struggling, with tiny market share, little momentum, and limited developer support. So which should they bet the company on...
DoD represents 20% of the budget. That's the same as social security. Medicare and Medicaid put together add up to 23%; either one of them alone is substantially smaller than DoD. Defense spending is not by any possible standard dwarfed by those programs.
The lesson I take from Egypt is that shutting down the internet doesn't work. Look what happened there. They tried to use an extreme measure to stop the protests. It completely failed - the protests just went right on. And they gave up the attempt after just a few days, because if they hadn't, it would have destroyed their economy. In the US, the harm caused by shutting down the internet would probably be even greater, and it would be even harder for them to resist the pressure to turn it back on again.
I'm not very worried about the government shutting down the internet as a way to suppress free speech. I'm much more worried about the more subtle methods they already have the power to use: monitoring or filtering traffic, shutting down particular websites, etc.
Let's compare this to the smartphones that will be out around the same time:
* Quad Core A9 CPU
The first dual core A9 based phones have just come out. Quad core ones are expected late this year - about the same time as the NGP. So it will have roughly the same power as a high end phone when it comes out, a low to mid range phone a year after that.
* Quad Core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU from Imagination Technologies.
Similar to what will be in high end smartphones late this year.
* 5" Multi touch OLED display with 960 x 544 res.
That's slightly larger than most high end phones right now - typically about 4 to 4.3 inches. The main reason they've gone with slightly smaller screens is because it's a more convenient size: 5 inches is too big to fit in your pocket. For people who want larger screens, though, there will be lots of options, especially in the 7 inch range.
* Rear multi touch pad
Overall, I think that's less useful than a front touch screen. The one place where I think a rear touch pad would be useful is the one place the NGP doesn't need it: on screen "analog sticks" and "action buttons". Having to cover up part of the screen with your fingers is inconvenient. But since the NGP has real analog sticks, that isn't an issue.
Standard for phones. By late this year, 4G will be pretty standard.
Basically, other than having real analog sticks, this seems to have very little advantage over a smartphone. And you'll probably already have a smartphone, since it does things the NGP can't replace. I don't see where the demand for this is supposed to come from.
The only litmus test for scientific method left nowadays is if you pass the review of your peers, that is couple of your colleagues from the same grant hunting boat.
That's nonsense. Peer review is not about proving something is correct, and no scientist interprets it that way. Peer review is primarily about checking that your papers are clearly written and describe your work well enough that other people can understand what you did. It also has a secondary function of helping journals pick the articles their readers are most likely to be interested in (and down the road, most likely to cite). The real test of your work is in other scientists' response to it. And that can take a long time to sort out - years or even decades. Science works slowly, but so what? Speed isn't the goal. The goal is to work out the right answer, however long that takes.
If you really want a smartphone (aka handheld computer) but won't use it enough as a phone to justify the expensive plan, here's what you do: get an unlocked Nexus S, which is a really nice phone available with no commitment. Then sign up for T-Mobile's "pay as you go" plan which lets you buy time in increments as small as $10 that (once you've spent a total of $100) last for a whole year before expiring. I use my Nexus One only rarely as a phone, but constantly for other things. I spend a total of about $25/year on phone charges. And they recently added the ability to buy data access ($1.50 for 24 hours), which is really nice on those rare occasions when I want data and don't have access to wifi.
To ask the obvious (or at least it seems obvious to me): what supernatural phenomena are reported to occur in this haunted house? Strange noises? Then bring good recording equipment. Visible apparitions? Bring video equipment. Electronic devices spontaneously turning themselves on and off? Bring a variety of electronic equipment, a meter to measure power line noise, etc. You need to know what you're looking for.
Of course, if you spend the night and fail to observe anything, that's unlikely to convince the believers. That is the difficulty with trying to prove a negative. Just because nothing happened while you were there, that doesn't mean nothing ever happens.
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You mean something like CopyOnWriteArrayList?
From your description, though, I don't think you really want copy on write. You just want an object that provides read access to your data without allowing it to be modified. That's trivial to write, and the JIT will inline the accessor calls, so there's no negligible overhead.
Multiple cores isn't just about multitasking. It's about making programs run faster. One application can easily use multiple cores if it's written to do parallel work. And even if it isn't, basic libraries like OpenGL can take advantage of them.
Of course, you might ask, "Why does a phone need that much computing power?" The answer is, "It's not a phone. It's a pocket computer." We only call them "phones" for historical reasons.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that computing power depends on the number of entangled bits. The promise of quantum computers is that they can solve in O(N) time certain problems that a conventional computer would need O(exp(N)) time to solve - but only if all N bits are entangled. If you're limited to 16 entangled bits, you can't solve problems any larger than N=16 without losing the linear scaling.
You know, when I saw this story, my first thought was, "That's a great idea!" Then I realized it was a joke and I was disappointed.
Actually, I personally have three different apps in the Android market that fall into exactly this category. I wrote them with resolution independence in mind, and there is absolutely nothing I would change about them to work better on a tablet. They simply don't need it.
Changing the size of game assets has nothing to do with tablets or with using Android 3.0 features. Tablets and high end phones tend to have similar screen resolutions. For example, the iPad 2's resolution is 1024x768, only very slightly higher than the iPhone 4's 960x640. And Android games are almost never tailored to a specific size and aspect ratio, because (unlike iPhones) Android devices have varied in those aspects for a long time.
Finally, remember there have been Android tablets around for over six months. Developers have had lots of time and reason to make sure their apps work well on them. None of the things you're talking about require using Android 3.0 features.
There also are lots of apps that don't benefit from changing the layout, and simply scaling the UI up to the larger screen is exactly what you want. A lot of games, for example, are in this category. So those apps are already "optimized" for tablets, but because that optimization doesn't require any 3.0 specific features, they somehow don't count. That's just silly. In truth, a lot fewer Android apps than iOS apps need to be customized for tablets, because Android has supported resolution independence a lot longer and lots of apps already use it.
Your objections aren't really problems with OOP, just with the misuse of it.
OOP is a tool. Like any tool, it's useful for some things and not useful for others. Inheritance, polymorphism, etc. is a very, very good way to model lots of relationships that occur in lots of real programs. Any competent software engineer absolutely needs a good understanding of OOP, and needs to be comfortable using it.
But that doesn't mean it's the right tool for every purpose. There are also lots of relationship that are not modeled well in this way, and you shouldn't use it for those. But too many people learn that OOP is the "right" way to architect their code, and that you should use it for everything you do. And that, as you say, leads to messy, unmaintainable programs.
"Having the devices installed as original equipment under a mandate to vehicle manufacturers would be relatively inexpensive but could lead to a long transition; requiring vehicles to be retrofitted with the devices could be faster but much more costly, and the equipment could be more susceptible to tampering than factory-installed equipment might be," CBO said.
Just compare the two:
:)
A gasoline tax requires no new infrastructure, creates no privacy concerns, and encourages people to buy more efficient cars.
A mileage tax requires lots of expensive new infrastructure, creates serious privacy concerns, and doesn't encourage people to buy more efficient cars.
Obviously the mileage tax is a far better choice. Why does anyone even need to ask the question!
But he did say he wanted cellular data access. Perhaps I should have said "cellular access" instead of "use it as a phone".
Sounds like you're describing a Nexus S. The only part I'm not sure about is whether you can use it as a phone in the UK. In the US, it should work fine with T-mobile's pay-as-you-go plans.
I use "reply all" much more than reply. I can't count how many times an email conversation has gotten messed up because someone accidentally hit "reply" instead of "reply all", causing their response to be sent only to whoever happened to have written the most recent message in the thread. Then they wondered why everyone was ignoring them. Or maybe they thought they had taken care of their responsibilities ("I don't have time to do X right now. Bill, can you take care of it? Thanks!"), but Bill never saw their message and so a very important task was missed. I definitely want the UI to nudge people toward "reply all", not "reply".
An interesting (and important) question will be whether Google manages to track down the people who created this malware. The Android Market may be open, but that doesn't mean it's completely unprotected. In order to post an app, you need to register as a developer. To register, you need to pay a $25 fee, which means giving Google a valid credit card. In principle, that makes it much harder to post malware and not get caught, since they can use that credit card as a lead for tracking you down. We'll have to wait and see how well that works in practice.
I hardly ever buy music anymore, and the reason has nothing to do with internet streaming. Nor does it have anything to do with piracy, or any of the other reasons they like to cite. It's simply that I already have plenty of music.
"Music" used to mean a physical object with a finite lifespan. Records wore out and needed to be replaced. Tapes wore out and needed to be replaced. But CDs changed that: you could play a CD as many times as you wanted, and the quality didn't change. You still needed to be careful not to scratch them, but ripping to computer solved even that problem. I now have my music collection on my computer, with various backups, and my music collection is now basically immortal. And once you have 100 or so CDs worth of music, you stop caring as much about continuing to expand your collection. Sure, I still get a new CD now and then when I come across something I really like, but far less often than I did 10 or 15 years ago. I have enough music now that if I wanted to, I could easily go for months without ever listening to the same recording twice.
1) Can we do anything about it?
2) If we can do something about it, SHOULD WE?
3) Is the cost of doing something about it less than the cost of mitigating the effects?
The answers, in order, are yes, yes, and yes.
Estimates of the cost of mitigation vary depending on what assumptions you make, but almost everyone agrees it's in the range of trillions of dollars a year. There are reasonable steps we can take to reduce climate change that cost only a fraction of that.
Also, mitigation is often either impossible or unrealistic. Example: If the sea level rises, causing an island nation to disappear, how do you mitigate that? You can look for somewhere to move all those people to, but most places that are equally pleasant to live are already taken. And even if you could find a comparable, uninhabited piece of land for them to move to, and pay the cost of moving the people, rebuilding their homes and businesses and infrastructure, and restarting their economy, that's still far worse than if they hadn't had to move in the first place. Another example: rising sea levels or changing rainfall patterns cause a billion people to lose their sources of drinking water. You could mitigate that by building a lot of desalination plants, but realistically this is what will actually happen: rich countries will build desalination plants, and in poor countries, a whole lot of people will die.
And another one: if it's caused by greenhouse gases, we expect the lower atmosphere to get warmer and the upper atmosphere to get cooler. (Greenhouse gases act like insulation by holding heat in. If you add insulation to your house, you expect the inside to get warmer, but the exterior walls to get cooler since less heat is escaping.) If it's caused by increased solar radiation, we expect both upper and lower atmosphere to get warmer (since both are receiving more solar radiation). Guess what? The upper atmosphere has gotten cooler at exactly the same time the lower atmosphere has gotten warmer.
That's part of the stupidity of our US EPA, declaring a gas essential to life on Earth a poison.
Did anyone at the EPA claim CO2 was poisonous? No.
Did they say CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is "harmful to human health"? Yes.
Did they explain how it is harmful? Yes.
Does their explanation have anything to do with it being poisonous? No. It has to do with it producing climate change.
So what on earth are you talking about?
There's something really ironic in complaining that modern games are all remakes or sequels, not like King's Quest... 3. :)
But really, it's not as if the 80's were a golden age of great game design. For every gem like King's Quest or Super Mario Brothers, there were a dozen games that did well enough at the time, but have since been justifiably forgotten... and another dozen games that were basically garbage. And the same is true of the games being made today. 20 years from now, most of them will have been forgotten, but people will still be playing and enjoying a handful of the best ones. By that point the technology will look hopelessly outdated, but that won't matter. They're good games and don't rely on technology to be fun. And maybe someone will remake them with more modern technology, and then they'll be even better.
As for other games that deserve to be remade: Below the Root. Arguably the very first "action adventure" game ever made. I recently replayed it on an emulator, and it was just as fun as ever.
Clearly, their OS strategy was failing. They needed to give up on it and adopt someone else's OS. There were two viable choices: Android or WP7.
Now, how could they choose between them... Android is thriving, with rapidly growing market share and a vibrant software ecosystem. WP7 is struggling, with tiny market share, little momentum, and limited developer support. So which should they bet the company on...
Duh.
This is simply false. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget.
DoD represents 20% of the budget. That's the same as social security. Medicare and Medicaid put together add up to 23%; either one of them alone is substantially smaller than DoD. Defense spending is not by any possible standard dwarfed by those programs.
The lesson I take from Egypt is that shutting down the internet doesn't work. Look what happened there. They tried to use an extreme measure to stop the protests. It completely failed - the protests just went right on. And they gave up the attempt after just a few days, because if they hadn't, it would have destroyed their economy. In the US, the harm caused by shutting down the internet would probably be even greater, and it would be even harder for them to resist the pressure to turn it back on again.
I'm not very worried about the government shutting down the internet as a way to suppress free speech. I'm much more worried about the more subtle methods they already have the power to use: monitoring or filtering traffic, shutting down particular websites, etc.
Let's compare this to the smartphones that will be out around the same time:
* Quad Core A9 CPU
The first dual core A9 based phones have just come out. Quad core ones are expected late this year - about the same time as the NGP. So it will have roughly the same power as a high end phone when it comes out, a low to mid range phone a year after that.
* Quad Core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU from Imagination Technologies.
Similar to what will be in high end smartphones late this year.
* 5" Multi touch OLED display with 960 x 544 res.
That's slightly larger than most high end phones right now - typically about 4 to 4.3 inches. The main reason they've gone with slightly smaller screens is because it's a more convenient size: 5 inches is too big to fit in your pocket. For people who want larger screens, though, there will be lots of options, especially in the 7 inch range.
* Rear multi touch pad
Overall, I think that's less useful than a front touch screen. The one place where I think a rear touch pad would be useful is the one place the NGP doesn't need it: on screen "analog sticks" and "action buttons". Having to cover up part of the screen with your fingers is inconvenient. But since the NGP has real analog sticks, that isn't an issue.
* Front and rear cameras
Standard for phones these days.
* Three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer, three-axis electronic compass
Ditto.
* GPS
Ditto.
* Dual Analogue sticks
This is definitely an advantage for gaming.
* Bluetooth, 3G and wifi connectivity
Standard for phones. By late this year, 4G will be pretty standard.
Basically, other than having real analog sticks, this seems to have very little advantage over a smartphone. And you'll probably already have a smartphone, since it does things the NGP can't replace. I don't see where the demand for this is supposed to come from.
The only litmus test for scientific method left nowadays is if you pass the review of your peers, that is couple of your colleagues from the same grant hunting boat.
That's nonsense. Peer review is not about proving something is correct, and no scientist interprets it that way. Peer review is primarily about checking that your papers are clearly written and describe your work well enough that other people can understand what you did. It also has a secondary function of helping journals pick the articles their readers are most likely to be interested in (and down the road, most likely to cite). The real test of your work is in other scientists' response to it. And that can take a long time to sort out - years or even decades. Science works slowly, but so what? Speed isn't the goal. The goal is to work out the right answer, however long that takes.
If you really want a smartphone (aka handheld computer) but won't use it enough as a phone to justify the expensive plan, here's what you do: get an unlocked Nexus S, which is a really nice phone available with no commitment. Then sign up for T-Mobile's "pay as you go" plan which lets you buy time in increments as small as $10 that (once you've spent a total of $100) last for a whole year before expiring. I use my Nexus One only rarely as a phone, but constantly for other things. I spend a total of about $25/year on phone charges. And they recently added the ability to buy data access ($1.50 for 24 hours), which is really nice on those rare occasions when I want data and don't have access to wifi.
To ask the obvious (or at least it seems obvious to me): what supernatural phenomena are reported to occur in this haunted house? Strange noises? Then bring good recording equipment. Visible apparitions? Bring video equipment. Electronic devices spontaneously turning themselves on and off? Bring a variety of electronic equipment, a meter to measure power line noise, etc. You need to know what you're looking for.
Of course, if you spend the night and fail to observe anything, that's unlikely to convince the believers. That is the difficulty with trying to prove a negative. Just because nothing happened while you were there, that doesn't mean nothing ever happens.