Er, well until there are reasonable limits on copyright duration—and fat chance of that happening any time soon given the massive corporate lobbying power behind making copyright infinitely long—attempts like Google's to work around the copyright lobby seem to be the only way to preserve the public interest. It's far more important to spread knowledge widely than preserve the illusory "rights" of dead authors for works written 75 years ago...
A solution that allows everybody to do this, rather than just Google, is of course superior. But there has to be something, and better just Google than nobody (other parties can of course make their own deals, or try to change the law, independent of what Google is doing). If you don't like that, then by all means press for a more universal solution—but the status quo is unacceptable.
I can't wait for this tech to get into tablets. Just a few of the advantages I'm expecting (and here's hoping there will be no disappointments)
...
3. The paper like effect (which I assume Mirasol will have), will be so much easier on the eyes - meaning less eye strain. Given a choice between ruining my eye sight and enduring bad colour, I'll choose bad colour anytime.
4. We can go back to the look & feel of paper without the associated wastage (trees cut down etc. etc). One "electronic book" to substitute them all.
I dunno, it's not so clear it will be "paper-like"...
e-paper uses a real matte reflective surface, like paper, but this mirasol stuff seems to be based on thin-film mirrors—i.e., not matte. Maybe they can do something with a diffusing layer over that, but who knows how much that will look like a real matte surface; it could look more like a material with significant sub-surface scatting, like wax...
The other thing of course, is that because mirasol uses separate wave-length-specific sub-pixels for red, green, and blue, the amount of light reflected is going to be cut down accordingly, as each sub-pixel will be absorbing many wavelengths even when in its "reflecting" state. So it may very well be kind of dim. [On an LCD, they can compensate for that by simply cranking up the backlight sufficiently to make up for any losses, but mirasol is supposed to work in ambient light...]
Hmm, neat idea, but my god, the g4tv presenter / production are mega annoying... I was wishing there'd be some sort of laser control malfunction and her head would explode... now that'd be youtube worthy!
There are many reasons most stores do not allow customers to take photos. I predict most chains will be issuing memos to their stores reminding them of the policy against allowing photos.
I'm sure many will, but I doubt it's going to be due do any well-founded fears. Businesses—especially large chains—simply tend to be very conservative, and extremely control-freaky. They simply hate and fear anything that isn't under their control.
I had the odd experience recently of taking cell-phone picture of a shelf of books at a bookstore. Not the store in general, no people, no wide view, just a big shelf of books. Not a closeup of a cover or title page, or, well, anything; the titles are probably barely readable. But the result was that the store clerk flipped out, and threw himself in front of me to block the camera, saying no photos, no photos, etc... I asked him why, and he sort of blathered "you might post it to the internet", "it might be a copyright violation", "some titles might be recognizable", etc. Anyway, the point was that he really didn't have a reason, he was just afraid, of vague murky threats, and in this state of fear, simply wasn't very rational.
And that state of vague irrational fear is the rule more than it's the exception in this sort of situation.
I recently installed Debian on a laptop I got at work (after wiping the bundled windows). I was nervous about wifi-type issues, but to my surprise, the wifi drivers/hardware seemed to work fine out of the box!
Then I discovered my workplace uses a 3rd-party "authenticated wifi" that requires installing a windows driver to connect... (so mac users are out of luck as well!)
Ah, those wacky big-company IT depts!
[They also bought like a million USB sticks, which they freely hand out to anybody that needs one — except these too, require a windows driver to operate—the USB stick appears by default as an extremely small read-only disk, with an autoexec of some sort that loads the windows driver, which then proceeds to communicate with the stick via some proprietary protocol! All for "security," of course...]
Yeah, everything except for true evaluates to false.
Hmm, that is a bit stupid... I think the opposite rule — everything evaluates to true except for false (used by e.g. Lua) — makes a lot more sense. It'll trip up C programmers too, but at least it naturally supports the "have some value" idiom, where you can use false as an out-of-band "not initialized" value in statements like "if (var) do-something-with-var", or "if (! var) var = init-value;".
I get the feeling that the reason Google keeps coming up with new languages is not really that existing languages aren't good enough, but rather that they've hired so many rock-star programmers. Programmers love to make new computer languages, and it's not like you can tell a rock-star what to do...
I use it daily—it's a great RSS reader, and being on the web makes it much handier than standalone apps—but I never even realized it had "social features"... hmm now that I think about it, I guess it does have "like" buttons and that sorta thing...
But if it does, switching to the Google+ equivalents seems a pretty reasonable move; duplicating this sort of functionality just seems silly. They should probably try to keep them optional though (using the reader without a G+ login would just disable the like buttons etc), to avoid pissing off all the Google+ haters.
I haven't, but I have a friend that moved from an iphone to a winphone7 phone, mostly based on the slick look in the store (it does look pretty cool).
Over time, she's come to absolutely loathe this phone—it's apparently insanely flaky, dysfunctional, and full of weird bugs and "clunk."
The impression I get is that they've got some good designers doing the interface (I dunno how usable it is, but does look good), but serious problems with (software) quality control.
No clue what you're talking about here. The FF UI is fine.
[Chrome has some interesting new ideas here and there—the "new tab page" is a neat concept, though not so well done in chrome— but it's mostly a wash.]
Er, did you read my comment? Firefox has gotten vastly faster and more memory efficient in the last few releases (specifically, FF versions 6 and 7), to the point where it's clearly better than chrome (at least for my usage).
If you are willing to trade speed and stability for greater customizability, there is always Firefox. Feature creep is what defines FF, so if Google doesn't want their browser to turn into a huge complicated mess, all I can do is agree with them.
Hmm, on the other, I've noticed that the most recent FF (7.0.1, but I think the changes started in 6) is significantly faster than chrome, and uses less memory on average! I used chrome until recently, but have now switched to FF because of this (my work machine only has 1GB of RAM, so I'm verrrry sensitive to browser bloat).
That isn't to say that FF isn't a bit too complicated / bloated / whatever, but the FF devs have been doing some very good work...
Of course, obviously so have the chrome devs, and I think the competition is very healthy. I suspect one factor in the recent FF improvements is the fire lit under their posteriors by the success of chrome...
Remember the last time Woz said something slightly skeptical in public about a modern Apple product, Steve smacked him down good and hard. Woz isn't gonna make that mistake again!
Precisely; what they (er, well, corporations) are afraid of is uncertainty, and hard-to-predict risk. Software patents are a sufficiently wacky area that it's difficult to say what the courts will rule in any particular case, and any time somebody's waving a big bundle of patents at you, there's a danger you'll get reamed (regardless of what "IP analytics firms IPVision" [who?] said).
So instead of taking on that risk—however silly the patents in question might seem—they'd much rather pay or deal or whatever. Such payoffs may be morally in the same realm as protection money, but at least they're budgetable...
The only real solution to this mess is to get rid of software patents entirely.
Er, the vast majority of patents being flung around in all the crazy control-freak corporate slap-fights we've seen recently seem to be horribly weak (of the "should never have been granted" variety). That hasn't stopped them from being flung around like monkeys do with, er, you know, and it apparently hasn't stopped other companies from being scared of them.
I have yet to encounter a Windows or Linux system that you can upgrade without rebooting. (In practice that is, in theory it should all work.)
The only part of an upgrade that requires rebooting on a modern well-designed linux distro (e.g. Debian, where upgrading-without-rebooting is normal practice) is to start the new kernel, if there happens to be one. Of course you can install a new kernel without rebooting, and just keep on using the old one until the next time you happen to reboot—that works fine.
[Yeah I know there are techniques that try to avoid even the start-the-new-kernel reboot, but so far as I've seen, they're kinda dodgy....]
If it's going to really capture the essence of the books, it's going to have to have insane amounts of mutilation and absurdly gruesome and completely unfair death, to the point where it would not only completely piss off all the players, but be the target of mass protests.
It would be amusing if they actually did that, but well... I'm bettin' it's going to be just another bog-standard vaguely medieval RPG with some locations slightly resembling those in the books and a bit of name-dropping here and there...
Re:For those of us who prefer a video
on
GNOME 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 2
Also "cairodock" is a great taskbar replacement; I've used it for a while instead of the gnome2 taskbar.
It can be easily configured to be more "OSX like" or more "taskbar like", though it tends towards the former.
Dunno when it was released, but I will note that FF 6 was a really good release. The most notable thing about it's extremely fast at rendering pages, especially for javascript-heavy sites (i.e., quite a few these days). It's faster than Google chrome (which is widely noted for its speed) on many sites, and not just a little faster but a lot faster.
I'm not sure what they did, but my guess is that some of the javascript JIT changes they've been working on for a long time finally made it into a release.
Anyway, I presume FF 7 includes those speedups and more, so you should definitely check it out...
Apple's an admirable company in many ways, and has many good ideas (some of which you mention) — but "good ideas" are not something out society is generally willing to grant a monopoly on.
Apple was not "hoodwinked." They know the score. Everybody else has to play by the same rules, and Apple benefits from this as much as they give (no, Apple's not the only one with good ideas....).
Most people can't teach themselves just anything. And I'm not talking about "dumb" people here. Try, for instance, teaching yourself quantum physics.
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression—I wasn't claiming that these online course materials are a replacement for taking classes. I think in-person classes are extremely valuable (and calls for moving teaching online horribly naive).
I just wanted to say how useful these materials are for those times when one does have enough knowledge to use them (a good grounding and intuition in the basic discipline, some broad knowledge of the specific topic, etc). No, they're not a replacement for personal interaction, but they're a great resource that often seems to be under-publicized.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, well until there are reasonable limits on copyright duration—and fat chance of that happening any time soon given the massive corporate lobbying power behind making copyright infinitely long—attempts like Google's to work around the copyright lobby seem to be the only way to preserve the public interest. It's far more important to spread knowledge widely than preserve the illusory "rights" of dead authors for works written 75 years ago...
A solution that allows everybody to do this, rather than just Google, is of course superior. But there has to be something, and better just Google than nobody (other parties can of course make their own deals, or try to change the law, independent of what Google is doing). If you don't like that, then by all means press for a more universal solution—but the status quo is unacceptable.
I can't wait for this tech to get into tablets. Just a few of the advantages I'm expecting (and here's hoping there will be no disappointments)
...
3. The paper like effect (which I assume Mirasol will have), will be so much easier on the eyes - meaning less eye strain. Given a choice between ruining my eye sight and enduring bad colour, I'll choose bad colour anytime.
4. We can go back to the look & feel of paper without the associated wastage (trees cut down etc. etc). One "electronic book" to substitute them all.
I dunno, it's not so clear it will be "paper-like"...
e-paper uses a real matte reflective surface, like paper, but this mirasol stuff seems to be based on thin-film mirrors—i.e., not matte. Maybe they can do something with a diffusing layer over that, but who knows how much that will look like a real matte surface; it could look more like a material with significant sub-surface scatting, like wax...
The other thing of course, is that because mirasol uses separate wave-length-specific sub-pixels for red, green, and blue, the amount of light reflected is going to be cut down accordingly, as each sub-pixel will be absorbing many wavelengths even when in its "reflecting" state. So it may very well be kind of dim. [On an LCD, they can compensate for that by simply cranking up the backlight sufficiently to make up for any losses, but mirasol is supposed to work in ambient light...]
Actually, a carbon tax might work, if it applies to imported goods as well. Of course, China would scream bloody murder.
hmm, if China's screaming bloody murder, then we must be doing something right...
Hmm, neat idea, but my god, the g4tv presenter / production are mega annoying... I was wishing there'd be some sort of laser control malfunction and her head would explode... now that'd be youtube worthy!
Hmm, I figure we could get away with three days:
There are many reasons most stores do not allow customers to take photos. I predict most chains will be issuing memos to their stores reminding them of the policy against allowing photos.
I'm sure many will, but I doubt it's going to be due do any well-founded fears. Businesses—especially large chains—simply tend to be very conservative, and extremely control-freaky. They simply hate and fear anything that isn't under their control.
I had the odd experience recently of taking cell-phone picture of a shelf of books at a bookstore. Not the store in general, no people, no wide view, just a big shelf of books. Not a closeup of a cover or title page, or, well, anything; the titles are probably barely readable. But the result was that the store clerk flipped out, and threw himself in front of me to block the camera, saying no photos, no photos, etc... I asked him why, and he sort of blathered "you might post it to the internet", "it might be a copyright violation", "some titles might be recognizable", etc. Anyway, the point was that he really didn't have a reason, he was just afraid, of vague murky threats, and in this state of fear, simply wasn't very rational.
And that state of vague irrational fear is the rule more than it's the exception in this sort of situation.
I recently installed Debian on a laptop I got at work (after wiping the bundled windows). I was nervous about wifi-type issues, but to my surprise, the wifi drivers/hardware seemed to work fine out of the box!
Then I discovered my workplace uses a 3rd-party "authenticated wifi" that requires installing a windows driver to connect... (so mac users are out of luck as well!)
Ah, those wacky big-company IT depts!
[They also bought like a million USB sticks, which they freely hand out to anybody that needs one — except these too, require a windows driver to operate—the USB stick appears by default as an extremely small read-only disk, with an autoexec of some sort that loads the windows driver, which then proceeds to communicate with the stick via some proprietary protocol! All for "security," of course...]
Incidentally, what tags do people use for stories like this?
I've been using "patentabuse", and also "patenttroll" for more egregious behavior.
Any better suggestions?
0 == false // expected
1 == false // wtf?
Yeah, everything except for true evaluates to false.
Hmm, that is a bit stupid... I think the opposite rule — everything evaluates to true except for false (used by e.g. Lua) — makes a lot more sense. It'll trip up C programmers too, but at least it naturally supports the "have some value" idiom, where you can use false as an out-of-band "not initialized" value in statements like "if (var) do-something-with-var", or "if (! var) var = init-value;".
I get the feeling that the reason Google keeps coming up with new languages is not really that existing languages aren't good enough, but rather that they've hired so many rock-star programmers. Programmers love to make new computer languages, and it's not like you can tell a rock-star what to do...
Google reader has social features?!
I use it daily—it's a great RSS reader, and being on the web makes it much handier than standalone apps—but I never even realized it had "social features"... hmm now that I think about it, I guess it does have "like" buttons and that sorta thing...
But if it does, switching to the Google+ equivalents seems a pretty reasonable move; duplicating this sort of functionality just seems silly. They should probably try to keep them optional though (using the reader without a G+ login would just disable the like buttons etc), to avoid pissing off all the Google+ haters.
I haven't, but I have a friend that moved from an iphone to a winphone7 phone, mostly based on the slick look in the store (it does look pretty cool).
Over time, she's come to absolutely loathe this phone—it's apparently insanely flaky, dysfunctional, and full of weird bugs and "clunk."
The impression I get is that they've got some good designers doing the interface (I dunno how usable it is, but does look good), but serious problems with (software) quality control.
No clue what you're talking about here. The FF UI is fine.
[Chrome has some interesting new ideas here and there—the "new tab page" is a neat concept, though not so well done in chrome— but it's mostly a wash.]
I was thinking it sounded like a pork-based indivisible unit of image representation...
Mmmmm... pork.......
Firefox improvements?
Er, did you read my comment? Firefox has gotten vastly faster and more memory efficient in the last few releases (specifically, FF versions 6 and 7), to the point where it's clearly better than chrome (at least for my usage).
If you are willing to trade speed and stability for greater customizability, there is always Firefox. Feature creep is what defines FF, so if Google doesn't want their browser to turn into a huge complicated mess, all I can do is agree with them.
Hmm, on the other, I've noticed that the most recent FF (7.0.1, but I think the changes started in 6) is significantly faster than chrome, and uses less memory on average! I used chrome until recently, but have now switched to FF because of this (my work machine only has 1GB of RAM, so I'm verrrry sensitive to browser bloat).
That isn't to say that FF isn't a bit too complicated / bloated / whatever, but the FF devs have been doing some very good work...
Of course, obviously so have the chrome devs, and I think the competition is very healthy. I suspect one factor in the recent FF improvements is the fire lit under their posteriors by the success of chrome...
Remember the last time Woz said something slightly skeptical in public about a modern Apple product, Steve smacked him down good and hard. Woz isn't gonna make that mistake again!
[Dead, schmead; it could be a trick!]
Trained monkeys?! Why we dreamed of being allowed to train our tech-support monkeys!
Precisely; what they (er, well, corporations) are afraid of is uncertainty, and hard-to-predict risk. Software patents are a sufficiently wacky area that it's difficult to say what the courts will rule in any particular case, and any time somebody's waving a big bundle of patents at you, there's a danger you'll get reamed (regardless of what "IP analytics firms IPVision" [who?] said).
So instead of taking on that risk—however silly the patents in question might seem—they'd much rather pay or deal or whatever. Such payoffs may be morally in the same realm as protection money, but at least they're budgetable...
The only real solution to this mess is to get rid of software patents entirely.
Er, the vast majority of patents being flung around in all the crazy control-freak corporate slap-fights we've seen recently seem to be horribly weak (of the "should never have been granted" variety). That hasn't stopped them from being flung around like monkeys do with, er, you know, and it apparently hasn't stopped other companies from being scared of them.
And in the end, fear is the goal...
I have yet to encounter a Windows or Linux system that you can upgrade without rebooting. (In practice that is, in theory it should all work.)
The only part of an upgrade that requires rebooting on a modern well-designed linux distro (e.g. Debian, where upgrading-without-rebooting is normal practice) is to start the new kernel, if there happens to be one. Of course you can install a new kernel without rebooting, and just keep on using the old one until the next time you happen to reboot—that works fine.
[Yeah I know there are techniques that try to avoid even the start-the-new-kernel reboot, but so far as I've seen, they're kinda dodgy....]
If it's going to really capture the essence of the books, it's going to have to have insane amounts of mutilation and absurdly gruesome and completely unfair death, to the point where it would not only completely piss off all the players, but be the target of mass protests.
It would be amusing if they actually did that, but well... I'm bettin' it's going to be just another bog-standard vaguely medieval RPG with some locations slightly resembling those in the books and a bit of name-dropping here and there...
Also "cairodock" is a great taskbar replacement; I've used it for a while instead of the gnome2 taskbar.
It can be easily configured to be more "OSX like" or more "taskbar like", though it tends towards the former.
Dunno when it was released, but I will note that FF 6 was a really good release. The most notable thing about it's extremely fast at rendering pages, especially for javascript-heavy sites (i.e., quite a few these days). It's faster than Google chrome (which is widely noted for its speed) on many sites, and not just a little faster but a lot faster.
I'm not sure what they did, but my guess is that some of the javascript JIT changes they've been working on for a long time finally made it into a release.
Anyway, I presume FF 7 includes those speedups and more, so you should definitely check it out...
Apple's an admirable company in many ways, and has many good ideas (some of which you mention) — but "good ideas" are not something out society is generally willing to grant a monopoly on.
Apple was not "hoodwinked." They know the score. Everybody else has to play by the same rules, and Apple benefits from this as much as they give (no, Apple's not the only one with good ideas....).
Most people can't teach themselves just anything. And I'm not talking about "dumb" people here. Try, for instance, teaching yourself quantum physics.
Sorry if I gave the wrong impression—I wasn't claiming that these online course materials are a replacement for taking classes. I think in-person classes are extremely valuable (and calls for moving teaching online horribly naive).
I just wanted to say how useful these materials are for those times when one does have enough knowledge to use them (a good grounding and intuition in the basic discipline, some broad knowledge of the specific topic, etc). No, they're not a replacement for personal interaction, but they're a great resource that often seems to be under-publicized.