I had to laugh at the "Possible GPS navigation" part, since they couldn't even get the GPS to work properly on their Galaxy S line of phones.
It looks like it will have the GPS. If you look at their teaser site, one of the pictures they flash through there shows the navigation screen. And they also advertize "navigation" as one of its features with moving/focusing words towards the end of the video.
That's right. In fact, Steve Jobs has scheduled a press conference later today demonstrating that, contrary to NASA's claim, this has nothing to do with Apple specifically. He will show pictures of moons from other planets that experience the same "shrinkage" if you look at them in a certain way. Sources familiar with the situation say the moons in the demo will resemble other fruits including different berries. YouTube videos will follow the press conference.
The phrase "net neutrality" has a moderately good chance to become a political term, much like "global warming". Since FCC has been effectively shut out by the courts, at the end it may come down to 2 possible outcomes:
1. Congress passes a law that regulates ISPs to serve "legal" content in a reasonable way; "political" and "charitable" content may also get a special treatment; they'll probably also mandate some sort of snooping, logging, filtering (or banning), and reporting since RIAA and MPAA will probably "help" draft the bill.
2. ISPs are not regulated in any significant way - they have special deals with high-bandwidth high profile providers; this is likely to negatively affect competition since the upstart "small guy" with great ideas, in addition to his bandwidth and hosting, now has to pay ISPs nationwide (maybe worldwide) to deliver his content and fight against the established "big guys" who may, in turn, try to coerce those same ISPs to keep the little guys from competing.
There was a security hole in the other OS that they couldn't think of a way of patching without removing the core functionality, so they removed it. That makes sense from a security standpoint.
How can you call this "security" even if you trust every word they say? E.g. in order to prevent this new USB exploit, if they simply claim they "can't fix" the software bug would it be OK for them to disable the USB ports in the next firmware update altogether? Too bad you used them to charge controllers, copy pictures from camera, etc.?
Security should refer to the product and the features you have. If you throw away the product and/or remove its core features it's not security of that product, because it's not the same product: what if they disable the Internet browser in the name of "security," then image gallery, then media functionality, how about the bluray player too? How much of the features would they have to remove before you say - hey, I'm not going to call it "makes sense from a security standpoint" anymore because it doesn't do what it claimed it would when I bought it?
Irrelevant because you didn't address anything I said.
Apple's HTML standards compliance has no bearing on whether it does, or in the future will, expose full OS APIs to web/HTML "apps" via its browser, and have both features and speed comparable to locally compiled apps.
HTML5 "apps" != Compiled apps; there's nothing in the HTML standard saying you must support 3D acceleration, multi-touch, gyroscope, front-facing (or any) camera, accelerometer, or compile your javascript to native binaries. And there's certainly no standard way, HTML or otherwise, of doing any of the above (and many others), no matter how often anyone tries to say otherwise. The closest thing to this was Palm's WebOS, but even in that case they had to provide "PDK" (their native development kit) to take full advantage of the device.
Flash, on the other hand, could expose any available API to Flash apps, and compete more closely to local apps; while at the same time attempting to abstract those APIs cross-platform - e.g. across iOS, Symbian, WP7, and Android devices.
And, adding insults don't really help your point either, just makes it look unintelligent.
Because Apple retains full control of what their browser can do, and what APIs it exposes - i.e. they will not compete against their own app store. And, they are not allowing alternate browsers either (no, Opera Mini is not a replacement for a full web browser).
Flash, on the other hand, would have full access to the OS API (like any other app), and Apple wouldn't have any control over how the APIs get used - maybe Flash games and apps you download/buy, they could even be stored locally and act like normal apps.
That's because Apple has ultimate control over their browser - i.e. what HTML5 "apps" can do, what APIs they can access, how they can "compete" and to what extent they can "bypass" the Apple app store.
This is not the same as Flash having full (as any other compiled app) access to the device OS and hardware, providing the full OS APIs to Flash apps, and maybe eventually bypassing Apple's control altogether.
Disallowing Flash or cross-compiling from Flash on iOS is no more different than doing the same on the PSP or Nintendo DS. Or do you demand Sony and Nintendo open the flood gates for homebrew?
- Apple already allows "homebrew" apps through their App store, just not Flash - who knows?
The issue is Apple wants to maintain the chokehold on their app store being the only source of apps, whereas Flash would effectively bypass it.
Mostly true; if you are running a family blog, or an Intranet for 100 employees for a monthly newsletter who cares about index merges?
But grow your database to a point where you need to query not 100s, but millions of rows in a meaningful way, then get back to me about "easiest and cheapest."
other than standards zealots, who demands ACID compliance?
Anyone who cares about data, and where data is important.
Samsung phones are known to have GPS problems. I can also confirm this first-hand. I don't know whether it's the GPS chip they use in Android phones, or it's a more widespread problem, but you'll have a lot better quality GPS hardware if you go with HTC or Motorola.
The reason MyISAM (not the whole MySQL) is "fast" is because there is no proper abstraction level between what executes the query and the actual file writes. This is true for simple inserts, simple selects, simple updates. This is also why when MySQL crashes, quite frequently MyISAM tables become corrupt - you can try to repair them, but hopefully you were replicating.
Besides, you use MyISAM for "speed" and you lose basic functionality like transactions, MVCC, ACID compliance (hmm, did you even have it in the first place?), row/page locks, etc. You can perform direct file writes even faster than that, I guess it counts for something, but that doesn't do you any good either.
On the other hand, what kind of "real-world" benchmarks did you do? No such "real world" I know of consists of simple inserts and selects. How about cases for:
- optimized subqueries - using index merges - reusing indexes in same query - partial indexes - indexes on expressions - transactions with savepoints - etc., etc.
MySQL doesn't do any of the above. Welcome to the "real world."
Actually, if you read the patent application, it's so broad, there is no requirement for screen captures, just text. Here's claim 1:
1. A method, comprising:recording data from a videogame on an electronic device; andinserting one or more portions of the recorded data into a narrative data structure, wherein the narrative data structure comprises a plurality of pregenerated text.
This is basically a text log of the game. There are other claims, of course, that extend this one that add images, dialogue, screenshots, etc. but none of those would be required to infringe.
I beg to differ. Postgres is not just "ok" - have you looked at its features and their completeness; standards compliance; scalability (clustering); RBAC; programming flexibility; reliability? If you are a developer - how about size and quality of code, optimizer, query execution flow? Postgres probably has one of the best maintained codebase for a complex piece of software you'll ever see.
In none of the categories above can you even start placing MySQL in the same ballpark as Postgres. It's not even the same league, it's not even the same sport. So, the other part of your sentence is right in a way - it's completely different in these and many other regards from MySQL.
IANAL, but so what that it's in the preamble? The statement is pretty clear itself, it's even preceded with the phrase we have made it clear.
Anyone who distributes the GPLed work is licensed or nobody is.
That's not so. First of all, with the patents it's the "use" that's licensed not the distribution. Second, to me "everyone's free use" means what it says and it's not limited to distributors or program in question only*. Third, if you read the patent section in the license "everyone" includes any person who receives the software "directly or indirectly through you" - that would include pretty much everyone.
* one argument that could be made is that you actually need to get a GPL program to acquire such license; that could easily be satisfied by distributing a small file with every copy of software.
Sun had to license their patents to anyone using the original work or derivatives of the work or they simply couldn't use the GPL.
I still don't see how Sun's patent license - i.e. only for full J2SE implementations - satisfies GPL anyway. There's nothing in GPL that prevents you from removing features from the program and creating another more limited derivative. Since this wouldn't be compatible with Sun's patent license, then was there an implicit license as well that did satisfy GPL?
The GPL only protects derivatives of the GPL'd code from patent liability. It does not protect any other code.
That is incorrect. Please refer to GPLv2 (in this case):
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
We paid for the phone, we should be able to use it how we see fit.
Actually, no, you didn't pay for the phone, at least not all of it. You paid $200, and AT&T paid more to Apple as a subsidy.
It's still a sale and not a lease. They fact that the sale price is subsidized via the sale of another product (2 year service contract) does not make it any less of a sale. If you buy a burrito and a bag of chips, the drink is only 25 cents. If you apply for a Macy's credit card, you get additional 40% off your purchase.
I'm sure I'm in the/. minority on this, but I really don't see the big deal about getting an unlocked phone in the US. They're not currently available from Apple, but if they were they'd cost about $600, based on what they sell for in Canada, and you're not entitled to have the iPhone you paid $200 for (subsidized) unlocked, so some questions:
You are confusing subsidized vs unlocked. They are 2 different things. I thought you could already get it unsubsidized, but not unlocked (at least in the U.S.).
Why would I want any "smartphone" without a data plan? What's the point? If that was my goal I'd go back to an iPod and a cheap Nokia
I don't know why you would want it, but that's not the point. One could still use it as a Wifi device with VoIP capabilities, etc. You may want to use it on T-Mobile, or get a plan from Canada, or sell it / give it to someone else from another country.
The only other carrier in the US is T-Mobile, but apparently they use some different frequencies and not everything works right, so I need AT&T anyway.
No you don't - 3G frequencies are different. Voice and 2G are the same.
Since I need a dataplan ($15 or $25 a month from AT&T), why would I pay $400 more for the unlocked phone, which amortized over 24 months is $16.67 a month?
Again, you are confusing subsidized vs unlocked.
The sense of entitlement by a lot of people is becoming increasingly disturbing. You want the iPhone 4 unlocked, but you don't (I assume) want to pay the full price for it, and you want the government to step in and tell AT&T / Apple to unlock a subsidized phone. Whatever. You are not entitled to an unlocked iPhone for $200.
Besides the "entitlement" argument, I agree with your point there - I am not convinced the government should step in.
Finally someone that understands what I am proposing. The only tricky part would be mounting that virtual partition, that would probably require some serious coding somewhere in the Android filesystem to make that work...
Android could move apps into a smaller embedded filesystem in a file
This could have been an arguable compromise solution. The other part - where your data on FAT32 is still wide open (pics/video/logs/whatever apps store on it) - would remain. But at least this way you could have some apps (depending on sensitivity of their info) store their data on such encrypted partition-in-a-file.
Other advantages would be:
- you could grow/shrink partition and filesystem as needed automatically by OS or manually - you could just copy one file from one SD card to another and have it automatically work on your device without compromising any info in it and bunch of other benefits you get from encryption.
Here's some more info. Still no link/name/source of the app. They could have paid someone to write a proof of concept/hypothetical app that did that, so they could do a press release and plug in their upcoming product.
No. Each Android app runs as a separate Linux userid. Even if you give the app filesystem access, it can't write to files that belong to other apps, let alone rewrite the apps themselves.
That would all be fine and dandy if there were no SD cards formatted with FAT32 with no filesystem security, and things like "move apps to SD card" features on top of that. These are simply bad choices for security.
Found the original announcement. No name of an app there either.
While there could definitely be such an app, the article definitely sounds like an advertisement for their product rather than a security notification.
When one party leads the Congress and the Presidency the American people will get the shaft.
I'm not sure who said this but - two is only one better.
Hopefully most will make the choice to boot incumbents out.
Hopefully not. People should be voting for a person they want in, not because they want to vote someone else out. But that may not be feasible when they only have 2 choices.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to laugh at the "Possible GPS navigation" part, since they couldn't even get the GPS to work properly on their Galaxy S line of phones.
It looks like it will have the GPS. If you look at their teaser site, one of the pictures they flash through there shows the navigation screen. And they also advertize "navigation" as one of its features with moving/focusing words towards the end of the video.
Happens to every moon, doesn't it?
That's right. In fact, Steve Jobs has scheduled a press conference later today demonstrating that, contrary to NASA's claim, this has nothing to do with Apple specifically. He will show pictures of moons from other planets that experience the same "shrinkage" if you look at them in a certain way. Sources familiar with the situation say the moons in the demo will resemble other fruits including different berries. YouTube videos will follow the press conference.
The phrase "net neutrality" has a moderately good chance to become a political term, much like "global warming". Since FCC has been effectively shut out by the courts, at the end it may come down to 2 possible outcomes:
1. Congress passes a law that regulates ISPs to serve "legal" content in a reasonable way; "political" and "charitable" content may also get a special treatment; they'll probably also mandate some sort of snooping, logging, filtering (or banning), and reporting since RIAA and MPAA will probably "help" draft the bill.
2. ISPs are not regulated in any significant way - they have special deals with high-bandwidth high profile providers; this is likely to negatively affect competition since the upstart "small guy" with great ideas, in addition to his bandwidth and hosting, now has to pay ISPs nationwide (maybe worldwide) to deliver his content and fight against the established "big guys" who may, in turn, try to coerce those same ISPs to keep the little guys from competing.
Hmm... which one to support...
There was a security hole in the other OS that they couldn't think of a way of patching without removing the core functionality, so they removed it. That makes sense from a security standpoint.
How can you call this "security" even if you trust every word they say? E.g. in order to prevent this new USB exploit, if they simply claim they "can't fix" the software bug would it be OK for them to disable the USB ports in the next firmware update altogether? Too bad you used them to charge controllers, copy pictures from camera, etc.?
Security should refer to the product and the features you have. If you throw away the product and/or remove its core features it's not security of that product, because it's not the same product: what if they disable the Internet browser in the name of "security," then image gallery, then media functionality, how about the bluray player too? How much of the features would they have to remove before you say - hey, I'm not going to call it "makes sense from a security standpoint" anymore because it doesn't do what it claimed it would when I bought it?
Wow, where do I even start?
Irrelevant because you didn't address anything I said.
Apple's HTML standards compliance has no bearing on whether it does, or in the future will, expose full OS APIs to web/HTML "apps" via its browser, and have both features and speed comparable to locally compiled apps.
HTML5 "apps" != Compiled apps; there's nothing in the HTML standard saying you must support 3D acceleration, multi-touch, gyroscope, front-facing (or any) camera, accelerometer, or compile your javascript to native binaries. And there's certainly no standard way, HTML or otherwise, of doing any of the above (and many others), no matter how often anyone tries to say otherwise. The closest thing to this was Palm's WebOS, but even in that case they had to provide "PDK" (their native development kit) to take full advantage of the device.
Flash, on the other hand, could expose any available API to Flash apps, and compete more closely to local apps; while at the same time attempting to abstract those APIs cross-platform - e.g. across iOS, Symbian, WP7, and Android devices.
And, adding insults don't really help your point either, just makes it look unintelligent.
Because Apple retains full control of what their browser can do, and what APIs it exposes - i.e. they will not compete against their own app store. And, they are not allowing alternate browsers either (no, Opera Mini is not a replacement for a full web browser).
Flash, on the other hand, would have full access to the OS API (like any other app), and Apple wouldn't have any control over how the APIs get used - maybe Flash games and apps you download/buy, they could even be stored locally and act like normal apps.
That's because Apple has ultimate control over their browser - i.e. what HTML5 "apps" can do, what APIs they can access, how they can "compete" and to what extent they can "bypass" the Apple app store.
This is not the same as Flash having full (as any other compiled app) access to the device OS and hardware, providing the full OS APIs to Flash apps, and maybe eventually bypassing Apple's control altogether.
The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,'
...
Something as distinctive and ripe for improvement as video delivery is the ideal place for open-source development.
Both you and the author of TFA seem to have omitted software patents from the equation in that claim (see x264).
Disallowing Flash or cross-compiling from Flash on iOS is no more different than doing the same on the PSP or Nintendo DS. Or do you demand Sony and Nintendo open the flood gates for homebrew?
- Apple already allows "homebrew" apps through their App store, just not Flash
- who knows?
The issue is Apple wants to maintain the chokehold on their app store being the only source of apps, whereas Flash would effectively bypass it.
Obviously, it's the product lifetime - i.e. if your product no longer works, you are no longer covered by the warranty.
Mostly true; if you are running a family blog, or an Intranet for 100 employees for a monthly newsletter who cares about index merges?
But grow your database to a point where you need to query not 100s, but millions of rows in a meaningful way, then get back to me about "easiest and cheapest."
other than standards zealots, who demands ACID compliance?
Anyone who cares about data, and where data is important.
I was considering a Samsung Behold II
Samsung phones are known to have GPS problems. I can also confirm this first-hand. I don't know whether it's the GPS chip they use in Android phones, or it's a more widespread problem, but you'll have a lot better quality GPS hardware if you go with HTC or Motorola.
The reason MyISAM (not the whole MySQL) is "fast" is because there is no proper abstraction level between what executes the query and the actual file writes. This is true for simple inserts, simple selects, simple updates. This is also why when MySQL crashes, quite frequently MyISAM tables become corrupt - you can try to repair them, but hopefully you were replicating.
Besides, you use MyISAM for "speed" and you lose basic functionality like transactions, MVCC, ACID compliance (hmm, did you even have it in the first place?), row/page locks, etc. You can perform direct file writes even faster than that, I guess it counts for something, but that doesn't do you any good either.
On the other hand, what kind of "real-world" benchmarks did you do? No such "real world" I know of consists of simple inserts and selects. How about cases for:
- optimized subqueries
- using index merges
- reusing indexes in same query
- partial indexes
- indexes on expressions
- transactions with savepoints
- etc., etc.
MySQL doesn't do any of the above. Welcome to the "real world."
Actually, if you read the patent application, it's so broad, there is no requirement for screen captures, just text. Here's claim 1:
1. A method, comprising:recording data from a videogame on an electronic device; andinserting one or more portions of the recorded data into a narrative data structure, wherein the narrative data structure comprises a plurality of pregenerated text.
This is basically a text log of the game. There are other claims, of course, that extend this one that add images, dialogue, screenshots, etc. but none of those would be required to infringe.
Postgre is ok
I beg to differ. Postgres is not just "ok" - have you looked at its features and their completeness; standards compliance; scalability (clustering); RBAC; programming flexibility; reliability? If you are a developer - how about size and quality of code, optimizer, query execution flow? Postgres probably has one of the best maintained codebase for a complex piece of software you'll ever see.
In none of the categories above can you even start placing MySQL in the same ballpark as Postgres. It's not even the same league, it's not even the same sport. So, the other part of your sentence is right in a way - it's completely different in these and many other regards from MySQL.
That's also only the preamble.
IANAL, but so what that it's in the preamble? The statement is pretty clear itself, it's even preceded with the phrase we have made it clear.
Anyone who distributes the GPLed work is licensed or nobody is.
That's not so. First of all, with the patents it's the "use" that's licensed not the distribution. Second, to me "everyone's free use" means what it says and it's not limited to distributors or program in question only*. Third, if you read the patent section in the license "everyone" includes any person who receives the software "directly or indirectly through you" - that would include pretty much everyone.
* one argument that could be made is that you actually need to get a GPL program to acquire such license; that could easily be satisfied by distributing a small file with every copy of software.
Sun had to license their patents to anyone using the original work or derivatives of the work or they simply couldn't use the GPL.
I still don't see how Sun's patent license - i.e. only for full J2SE implementations - satisfies GPL anyway. There's nothing in GPL that prevents you from removing features from the program and creating another more limited derivative. Since this wouldn't be compatible with Sun's patent license, then was there an implicit license as well that did satisfy GPL?
Definitely interested to see how it develops.
The GPL only protects derivatives of the GPL'd code from patent liability. It does not protect any other code.
That is incorrect. Please refer to GPLv2 (in this case):
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
Emphasis mine.
We paid for the phone, we should be able to use it how we see fit.
Actually, no, you didn't pay for the phone, at least not all of it. You paid $200, and AT&T paid more to Apple as a subsidy.
It's still a sale and not a lease. They fact that the sale price is subsidized via the sale of another product (2 year service contract) does not make it any less of a sale. If you buy a burrito and a bag of chips, the drink is only 25 cents. If you apply for a Macy's credit card, you get additional 40% off your purchase.
I'm sure I'm in the /. minority on this, but I really don't see the big deal about getting an unlocked phone in the US. They're not currently available from Apple, but if they were they'd cost about $600, based on what they sell for in Canada, and you're not entitled to have the iPhone you paid $200 for (subsidized) unlocked, so some questions:
You are confusing subsidized vs unlocked. They are 2 different things. I thought you could already get it unsubsidized, but not unlocked (at least in the U.S.).
Why would I want any "smartphone" without a data plan? What's the point? If that was my goal I'd go back to an iPod and a cheap Nokia
I don't know why you would want it, but that's not the point. One could still use it as a Wifi device with VoIP capabilities, etc. You may want to use it on T-Mobile, or get a plan from Canada, or sell it / give it to someone else from another country.
The only other carrier in the US is T-Mobile, but apparently they use some different frequencies and not everything works right, so I need AT&T anyway.
No you don't - 3G frequencies are different. Voice and 2G are the same.
Since I need a dataplan ($15 or $25 a month from AT&T), why would I pay $400 more for the unlocked phone, which amortized over 24 months is $16.67 a month?
Again, you are confusing subsidized vs unlocked.
The sense of entitlement by a lot of people is becoming increasingly disturbing. You want the iPhone 4 unlocked, but you don't (I assume) want to pay the full price for it, and you want the government to step in and tell AT&T / Apple to unlock a subsidized phone. Whatever. You are not entitled to an unlocked iPhone for $200.
Besides the "entitlement" argument, I agree with your point there - I am not convinced the government should step in.
Finally someone that understands what I am proposing. The only tricky part would be mounting that virtual partition, that would probably require some serious coding somewhere in the Android filesystem to make that work...
Not as hard as you think. All the tools are already there or readily available.
You could easily do this yourself on your rooted Android phone.
Android could move apps into a smaller embedded filesystem in a file
This could have been an arguable compromise solution. The other part - where your data on FAT32 is still wide open (pics/video/logs/whatever apps store on it) - would remain. But at least this way you could have some apps (depending on sensitivity of their info) store their data on such encrypted partition-in-a-file.
Other advantages would be:
- you could grow/shrink partition and filesystem as needed automatically by OS or manually
- you could just copy one file from one SD card to another and have it automatically work on your device without compromising any info in it and bunch of other benefits you get from encryption.
Here's some more info. Still no link/name/source of the app. They could have paid someone to write a proof of concept/hypothetical app that did that, so they could do a press release and plug in their upcoming product.
No. Each Android app runs as a separate Linux userid. Even if you give the app filesystem access, it can't write to files that belong to other apps, let alone rewrite the apps themselves.
That would all be fine and dandy if there were no SD cards formatted with FAT32 with no filesystem security, and things like "move apps to SD card" features on top of that. These are simply bad choices for security.
Found the original announcement. No name of an app there either.
While there could definitely be such an app, the article definitely sounds like an advertisement for their product rather than a security notification.
When one party leads the Congress and the Presidency the American people will get the shaft.
I'm not sure who said this but - two is only one better.
Hopefully most will make the choice to boot incumbents out.
Hopefully not. People should be voting for a person they want in, not because they want to vote someone else out. But that may not be feasible when they only have 2 choices.
Nice - GPL translated in RBAC.