This stuff doesn't go "over the Internet": cable and DSL companies themselves provide you with on-demand video, often from a disk cache that sits within a few miles of your house and where the data only travels over their wires.
First of all, it remains to be seen whether this "saves money".
Second, it's misleading to report an algorithmic speedup as energy savings, since there are plenty of algorithmic speedups people come up with every day.
(Third, but that's a separate discussion, there are already known, faster and simpler ways of computing what they are trying to compute.)
Do you honestly think your mother or grandmother is gonna break out a PC and stream TV from Hulu?
Are you living under a rock? Many cable TV boxes provide on-demand video. DSL often comes with free or cheap on-demand video these days. Netflix and other companies offer additional little boxes you can hook up to your TV.
They had to invent their own filesystem in order to stream video fast enough using the hardware available at the time, so they certainly invested in innovation
How does that translate into "they invented the DVR"?
TiVo did a good job engineering a low-cost consumer DVR and they were first at that. That doesn't mean they invented the DVR.
Well, that's hard to do since there was no reference. But the guy seems to be talking about "Massively Parallel Low Cost Uncertainty Quantification". This is probably the same work as this:
Sounds like someone found a faster algorithm (maybe just constants), and since energy efficiency is the hot new thing, "faster" is now translated into "saves energy".
TiVo didn't invent the DVR, they were simply the first company with a successful consumer product. And they were successful just because prices had come down so much.
And it's a dying and obsolete product category anyway.
We just might want to consider the ethics before developing the technology this time.
Which technology would that be? Nobody has a remote clue what space travel will be like or what issues we will be facing.
We don't do well with large releases of energy if we're not ready to deal with it.
With the bomb, people had some idea of what they were developing. With space travel, nobody knows. At all. And we won't know for probably a few centuries.
Until then, our primary concern shouldn't be ethics, it should be self-preservation: if there are ethical issues in space (i.e., if it's not all just lifeless rocks), then we're at a far greater risk from other life than we can possibly be to them.
"but it's all complete lies. They're really little different from the Democrats."
Republicans are quite different from Democrats: Democrats at least pay for big government through tax increases, Republicans just spend and leave it up to the next democratic president to figure out how to bring some fiscal responsibility back to government.
Space exploration may not happen at all. If it does, it probably will be completely different from what we imagine it to be like. We can worry about the ethics when we get reasonably close.
The problem isn't inability to run old apps on new phones... it's the current inability of a substantial plurality of Android phones that aren't even SIX MONTHS OLD to run more and more apps that come out daily.
If there is forward compatibility, then developers have a simple option for making software that runs on all phones: stick to the older APIs. If they don't, it's either because they can't or because they don't see much of a market.
In contrast, the overwhelming majority of Android phone owners don't have that freedom. The bootloaders are locked, the hardware [yadda yadda yadda]
Who cares? It's a phone. You run maybe a dozen apps on it, and Android does that well. Many people have their phones less than a year before they upgrade.
MHO, Google's day of harsh reckoning is going to arrive in a couple of months
That's Steve Jobs's pipe dream. In reality, nobody really gives a damn.
For the price of a single iPhone, you can pay for two or three generations of Android phones if you really always must have the latest and greatest.
Yeah, Emerald is a bit flaky and bloated. But I could say the same about other GPL software. In the end, just use whatever gets the job done, and for all its faults, I think Emerald is better than the official SL viewer, just like I think Linux is--for all its faults and messiness--better than the Windows kernel.
If being nice or not spreading FUD is a requirement for you to use GPL'ed software, well, you should stop using GNU software and the Linux kernel right away, because neither RMS nor Linus are particularly nice, and they do spread a lot of FUD too.
SL hasn't changed as much as I had hoped over the last few years, but they have made some progress behind the scenes. They may be working on a completely new rendering engines.
One thing that seems to be a big change is the open simulator grid that's growing fast.
Don't confuse this with Linden's right to dictate the terms of their service, which they of course have. The conflict with the GPL is not in their restrictions on the USAGE of a modified client, but in their imposing restrictions on the freedom to develop and distribute it.
The Third Party Viewer restrictions only apply to users of the service. If you never use Linden Labs' service, you aren't bound by them.
The GPL is no longer available to developers of Second Life clients, because Linden Lab has added new restrictions on a developer's freedom to develop and distribute,
They have done no such thing. The have restricted the freedoms of people who access the service under the TOS. If you never access their service, you aren't bound by the TPV restrictions.
You can easily see that in Section 8 of TPV: if you violate the Third Party Viewer policy, you don't lose the rights to the source code (which would be the GPL remedy), you lose the right to access the service.
SL is mainly a social network and chat platform, with audio support and translation. It's also a bit like YouTube, except that people listen and view together. And people who'd otherwise never go near 3D Studio or VisualStudio actually learn 3D modeling and scripting in it.
If you think it has anything to do with people becoming "idiots", you really don't quite understand it.
That's just not true. You have all the rights granted under the GPL. What you can't do is connect to their servers with a client that doesn't conform to their policies. That conforms to the GPL, and they don't have any choice in the matter anyway: people use modified SL viewers to grief and spam, and that's basically what they are trying to prohibit.
Even if you couldn't connect to their servers with a modified client at all, it would still be useful: Linden Labs also open sourced the server. So, if you like, you can connect with your client to your server, or anybody else's server who allows it.
Linden Labs didn't have to open source anything; they did the enlightened thing and open sourced both their client and their server code. One of the most popular viewer is now an open source viewer, with many more functions than their original viewer. And the grid of non-Linden Labs servers will probably grow to be bigger than their own, money-making grid some time this year or next year.
Galen Gruman is the author of the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Bible, so it's a good bet he is biased towards Apple and against Android.
I have owned several Android devices and I haven't had significant compatibility problems. Some software takes a little while to get updated to the latest version of Android, but that's pretty much it.
The Olympics received special privileges (including special trademark protection) because they were intended to serve humanitarian purposes: improve understanding between the peoples of the world. These days, they serve that function in about the same way Coca Cola and Nike do. There is no reason anymore to grant special privileges to the Olympics. And if we want to return to the Olympic ideals, rather than giving them special commercial privileges, they should be required to be a lot more non-commercial and open than they are.
Game graphics seem to be getting better and better while the games seem to be getting more and more dull. Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2 are hardly games at all anymore, they are little more than movies with a fast forward button.
Slashdot Mirror
This stuff doesn't go "over the Internet": cable and DSL companies themselves provide you with on-demand video, often from a disk cache that sits within a few miles of your house and where the data only travels over their wires.
First of all, it remains to be seen whether this "saves money".
Second, it's misleading to report an algorithmic speedup as energy savings, since there are plenty of algorithmic speedups people come up with every day.
(Third, but that's a separate discussion, there are already known, faster and simpler ways of computing what they are trying to compute.)
Do you honestly think your mother or grandmother is gonna break out a PC and stream TV from Hulu?
Are you living under a rock? Many cable TV boxes provide on-demand video. DSL often comes with free or cheap on-demand video these days. Netflix and other companies offer additional little boxes you can hook up to your TV.
Pro-tip: Just because you're a nerd who pirates all his content, doesn't mean everyone else is.
Just because you're an idiot who lives in the digital sticks doesn't mean everybody else does as well.
Between Netflix, iTunes, and my cable operator's movie and TV library, there is exactly zero need for me to either record or pirate anything.
I don't recall a retail product before TiVo's.
So? How does that contradict what I said?
They had to invent their own filesystem in order to stream video fast enough using the hardware available at the time, so they certainly invested in innovation
How does that translate into "they invented the DVR"?
TiVo did a good job engineering a low-cost consumer DVR and they were first at that. That doesn't mean they invented the DVR.
Did you actually read the article?
Well, that's hard to do since there was no reference. But the guy seems to be talking about "Massively Parallel Low Cost Uncertainty Quantification". This is probably the same work as this:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1645413.1645421
The work has nothing to do with energy savings, it's just about a fast, approximate algorithm for a fairly common operation.
Common sense tells you that spending 20 minutes to do something takes less energy than taking up to a day doing the same thing.
My point exactly. The whole press release is analogous to saying that you save a lot of energy by compiling with "-O0" instead of "-O4".
Sounds like someone found a faster algorithm (maybe just constants), and since energy efficiency is the hot new thing, "faster" is now translated into "saves energy".
TiVo didn't invent the DVR, they were simply the first company with a successful consumer product. And they were successful just because prices had come down so much.
And it's a dying and obsolete product category anyway.
We just might want to consider the ethics before developing the technology this time.
Which technology would that be? Nobody has a remote clue what space travel will be like or what issues we will be facing.
We don't do well with large releases of energy if we're not ready to deal with it.
With the bomb, people had some idea of what they were developing. With space travel, nobody knows. At all. And we won't know for probably a few centuries.
Until then, our primary concern shouldn't be ethics, it should be self-preservation: if there are ethical issues in space (i.e., if it's not all just lifeless rocks), then we're at a far greater risk from other life than we can possibly be to them.
"but it's all complete lies. They're really little different from the Democrats."
Republicans are quite different from Democrats: Democrats at least pay for big government through tax increases, Republicans just spend and leave it up to the next democratic president to figure out how to bring some fiscal responsibility back to government.
Space exploration may not happen at all. If it does, it probably will be completely different from what we imagine it to be like. We can worry about the ethics when we get reasonably close.
The problem isn't inability to run old apps on new phones... it's the current inability of a substantial plurality of Android phones that aren't even SIX MONTHS OLD to run more and more apps that come out daily.
If there is forward compatibility, then developers have a simple option for making software that runs on all phones: stick to the older APIs. If they don't, it's either because they can't or because they don't see much of a market.
In contrast, the overwhelming majority of Android phone owners don't have that freedom. The bootloaders are locked, the hardware [yadda yadda yadda]
Who cares? It's a phone. You run maybe a dozen apps on it, and Android does that well. Many people have their phones less than a year before they upgrade.
MHO, Google's day of harsh reckoning is going to arrive in a couple of months
That's Steve Jobs's pipe dream. In reality, nobody really gives a damn.
For the price of a single iPhone, you can pay for two or three generations of Android phones if you really always must have the latest and greatest.
Sorry, but this is a tempest in a teapot.
Yeah, Emerald is a bit flaky and bloated. But I could say the same about other GPL software. In the end, just use whatever gets the job done, and for all its faults, I think Emerald is better than the official SL viewer, just like I think Linux is--for all its faults and messiness--better than the Windows kernel.
If being nice or not spreading FUD is a requirement for you to use GPL'ed software, well, you should stop using GNU software and the Linux kernel right away, because neither RMS nor Linus are particularly nice, and they do spread a lot of FUD too.
my thats a clever way of saying it's about tenticle sex monsters and flying cocks.
Well, it's still 3D models, 3D animation, and scripting, isn't it?
(But actually, people do do other things in SL as well.)
No, Linden Labs did no such thing. You are probably thinking of OpenSim
OK, they announced open sourcing the server. I thought OpenSim contained some of their source code.
LL has been active in working on virtual world interoperability, so at least they are supporting this kind of thing.
OpenSim is far less mature than the official closed-source SL server. It is also written in C#, with the issues that brings.
Better maintainability? Simpler development?
OpenSim won't accept patches from people that hack on the SL client, for fear of 'contamination' by the GPL.
Well, that's just foolish.
One of the more popular ones is Emerald.
SL hasn't changed as much as I had hoped over the last few years, but they have made some progress behind the scenes. They may be working on a completely new rendering engines.
One thing that seems to be a big change is the open simulator grid that's growing fast.
Don't confuse this with Linden's right to dictate the terms of their service, which they of course have. The conflict with the GPL is not in their restrictions on the USAGE of a modified client, but in their imposing restrictions on the freedom to develop and distribute it.
The Third Party Viewer restrictions only apply to users of the service. If you never use Linden Labs' service, you aren't bound by them.
The GPL is no longer available to developers of Second Life clients, because Linden Lab has added new restrictions on a developer's freedom to develop and distribute,
They have done no such thing. The have restricted the freedoms of people who access the service under the TOS. If you never access their service, you aren't bound by the TPV restrictions.
You can easily see that in Section 8 of TPV: if you violate the Third Party Viewer policy, you don't lose the rights to the source code (which would be the GPL remedy), you lose the right to access the service.
SL is mainly a social network and chat platform, with audio support and translation. It's also a bit like YouTube, except that people listen and view together. And people who'd otherwise never go near 3D Studio or VisualStudio actually learn 3D modeling and scripting in it.
If you think it has anything to do with people becoming "idiots", you really don't quite understand it.
That's just not true. You have all the rights granted under the GPL. What you can't do is connect to their servers with a client that doesn't conform to their policies. That conforms to the GPL, and they don't have any choice in the matter anyway: people use modified SL viewers to grief and spam, and that's basically what they are trying to prohibit.
Even if you couldn't connect to their servers with a modified client at all, it would still be useful: Linden Labs also open sourced the server. So, if you like, you can connect with your client to your server, or anybody else's server who allows it.
Linden Labs didn't have to open source anything; they did the enlightened thing and open sourced both their client and their server code. One of the most popular viewer is now an open source viewer, with many more functions than their original viewer. And the grid of non-Linden Labs servers will probably grow to be bigger than their own, money-making grid some time this year or next year.
Galen Gruman is the author of the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Bible, so it's a good bet he is biased towards Apple and against Android.
I have owned several Android devices and I haven't had significant compatibility problems. Some software takes a little while to get updated to the latest version of Android, but that's pretty much it.
Murdering someone in your bedroom isn't "inappropriate", it's simply illegal.
And for suicide, a private bedroom or bathroom is the appropriate place.
The Olympics received special privileges (including special trademark protection) because they were intended to serve humanitarian purposes: improve understanding between the peoples of the world. These days, they serve that function in about the same way Coca Cola and Nike do. There is no reason anymore to grant special privileges to the Olympics. And if we want to return to the Olympic ideals, rather than giving them special commercial privileges, they should be required to be a lot more non-commercial and open than they are.
Game graphics seem to be getting better and better while the games seem to be getting more and more dull. Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2 are hardly games at all anymore, they are little more than movies with a fast forward button.
The school denies Misuse, however they have photographic evidence of a child committing inappropriate behavior in the child's bedroom.
I'm sorry, but what behavior could possibly be "inappropriate" in one's bedroom?