Any civilization that has the resources to build massive ships and navigate them between the stars doesn't need to conquer earth; they have so much excess energy that they can turn whatever lifeless rock they want into whatever biosphere they desire.
But it's doubtful that they would even bother keeping their original ape-like forms. Cyborgs and uploading are not all that far out technologically, and they are the most reasonable choice for space travel. But once you do that, there's no reason to conquer biospheres anymore.
Like them or loathe them, I don't think you can classify the Mac platform as "commercially insignificant".
To Google it is. All they ever need from Mac or iPhone users is that they view text ads in browsers. All their apps for iPhone are free anyway, and Apple has effectively shut down everybody else from the mobile ad market on iPhone.
And tell me, on what are you basing the "good chance" of turning down the turn-by-turn app from Google?
Because Apple has turned down applications from Google in the past.
The fact that there are already five or six other turn by turn apps from several different companies on the iPhone?
I can also get applications like Google Voice for iPhone, yet Google Voice got turned down anyway. Apple's approval process is not consistent, so you can't argue that way.
I'm also not sure how they are "attempting to monopolise the smartphone market" by their developer agreements - I don;t think that specifying what code you use for your app restricts the rest of the market.
It sure does when over 90% of all mobile application revenue comes from Apple's platform.
With the new iPhone development agreement prohibiting the use of cross-platform toolkits, Apple is leveraging their dominance in the mobile app market by forcing developers to develop a separate application for iPhone and other platforms. Apple is betting that most developers will choose to develop for the iPhone first, and then for other platforms (if at all). And that's the way things have been going so far.
Also, why should Google care about Flash and Air? Those are Adobe's babies, and Google are no fans of either thing.
The Android platform is open, so Adobe can port its tools to it whether Google wants them to or not. But more importantly, Adobe brings a ton of developers and games along with Flash. Why shouldn't Google welcome them on Android?
HTC has a winner with Android: it's great software, it's free, and if they want to customize it, they can do that too.
Palm doesn't have a lot of developers. The few UI elements in Palm that don't exist in Android are easy to replicate. And you can already program Android in JavaScript.
Google has been going out of its way to help Apple and make it a more viable platform. Even though they already had their own phone under development, they supported iPhone. Even though Apple laptops and desktops are commercially insignificant, Google supports a lot of software on them. And the thanks from Apple? Insults, lawsuits, rejected apps, and attempts to monopolize the smartphone market through dirty tricks like restrictive developer agreements.
Why should Google even bother develop anything for the iPhone anymore after Apple's rejections of Google Voice, Flash, and Air? There's a good chance Apple would turn down turn-by-turn directions from Google anyway.
The Dead Sea is being ruined because people divert water from its natural inflows for agricultural use. Since they are destroying it, let them pay for fixing it.
It is that simple. The resolution of the human eye is about 6 megapixels. In fact the useful resolution (fovea) is about 0.2 megapixels. Moving your eyes doesn't increase their resolution any more than a panorama head increases the resolution of your camera.
If you do some testing with people, you'll notice that maximum required resolution to cover the whole visual field uniformly is somewhere between 12M and 50M pixels.
You need to divide those by three, which places the upper bound for a display at about 4-16 megapixel. Anything beyond that is not going to be useful.
But that doesn't show that going to the upper bound is useful. For example, a 16 megapixel flat display isn't going to be useful because you see the pixels at very different angles. You need a wraparound display.
You can already get 4 megapixel displays for under $1000. Get four of those and hook them up to your machine and you're pretty close to what makes sense given the human visual system.
You can't compare DPI for print and monitors that way because they count completely different things.
And the "idiot consumer" isn't such an idiot: if low resolution gets their job done, why should they subsidize the foibles of the "visual-oriented industries"? Many regular folks I know still use 1280x1024 even though they could upgrade to much higher resolutions for next to nothing. They really don't need or want more.
Making many assumptions, the human eye has about 500 to 600 megapixels of resolution.
The human eye has about 6 million cones, so that's its resolution (in the sense of a digital camera): 6 megapixels. The human eye can scan a scene and the brain can detect some finer detail, but so can a camera; it doesn't change the resolution. However, since monitors and cameras count resolution differently, that 6 megapixel resolution correponds to a 2 megapixel color display screen resolution.
You get the higher figures through eye and head movement. But instead of surrounding yourself with monitors and moving your head, you can just... move and manage your windows. That way you have many gigapixels at your fingertips. The human brain is remarkably adaptable that way.
You can get a 30" 2500x1600 screen for under $1000. That's a really good deal. It's also pretty much at the limit of what makes sense, both in terms of absolute size and pixel density. If you want more, you can always use a dual or triple screen setup.
You shouldn't be surprised that "Linux is so far behind"; we like it that way. If we thought that what the Solaris or DragonFly engineers are doing was important, we'd be using their systems instead.
It's absolutely ridiculous to suggest that Apple would buy ARM because they are worried about ARM becoming unsuitable for mobile use. Half the industry uses ARM for mobile applications, the rest for low power servers and embedded systems.
Sorry, but you make no sense.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I do. Like the fact that Apple marketing, in the span of a few months, switched their rhetoric from "Intel sucks" to "Intel rocks". Funny how that goes.
PowerPC probably wasn't a good match for Apple. But IBM certainly did nothing deliberate to hurt Apple; IBM was trying hard to make PowerPC go because they depended on it as well. And it's not like other chip manufacturers haven't had bad periods.
And if Steve Jobs thinks he can manage chip design and manufacturing better than IBM or Intel, he's a fool.
Apple's PowerPC experience is not a plausible reason for Apple to buy ARM.
They're a for-profit company whose only asset is detailed information about people and their interactions
My personal information is no more "their asset" than my phone calls are the asset of the phone company. They should be a communication service, and they shouldn't "mine" anybody's data except as necessary to allow me to communicate with others as I see fit.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Its a quite accurate statement to say Apple is a founder
It is accurate, but it is also massively misleading because it suggests that Apple participated in the creation ARM, which they did not. All Apple really did was invest in already existing technology when a business reorganization gave them an opportunity to do that.
it could be quite possible that Apple wants to go this way as an insurance policy,
Who are you trying to kid? Apple wants this to screw their competitors by controlling the chip design many of them rely on.
because they fear other big stalkers might acquire a company they are increasingly strategically reliant on
Apple shouldn't project their own rotten behavior and motives onto others.
in other words our entire tech world is already built around this architecture.
And that's why Apple cannot be allowed to have it.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's massively misleading to say that "ARM was founded by Apple and Acorn" and that they "want it back".
ARM was founded long before Apple got involved, and the core architecture was developed without Apple's involvement. At some point, Apple started working with them because they had some special requirements for the Newton.
Given Apple's current position, it would be an outrage if antitrust regulators allowed them to purchase ARM. And you would likely see the rest of the industry dropping the chip like a hot potato and coming up with their own alternatives.
So what? Someone else will publish something that you didn't find out.
But scientists wouldn't invest the years of hard work to collect the data in the first place if they only get one paper out of it before they get scooped by other research groups, so there will be no data based on which to publish.
See, scientists don't just work for money, they work for publications, because that determines their career. And the problem is even worse in the UK since number of publications and citations strongly determines everything from pay to whether you keep your job in the UK.
The current system already discourages deep analysis or anything that requires lots of effort. Many papers are theoretically shallow ideas supported by little data because investing more time and effort simply isn't rewarded. This rule makes the situation even worse.
Generally, people often don't like to publish data because they invested a lot of time in gathering the data. If they have to publish it, presumably along with the first paper they write, many other groups can take the data and start analyzing it and publishing papers on it without investing work in gathering their own data. Since scientific careers stand and fall with publications, that's a serious concern to scientists.
I like the idea of all data being public, but I don't know what a good solution is or what the consequences of this decision are.
People should not forget that climate science is an exception. In most sciences, this isn't necessary because experiments are supposed to be replicable by other scientists. If the experiment can't be replicated, the original paper and conclusions are invalid. Publishing the original data really serves little purpose and may actually discourage (necessary) replication of the experiments.
Climate science is a special case because it is based on massive observational data that cannot be replicated and that was derived from tax-payer funded satellites and other data sources.
That'd bullshit. Apple used to disallow anything that would havd allowed companies to circumvent the app store approval process. But if you used your own abstractions or libraries inside your app, that was your business.
With 4.0, they try to regulate which languages and libraries you use to. That is a totally different and complete new restriction. Adobe couldn't foresee such a draconian move. What Adobe did was completely within the spirit and intent of Apple's original restrictions. There was no "brinksmanship" involved.
You are right that Adobe was foolish to attempt to support iPhone. In fact, given Apple's recent history, it is foolish for any serious software house to support any Apple product, because if Apple succeeds at what they are trying to do, we can close down the software industry entirely.
If Apple is going to try to enforce this policy evenhandedly, they will have to kick out many applications, in particular games. If they apply it selectively to Adobe, they will hopefully get sued for unfair business practices.
I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...
Slashdot Mirror
Most graphics and geometry requires lots of sign tests (or some other comparisons), but those are expensive. So it doesn't really help.
Any civilization that has the resources to build massive ships and navigate them between the stars doesn't need to conquer earth; they have so much excess energy that they can turn whatever lifeless rock they want into whatever biosphere they desire.
But it's doubtful that they would even bother keeping their original ape-like forms. Cyborgs and uploading are not all that far out technologically, and they are the most reasonable choice for space travel. But once you do that, there's no reason to conquer biospheres anymore.
Like them or loathe them, I don't think you can classify the Mac platform as "commercially insignificant".
To Google it is. All they ever need from Mac or iPhone users is that they view text ads in browsers. All their apps for iPhone are free anyway, and Apple has effectively shut down everybody else from the mobile ad market on iPhone.
And tell me, on what are you basing the "good chance" of turning down the turn-by-turn app from Google?
Because Apple has turned down applications from Google in the past.
The fact that there are already five or six other turn by turn apps from several different companies on the iPhone?
I can also get applications like Google Voice for iPhone, yet Google Voice got turned down anyway. Apple's approval process is not consistent, so you can't argue that way.
I'm also not sure how they are "attempting to monopolise the smartphone market" by their developer agreements - I don;t think that specifying what code you use for your app restricts the rest of the market.
It sure does when over 90% of all mobile application revenue comes from Apple's platform.
With the new iPhone development agreement prohibiting the use of cross-platform toolkits, Apple is leveraging their dominance in the mobile app market by forcing developers to develop a separate application for iPhone and other platforms. Apple is betting that most developers will choose to develop for the iPhone first, and then for other platforms (if at all). And that's the way things have been going so far.
Also, why should Google care about Flash and Air? Those are Adobe's babies, and Google are no fans of either thing.
The Android platform is open, so Adobe can port its tools to it whether Google wants them to or not. But more importantly, Adobe brings a ton of developers and games along with Flash. Why shouldn't Google welcome them on Android?
HTC has a winner with Android: it's great software, it's free, and if they want to customize it, they can do that too.
Palm doesn't have a lot of developers. The few UI elements in Palm that don't exist in Android are easy to replicate. And you can already program Android in JavaScript.
Google has been going out of its way to help Apple and make it a more viable platform. Even though they already had their own phone under development, they supported iPhone. Even though Apple laptops and desktops are commercially insignificant, Google supports a lot of software on them. And the thanks from Apple? Insults, lawsuits, rejected apps, and attempts to monopolize the smartphone market through dirty tricks like restrictive developer agreements.
Why should Google even bother develop anything for the iPhone anymore after Apple's rejections of Google Voice, Flash, and Air? There's a good chance Apple would turn down turn-by-turn directions from Google anyway.
The Dead Sea is being ruined because people divert water from its natural inflows for agricultural use. Since they are destroying it, let them pay for fixing it.
Just stop messing with it for a couple of centuries and it will recover.
Trouble with that is that you can't pull over on many highways, to text or do anything else.
It's not that simple.
It is that simple. The resolution of the human eye is about 6 megapixels. In fact the useful resolution (fovea) is about 0.2 megapixels. Moving your eyes doesn't increase their resolution any more than a panorama head increases the resolution of your camera.
If you do some testing with people, you'll notice that maximum required resolution to cover the whole visual field uniformly is somewhere between 12M and 50M pixels.
You need to divide those by three, which places the upper bound for a display at about 4-16 megapixel. Anything beyond that is not going to be useful.
But that doesn't show that going to the upper bound is useful. For example, a 16 megapixel flat display isn't going to be useful because you see the pixels at very different angles. You need a wraparound display.
You can already get 4 megapixel displays for under $1000. Get four of those and hook them up to your machine and you're pretty close to what makes sense given the human visual system.
You can't compare DPI for print and monitors that way because they count completely different things.
And the "idiot consumer" isn't such an idiot: if low resolution gets their job done, why should they subsidize the foibles of the "visual-oriented industries"? Many regular folks I know still use 1280x1024 even though they could upgrade to much higher resolutions for next to nothing. They really don't need or want more.
Making many assumptions, the human eye has about 500 to 600 megapixels of resolution.
The human eye has about 6 million cones, so that's its resolution (in the sense of a digital camera): 6 megapixels. The human eye can scan a scene and the brain can detect some finer detail, but so can a camera; it doesn't change the resolution. However, since monitors and cameras count resolution differently, that 6 megapixel resolution correponds to a 2 megapixel color display screen resolution.
You get the higher figures through eye and head movement. But instead of surrounding yourself with monitors and moving your head, you can just... move and manage your windows. That way you have many gigapixels at your fingertips. The human brain is remarkably adaptable that way.
You can get a 30" 2500x1600 screen for under $1000. That's a really good deal. It's also pretty much at the limit of what makes sense, both in terms of absolute size and pixel density. If you want more, you can always use a dual or triple screen setup.
You shouldn't be surprised that "Linux is so far behind"; we like it that way. If we thought that what the Solaris or DragonFly engineers are doing was important, we'd be using their systems instead.
It's absolutely ridiculous to suggest that Apple would buy ARM because they are worried about ARM becoming unsuitable for mobile use. Half the industry uses ARM for mobile applications, the rest for low power servers and embedded systems.
Sorry, but you make no sense.
I do. Like the fact that Apple marketing, in the span of a few months, switched their rhetoric from "Intel sucks" to "Intel rocks". Funny how that goes.
PowerPC probably wasn't a good match for Apple. But IBM certainly did nothing deliberate to hurt Apple; IBM was trying hard to make PowerPC go because they depended on it as well. And it's not like other chip manufacturers haven't had bad periods.
And if Steve Jobs thinks he can manage chip design and manufacturing better than IBM or Intel, he's a fool.
Apple's PowerPC experience is not a plausible reason for Apple to buy ARM.
For the same reason we use Microsoft, iPhone, and other crap: these companies have a near-monopoly.
And to keep them from abusing it, the public needs to regulate them.
They're a for-profit company whose only asset is detailed information about people and their interactions
My personal information is no more "their asset" than my phone calls are the asset of the phone company. They should be a communication service, and they shouldn't "mine" anybody's data except as necessary to allow me to communicate with others as I see fit.
Its a quite accurate statement to say Apple is a founder
It is accurate, but it is also massively misleading because it suggests that Apple participated in the creation ARM, which they did not. All Apple really did was invest in already existing technology when a business reorganization gave them an opportunity to do that.
it could be quite possible that Apple wants to go this way as an insurance policy,
Who are you trying to kid? Apple wants this to screw their competitors by controlling the chip design many of them rely on.
because they fear other big stalkers might acquire a company they are increasingly strategically reliant on
Apple shouldn't project their own rotten behavior and motives onto others.
in other words our entire tech world is already built around this architecture.
And that's why Apple cannot be allowed to have it.
It's massively misleading to say that "ARM was founded by Apple and Acorn" and that they "want it back".
ARM was founded long before Apple got involved, and the core architecture was developed without Apple's involvement. At some point, Apple started working with them because they had some special requirements for the Newton.
Given Apple's current position, it would be an outrage if antitrust regulators allowed them to purchase ARM. And you would likely see the rest of the industry dropping the chip like a hot potato and coming up with their own alternatives.
So what? Someone else will publish something that you didn't find out.
But scientists wouldn't invest the years of hard work to collect the data in the first place if they only get one paper out of it before they get scooped by other research groups, so there will be no data based on which to publish.
See, scientists don't just work for money, they work for publications, because that determines their career. And the problem is even worse in the UK since number of publications and citations strongly determines everything from pay to whether you keep your job in the UK.
The current system already discourages deep analysis or anything that requires lots of effort. Many papers are theoretically shallow ideas supported by little data because investing more time and effort simply isn't rewarded. This rule makes the situation even worse.
Generally, people often don't like to publish data because they invested a lot of time in gathering the data. If they have to publish it, presumably along with the first paper they write, many other groups can take the data and start analyzing it and publishing papers on it without investing work in gathering their own data. Since scientific careers stand and fall with publications, that's a serious concern to scientists.
I like the idea of all data being public, but I don't know what a good solution is or what the consequences of this decision are.
People should not forget that climate science is an exception. In most sciences, this isn't necessary because experiments are supposed to be replicable by other scientists. If the experiment can't be replicated, the original paper and conclusions are invalid. Publishing the original data really serves little purpose and may actually discourage (necessary) replication of the experiments.
Climate science is a special case because it is based on massive observational data that cannot be replicated and that was derived from tax-payer funded satellites and other data sources.
That'd bullshit. Apple used to disallow anything that would havd allowed companies to circumvent the app store approval process. But if you used your own abstractions or libraries inside your app, that was your business.
With 4.0, they try to regulate which languages and libraries you use to. That is a totally different and complete new restriction. Adobe couldn't foresee such a draconian move. What Adobe did was completely within the spirit and intent of Apple's original restrictions. There was no "brinksmanship" involved.
You are right that Adobe was foolish to attempt to support iPhone. In fact, given Apple's recent history, it is foolish for any serious software house to support any Apple product, because if Apple succeeds at what they are trying to do, we can close down the software industry entirely.
If Apple is going to try to enforce this policy evenhandedly, they will have to kick out many applications, in particular games. If they apply it selectively to Adobe, they will hopefully get sued for unfair business practices.
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Smut-lyrics-Tom-Lehrer/6AF3E9A2451F2F0548256A7D0025920C
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pva35TFiBfI
I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...
In short, yes, it would be better, because Adobe is less evil than Apple.