I would have thought that the last 20 years of desktop OS programming would have taught programmers how to deal with the fact that not every customer has an identical piece of hardware. I'm sure it makes it marginally harder when you aren't programming for a completely homogeneous platform, but it's not a new paradigm.
My Droid Eris was on Android 1.5 for the last several months and I noticed very few differences between it and my father's Droid with 2.0. Yea he had voice nav, and he got live wallpapers when the 2.1 rolled out, but the core features that made me love the OS were largely identical (push gmail, widgets, great web browsing experience, etc.).
The only people to be hurt by the 'fragmentation/obsolescence' issue is developers. I don't want to downplay the developer issue, but as far as consumers are concerned , most of the big-time apps have no trouble supporting multiple iterations of the platform.
Are you implying that the rulings of a court overrule scientific literature and decades of accepted scientific practice?
like I said previously (and you didn't bother to quote). Scientific instruments are calibrated. Calibration is why we trust the results. I could have an open source mass spec but if it couldn't be calibrated reliably I would toss it for the proverbial Microsoft mass spec.
I work in a lab and every computer there runs Windows XP or Vista because most of our instruments use software written for windows and most of our data is analyzed in Excel or Mathcad.
Several of the workstations will dual boot into a Linux distribution because one guy does simulations with software that runs on Linux (I wish I could remember what software he uses).
The idea that closed source software makes an instrument a "black box" is ridiculous. Instruments are tested and calibrated on a regular basis. The final output from a scientist using a machine has much more meaning than the raw data produced by the instrument.
The most important things to a scientist (industry or academic) is that his instrument works reliably and accurately. Companies that make reliable accurate scientific instruments are often so specialized that maybe 5 or 10 of a single instrument will ship in a given year. I can understand why they don't tend to release all their code to the public so their competitors can mooch off their work.
My issue wasn't that anybody is entitled to be successful, only an individual can shape one's future. But the post I was replying to made the implication than, in an ideal world, wealthy people shouldn't be able to purchase expensive education for their children.
Many mediocre people with wealthy parent's have gone on to live much better lives then mediocre people with poor parents. It isn't fair, but a fair system isn't what works nor has it even been proven to be possible. A working system gives incentive for people to be productive, and few things are a more powerful motivational force than the desire to protect/promote one's children.
Again, competitive school grants SHOULD exist because the loss of an exceptional mind due to social factors is abhorrent and antiproducive. But, just as we should help those less fortunate, we should continue to reward those who, by the standards of capitalism, have become successful.
"In an ideal world, all barriers to higher education will be based solely on your ability and not on how much money you (or your family) has."
Whose ideal world?
In my ideal world, if I earn a load of money due to my own hard work and determination, I will give my (future) children the best possible chance in life by paying for a top notch education. Should there be opportunity for the hard working children with poor parents? YES! Scholarships and federal student aid should exist as a competitive need-based service.
To take you're 'ideal world' to the extreme, should a rich person not be allowed to give his children expensive toys or clothing because it gives the child an unearned advantage over the children with poor parents?
Re:I wonder what the DOJ will have to say...
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 1
Restricting sales "to a select group" IS illegal. But restricting sales to EVERYBODY is totally within the rights of an IP owner, as is raising the price to whatever they deem 'marketable'.
Re:Quoting himself now? Megalomania
on
Life Recorder
·
· Score: 1
It seems that a Tech columnist posted a scantily detailed opinion piece on the subject last march. Our submitter linked to his opinion on the opinion piece.
I'm all for laissez-faire, but rather than building a city based on taking that philosophy to the extreme (in mother Russia, the government PAYS tax to the business), they could pass laws to make the whole country more business friendly. Small business hate red tape because it stifles their growth, large business secretly love red tape because startups cannot navigate around it.
Everybody knows those business friendly cities are merely bait and switch anyways. If the next Google is founded there and their yearly income is measured in billions, do you think Russian regulators will still extol the virtues of tax holidays?
To expand on your point; Google lacks a great deal of intellectual property that puts them at legal risk from competitors such as RIM and Apple when it comes to their Android OS. A Google acquisition would spell a quick end to the HTC vs. Apple suit. On the other hand, if RIM, Apple, or Nokia acquires Palm, we can say hello to a torrent of lawsuits directed at every aspect of their respective smartphone manufacturing competitors.
As an aside, I don't think it would be bad if Microsoft purchased Palm, since Microsoft's smartphone IP is shallow at best. I would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS pop up that could cut it with iPhone OS or Android, and I don't think that WM 7 is going to do it.
Say what you will about litigation against customers, it's effective and that is why they do it. It seems like shutting down sites like IsoHunt is a waste of time to copyright holders since so many others exist and will pop up. But sue a few customers and everything changes.
"the more attention you give morons, the more they'll act like morons."
I disagree with your sentiment. If you publicly embarrass somebody for acting stupidly. They often think twice before acting stupidly again. What we need is more bad press for these types of people, like that town in Africa where everybody claimed to be getting sick from radio waves until they were told that the tower had been turned off two weeks prior. Also there is the guy who became violently ill only when cell phones rang (but not when they communicated with the cell tower silently). Yea. Lots of stupid people more need attention.
My dad accidentally hit my dog with his truck three days ago. We brought him to the vet with a massive wound in his leg. The vet put him under anesthesia and repaired some muscular damage. He closed the wound with 9 staples. We were given antibiotics and powerful painkillers.
The tally? $600
It is an unsavory analogy, but veterinary medicine is what healthcare would be like if it were truly private. The reason we are where we are today is because government regulation, excessive tort, defensive medicine, and 'healthcare theft' have all conspired to make our healthcare cost unreasonable.
This silver lining to this all: we will get real healthcare reform when the conservatives repeal this in 2014.
I think his point, although poorly stated, is that Apple's way of doing business should concern us all. If us consumers make it a successful business model, other companies will follow. That is why many of us 'apple h8rs' are such vocal advocates. We want to spread the message. We want others to join our cause of avoiding Apple branded products.
Here's a short list of things Apple does that makes many of us so opposed to them: Restricted development, DRM content, competition through litigation.
I don't disagree with the implication you are making here, but I'd like to point out the irony that Google needs to win a fight for a software platform in order to prevent themselves from becoming irrelevant in the cloud.
Perhaps this supports the idea that the future is going to be made on software+service. This also turns all the old antitrust rules on their head. Businesses based on software+service can't be decoupled in the same way as windows + IE.
Working with the ribosome seems like as good an idea as any, but the research seems so restricted. The nutrient rich medium does run out, but they are not selecting for long term viability, they are only selecting for speed of replication.
Problems that this does not address are: how did metabolisms develop, and where did membranes come from? It seems that a membrane bound replicating body of this sort would fit all the requirements of rudimentary life.
Re:Still not quite sure why twitter is necessary
on
Two Scoops of Buzz
·
· Score: 1
I have two issues with your retort.
1) Are you saying that your disdain of twitter is one borne of concern of societal decline? You aren't the first person to worry that everybody in the world is getting stupider, but this is simply not the case. Would you suggest that newspapers remove headlines because ignorant people might not read the article? Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, services like twitter encourage reading. By making it easy to sort through what you don't want to read, it is easier to find what you do want to read.
2) When it comes to social media, brevity is extremely important. I don't want to waste my day reading a bunch of wordy blog posts by all my friends. If I'm even interested, I only want a few words updating me on my friends' status, location, and plans.
Re:Still not quite sure why twitter is necessary
on
Two Scoops of Buzz
·
· Score: 1
The appeal of twitter is the EVERY update is small. When reading a newspaper, most people like to read the headlines before they decide to read the story; this concept is why twitter is popular.
Blogs are great and all, but it is hard to follow many blogs at once without getting information overload. This is where twitter comes in.
Google has been the darling of the tech media for a long time now, but for the last few years, more and more media companies see Google as a competitor, or see google as unfairly profiting off their publications. I think this whole fiasco is overblown by journalists who have a bone to pick with the company. Any change to a popular product like gmail is going to bother some people and offend others and all the stories seem to focus on this.
Don't get me wrong, I think there are some serious issues with buzz, especially with it's added noise to the social networking scene, but most of the bad press has to do with the 'privacy issue'. Honestly, when Myspace launched every profile was public and most facebook friend lists are still public. Where is the outrage there?
Back in the 90's when MS was in trouble with the DOJ they had an epiphany. Hire lobbyists and donate to campaigns to get the feds off your back. It hasn't failed them since.
Perhaps if Toyota could field some candidates, or buy a few, they would get rid of their latest headache.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have thought that the last 20 years of desktop OS programming would have taught programmers how to deal with the fact that not every customer has an identical piece of hardware. I'm sure it makes it marginally harder when you aren't programming for a completely homogeneous platform, but it's not a new paradigm.
My Droid Eris was on Android 1.5 for the last several months and I noticed very few differences between it and my father's Droid with 2.0. Yea he had voice nav, and he got live wallpapers when the 2.1 rolled out, but the core features that made me love the OS were largely identical (push gmail, widgets, great web browsing experience, etc.).
The only people to be hurt by the 'fragmentation/obsolescence' issue is developers. I don't want to downplay the developer issue, but as far as consumers are concerned , most of the big-time apps have no trouble supporting multiple iterations of the platform.
Are you implying that the rulings of a court overrule scientific literature and decades of accepted scientific practice?
like I said previously (and you didn't bother to quote). Scientific instruments are calibrated. Calibration is why we trust the results. I could have an open source mass spec but if it couldn't be calibrated reliably I would toss it for the proverbial Microsoft mass spec.
I work in a lab and every computer there runs Windows XP or Vista because most of our instruments use software written for windows and most of our data is analyzed in Excel or Mathcad.
Several of the workstations will dual boot into a Linux distribution because one guy does simulations with software that runs on Linux (I wish I could remember what software he uses).
The idea that closed source software makes an instrument a "black box" is ridiculous. Instruments are tested and calibrated on a regular basis. The final output from a scientist using a machine has much more meaning than the raw data produced by the instrument.
The most important things to a scientist (industry or academic) is that his instrument works reliably and accurately. Companies that make reliable accurate scientific instruments are often so specialized that maybe 5 or 10 of a single instrument will ship in a given year. I can understand why they don't tend to release all their code to the public so their competitors can mooch off their work.
My issue wasn't that anybody is entitled to be successful, only an individual can shape one's future. But the post I was replying to made the implication than, in an ideal world, wealthy people shouldn't be able to purchase expensive education for their children.
Many mediocre people with wealthy parent's have gone on to live much better lives then mediocre people with poor parents. It isn't fair, but a fair system isn't what works nor has it even been proven to be possible. A working system gives incentive for people to be productive, and few things are a more powerful motivational force than the desire to protect/promote one's children.
Again, competitive school grants SHOULD exist because the loss of an exceptional mind due to social factors is abhorrent and antiproducive. But, just as we should help those less fortunate, we should continue to reward those who, by the standards of capitalism, have become successful.
"In an ideal world, all barriers to higher education will be based solely on your ability and not on how much money you (or your family) has."
Whose ideal world?
In my ideal world, if I earn a load of money due to my own hard work and determination, I will give my (future) children the best possible chance in life by paying for a top notch education. Should there be opportunity for the hard working children with poor parents? YES! Scholarships and federal student aid should exist as a competitive need-based service.
To take you're 'ideal world' to the extreme, should a rich person not be allowed to give his children expensive toys or clothing because it gives the child an unearned advantage over the children with poor parents?
Restricting sales "to a select group" IS illegal. But restricting sales to EVERYBODY is totally within the rights of an IP owner, as is raising the price to whatever they deem 'marketable'.
It seems that a Tech columnist posted a scantily detailed opinion piece on the subject last march. Our submitter linked to his opinion on the opinion piece.
http://www.darkreading.com/blog/archives/2010/03/is_it_time_for.html?cid=nl_DR_DAILY_2010-03-15_h
I don't think the venture capitalists will bite.
I'm all for laissez-faire, but rather than building a city based on taking that philosophy to the extreme (in mother Russia, the government PAYS tax to the business), they could pass laws to make the whole country more business friendly. Small business hate red tape because it stifles their growth, large business secretly love red tape because startups cannot navigate around it.
Everybody knows those business friendly cities are merely bait and switch anyways. If the next Google is founded there and their yearly income is measured in billions, do you think Russian regulators will still extol the virtues of tax holidays?
To expand on your point; Google lacks a great deal of intellectual property that puts them at legal risk from competitors such as RIM and Apple when it comes to their Android OS. A Google acquisition would spell a quick end to the HTC vs. Apple suit. On the other hand, if RIM, Apple, or Nokia acquires Palm, we can say hello to a torrent of lawsuits directed at every aspect of their respective smartphone manufacturing competitors.
As an aside, I don't think it would be bad if Microsoft purchased Palm, since Microsoft's smartphone IP is shallow at best. I would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS pop up that could cut it with iPhone OS or Android, and I don't think that WM 7 is going to do it.
I don't think this will affect me. Since I heard the following news yesterday, I have already uninstalled bittorrent.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/03/30/2352256/New-Litigation-Targets-20000-BitTorrent-Using-Downloaders?art_pos=1
Say what you will about litigation against customers, it's effective and that is why they do it. It seems like shutting down sites like IsoHunt is a waste of time to copyright holders since so many others exist and will pop up. But sue a few customers and everything changes.
"the more attention you give morons, the more they'll act like morons."
I disagree with your sentiment. If you publicly embarrass somebody for acting stupidly. They often think twice before acting stupidly again. What we need is more bad press for these types of people, like that town in Africa where everybody claimed to be getting sick from radio waves until they were told that the tower had been turned off two weeks prior. Also there is the guy who became violently ill only when cell phones rang (but not when they communicated with the cell tower silently). Yea. Lots of stupid people more need attention.
Scientology too... but that is another thread.
My dad accidentally hit my dog with his truck three days ago. We brought him to the vet with a massive wound in his leg. The vet put him under anesthesia and repaired some muscular damage. He closed the wound with 9 staples. We were given antibiotics and powerful painkillers.
The tally? $600
It is an unsavory analogy, but veterinary medicine is what healthcare would be like if it were truly private. The reason we are where we are today is because government regulation, excessive tort, defensive medicine, and 'healthcare theft' have all conspired to make our healthcare cost unreasonable.
This silver lining to this all: we will get real healthcare reform when the conservatives repeal this in 2014.
Or he lives in New Jersey , New York, or California where we already have punitive insurance regulation like this bill enacts.
I hope this turns out better than the geothermal energy that was causing earthquakes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html
But I jest, this is a step in the right direction.
I think his point, although poorly stated, is that Apple's way of doing business should concern us all. If us consumers make it a successful business model, other companies will follow. That is why many of us 'apple h8rs' are such vocal advocates. We want to spread the message. We want others to join our cause of avoiding Apple branded products.
Here's a short list of things Apple does that makes many of us so opposed to them:
Restricted development, DRM content, competition through litigation.
I don't disagree with the implication you are making here, but I'd like to point out the irony that Google needs to win a fight for a software platform in order to prevent themselves from becoming irrelevant in the cloud.
Perhaps this supports the idea that the future is going to be made on software+service. This also turns all the old antitrust rules on their head. Businesses based on software+service can't be decoupled in the same way as windows + IE.
Well, I've now seen at least one steampunk hearing aid:
http://turonistan.blogspot.com/2009/12/steampunk-hearing-aid.html
Working with the ribosome seems like as good an idea as any, but the research seems so restricted. The nutrient rich medium does run out, but they are not selecting for long term viability, they are only selecting for speed of replication.
Problems that this does not address are: how did metabolisms develop, and where did membranes come from? It seems that a membrane bound replicating body of this sort would fit all the requirements of rudimentary life.
I have two issues with your retort.
1) Are you saying that your disdain of twitter is one borne of concern of societal decline? You aren't the first person to worry that everybody in the world is getting stupider, but this is simply not the case. Would you suggest that newspapers remove headlines because ignorant people might not read the article? Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, services like twitter encourage reading. By making it easy to sort through what you don't want to read, it is easier to find what you do want to read.
2) When it comes to social media, brevity is extremely important. I don't want to waste my day reading a bunch of wordy blog posts by all my friends. If I'm even interested, I only want a few words updating me on my friends' status, location, and plans.
The appeal of twitter is the EVERY update is small. When reading a newspaper, most people like to read the headlines before they decide to read the story; this concept is why twitter is popular.
Blogs are great and all, but it is hard to follow many blogs at once without getting information overload. This is where twitter comes in.
Google has been the darling of the tech media for a long time now, but for the last few years, more and more media companies see Google as a competitor, or see google as unfairly profiting off their publications. I think this whole fiasco is overblown by journalists who have a bone to pick with the company. Any change to a popular product like gmail is going to bother some people and offend others and all the stories seem to focus on this.
Don't get me wrong, I think there are some serious issues with buzz, especially with it's added noise to the social networking scene, but most of the bad press has to do with the 'privacy issue'. Honestly, when Myspace launched every profile was public and most facebook friend lists are still public. Where is the outrage there?
I agree that the DVD version is better, TBH I loved it even before I saw the extended cut.
But, I was bothered by the epic ripoff of the Borg: Necromongers? yea.
Back in the 90's when MS was in trouble with the DOJ they had an epiphany. Hire lobbyists and donate to campaigns to get the feds off your back. It hasn't failed them since.
Perhaps if Toyota could field some candidates, or buy a few, they would get rid of their latest headache.