You will probably die a happy old man who never saw the reckoning your brand of apathy caused. It will come though not likely in our life time.
I'm guessing we can agree that the world cannot sustain a trillion people, right? We are already doing all manner of terrible things to sustain our current population (inoculating livestock with antibiotics so they grow faster comes to mind). We will have to get more and more grotesque in our "advances" to keep with the billions of new mouths to feed. At some point, be it 12 billion or 24 billion, our "advances" will fail to keep up and it will be catastrophic. More is not better. More is just more. We can see the end of the road ahead (even if it is a at trillion people), it seems silly to just ignore it and hope for the best.
Malthus proved wrong? LOL, thats a good one! We should talk that one over at your next bible study meeting.
I know a scientist that is working on a microbe that you can pump into an oil well and after a sufficient period of time you pump out diesel. It's really cool and creates major efficiencies in refining but doesn't deal with the release of fossil carbon at all. I'd like to see a biodiesel solution as well.
That is the choice I don't want to have to make. I'd prefer we stop creating so many new people. That requires that we raise the likelihood that each child born has a high probably of surviving and thriving though. That means the wealthy we will need to be more generous with the less fortunate. The other option though is that we are stingy, so the less fortunate perceive that the only way to be sure that someone will be there to support them when they are old is to have a ton a children, and that will make the lives of each of those offspring more miserable than necessary, but may also hasten the death of all of us (through destruction of the environment and creation of epidemics).
Malthus explained all of this almost 2 centuries ago. We will reproduce until the environment cannot sustain us, and then we will have mass culling of some type. Darwin expanded on Malthus' work to show that this culling was one of the mechanisms of natural selection. I may have an overly high opinion of what it is possible for people to do, but I'd like to think that we could avoid all that unnecessary suffering through generosity and family planning. It's probably impossible, but since the outcome cannot be worse than doing nothing I think its worth a try. Finding new resources to exploit so that the mass culling begins when there are 12 billion people instead of 7 billion people only mean 5 billion more people need to suffer when the inevitable happens. It will happen if we don't take action.
This is true, but what about the "nutrients" that the kelp captures while it grows and then is removed en masse during the harvest? I find this worrisome. More worrisome though is the constant search for more resources to exploit while the ignoring of the fact that we cannot sustain population growth forever. Why not stop increasing the resource requirements before the inevitable war for resources happens and kills off a few billion people?
For the sake of argument, lets say it works and pretty soon the ocean is all fenced off like Nebraska and each family farmer (multinational corp) has their own little farm (ocean). All this does is push off the problems of over populating a little bit further all the while putting pressure new pressures on the environment. While kelp would capture CO from the atmosphere in equal parts to those exhausted when burnt, I'm sure we are not taking into account the other things it will be removing from the seas. What affect might that have? No one knows. While the Capitalist ethic of "Drive it hard and fix what breaks." is romantic, it is also dangerous and doesn't take into account the people they kill along the way. I think I'd prefer to have a substantive conversation on the population control instead of only looking for more resources to exploit. Eventually Malthus will catch up to us, why not stop running from him and face his challenge. Better now while only 7 billion people will have to suffer rather than 12 billion in 20 or 30 years.
The concept that a person with a smart phone and cell phone contract can't afford $2 sounds disingenuous though. I know that is very bourgeois of me to say, but $2 is less than most product offers at Starbucks, less than it costs to park at most city lots, less than just about anything you can buy that will last as long as a perpetual license for a piece of software. Ultimately, I believe this has more to do with the basic devaluing of software. I've read other people's hypotheses that the world would be a very different place now if the Apple app store had set a minimum price for apps at $1. The idea being that getting people used to the idea that software can be free and therefore SHOULD be free is not helpful for people who either write or consume software. Software makers like myself need to eat and it ought not be a chore to convince people that they ought to pay for the software I produce. Like Starbucks, my largest expense is paying debt service on real property and paying for health insurance, NOT the basic ingredients that are going into my product. When I sell software the money goes to banks and insurance companies. This exactly where Starbucks money goes too. Just like the lions share of my money doesn't go to the Eclipse foundation or Oracle (my ingredients), Starbucks doesn't send the lions share of its money to coffee farmers. The same people who CAN'T afford the $2 for my work wouldn't think twice about dropping $4 on a "premium" coffee experience.
Well, you might be surprised at the crap reviews that come out. Put up a pay wall and the quality of the review goes way up. That is not to say that the the reviews are more positive, but they are better considered and more thoughtfully executed. This is just a symptom of the observation I've made that free stuff is valued less than the same thing that cost money. In fact, the more you charge the more the user values it my experience informs me. What the cost is and what its value is to the user should be totally unrelated for something like software which cannot generally be resold and yet people still appear to behave that way. I've offered similar software over the years to people that was either free (as a loss leader) or expensive. These are not controlled scientific studies, but my experience is long and instructive to me. I've learned my lesson.
Because a review of a product should have nothing to do with its utility to the user specifically. It should have to do with its ability to do what its claims to do. While a NASCAR race winning stock car has no utility to me personally, I could say that it is of high quality as evidenced by its winning a race. It claimed to be able to drive in circles very fast, and it in fact can drive in circles faster than any other car on the track that day. 5 stars
In this example it would be stupid of me to say, "The car SUX. It has no doors and the DMV wouldn't let me license it." 1 star
I don't disagree, but it seems odd that a review of a product would have anything to do with its utility to you specifically. A review of software ought to be about whether it does what it claims to do and how well it does those things. To give something a bad review you don't care what it does is dumb, and yet people do it all the time. Putting a pay wall between users and software does filter out all those idiots thankfully.
To set my app's price, I did an unscientific survey of what people considered "very expensive" and set my app to that price, $20. I filter out LOTS of the idiots. My users are very pleased and support costs are kept at bay. I'm very pleased with the results I've gotten.
I will not engage in the this freemium model anymore either. Not only do the freeloaders ask for more support than do customers, they bad mouth your product more as well. I believe the process of transferring money from customer to merchant gives the customer a sense of "buy-in" in the product. The customers value it more because they are invested in it. Invested customers then feel MORE willing to invest time figuring out how to use it than do those who get it for free. It sounds counter-intuitive certainly, but I have lots of anecdotal evidence to support this in my career experience. The proof is in the pudding though. The higher I set the price of software in the app store, the happier my customers are with the product. Go figure!?!?
I'm just annoyed that they have not implemented all of Gingerbread. They claim they have Android 2.3.4 on kernel 2.6.37 and yet they don't support the ADK (accessory development kit). It's just a couple of already written classes in the kernel, a framework jar, and a permissions file. It would take an hour to implement and 3 to test. Hook us up Amazon! Then I wouldn't even want to root the thing.
I'd support a permission for launching intents originating outside this signed package. Starting an Activity, like a new screen in the current app uses the same code as starting the browser or any other activity. If Android is able to tease apart the difference, and I think that would be possible, then that seems reasonable. I have an app that launches a service for listening for an Accessory (ADK) mode device that is outside the original package because ADK requires Android 2.3.4 but the app only requires 2.2. I compiled them separately because of the different kernel requirements but they still talk to one another. While I'd be VERY put off if I could not do this at all, I am ok with documenting it to the user.
The magic is getting the browser to return its data back to the app without privileges. That turns out to not be hard either. I found an example and posted it below. With this, you have a functional two way link from app without privileges to webserver and back. I'm not impressed and I don't consider this an "exploit". If you want a system that allows apps to communicate with each other, which we all do, then you have to be careful of what you install on your phone. This is better than a PC which almost always has full root access. This is just voyeur access...
What happening here is that the app he installed opens the web browser to when you lock the screen. The app is then, in here in lies the secret sauce, is able to get the commands from the the browser is receiving. The browser part is simple, it can poll looking for input. How the app gets that input is interesting part. I don't know how its doing that. It may have created a callback from the browser to there app. Android has excellent inter process communication tools, but I don't know how he is doing this from an app he doesn't control. I've only thought about it for 5 minutes though. With this app and another app you control, this exploit would be trivial (one with internet access and another with sdcard access for example). I think any app can execute process with would give it access to the shell. That doesn't mean it has root access, but Android will let you view much of the file system without root. You cannot get to private app data storage, but you can see the sdcard and other basic parts of the file system like/framework or/etc.
I got the first Nexus S with T-Mobile crystal sets in it but have an ATT sim card. If this comes to pass, I'll finally get 3G in the US (instead of just EDGE). I only get 3G when I'm travelling outside the US now.
Building one for $130 would be easy enough. You would have to pay a monthly for cell service though. An Arduino, a voltage regulator, a GPS module, and a GSM module would be the essential parts. Stick them in a weatherproof enclosure and conceal it on the scoot. You would be good to go. You would need to write a little code to get it to squawk its location to a webserver somewhere so in case it was stolen you'd know where it was hiding. I'm not sure how much the retail version are but I'd bet they are similarly priced. Economies of scale are a bitch.
I'd mod up your post, but I want to reply instead. Are you suggesting that the display uses 50-100 times the power of an ARM chip (and therefore 5-10 times an x86)? If that is true, that is very interesting. I did not realize the display was such an outlier in power consumption department...
I thought x86 is a power hog compared to ARM. It seems like that is a serious consideration for mobile devices to me. I'll be interested to see where this goes. In the mean time, x86 chips are going to have to get a lot cheaper to compete with ARMs prices.
That rings true to me. I don't know the numbers, but I do know that a lot of software I use is not very thoughtful about using available resources. Until developers or our tools are smarter about using the resources on the target devices we will continue to see disappointing performance numbers. We've been spoiled by Intel for a long time now. I think its our turn to start writing better software because Intel isn't saving our bacon anymore.
GWT is only the front end. I use Glassfish for the back end of websites. That is just J2EE stuff so it's not nearly as slow as GWT though it does only use one core. In essence I already am doing as you suggest.
As a developer and not a gamer or video maker I stand by my original complaint. These multi-core processors have been a step in the wrong direction for me from a performance standpoint. Some of us would benefit from 4 cores that packed as much punch (whatever that really means) as the the 8 cores we can buy. I really do appreciate that my OS doesn't lock up anymore when it's working hard. I just get annoyed when I'm waiting and waiting on a build and my CPU is pegged at 13%.
I also feel like the marketing of these processors is confusing. Back in the day, when I was doing my first profession software projects on an IBM XT it was very clear what the performance boost would be when transitioning to the 80286 processor or the addition of the 80287 to your IBM AT. I continued to understand what I was buying throughout the next decade or two. I chose the 486DX 50 rather than the DX2 66 because the distinction was as clear. At some point though the marketing materials just got too confusing. Maybe it's just that I'm old now, but I can't figure out what they are selling or why I would choose one processor from another anymore. I went to Dell and ordered the fanciest one (based on price). That clearly was not the right answer. I've asked people who appeared knowledgeable on the topic to explain it to me, but the answers sounded more like BS than CS. Perhaps as it has become more difficult to differentiate their products based on merit they chose to obscure their offerings with lingo and slogans in hopes of gaining sales through confusion. Or, maybe I'm just to old and dumb to get it anymore.
That's what I thought. I research it every couple months when I get annoyed by multi minute builds. I never get any answers.
GWT is slow and deployment is a little cumbersome, but the code is so elegant I just don't care. I love GWT. I wish Google provider more libraries, but I'm pleased with it. I'm not certain it has a future though.
I loath Ruby. What's a fella to do if he wants a strongly typed object oriented website?
I mostly work with Eclipse doing Java, Android, and GWT. Only GWT offered an effective way to use those cores. It is VERY possible that I just don't know how to use Eclipse to the best of its ability, but I can tell you that Eclipse never pushes more than one core during a build except when its building GWT projects for me (I had to tell it explicitly to do that though).
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You will probably die a happy old man who never saw the reckoning your brand of apathy caused. It will come though not likely in our life time.
I'm guessing we can agree that the world cannot sustain a trillion people, right? We are already doing all manner of terrible things to sustain our current population (inoculating livestock with antibiotics so they grow faster comes to mind). We will have to get more and more grotesque in our "advances" to keep with the billions of new mouths to feed. At some point, be it 12 billion or 24 billion, our "advances" will fail to keep up and it will be catastrophic. More is not better. More is just more. We can see the end of the road ahead (even if it is a at trillion people), it seems silly to just ignore it and hope for the best.
Malthus proved wrong? LOL, thats a good one! We should talk that one over at your next bible study meeting.
I know a scientist that is working on a microbe that you can pump into an oil well and after a sufficient period of time you pump out diesel. It's really cool and creates major efficiencies in refining but doesn't deal with the release of fossil carbon at all. I'd like to see a biodiesel solution as well.
That is the choice I don't want to have to make. I'd prefer we stop creating so many new people. That requires that we raise the likelihood that each child born has a high probably of surviving and thriving though. That means the wealthy we will need to be more generous with the less fortunate. The other option though is that we are stingy, so the less fortunate perceive that the only way to be sure that someone will be there to support them when they are old is to have a ton a children, and that will make the lives of each of those offspring more miserable than necessary, but may also hasten the death of all of us (through destruction of the environment and creation of epidemics).
Malthus explained all of this almost 2 centuries ago. We will reproduce until the environment cannot sustain us, and then we will have mass culling of some type. Darwin expanded on Malthus' work to show that this culling was one of the mechanisms of natural selection. I may have an overly high opinion of what it is possible for people to do, but I'd like to think that we could avoid all that unnecessary suffering through generosity and family planning. It's probably impossible, but since the outcome cannot be worse than doing nothing I think its worth a try. Finding new resources to exploit so that the mass culling begins when there are 12 billion people instead of 7 billion people only mean 5 billion more people need to suffer when the inevitable happens. It will happen if we don't take action.
This is true, but what about the "nutrients" that the kelp captures while it grows and then is removed en masse during the harvest? I find this worrisome. More worrisome though is the constant search for more resources to exploit while the ignoring of the fact that we cannot sustain population growth forever. Why not stop increasing the resource requirements before the inevitable war for resources happens and kills off a few billion people?
For the sake of argument, lets say it works and pretty soon the ocean is all fenced off like Nebraska and each family farmer (multinational corp) has their own little farm (ocean). All this does is push off the problems of over populating a little bit further all the while putting pressure new pressures on the environment. While kelp would capture CO from the atmosphere in equal parts to those exhausted when burnt, I'm sure we are not taking into account the other things it will be removing from the seas. What affect might that have? No one knows. While the Capitalist ethic of "Drive it hard and fix what breaks." is romantic, it is also dangerous and doesn't take into account the people they kill along the way. I think I'd prefer to have a substantive conversation on the population control instead of only looking for more resources to exploit. Eventually Malthus will catch up to us, why not stop running from him and face his challenge. Better now while only 7 billion people will have to suffer rather than 12 billion in 20 or 30 years.
The concept that a person with a smart phone and cell phone contract can't afford $2 sounds disingenuous though. I know that is very bourgeois of me to say, but $2 is less than most product offers at Starbucks, less than it costs to park at most city lots, less than just about anything you can buy that will last as long as a perpetual license for a piece of software. Ultimately, I believe this has more to do with the basic devaluing of software. I've read other people's hypotheses that the world would be a very different place now if the Apple app store had set a minimum price for apps at $1. The idea being that getting people used to the idea that software can be free and therefore SHOULD be free is not helpful for people who either write or consume software. Software makers like myself need to eat and it ought not be a chore to convince people that they ought to pay for the software I produce. Like Starbucks, my largest expense is paying debt service on real property and paying for health insurance, NOT the basic ingredients that are going into my product. When I sell software the money goes to banks and insurance companies. This exactly where Starbucks money goes too. Just like the lions share of my money doesn't go to the Eclipse foundation or Oracle (my ingredients), Starbucks doesn't send the lions share of its money to coffee farmers. The same people who CAN'T afford the $2 for my work wouldn't think twice about dropping $4 on a "premium" coffee experience.
Well, you might be surprised at the crap reviews that come out. Put up a pay wall and the quality of the review goes way up. That is not to say that the the reviews are more positive, but they are better considered and more thoughtfully executed. This is just a symptom of the observation I've made that free stuff is valued less than the same thing that cost money. In fact, the more you charge the more the user values it my experience informs me. What the cost is and what its value is to the user should be totally unrelated for something like software which cannot generally be resold and yet people still appear to behave that way. I've offered similar software over the years to people that was either free (as a loss leader) or expensive. These are not controlled scientific studies, but my experience is long and instructive to me. I've learned my lesson.
Because a review of a product should have nothing to do with its utility to the user specifically. It should have to do with its ability to do what its claims to do. While a NASCAR race winning stock car has no utility to me personally, I could say that it is of high quality as evidenced by its winning a race. It claimed to be able to drive in circles very fast, and it in fact can drive in circles faster than any other car on the track that day. 5 stars
In this example it would be stupid of me to say, "The car SUX. It has no doors and the DMV wouldn't let me license it." 1 star
I don't disagree, but it seems odd that a review of a product would have anything to do with its utility to you specifically. A review of software ought to be about whether it does what it claims to do and how well it does those things. To give something a bad review you don't care what it does is dumb, and yet people do it all the time. Putting a pay wall between users and software does filter out all those idiots thankfully.
To set my app's price, I did an unscientific survey of what people considered "very expensive" and set my app to that price, $20. I filter out LOTS of the idiots. My users are very pleased and support costs are kept at bay. I'm very pleased with the results I've gotten.
I will not engage in the this freemium model anymore either. Not only do the freeloaders ask for more support than do customers, they bad mouth your product more as well. I believe the process of transferring money from customer to merchant gives the customer a sense of "buy-in" in the product. The customers value it more because they are invested in it. Invested customers then feel MORE willing to invest time figuring out how to use it than do those who get it for free. It sounds counter-intuitive certainly, but I have lots of anecdotal evidence to support this in my career experience. The proof is in the pudding though. The higher I set the price of software in the app store, the happier my customers are with the product. Go figure!?!?
I think it's hilarious that instead of commenting on the topic you guys chose to argue semantics.
Tell that to Google.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/usb/adk.html
I'm just annoyed that they have not implemented all of Gingerbread. They claim they have Android 2.3.4 on kernel 2.6.37 and yet they don't support the ADK (accessory development kit). It's just a couple of already written classes in the kernel, a framework jar, and a permissions file. It would take an hour to implement and 3 to test. Hook us up Amazon! Then I wouldn't even want to root the thing.
I'd support a permission for launching intents originating outside this signed package. Starting an Activity, like a new screen in the current app uses the same code as starting the browser or any other activity. If Android is able to tease apart the difference, and I think that would be possible, then that seems reasonable. I have an app that launches a service for listening for an Accessory (ADK) mode device that is outside the original package because ADK requires Android 2.3.4 but the app only requires 2.2. I compiled them separately because of the different kernel requirements but they still talk to one another. While I'd be VERY put off if I could not do this at all, I am ok with documenting it to the user.
The magic is getting the browser to return its data back to the app without privileges. That turns out to not be hard either. I found an example and posted it below. With this, you have a functional two way link from app without privileges to webserver and back. I'm not impressed and I don't consider this an "exploit". If you want a system that allows apps to communicate with each other, which we all do, then you have to be careful of what you install on your phone. This is better than a PC which almost always has full root access. This is just voyeur access...
http://www.android10.org/index.php/forums/49-other-coding-problemsarticles/1575-example-communication-between-an-activity-and-the-browser-callback
What happening here is that the app he installed opens the web browser to when you lock the screen. The app is then, in here in lies the secret sauce, is able to get the commands from the the browser is receiving. The browser part is simple, it can poll looking for input. How the app gets that input is interesting part. I don't know how its doing that. It may have created a callback from the browser to there app. Android has excellent inter process communication tools, but I don't know how he is doing this from an app he doesn't control. I've only thought about it for 5 minutes though. With this app and another app you control, this exploit would be trivial (one with internet access and another with sdcard access for example). I think any app can execute process with would give it access to the shell. That doesn't mean it has root access, but Android will let you view much of the file system without root. You cannot get to private app data storage, but you can see the sdcard and other basic parts of the file system like /framework or /etc.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Parcel.html this shows inter-process communication.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html this shows how to launch the browser.
I almost always have WIFI nearby, so its not a daily bother. Once a week though, its pretty darn annoying.
I got the first Nexus S with T-Mobile crystal sets in it but have an ATT sim card. If this comes to pass, I'll finally get 3G in the US (instead of just EDGE). I only get 3G when I'm travelling outside the US now.
Building one for $130 would be easy enough. You would have to pay a monthly for cell service though.
An Arduino, a voltage regulator, a GPS module, and a GSM module would be the essential parts. Stick them in a weatherproof enclosure and conceal it on the scoot. You would be good to go. You would need to write a little code to get it to squawk its location to a webserver somewhere so in case it was stolen you'd know where it was hiding. I'm not sure how much the retail version are but I'd bet they are similarly priced. Economies of scale are a bitch.
I'd mod up your post, but I want to reply instead. Are you suggesting that the display uses 50-100 times the power of an ARM chip (and therefore 5-10 times an x86)? If that is true, that is very interesting. I did not realize the display was such an outlier in power consumption department...
I thought x86 is a power hog compared to ARM. It seems like that is a serious consideration for mobile devices to me. I'll be interested to see where this goes. In the mean time, x86 chips are going to have to get a lot cheaper to compete with ARMs prices.
That rings true to me. I don't know the numbers, but I do know that a lot of software I use is not very thoughtful about using available resources. Until developers or our tools are smarter about using the resources on the target devices we will continue to see disappointing performance numbers. We've been spoiled by Intel for a long time now. I think its our turn to start writing better software because Intel isn't saving our bacon anymore.
GWT is only the front end. I use Glassfish for the back end of websites. That is just J2EE stuff so it's not nearly as slow as GWT though it does only use one core. In essence I already am doing as you suggest.
As a developer and not a gamer or video maker I stand by my original complaint. These multi-core processors have been a step in the wrong direction for me from a performance standpoint. Some of us would benefit from 4 cores that packed as much punch (whatever that really means) as the the 8 cores we can buy. I really do appreciate that my OS doesn't lock up anymore when it's working hard. I just get annoyed when I'm waiting and waiting on a build and my CPU is pegged at 13%.
I also feel like the marketing of these processors is confusing. Back in the day, when I was doing my first profession software projects on an IBM XT it was very clear what the performance boost would be when transitioning to the 80286 processor or the addition of the 80287 to your IBM AT. I continued to understand what I was buying throughout the next decade or two. I chose the 486DX 50 rather than the DX2 66 because the distinction was as clear. At some point though the marketing materials just got too confusing. Maybe it's just that I'm old now, but I can't figure out what they are selling or why I would choose one processor from another anymore. I went to Dell and ordered the fanciest one (based on price). That clearly was not the right answer. I've asked people who appeared knowledgeable on the topic to explain it to me, but the answers sounded more like BS than CS. Perhaps as it has become more difficult to differentiate their products based on merit they chose to obscure their offerings with lingo and slogans in hopes of gaining sales through confusion. Or, maybe I'm just to old and dumb to get it anymore.
That's what I thought. I research it every couple months when I get annoyed by multi minute builds. I never get any answers.
GWT is slow and deployment is a little cumbersome, but the code is so elegant I just don't care. I love GWT. I wish Google provider more libraries, but I'm pleased with it. I'm not certain it has a future though.
I loath Ruby. What's a fella to do if he wants a strongly typed object oriented website?
I mostly work with Eclipse doing Java, Android, and GWT. Only GWT offered an effective way to use those cores. It is VERY possible that I just don't know how to use Eclipse to the best of its ability, but I can tell you that Eclipse never pushes more than one core during a build except when its building GWT projects for me (I had to tell it explicitly to do that though).