The specific issue is the bundling. Manufacturers can install their own app stores, and many do, but they need the Play Store or it's not Android and doesn't get updates from Google. And if they have the Play Store then Google requires them to install Google Search and Chrome and make them the defaults.
The judgement was that Google was "abusing its dominance", i.e. using the fact that manufacturers really have no other choice than Android for their phones to force them to pre-install Chrome and Google Search.
What are they going to do, install Windows Phone instead?
The US will push hard for China to respect intellectual property. Then China will enforce its patents on renewable energy, electric vehicles and batteries in the US.
It's not about search, it's about Android. Android is huge in China, but they can't use any Google apps/services because they are all blocked. If Google just relents and provides a censored search engine then they can get their apps on to Chinese phones and partner with OEMs who are already shipping their customized versions of AOSP.
It's disappointing, but Microsoft (Bing) and Apple have been doing it for years so I guess it's unprecedented.
Google is already huge in China thanks to Android. Most Chinese phones run Android, just with the Google services removed.
That's why they want in. Search is just so that Google Assistant and other services that rely on it work. And they have an opportunity - Tencent have the speech recognition tech but not the search capability to make it intelligent, Siri is even dumber than the western versions, and Baidu have basically nothing.
I've used Baidu maps, it's no Google. The potential is huge, but they have to have a censored search engine to enable it all.
Reason people care is it shows google has the coding needed to selectively censor speech they claimed they weren't doing.
Um, they have been quite proud of that capability and open about how they use it since the start.
The search engine is the best because it filters out the crap. They filter out illegal images from image search. Gmail filters spam. YouTube filters everything randomly with an extremely broken copyright detection system.
"Censoring" shit people don't want is their USP. Without that they would be Yahoo! or Alta Vista. Remember those?
Right, there were three voices available. However, it's not much use if you need all 3 to play a single chord, with none left over for percussion or other instruments. So the solution was to play three notes in succession on one channel.
I'm trying to remember who invented it. I read it once but can't find it now.
The CPU normally has 63 cycles per scanline available, but when the VIC-II needs to fetch colour data every 8 lines this is reduced to 23. Reason being that the VIC-II can't fetch both the bitmap data and the colour data on only the low part of the clock cycle, so has to lock the CPU out for some of the high parts too.
During that time the CPU is frozen as it can't fetch new instructions. Sprites had a similar effect, as you note.
Some games aren't available as physical copies. You have to buy them through PSN.
Boycotting Sony isn't much of an option. Aside from PS4 exclusives, the XBOX is the same and while Nintendo seems to be slightly better with the Switch it doesn't get a lot of the games that the other two do.
This is an area that needs some regulation. As people move to buying software online (and it is buying, even if they try to claim it's licencing) they should have the same rights as they have when buying physical software. If the service dies or loses their account details they need some rights to get back what they lost or compensation.
In fact it should go further for physical purchases too. Loss of functionality must be compensated, e.g. turning off online play servers after only a couple of years.
And something needs to be done about banning consoles and accounts permanently.
The C64 is one of the most interesting machines ever made. The hardware was powerful but needed a lot of skill to get the most from. You can see this by comparing early and late C64 games; the difference is incredible, you wouldn't think they were the same machine.
The sound chip, for example, could produce some amazing output but had to be programmed directly. Musicians were coders as well, and of course as well as figuring out how to make the chip produce those sounds they had to fit it all within the limited memory and CPU power available. An interesting bit of trivia, the C64 was where the iconic "fake chord" was invented, where two or three notes are played in quick succession on a single channel to make up for the lack of greater polyphony.
The CPU was 8 bit and ran at 1MHz. But it had to share the memory bus with the video chip, so it couldn't make use of every cycle, and of course there were no caches or anything like that. It had a few tricks like the zero page, which gave it 256 fairly fast register-like bytes of RAM to play with. Compilers were expensive and almost exclusively had to run on more powerful machines for cross-compilation, so most software was written in BASIC or assembler.
All sorts of tricks were developed to make the most of this limited CPU power. For example, "speed code" is where instead of storing data separately in RAM it's directly inserted into the machine code instructions as immediate operands.
The video hardware was also very hackable, with all sorts of tricks possible to produce effects that were way beyond what the designers imagined. The Amiga took this to another level, but the C64 was better understood at an earlier stage. People reverse engineered it completely, understanding the internal workings of the video chip and being able to write code that made full use of every available memory access slot. That's something that didn't really happen with the Amiga until emulators started to make it easier, although some people came close.
The C64 was probably the pinnacle of 8 bit home computers.
Problem is that there is no real penalty for deleting people's data. At most we might see a class action one day, resulting in a $5 discount on Microsoft products for affected users, most of which will never be taken up.
The EU has regulators for privacy issues who proactively look for problems and investigate. We need something similar for severe product flaws.
I have tried it. It's my job sometimes. Much of it could be automated. I'd have a room with 20 WiFi APs and an app to test connecting to them all, for example. Also employees running nightly builds.
On the Model 3 it uses the front facing camera. As well as consuming more energy, it means that if it breaks it's an expensive repair rather than a $5 sensor.
That's not a lot of models. Maybe multiply by 3 to account for all hardware variations. Should be no problem for one of the richest companies in the world to organise testing that lot fully with every release cycle.
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The specific issue is the bundling. Manufacturers can install their own app stores, and many do, but they need the Play Store or it's not Android and doesn't get updates from Google. And if they have the Play Store then Google requires them to install Google Search and Chrome and make them the defaults.
I mean boycotting Sony isn't much of an option if you like to play video games.
The only other options are Microsoft who are just as bad, or Nintendo who don't have a lot of the games you want.
The judgement was that Google was "abusing its dominance", i.e. using the fact that manufacturers really have no other choice than Android for their phones to force them to pre-install Chrome and Google Search.
What are they going to do, install Windows Phone instead?
Reminds me of electric car batteries. "You will need to buy a new battery every 3 years!" they said, ignoring he 8 year warranty...
The US will push hard for China to respect intellectual property. Then China will enforce its patents on renewable energy, electric vehicles and batteries in the US.
China to add 259 GW of coal capacity, satellite imagery shows
How do you square that with the fact that China hit peak coal 4 years ago?
http://ieefa.org/ieefa-update-...
The new plants are replacing older ones and are also much more efficient.
As I pointed out to you last time, China is no 4 years past peak coal and declining.
http://ieefa.org/ieefa-update-...
New plants are more efficient, cleaner ones to replace older plants that are EOL.
Not really a fair comparison when Germany started in a worse position than the US.
Be interesting to know how much Apple and Microsoft make out of the Chinese market. iPhones are quite popular, but I have no idea about Bing.
It's not about search, it's about Android. Android is huge in China, but they can't use any Google apps/services because they are all blocked. If Google just relents and provides a censored search engine then they can get their apps on to Chinese phones and partner with OEMs who are already shipping their customized versions of AOSP.
It's disappointing, but Microsoft (Bing) and Apple have been doing it for years so I guess it's unprecedented.
Google is already huge in China thanks to Android. Most Chinese phones run Android, just with the Google services removed.
That's why they want in. Search is just so that Google Assistant and other services that rely on it work. And they have an opportunity - Tencent have the speech recognition tech but not the search capability to make it intelligent, Siri is even dumber than the western versions, and Baidu have basically nothing.
I've used Baidu maps, it's no Google. The potential is huge, but they have to have a censored search engine to enable it all.
Reason people care is it shows google has the coding needed to selectively censor speech they claimed they weren't doing.
Um, they have been quite proud of that capability and open about how they use it since the start.
The search engine is the best because it filters out the crap. They filter out illegal images from image search. Gmail filters spam. YouTube filters everything randomly with an extremely broken copyright detection system.
"Censoring" shit people don't want is their USP. Without that they would be Yahoo! or Alta Vista. Remember those?
"on a shopping cart"
Right, there were three voices available. However, it's not much use if you need all 3 to play a single chord, with none left over for percussion or other instruments. So the solution was to play three notes in succession on one channel.
I'm trying to remember who invented it. I read it once but can't find it now.
The CPU normally has 63 cycles per scanline available, but when the VIC-II needs to fetch colour data every 8 lines this is reduced to 23. Reason being that the VIC-II can't fetch both the bitmap data and the colour data on only the low part of the clock cycle, so has to lock the CPU out for some of the high parts too.
During that time the CPU is frozen as it can't fetch new instructions. Sprites had a similar effect, as you note.
Some games aren't available as physical copies. You have to buy them through PSN.
Boycotting Sony isn't much of an option. Aside from PS4 exclusives, the XBOX is the same and while Nintendo seems to be slightly better with the Switch it doesn't get a lot of the games that the other two do.
This is an area that needs some regulation. As people move to buying software online (and it is buying, even if they try to claim it's licencing) they should have the same rights as they have when buying physical software. If the service dies or loses their account details they need some rights to get back what they lost or compensation.
In fact it should go further for physical purchases too. Loss of functionality must be compensated, e.g. turning off online play servers after only a couple of years.
And something needs to be done about banning consoles and accounts permanently.
The C64 is one of the most interesting machines ever made. The hardware was powerful but needed a lot of skill to get the most from. You can see this by comparing early and late C64 games; the difference is incredible, you wouldn't think they were the same machine.
The sound chip, for example, could produce some amazing output but had to be programmed directly. Musicians were coders as well, and of course as well as figuring out how to make the chip produce those sounds they had to fit it all within the limited memory and CPU power available. An interesting bit of trivia, the C64 was where the iconic "fake chord" was invented, where two or three notes are played in quick succession on a single channel to make up for the lack of greater polyphony.
The CPU was 8 bit and ran at 1MHz. But it had to share the memory bus with the video chip, so it couldn't make use of every cycle, and of course there were no caches or anything like that. It had a few tricks like the zero page, which gave it 256 fairly fast register-like bytes of RAM to play with. Compilers were expensive and almost exclusively had to run on more powerful machines for cross-compilation, so most software was written in BASIC or assembler.
All sorts of tricks were developed to make the most of this limited CPU power. For example, "speed code" is where instead of storing data separately in RAM it's directly inserted into the machine code instructions as immediate operands.
The video hardware was also very hackable, with all sorts of tricks possible to produce effects that were way beyond what the designers imagined. The Amiga took this to another level, but the C64 was better understood at an earlier stage. People reverse engineered it completely, understanding the internal workings of the video chip and being able to write code that made full use of every available memory access slot. That's something that didn't really happen with the Amiga until emulators started to make it easier, although some people came close.
The C64 was probably the pinnacle of 8 bit home computers.
Problem is that there is no real penalty for deleting people's data. At most we might see a class action one day, resulting in a $5 discount on Microsoft products for affected users, most of which will never be taken up.
The EU has regulators for privacy issues who proactively look for problems and investigate. We need something similar for severe product flaws.
Maybe they can add it with software later. The hardware accelerated part of AV1 could be implemented as shaders on the GPU.
Glad to see 60fps support. Hopefully it's got full frame rate switching for 24 and 25 FPS too.
I have tried it. It's my job sometimes. Much of it could be automated. I'd have a room with 20 WiFi APs and an app to test connecting to them all, for example. Also employees running nightly builds.
Does it need to be unlocked to open/start the car? I suppose it's no worse than a fob in that respect.
On the Model 3 it uses the front facing camera. As well as consuming more energy, it means that if it breaks it's an expensive repair rather than a $5 sensor.
Good point, the keyfob for the M3 isn't out yet. Not sure about the phone unlock... Lose your phone, lose your car too?
Only one per person? That's interesting.
That's not a lot of models. Maybe multiply by 3 to account for all hardware variations. Should be no problem for one of the richest companies in the world to organise testing that lot fully with every release cycle.