It's not really the app store they care about, that's just a way of making getting what they really want more convenient. And what they want is Microsoft Word and Excel, YouTube, Facebook and Maps.
Geeks like us hate all that. We see it as bloatware, crap we don't want rammed in our faces. But for ordinary users it's exactly what they want. They don't care about your repo with 57 different IRC clients and 9 versions of Firefox with slightly different licence terms. They want Skype and WhatsApp, because that's what their friends use.
NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?
Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!
Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!
Trump really doesn't seem to think that the world is warming, or at least doesn't understand the different between weather and climate. Maybe he has changed his tune since those tweets were posted.
I used to be a fan of direct democracy. Why not just vote on everything now that technology makes voting cheap and reliable, right?
But the reality is that most people aren't interested enough to educate themselves about important topics, but want to participate anyway. Even the ones who seem to be engaged are often really just angry because of decades of abusive Daily Mail headlines warping their perception of the world and baiting them every single day.
Someone will now accuse me of being a fascist who gets butthurt when things don't go his way, but actually every democracy has things to prevent direct democracy getting out of hand, e.g. a constitution.
This would be more confusing for travellers though. For example, say you book a flight to Korea, and you arrive at 5:00... Should you be planning to go directly to your business meeting, or getting dinner... Will the trains be running, will the shops be open if you need to grab something? And what is the best strategy to manage your jetlag?
Ticking over midnight while at work could also be problematic for some people. Days nicely batch things together.
And that's before you get to the fighting over where the international date line ends up.
Airports are unsuitable for private ownership because there is little meaningful competition. It's not like a rival can open their own competing airport nearby.
Face masks are actually great for this. It's debatable how much protection they give against airborne viruses, but they are pretty good at stopping you from touching your face.
Google wants to make search like the Star Trek computer that can answer natural language questions. But this is kind of like you starting to say "Jews are..." and the computer finishing your sentence with "evil?"
That's how people see it. It's call a "suggestion", not a list of most frequent search terms.
More interesting (to me at least) is the argument that Google search should have some moral responsibility to give certain answers. For example, is someone asks "do vaccines cause autism?" then it's it okay for Google to give them a load of crank sites claiming it does as the top results? Some people argue it's the marketplace of ideas (where bargain basement bullshit seems to be the most popular item) and some argue that there is a public health and child protection issue (even though medical science is wrong sometimes.)
Russia has already said that if the US abandoned the ISS it would likely keep its modules in orbit and perhaps invite the Chinese to participate. I doubt that the US would de-orbit its bits if that were the case, it would just abandon them to the other countries.
Commercialization seems like it would require agreement from the other nations. Russia is way ahead on that front, having been doing commercial flights for years, including to Mir. In fact I read that Russia had been pressuring the US to allow more commercial use of the ISS for years anyway.
Google Maps is available as an API for commercial use. A lot of business specific apps use it. So for that reason the API is very stable, and they don't deprecate old stuff. They add lots of new functionality, but the old stuff keeps working as a fall-back.
The map tiles are a good example. The current version of the app and web site use vectors, allowing for arbitrary zoom levels and rotation. But the old bitmap tiles are still there and constantly updated, because a vast amount of stuff uses them. If they ever went away it would break people's cars and a whole load of custom business/industrial applications.
The web site is the most impressive bit of backwards compatibility. They keep the older bitmap tile based interface going and supporting most of the features of the new one. It works reasonably well in more limited browsers, and on both desktop and mobile.
We solved a lot of those problems decades ago with tractor feed paper. No need for all the complex paper handling stuff modern printers have when the paper itself has a built in system for pulling it through straight and without relying on friction rollers.
I guess people don't like the tractor holes. Maybe if the people who made ring binders got together with the printer people and agreed to make the tractor paper fit in the folders without needing to punch extra holes or use a plastic bag... Then again these days we shouldn't be printing 90% of the stuff we print anyway.
Not really though. There are new designs of printer coming out all the time, and a lot of the work these engineers do is on industrial printers for things like newspapers and books anyway. As well as the printers changing the paper changes as we try to make it more environmentally friendly or one particular publication wants a different type for some reason (premium feel, lower cost, etc.)
Imaging applying this logic to other products. Engineers wouldn't make cars too safe, lest they be out of a job. Nuclear reactors would have to melt down from time to time, just to justify the existence of anti-meltdown-engineers. Aircraft fly-by-wire would very occasionally invert the controls, otherwise the developers would have no more bugs to fix and be out of work.
The Essential Phone has a small notch and runs Android. So clearly it was possible with a bit of work and it looks like Google is just formalizing support for it. Presumably the width of the notch will be manufacturer defined.
BTW, the Essential Phone was released before the iPhone X. In any case, I doubt anyone is copying anyone here, it's just a question of LCD manufacturers starting to offer non-rectangular shapes. Started with aircraft and car manufacturers wanting round LCDs to replace dials, and then smartwatches.
To be fair OpenGL lagged behind DirectX quite a bit, and even today hasn't reached parity without vendor specific extensions (like games consoles get). Especially in the early years when things were moving quite fast it usually took OpenGL a while to support the latest features that DirectX did.
Microsoft are dicks but if it wasn't DirectX it would just have been some proprietary Nvidia or ATI thing. In fact a lot of games of that era did support manufacturer specific features on top of DirectX.
Playstation 3 gamepad. Linux was the first desktop OS to properly support it. It's basically just a Bluetooth device but there is some custom stuff in there that needs special support if you want more than just the basic buttons.
Strange you would make this about social justice, and not just an interesting technology problem. TFA doesn't mention racism or anything... It's almost like you are some kind of social justice obsessed warrior who has to bring it into every conversation.
Have to agree with you about the sock puppets though.
They pay to be on the app. Having your own website only works if people come to it, and a lot of people just use apps.
Platforms like this as undermining the idea of a free internet with a level playing field. It's not new either - try setting up an online store but not being on Amazon, Etsy, eBay etc. Unless you already have huge brand recognition it doesn't work.
They have overseas operations. Also, Twitter isn't totally banned. In Shenzhen internet access is a little more liberal, to help tech companies do business internationally.
For example, it's kinda hard to develop an internationally sold Android phone when all Google services are blocked.
Not sure why the headline felt the need to mention that this company is Chinese though. What relevance does it have?
Recognising emotion is different to recognising identity. It's heavily dependent on culture. It took me a while to learn to recognise Chinese and Japanese emotions from people's faces, because they are different to British ones. I guess different shape faces probably had an influence too.
But I don't think skin colour alone was much of a factor, which is what screws up these facial recognition systems.
Face recognition doesn't care about hair style. It doesn't with like a human, it measures face geometry like the distance between the eyes.
Camouflage make up works only if you design it to make it hard for the face recognition to see features like the eyes and mouth. Basic war paint has mixed results, especially with cameras that are IR sensitive for night vision.
Most of the time these cameras would work just fine if they adjusted the exposure properly. They have auto exposure but it's tuned either for general photography or white skin.
The fix isn't that complex, and some kind of calibration could be done when setting up face recognition.
The point you missed is that set lighting for white people has to be carefully designed and set up. One of the reasons colour film took so long to become practical was the difficulty of getting skin tones right.
If you look at early colour film the skin tones of white people are pretty good, but other colours are way off. Over saturated in places, washed out in others. It was a design decision.
Vox is correctly pointing out that film from the era was not designed for dark skin, and that made it hard for non-white actors. Similar to how when sound came in a lot of actors lost work because they had thick accents.
Note that the Vox article does not contain the word "racist" or even "race". It's pertinent because we are now seeing more black actors on screen and Hollywood finally figured out how to light them properly.
It really depends if they actually have the hardware necessary to write the flash memory. It requires a higher than normal voltage, so if the chip wants to have self programming capability then it has to have as high voltage generator.
While this hardware is cheap it's not free, and carries risks. It can accidently erase or corrupt the flash memory. To mitigate that you need brown out protection, but even that isn't perfect so you will see a higher failure rate.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really the app store they care about, that's just a way of making getting what they really want more convenient. And what they want is Microsoft Word and Excel, YouTube, Facebook and Maps.
Geeks like us hate all that. We see it as bloatware, crap we don't want rammed in our faces. But for ordinary users it's exactly what they want. They don't care about your repo with 57 different IRC clients and 9 versions of Firefox with slightly different licence terms. They want Skype and WhatsApp, because that's what their friends use.
From your own link:
NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?
Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!
Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!
Trump really doesn't seem to think that the world is warming, or at least doesn't understand the different between weather and climate. Maybe he has changed his tune since those tweets were posted.
China hit peak coal a few years ago and has been in decline ever since.
http://ieefa.org/ieefa-update-... (article from a year ago, so 4 years past now)
The new plants are just replacing old ones with cleaner technology and better load following capability to back up wind.
I used to be a fan of direct democracy. Why not just vote on everything now that technology makes voting cheap and reliable, right?
But the reality is that most people aren't interested enough to educate themselves about important topics, but want to participate anyway. Even the ones who seem to be engaged are often really just angry because of decades of abusive Daily Mail headlines warping their perception of the world and baiting them every single day.
Someone will now accuse me of being a fascist who gets butthurt when things don't go his way, but actually every democracy has things to prevent direct democracy getting out of hand, e.g. a constitution.
This would be more confusing for travellers though. For example, say you book a flight to Korea, and you arrive at 5:00... Should you be planning to go directly to your business meeting, or getting dinner... Will the trains be running, will the shops be open if you need to grab something? And what is the best strategy to manage your jetlag?
Ticking over midnight while at work could also be problematic for some people. Days nicely batch things together.
And that's before you get to the fighting over where the international date line ends up.
Airports are unsuitable for private ownership because there is little meaningful competition. It's not like a rival can open their own competing airport nearby.
Face masks are actually great for this. It's debatable how much protection they give against airborne viruses, but they are pretty good at stopping you from touching your face.
Google wants to make search like the Star Trek computer that can answer natural language questions. But this is kind of like you starting to say "Jews are..." and the computer finishing your sentence with "evil?"
That's how people see it. It's call a "suggestion", not a list of most frequent search terms.
More interesting (to me at least) is the argument that Google search should have some moral responsibility to give certain answers. For example, is someone asks "do vaccines cause autism?" then it's it okay for Google to give them a load of crank sites claiming it does as the top results? Some people argue it's the marketplace of ideas (where bargain basement bullshit seems to be the most popular item) and some argue that there is a public health and child protection issue (even though medical science is wrong sometimes.)
Google has been "censoring" suggestions for terms and names related to things like porn and adult services for many years already.
Russia has already said that if the US abandoned the ISS it would likely keep its modules in orbit and perhaps invite the Chinese to participate. I doubt that the US would de-orbit its bits if that were the case, it would just abandon them to the other countries.
Commercialization seems like it would require agreement from the other nations. Russia is way ahead on that front, having been doing commercial flights for years, including to Mir. In fact I read that Russia had been pressuring the US to allow more commercial use of the ISS for years anyway.
Google Maps is available as an API for commercial use. A lot of business specific apps use it. So for that reason the API is very stable, and they don't deprecate old stuff. They add lots of new functionality, but the old stuff keeps working as a fall-back.
The map tiles are a good example. The current version of the app and web site use vectors, allowing for arbitrary zoom levels and rotation. But the old bitmap tiles are still there and constantly updated, because a vast amount of stuff uses them. If they ever went away it would break people's cars and a whole load of custom business/industrial applications.
The web site is the most impressive bit of backwards compatibility. They keep the older bitmap tile based interface going and supporting most of the features of the new one. It works reasonably well in more limited browsers, and on both desktop and mobile.
We solved a lot of those problems decades ago with tractor feed paper. No need for all the complex paper handling stuff modern printers have when the paper itself has a built in system for pulling it through straight and without relying on friction rollers.
I guess people don't like the tractor holes. Maybe if the people who made ring binders got together with the printer people and agreed to make the tractor paper fit in the folders without needing to punch extra holes or use a plastic bag... Then again these days we shouldn't be printing 90% of the stuff we print anyway.
Not really though. There are new designs of printer coming out all the time, and a lot of the work these engineers do is on industrial printers for things like newspapers and books anyway. As well as the printers changing the paper changes as we try to make it more environmentally friendly or one particular publication wants a different type for some reason (premium feel, lower cost, etc.)
Imaging applying this logic to other products. Engineers wouldn't make cars too safe, lest they be out of a job. Nuclear reactors would have to melt down from time to time, just to justify the existence of anti-meltdown-engineers. Aircraft fly-by-wire would very occasionally invert the controls, otherwise the developers would have no more bugs to fix and be out of work.
The Essential Phone has a small notch and runs Android. So clearly it was possible with a bit of work and it looks like Google is just formalizing support for it. Presumably the width of the notch will be manufacturer defined.
BTW, the Essential Phone was released before the iPhone X. In any case, I doubt anyone is copying anyone here, it's just a question of LCD manufacturers starting to offer non-rectangular shapes. Started with aircraft and car manufacturers wanting round LCDs to replace dials, and then smartwatches.
To be fair OpenGL lagged behind DirectX quite a bit, and even today hasn't reached parity without vendor specific extensions (like games consoles get). Especially in the early years when things were moving quite fast it usually took OpenGL a while to support the latest features that DirectX did.
Microsoft are dicks but if it wasn't DirectX it would just have been some proprietary Nvidia or ATI thing. In fact a lot of games of that era did support manufacturer specific features on top of DirectX.
Playstation 3 gamepad. Linux was the first desktop OS to properly support it. It's basically just a Bluetooth device but there is some custom stuff in there that needs special support if you want more than just the basic buttons.
Strange you would make this about social justice, and not just an interesting technology problem. TFA doesn't mention racism or anything... It's almost like you are some kind of social justice obsessed warrior who has to bring it into every conversation.
Have to agree with you about the sock puppets though.
They pay to be on the app. Having your own website only works if people come to it, and a lot of people just use apps.
Platforms like this as undermining the idea of a free internet with a level playing field. It's not new either - try setting up an online store but not being on Amazon, Etsy, eBay etc. Unless you already have huge brand recognition it doesn't work.
They have overseas operations. Also, Twitter isn't totally banned. In Shenzhen internet access is a little more liberal, to help tech companies do business internationally.
For example, it's kinda hard to develop an internationally sold Android phone when all Google services are blocked.
Not sure why the headline felt the need to mention that this company is Chinese though. What relevance does it have?
Recognising emotion is different to recognising identity. It's heavily dependent on culture. It took me a while to learn to recognise Chinese and Japanese emotions from people's faces, because they are different to British ones. I guess different shape faces probably had an influence too.
But I don't think skin colour alone was much of a factor, which is what screws up these facial recognition systems.
Face recognition doesn't care about hair style. It doesn't with like a human, it measures face geometry like the distance between the eyes.
Camouflage make up works only if you design it to make it hard for the face recognition to see features like the eyes and mouth. Basic war paint has mixed results, especially with cameras that are IR sensitive for night vision.
Most of the time these cameras would work just fine if they adjusted the exposure properly. They have auto exposure but it's tuned either for general photography or white skin.
The fix isn't that complex, and some kind of calibration could be done when setting up face recognition.
The point you missed is that set lighting for white people has to be carefully designed and set up. One of the reasons colour film took so long to become practical was the difficulty of getting skin tones right.
If you look at early colour film the skin tones of white people are pretty good, but other colours are way off. Over saturated in places, washed out in others. It was a design decision.
Vox is correctly pointing out that film from the era was not designed for dark skin, and that made it hard for non-white actors. Similar to how when sound came in a lot of actors lost work because they had thick accents.
Note that the Vox article does not contain the word "racist" or even "race". It's pertinent because we are now seeing more black actors on screen and Hollywood finally figured out how to light them properly.
3.3v isn't enough to write cheap flash memory.
It really depends if they actually have the hardware necessary to write the flash memory. It requires a higher than normal voltage, so if the chip wants to have self programming capability then it has to have as high voltage generator.
While this hardware is cheap it's not free, and carries risks. It can accidently erase or corrupt the flash memory. To mitigate that you need brown out protection, but even that isn't perfect so you will see a higher failure rate.