There is library code for both platforms that does the hard work, but it probably would be easier and prettier in Python on a Pi than C on an Ardunio.
Now, how about running an interrupt-driven loop at 5 kHz to bit-bang the RF protocol for your central heating timer? Pretty standard stuff on a microcontroller, but I wouldn't like to try that on Linux. On an MCU not only do you have peripherals like PWM units and UARTs you can use to relax the timing requirements for your code, but you have much more predictable interrupt response anyway. Even if you went into the Linux kernel rather than userspace I suspect the jitter would be horrible.
>Either way I these devices will be great for home automation. >Low power enough to sit behind a light switch but powerful enough to handle monitoring >lights, temperatures and a lot more.
A 700 MHz ARM11 SoC with 128 MiB of RAM is two or three orders of magnitude more hardware than you need to do that.
Booting up and restarting all your applications, which involves a couple of minutes of fairly heavy CPU and disk load, has a non-trivial cost in terms of energy. It takes several hours of sleep until you surpass the energy it takes to boot. If you shut down for your lunch hour you are actually wasting energy.
Evidently I confused you with somebody who uses facts to come to conclusions. You suggested that Apple didn't include a manual to save money, but in fact, Apple do include a manual and they don't skimp on it. Saving money on that area is clearly not a priority for them.
Out of curiosity I looked in the box for a Macbook Air. What did I find? A nicely bound 72 page manual which comes in a little cardboard envelope with a tab to make it easy to remove it from the box. I'm glad I looked, as when I opened the sleeve it said "hello" on the front of the manual, and that made me smile.
It's not recognising the speech that's the cool bit. It's understanding what is said (and not merely a few pre-defined commands) and being able to do useful things with it. That's a long way from dictation.
For a moment there I loved you. Something as good as Siri for my humble Nokia? So I downloaded Vlingo and tried it out. It is not the same thing at all. I asked it what my next appointment was - it gave me a Google search of "what is my next appointment". Fucking hilarious.
I tried the same voice actions from the Apple trailer for Siri:
It could write a text message to a named contact. That's actually pretty useful.
I asked it "what's the traffic like around here" and I got... a Google search for "what's the traffic like around here".
I said "text mom I'm going to be 30 minutes late" and I got... a Google search of what I said. I'm beginning to see a pattern here...
I tried "is it going to be chilly in San Francisco this weekend?" and I got... you already know what I got. A fucking Google search.
"Set my timer for 30 minutes" got me... a Google search!
Based on that all-too-brief test Vlingo does not support all the commands Siri does, at least on my phone; it does not understand natural language very well; does not speak back at all (let alone to refine a query) and has no idea about context.
Apple leads of all kinds fray. Sometimes, Apple's designs favour the beautiful over the functional though usually they manage to achieve both). The little plastic collars on their leads are prettier than the kind of strain relief everyone else uses, but they just don't work very well.
Funny how I can't find the 1st gen iPad or 3rd gen iPod Touch on the Apple Store site but they are listed as supported by iOS5. I guess that must be because they don't sell them any more. They haven't sold the 3rd gen iPod Touch for over a year.
Quite clearly the cheapest would have been a single 1 GiB stick at 9.69€. The logical option would have been 2 x 2 GiB at 21.98€ because 4 GiB is more than enough and the additional cost over 2 x 1 GiB is negligible. 4 GiB is enough for me to play the Battlefield 3 beta so it's more than enough for your mom to do the same, let alone do stereotypical mom things like emailing you amusing pictures of cats.
Plenty of people do work where a silent, undetected error could cost more than the extra couple of hundred bucks it costs to go ECC. Google's study found over 8% of DIMMs had memory errors each year. A hefty workstation with more RAM than a Google server (which are individually quite modest) could expect a proportionally higher rate of errors than a Google server.
It's even more specific than that. It's to do with doing things other than writing in a text-entry box or just tapping on an icon - doing things like writing an X on an application to delete it. That actually seems like it could be relatively non-obvious and innovative for 11 years ago. Whether it's sufficiently so to deserve a patent is another matter.
Look at Apple; they managed to convince a judge the shape of an iPad and iPhone are unique and worthy of protection and so they're used to cause Samsung pain. It doesn't matter if its valid or not, Samsung can't sell their devices.
There was a lot more to it than just the shape of the devices. Samsung didn't just make another tablet, they slavishly copied the iPad's industrial design, UI and packaging. You'll note that other tablet manufacturers can still sell their devices, this is because they only copied the concept rather than copying the whole design from top to bottom.
But then some of them are like this beauty [uspto.gov]. Now here's an patent which covers the use of fuel cells in electronic equipment.
Actually it covers a system where a camera body supplies fuel (rather than electrical power) to accessories (lens, flash etc.), each of which have their own fuel cell. It's not a patent covering merely using a fuel cell in a portable device - it's covering a specific method of distributing power to accessories. Still overly broad and obvious IMO, but not as bad as you imply.
Ubuntu regularly ship with patched versions of stuff to fix annoyances like this from upstream. That's why I switched from Debian, who avoid patching upstream even if it means things are a bit broken. The Debian way in theory leads to better software in the long-run, which is good, but I want my machines to work now
If you want a specific example, the DHCP client Debian used doesn't have an option to send the system hostname - you had to manually enter the hostname into the configuration file. This annoyed me every single time I set up a Debian box and bit me in the ass every time I changed the hostname. Ubuntu used the same DHCP client but patched it so it sent the system hostname by default. That bug still is still open on Debian's bug tracker 9 years after it was first reported.
Let's say you have 8 GB RAM on your system. When you put your system to hibernate, it writes that 8 GB to disk and shuts down.
Given it doesn't write caches to disk it would be highly unusual for it to actually have to write all 8 GiB to disk, and most OSs compress the hibernation file.
How long does it take your system to read 8GB of data from your HDD?
Not only a straw man but irrelevant unless all you do with your computer is stare at your desktop. You should be asking is "How long does it take from me to get back to what I was doing?".
if you're actually using 8 GiB of RAM to do your work you're going to have to load it off disk or run the processes which created that data anyway. It's not like a clean reboot gets you back to the same state as restoring from hibernation.
Computers which don't wake from sleep or hibernate reliably are so 1990s. Mine wakes from sleep in a second or from hibernate in under 10 and everything is exactly the way I left it.
I spend most of my time when I reboot restoring my state - open applications, files etc. Waiting for the machine to do its stuff is the least time consuming part.
> Except that I can buy a licensed copy Windows, install it on a computer, and then sell that computer to you without it being considered a violation of copyright law.
I can buy a copy of OS X and install it on a computer and sell the computer to you without being in violation of copyright law.
What you cannot do without permission from the copyright holder - with either Windows or OS X - is create a derivative and sell it. Under the first sale doctrine you can only sell unmodified copies. You could not sell, say, computers with copies of Windows where you've run the binaries through a translator so it would run on ARM.
If OS X just worked on any old PC with no modification this might have been a rather different case, but it doesn't.
> And that's exactly the problem: no other seller can dictate how "their" product is used; why should software developers be any different?
Actually they can and they do. It's not at all uncommon for stuff protected by copyright. Photographers do it, movie studios do it, TV producers do it, journalists do it. It's pretty standard to limit the ways in which copyright works can be used.
So it wasn't worth Apple releasing the most profitable phone in the history of the world? Millions of people think it was worth them shipping it, otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. It may not have had every feature, but the ones it did have worked - which is the point.
I find it odd that you put Symbian and Blackberry after Windows Phone when the market share says otherwise. Symbian has 8x Win Phone's market share and Blackberry 4x. Windows Phone is 5th in terms of market share.
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There is library code for both platforms that does the hard work, but it probably would be easier and prettier in Python on a Pi than C on an Ardunio.
Now, how about running an interrupt-driven loop at 5 kHz to bit-bang the RF protocol for your central heating timer? Pretty standard stuff on a microcontroller, but I wouldn't like to try that on Linux. On an MCU not only do you have peripherals like PWM units and UARTs you can use to relax the timing requirements for your code, but you have much more predictable interrupt response anyway. Even if you went into the Linux kernel rather than userspace I suspect the jitter would be horrible.
>Either way I these devices will be great for home automation.
>Low power enough to sit behind a light switch but powerful enough to handle monitoring
>lights, temperatures and a lot more.
A 700 MHz ARM11 SoC with 128 MiB of RAM is two or three orders of magnitude more hardware than you need to do that.
Booting up and restarting all your applications, which involves a couple of minutes of fairly heavy CPU and disk load, has a non-trivial cost in terms of energy. It takes several hours of sleep until you surpass the energy it takes to boot. If you shut down for your lunch hour you are actually wasting energy.
Evidently I confused you with somebody who uses facts to come to conclusions. You suggested that Apple didn't include a manual to save money, but in fact, Apple do include a manual and they don't skimp on it. Saving money on that area is clearly not a priority for them.
Out of curiosity I looked in the box for a Macbook Air. What did I find? A nicely bound 72 page manual which comes in a little cardboard envelope with a tab to make it easy to remove it from the box. I'm glad I looked, as when I opened the sleeve it said "hello" on the front of the manual, and that made me smile.
Siri is hooked into Wolfram Alpha already and Apple are generally better at UI than Google, so I don't see how your idea would be a "Siri-killer".
It's not recognising the speech that's the cool bit. It's understanding what is said (and not merely a few pre-defined commands) and being able to do useful things with it. That's a long way from dictation.
For a moment there I loved you. Something as good as Siri for my humble Nokia? So I downloaded Vlingo and tried it out. It is not the same thing at all. I asked it what my next appointment was - it gave me a Google search of "what is my next appointment". Fucking hilarious.
I tried the same voice actions from the Apple trailer for Siri:
It could write a text message to a named contact. That's actually pretty useful.
I asked it "what's the traffic like around here" and I got... a Google search for "what's the traffic like around here".
I said "text mom I'm going to be 30 minutes late" and I got... a Google search of what I said. I'm beginning to see a pattern here...
I tried "is it going to be chilly in San Francisco this weekend?" and I got... you already know what I got. A fucking Google search.
"Set my timer for 30 minutes" got me... a Google search!
Based on that all-too-brief test Vlingo does not support all the commands Siri does, at least on my phone; it does not understand natural language very well; does not speak back at all (let alone to refine a query) and has no idea about context.
Have you ever seen Apple's packaging? They really aren't bothered about trying to save a few cents.
Apple leads of all kinds fray. Sometimes, Apple's designs favour the beautiful over the functional though usually they manage to achieve both). The little plastic collars on their leads are prettier than the kind of strain relief everyone else uses, but they just don't work very well.
Funny how I can't find the 1st gen iPad or 3rd gen iPod Touch on the Apple Store site but they are listed as supported by iOS5. I guess that must be because they don't sell them any more. They haven't sold the 3rd gen iPod Touch for over a year.
What a load of bollocks. Over 100 billion people have been born, of whom fewer than 7 billion are still alive.
Quite clearly the cheapest would have been a single 1 GiB stick at 9.69€. The logical option would have been 2 x 2 GiB at 21.98€ because 4 GiB is more than enough and the additional cost over 2 x 1 GiB is negligible. 4 GiB is enough for me to play the Battlefield 3 beta so it's more than enough for your mom to do the same, let alone do stereotypical mom things like emailing you amusing pictures of cats.
Plenty of people do work where a silent, undetected error could cost more than the extra couple of hundred bucks it costs to go ECC. Google's study found over 8% of DIMMs had memory errors each year. A hefty workstation with more RAM than a Google server (which are individually quite modest) could expect a proportionally higher rate of errors than a Google server.
It's even more specific than that. It's to do with doing things other than writing in a text-entry box or just tapping on an icon - doing things like writing an X on an application to delete it. That actually seems like it could be relatively non-obvious and innovative for 11 years ago. Whether it's sufficiently so to deserve a patent is another matter.
Paying taxes is just a collective way of hiring people with guns to protect your property.
Look at Apple; they managed to convince a judge the shape of an iPad and iPhone are unique and worthy of protection and so they're used to cause Samsung pain. It doesn't matter if its valid or not, Samsung can't sell their devices.
There was a lot more to it than just the shape of the devices. Samsung didn't just make another tablet, they slavishly copied the iPad's industrial design, UI and packaging. You'll note that other tablet manufacturers can still sell their devices, this is because they only copied the concept rather than copying the whole design from top to bottom.
But then some of them are like this beauty [uspto.gov]. Now here's an patent which covers the use of fuel cells in electronic equipment.
Actually it covers a system where a camera body supplies fuel (rather than electrical power) to accessories (lens, flash etc.), each of which have their own fuel cell. It's not a patent covering merely using a fuel cell in a portable device - it's covering a specific method of distributing power to accessories. Still overly broad and obvious IMO, but not as bad as you imply.
Ubuntu regularly ship with patched versions of stuff to fix annoyances like this from upstream. That's why I switched from Debian, who avoid patching upstream even if it means things are a bit broken. The Debian way in theory leads to better software in the long-run, which is good, but I want my machines to work now
If you want a specific example, the DHCP client Debian used doesn't have an option to send the system hostname - you had to manually enter the hostname into the configuration file. This annoyed me every single time I set up a Debian box and bit me in the ass every time I changed the hostname. Ubuntu used the same DHCP client but patched it so it sent the system hostname by default. That bug still is still open on Debian's bug tracker 9 years after it was first reported.
Let's say you have 8 GB RAM on your system. When you put your system to hibernate, it writes that 8 GB to disk and shuts down.
Given it doesn't write caches to disk it would be highly unusual for it to actually have to write all 8 GiB to disk, and most OSs compress the hibernation file.
How long does it take your system to read 8GB of data from your HDD?
Not only a straw man but irrelevant unless all you do with your computer is stare at your desktop. You should be asking is "How long does it take from me to get back to what I was doing?".
if you're actually using 8 GiB of RAM to do your work you're going to have to load it off disk or run the processes which created that data anyway. It's not like a clean reboot gets you back to the same state as restoring from hibernation.
Computers which don't wake from sleep or hibernate reliably are so 1990s. Mine wakes from sleep in a second or from hibernate in under 10 and everything is exactly the way I left it. I spend most of my time when I reboot restoring my state - open applications, files etc. Waiting for the machine to do its stuff is the least time consuming part.
> Except that I can buy a licensed copy Windows, install it on a computer, and then sell that computer to you without it being considered a violation of copyright law.
I can buy a copy of OS X and install it on a computer and sell the computer to you without being in violation of copyright law.
What you cannot do without permission from the copyright holder - with either Windows or OS X - is create a derivative and sell it. Under the first sale doctrine you can only sell unmodified copies. You could not sell, say, computers with copies of Windows where you've run the binaries through a translator so it would run on ARM.
If OS X just worked on any old PC with no modification this might have been a rather different case, but it doesn't.
> And that's exactly the problem: no other seller can dictate how "their" product is used; why should software developers be any different?
Actually they can and they do. It's not at all uncommon for stuff protected by copyright. Photographers do it, movie studios do it, TV producers do it, journalists do it. It's pretty standard to limit the ways in which copyright works can be used.
So it wasn't worth Apple releasing the most profitable phone in the history of the world? Millions of people think it was worth them shipping it, otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. It may not have had every feature, but the ones it did have worked - which is the point.
I find it odd that you put Symbian and Blackberry after Windows Phone when the market share says otherwise. Symbian has 8x Win Phone's market share and Blackberry 4x. Windows Phone is 5th in terms of market share.
I can't imagine anything less "boutique" than a branch of PC World at the wrong end of Tottenham Court Road.