"The biggest surprise of the demos was how well Android runs on slow devices. TI showed Android on a Motorola Q-like QWERTY handheld with their 200 Mhz OMAP 850 platform, where the user interface felt smooth and fast, even with little Apple-like animated transitions between screens."
I don't know why that would be so surprising.
Android is based on Java. In many minds, Java = slow. Also, some mobile phones have very high latency interfaces. Example: on the Virgin Mobile MARBL phone that I just replaced, it would take several seconds to respond to a keypress when dialing phone numbers. I would dial 17078221927, and the 1 would show up on the screen at about the same time that I pressed the 9 button.
I agree that this sounds easy to fake. However, cryptography is not a silver bullet that one can incorporate into any technology idea and have it make the whole thing work. Cryptography is a tool, like a screwdriver, and it can be used for some jobs and not others.
Yes, it's possible that the cable was cut to install spying equipment. If you are at all concerned about spying, you should encrypt your data before transmitting it over the Internet.
The blurb says this will lead to faster transfers between flash memory and video card memory, which is certainly true. Faster flash will lead to faster transfer between flash and just about anything.
I think this is similar to how the latest greatest processors are marketed as improving the "internet experience." Well sure. Not having a CPU at all or having a CPU from twelve years ago will hamper your "internet experience" compared to any new CPU.
If that is how you feel, you should be encrypting sensitive information. There is never a guarantee that someone isn't looking at information you send in the clear over the Internet.
As a kid, I always thought it would be really neat to design video compression algorithms. As I grew up, I saw friends passing around copies of pirated games and realized that copyrights and patents were fundamentally flawed ideas. Copy prevention is wrong, both because working copy protection is impossible and because it's immoral to use copyright law to prevent users from helping their friends. I feel bad for people who got duped into trying to sell information like a physical good, but I thank the crackers for keeping me in touch with reality.
Some day, when a reasonable system for compensating inventors for their ideas (e.g. ransom licensing) becomes mainstream, I may dig out those old video compression ideas and try to turn an honest profit.
For now, I make money selling real goods and providing valuable services. I scratch my coding itch by contributing to open source projects. Life is good. I earnestly appreciate what you and others like you have done for me.
Yes, we do need to be on guard against nascent mass surveillance, but there are technical problems with this. In order to record and report on audio all the time, the phone either has to be transmitting audio all of the time (draining the battery) or running phrase detection algorithms on its processor to decide what audio is worth noting (draining the battery).
On the other hand, "It would hurt economically" would be an excellent reason to do so from the point of view of the donation-dependent politician.
Not that it has anything to do with copyright, but I don't buy this.
Maybe you've seen previews of a new movie where a crazed killer kidnaps someone and sets up a web site with a kidnapping cam. The twist is that the web server is hooked up to a machine that injects poison into the captive every time someone visits the site to look at the captive (or something like that). Enough hits on the server and the captive dies. Predictably, the site gets popular, the hit rate goes up, and captives die more an more quickly.
I've asked several people whether they would visit the site if it were happening in real life. All of them have said, "Yeah, everyone would visit the site. The captive would have no chance." But when I ask them if they personally would visit the site, all of them have said no. I'm willing to bet that a sense of personal responsibility would outweigh morbid curiosity in this case. I mean honestly, would you feel good about visiting the site?
I think it would work the same way with food duplicators. Maybe you're jaded, but do you think any individual would say, "Yes, food duplicators should be illegal to ensure farmers can go on making money."? Even the farmers?
You make a good point. It's always nice to hear other people advocating the end of copyright. Although most of the time, I warn people about the dangers of not abolishing copyright.
This sort of thing: "Enforcing copyright law requires detecting copyright violations. Copyright violations occur when certain kinds of information are transferred between two private parties. So ultimately, enforcing copyright law requires monitoring communications between arbitrary pairs of individuals. This behavior is mutually exclusive with free speech. Free speech is more important than copyright, so copyright must go."
Like you, I believe that maintaining a legal/belief system that treats digital information like a scarce physical good keeps information away from people, which makes people immeasurably poorer. If we could duplicate food like we can duplicate digital information, imagine what the world would be like. "It would hurt farmers economically," would be a ridiculous reason to out outlaw food duplicators.
However, I find that when I express the above views, I get one of two responses: 1. Ok, smart guy. Why don't you come up with a way to pay artists without copyright? (These people then reject various schemes for compensating artists because they would result in less income than copyright.) 2. People mostly download pop culture entertainment, not a cause worth furthering.
So far, I haven't figured out where to go from here. Do you have much success extolling the virtues of abolishing copyright? If so, how do you do it?
There's a difference between not supporting third party firmware and deliberately expending extra effort to brick the iPhones of people who installed third party firmware.
If, in fact, that's what Apple did. As many people have already pointed out, if the device has enough of a brainstem left to accept a flash over a USB cable, it isn't bricked.
Persistent immersive synthetic environments in the form of massive multiplayer online gaming and social virtual worlds, initially popularized as gaming and social settings, are now finding growing interest as education and training venues. There is increasing recognition that these synthetic environments can serve as powerful "hands-on" tools for teaching a range of complex subjects, including STEM-based instruction. Virtual worlds with scientifically accurate simulations could permit learners to tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, and experience microgravity - making it easier to grasp complex concepts and quickly transfer this understanding to practical problems.
Notice that it refers to MMOs and not necessarily MMORPGs which, IMHO, is the most common kind of MMO. The two primary activities in MMORPGs are questing and grinding, and I don't think those activities lend themselves to accomplishing the goals NASA has set out.
What if I don't want a wireless mouse? One of the goals of Bonjour/Rendezvous/Zeroconf/whatever, according to the presentation, is to reduce the number of incompatible connectors on PCs. I suppose if I wanted a wired mouse without an ethernet cable, it could implement ethernet over USB and do zeroconf on top of that. But then there would be no advantage over a HID USB device.
I did not make up ransom licensing. The idea has been around for a while. If the original poster is concerned about the appearance of accountability, he or she can use an escrow service.
This guy is of the opinion that wireless/normal ethernet+zeroconf can replace all of our other wireless/wired peripheral connection standards. I don't know if I would like a big thick ethernet cable connecting my mouse to my PC, but it's an interesting idea.
No it isn't. It's just not a filesystem that's suitable for the masses. Average users cannot understand or manage an advanced storage pool system like ZFS. They're better off with filesystems that make sense to them, like HFS+, ext2 or NTFS.
I beg to differ. Even with a single disk preformatted with ZFS from the factory, users can benefit from ZFS's paranoid checksumming.
1. Make some videos that show off how awesome your software is, and post them on youtube. 2. Tell everyone that you will release your program under the GPL once you have received, say, $1000 in donations. Substitute however much money you want for $1000. 3. Follow through on your promise.
You will only be paid once, but that's the only sensible way to charge money for software. Software is not a product or physical good; the creation of software is a service.
I just think this sounds incredibly weak. If people can break encryption and decode entire streams, there are going to be ways to strip these watermarks -- probably the day the first song that contains it is released.
Ok, first of all, breaking DRM is not the same thing as breaking encryption. The Achilles heal of all DRM systems is not that they use weak encryption algorithms; it's that in order for the intended recipient to be able to play the DRM'd music, the content producer has to hand over the decryption key. Anything that can be read can be copied.
Second, erasing a watermark is fundamentally different from removing DRM. It's easy to tell when a DRM scheme has been defeated because one can then freely make copies of an audio file. It's not as easy to tell when a watermark has been removed.
after state-run rebates, you can get solar basically for free
I would love to lower my electricity bills with a solar system. Please tell me where I can find rebates to cover the entire materials+installation cost of a solar system for my California house, or close enough that it makes no difference. I'm not joking. I really want those rebates, but the best rebate deal I've been able to find covers "about" 50% of the cost of materials+installation if I count a tax credit as part of the rebate.
This is a fundamentally broken system, like the cable companies relying on cable modems (in the customers' houses) to limit the amount of data customers can upload into the network per second. Uncapping, anyone? Unless the meters get smarter, "uncapping" a thermostat would be easy and very hard to detect.
Instead, why not plan properly so that electricity shortages don't happen?
As an aside, I don't think many people will take kindly to having their thermostats adjusted by an outside force. Being told "no" by technology tends to make people angry, even if it's for the greater social good. Ever seen a person get mad at a red traffic light? They don't realize that a red traffic light is not "the man" telling them no. It's a helpful, sensible warning that the cross traffic has a green light.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all right if you don't want to leave town. If you're up for a 45 minute drive, go to Ferndale Pizza Company instead.
I don't know why that would be so surprising.
Android is based on Java. In many minds, Java = slow. Also, some mobile phones have very high latency interfaces. Example: on the Virgin Mobile MARBL phone that I just replaced, it would take several seconds to respond to a keypress when dialing phone numbers. I would dial 17078221927, and the 1 would show up on the screen at about the same time that I pressed the 9 button.
I agree that this sounds easy to fake. However, cryptography is not a silver bullet that one can incorporate into any technology idea and have it make the whole thing work. Cryptography is a tool, like a screwdriver, and it can be used for some jobs and not others.
First of all, it's not a "fact." It's a report, which may or may not be true. Or were you there when the cable was cut?
Second, the U.S. has a bad track record when it comes to spying, so we don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, it's possible that the cable was cut to install spying equipment. If you are at all concerned about spying, you should encrypt your data before transmitting it over the Internet.
The blurb says this will lead to faster transfers between flash memory and video card memory, which is certainly true. Faster flash will lead to faster transfer between flash and just about anything.
I think this is similar to how the latest greatest processors are marketed as improving the "internet experience." Well sure. Not having a CPU at all or having a CPU from twelve years ago will hamper your "internet experience" compared to any new CPU.
If that is how you feel, you should be encrypting sensitive information. There is never a guarantee that someone isn't looking at information you send in the clear over the Internet.
As a kid, I always thought it would be really neat to design video compression algorithms. As I grew up, I saw friends passing around copies of pirated games and realized that copyrights and patents were fundamentally flawed ideas. Copy prevention is wrong, both because working copy protection is impossible and because it's immoral to use copyright law to prevent users from helping their friends. I feel bad for people who got duped into trying to sell information like a physical good, but I thank the crackers for keeping me in touch with reality.
Some day, when a reasonable system for compensating inventors for their ideas (e.g. ransom licensing) becomes mainstream, I may dig out those old video compression ideas and try to turn an honest profit.
For now, I make money selling real goods and providing valuable services. I scratch my coding itch by contributing to open source projects. Life is good. I earnestly appreciate what you and others like you have done for me.
Yes, we do need to be on guard against nascent mass surveillance, but there are technical problems with this. In order to record and report on audio all the time, the phone either has to be transmitting audio all of the time (draining the battery) or running phrase detection algorithms on its processor to decide what audio is worth noting (draining the battery).
$1/gallon would be great if it were gasoline, but one gallon of ethanol doesn't store the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas.
How many joules per dollar does that work out to compared to gas?
Or, even better, how many miles per dollar does that work out to in today's ethanol-powered cars?
On the other hand, "It would hurt economically" would be an excellent reason to do so from the point of view of the donation-dependent politician.
Not that it has anything to do with copyright, but I don't buy this.
Maybe you've seen previews of a new movie where a crazed killer kidnaps someone and sets up a web site with a kidnapping cam. The twist is that the web server is hooked up to a machine that injects poison into the captive every time someone visits the site to look at the captive (or something like that). Enough hits on the server and the captive dies. Predictably, the site gets popular, the hit rate goes up, and captives die more an more quickly.
I've asked several people whether they would visit the site if it were happening in real life. All of them have said, "Yeah, everyone would visit the site. The captive would have no chance." But when I ask them if they personally would visit the site, all of them have said no. I'm willing to bet that a sense of personal responsibility would outweigh morbid curiosity in this case. I mean honestly, would you feel good about visiting the site?
I think it would work the same way with food duplicators. Maybe you're jaded, but do you think any individual would say, "Yes, food duplicators should be illegal to ensure farmers can go on making money."? Even the farmers?
You make a good point. It's always nice to hear other people advocating the end of copyright. Although most of the time, I warn people about the dangers of not abolishing copyright.
This sort of thing:
"Enforcing copyright law requires detecting copyright violations. Copyright violations occur when certain kinds of information are transferred between two private parties. So ultimately, enforcing copyright law requires monitoring communications between arbitrary pairs of individuals. This behavior is mutually exclusive with free speech. Free speech is more important than copyright, so copyright must go."
Like you, I believe that maintaining a legal/belief system that treats digital information like a scarce physical good keeps information away from people, which makes people immeasurably poorer. If we could duplicate food like we can duplicate digital information, imagine what the world would be like. "It would hurt farmers economically," would be a ridiculous reason to out outlaw food duplicators.
However, I find that when I express the above views, I get one of two responses:
1. Ok, smart guy. Why don't you come up with a way to pay artists without copyright? (These people then reject various schemes for compensating artists because they would result in less income than copyright.)
2. People mostly download pop culture entertainment, not a cause worth furthering.
So far, I haven't figured out where to go from here. Do you have much success extolling the virtues of abolishing copyright? If so, how do you do it?
There's a difference between not supporting third party firmware and deliberately expending extra effort to brick the iPhones of people who installed third party firmware.
If, in fact, that's what Apple did. As many people have already pointed out, if the device has enough of a brainstem left to accept a flash over a USB cable, it isn't bricked.
Persistent immersive synthetic environments in the form of massive multiplayer online gaming and social virtual worlds, initially popularized as gaming and social settings, are now finding growing interest as education and training venues. There is increasing recognition that these synthetic environments can serve as powerful "hands-on" tools for teaching a range of complex subjects, including STEM-based instruction. Virtual worlds with scientifically accurate simulations could permit learners to tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, and experience microgravity - making it easier to grasp complex concepts and quickly transfer this understanding to practical problems.
Notice that it refers to MMOs and not necessarily MMORPGs which, IMHO, is the most common kind of MMO. The two primary activities in MMORPGs are questing and grinding, and I don't think those activities lend themselves to accomplishing the goals NASA has set out.
So, how are they going to make this fun?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/08/22
You've got filter power! Use it!
What if I don't want a wireless mouse? One of the goals of Bonjour/Rendezvous/Zeroconf/whatever, according to the presentation, is to reduce the number of incompatible connectors on PCs. I suppose if I wanted a wired mouse without an ethernet cable, it could implement ethernet over USB and do zeroconf on top of that. But then there would be no advantage over a HID USB device.
Hasn't ZFS always had ditto blocks? Anyway, yes, self-healing is cool. It's too bad that Sun is keeping it away from Linux.
I did not make up ransom licensing. The idea has been around for a while. If the original poster is concerned about the appearance of accountability, he or she can use an escrow service.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7398680103951126462
This guy is of the opinion that wireless/normal ethernet+zeroconf can replace all of our other wireless/wired peripheral connection standards. I don't know if I would like a big thick ethernet cable connecting my mouse to my PC, but it's an interesting idea.
No it isn't. It's just not a filesystem that's suitable for the masses. Average users cannot understand or manage an advanced storage pool system like ZFS. They're better off with filesystems that make sense to them, like HFS+, ext2 or NTFS.
I beg to differ. Even with a single disk preformatted with ZFS from the factory, users can benefit from ZFS's paranoid checksumming.
You might try ransom licensing.
1. Make some videos that show off how awesome your software is, and post them on youtube.
2. Tell everyone that you will release your program under the GPL once you have received, say, $1000 in donations. Substitute however much money you want for $1000.
3. Follow through on your promise.
You will only be paid once, but that's the only sensible way to charge money for software. Software is not a product or physical good; the creation of software is a service.
I just think this sounds incredibly weak. If people can break encryption and decode entire streams, there are going to be ways to strip these watermarks -- probably the day the first song that contains it is released.
Ok, first of all, breaking DRM is not the same thing as breaking encryption. The Achilles heal of all DRM systems is not that they use weak encryption algorithms; it's that in order for the intended recipient to be able to play the DRM'd music, the content producer has to hand over the decryption key. Anything that can be read can be copied.
Second, erasing a watermark is fundamentally different from removing DRM. It's easy to tell when a DRM scheme has been defeated because one can then freely make copies of an audio file. It's not as easy to tell when a watermark has been removed.
after state-run rebates, you can get solar basically for free
I would love to lower my electricity bills with a solar system. Please tell me where I can find rebates to cover the entire materials+installation cost of a solar system for my California house, or close enough that it makes no difference. I'm not joking. I really want those rebates, but the best rebate deal I've been able to find covers "about" 50% of the cost of materials+installation if I count a tax credit as part of the rebate.
This is a fundamentally broken system, like the cable companies relying on cable modems (in the customers' houses) to limit the amount of data customers can upload into the network per second. Uncapping, anyone? Unless the meters get smarter, "uncapping" a thermostat would be easy and very hard to detect.
Instead, why not plan properly so that electricity shortages don't happen?
As an aside, I don't think many people will take kindly to having their thermostats adjusted by an outside force. Being told "no" by technology tends to make people angry, even if it's for the greater social good. Ever seen a person get mad at a red traffic light? They don't realize that a red traffic light is not "the man" telling them no. It's a helpful, sensible warning that the cross traffic has a green light.
loves technology != socially maladapted
passionate != primadonna