If you have a modern router, the chances are it already allows you to use IPv6 irrespective of your ISP's support for it. Check the IPv6 settings.
Enable "stateless configuration" for the network part (as opposed to DHCPv6 - you don't want that)
Enable 6to4 tunneling. If the system asks for a gateway IP address, leave it blank (Linksys routers do for some reason, but they route properly if it's absent.)
Enable IPv6 on your operating system. Wait until your computer shows that it has an IP address starting with "2002:", and then try to connect to "ipv6.google.com". If that works, start browsing! You'll use the IPv6 version of the sites you browse today because AAAA is generally routed first, and if there is a problem, you'll notice it with either timeouts/host-cannot-be-reached type errors, or huge delays loading pages.
If it didn't work, go to tunnelbroker.net, register for an IPv6 tunnel, and repeat from step 3, substituting using a tunnel instead of 6to4, and waiting until your computer has an IP address beginning with the prefix you get from HE.
Either 6to4, or the tunnel broker, should get you live, real, honest to goodness, IPv6 connectivity. Every computer on your network that has IPv6 enabled will suddenly have a real IP address, and a direct connection to the Internet. For those services that support it, there'll be no stupid tricks involving DMZs and port forwarding you have to do to get SIP, Bittorrent, online video games, or anything else working.
In fairness, Unicode requires quite a bit of testing to make sure it works, even if you're using tools that, out of the box, should support Unicode transparently. In Slashdot's case, a legacy of building the site on what was considered top of the line in the 1990s has left them with a lot of things that can go wrong.
IPv6, on the other hand... well, if you're using virtual hosting (and/. is), all that it takes is to turn on IPv6 on the front facing server, give it an IP address (which could just be a 6to4 address), update DNS, and, well, it either works or it doesn't. A half competent sysadmin should be able to do all that in less than ten minutes. I say that, because I am a half competent sysadmin, and adding IPv6 to the websites I host (on a third party VPS no less) took just that. I enabled 6to4 on the VPS itself, assigned the 6to4 address, and added the DNS record. And everything "just worked". Took me less than 15 minutes.
I'd be very interested to know why CT hasn't done this.
$ host www.google.com www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.147 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.104 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.99 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.105 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.103 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.45.106 www.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:800a::6a $
But one tech website you'd expect to want to dabble in the new and good for some reason isn't:
$ host slashdot.org slashdot.org has address 216.34.181.45 slashdot.org mail is handled by 10 mx.sourceforge.net. $
Shouldn't. With the exception of Android phones sold by AT&T, virtually all Android phones can install any application manually copied across (or downloaded) as a.apk file, without the need to root them. Typically you do have to enable the feature, in Settings -< Applications.
This is one major reason why Android (as delivered by Google, anyway) is considered open.
IndexedDB is supposed to be Mozilla's and Microsoft's answer to Web SQL Database, but it has no SQL API, and isn't relational. So how is it an answer? It isn't.
I fully agree that Web SQL Database is a bad standard. That doesn't mean that anything else is better.
Because it's not got a lot of momentum at this point, and other than compression quality it appears to be an inferior of JPEG - it lacks, apparently, the same degree of metadata.
If there's a major problem with the web right now it's the number of half-assed ill-thought out technologies that are already in there and that have to be supported permanently because someone out there might be still using it - and in many cases, they are, from GIFs to frames. Mozilla and Microsoft just threw IndexedDB into the mix, just to add another thing to fuck things up for another decade.
So yeah, I have to agree with Mozilla in this case that WebP shouldn't be accepted. Less is more.,
Yes, but it's questionable it was a valid trademark to begin with.
Look, you know all those stupid Slashdot threads where people just post stuff like "Oh yeah? Well I'm going to patent patenting, hahaha, I'm so funny, nobody's ever thought of that joke before", or "I'm going to copyright the wheel", or "I'm going to trademark 'searching'"?
Well, this is a trademark just as stupid as the examples above, except that Apple's being serious. People are coming up with the most bizarre justifications, including the utterly bizarre claim that "App" hasn't been in common usage for about 20-30 years (it most certainly has!), but in the real world, app store is an obvious, natural, generic way of describing the consumer interfacing side of a vendor of computer software, the kind of combination of words that people have naturally used many years before Apple did what it did without even thinking about it.
Apple kinda knows that already. They didn't call their music store the Music Store or even the Tunes Store, they originally called it the iTunes Music Store and then shortened it to iTunes Store once it became more generic in usage. It wouldn't take a lot to fix this, they're just being assholes.
non-sequitur. The END of Keynesian economics (end of war time spending) allowed USA to become a major private goods producer again, but of-course it didn't hurt that the competition was wiped out during the war, and thus USA had a basic monopoly on labor just past the WWII
What a load of crap.
First of all, classical Keynesian economics was pretty much the default until the mid-seventies in every western country, including the US.
Secondly, you defined "Keynesian" above - or implied it - as including pretty much all mainstream economics, whether they believe in classical Keynesian, Neo-Keynesianism, or Monetarism, or any of the other offshoots. And before you hit the Reply button claiming I'm misquoting you, you did this when you responded to the point that deflation is considered by economics as a disaster by implying that such economists are "Keynesian" and somehow as stupid as astrologists. And that's OK, because actually virtually all mainstream economic theories are built on Keynesianism, which isn't anything like as discredited as some like to pretend.
Outside of fringe kooks, be they pseudo-libertarians who make stuff up as they go along, or havens of unscientific thought and approaches like the Austrian school, I don't think you'll find many economists (or anyone else for that matter) who agree that depressions (which is what a period of deflation is) are a great thing.
It's not even hard to understand even if you put it in Austrian terms. You're thinking of setting up a business. You know that if you buy $1,000 worth of goods, in an environment with no deflation, you'll be able to sell them for $1,100 over the space of a year and make a profit.
But you're in a depression, so the value of the goods (relative to your stack of green pieces of paper) will decrease. You'll, perhaps, make $900 back. And while that $900 might be "worth" $1,100 in 2012's currency, wouldn't it make more sense for you to stick the money under the mattress instead? There's less work involved, AND you get more value at the end of it.
Deflation kills business. It's as simple as that. There's little reason to invest if those little green pieces of paper are going to be worth more than the goods and services you could buy instead.
Deflation helps one group of people, and one group alone: people who hoard green pieces of paper. It doesn't help anyone else. It destroys businesses, it destroys commerce, people lose their jobs and become even less able to buy goods and services, and so without massive Keynesian stimuli, it's very difficult to pull out of such a thing as the economy generally goes into free-fall.
Nah, the submitter is still an idiot. The original screenshot shows the original text, where it's obvious they're talking about sharing your Internet connection with others being risky because those users might commit copyright infringement with it appearing to be coming from your system.
"* Using a wireless router in your room; others may share illegal material through your router, giving the appearance that you are the guilty party."
Basically this story ought to be pulled. The wording could be better, but the college's advice is actually good advice.
It's actually licensed under the Apache license, the Linux kernel excepted.
To be honest, while it's disappointing, I'm hopeful it's a temporary thing based on what's been said thus far. Android gets much of its strength from being open source, and I'd assume Google wants that strength for its tablets too.
You use email? That's so 1990s. My wife uses this great technology called MMS all the time, sends the picture directly to the phones of anyone she messages. Has the added benefit you don't need to program everyone's email address into your phone.
The reason Microsoft attracts criticism and Google doesn't is because for the most part you don't have to use Google. They have obscene market shares in a very small number of fields, which require people do business with them in an even smaller number, but there's no evidence (I've seen) they're abusing their positions in those fields.
"Data mining" and "selling to advertisers" are not, by themselves, bad things. I have no objection to seeing ads beside the things I read, and Google's ads are unobtrusive and well designed. Data mining is only a concern if others can easily identify you and the information associated with you, rather than see you purely as a statistic. While Google's search engine has had its problems in that regard (as will any, from Bing to Altavista), there's no evidence its general ad-driven products have caused any problems.
So I don't think the two are exactly comparable. Microsoft did some unquestionably evil things in terms of how it kept its monopoly, and how it leveraged it. We're not seeing the same behavior from Google. And, to top it all, we're seeing an enormous amount of positive innovation, donated for free to the public, coming out of that organization.
Much as I'd like to believe this, it's not true. People own cars because they want to guarantee they can transport themselves at speed from any location to any other location, in a device they have overall control over. The selling points of taxis are not that they offer a way to do that, but trade driving for expense, but because they offer privacy and some degree of timeliness compared to public transport.
I, and most people in the country, wouldn't choose a taxi to go to work in the morning not because it's expensive but because it's a resource that's difficult to guarantee the availability of. Even a bus or train has a better guarantee of availability at peak periods. The idea of relying upon a version of cars
Would self driving cars kill cars? Maybe, but not because they'd be sharable - sharing doesn't come into it.
I'm a firm believer that cars are a terrible form of transport, and the only reason people tolerate them is because the person who makes the decision to buy and use them is inevitably the person driving them. That person overlooks the discomfort and inhuman conditions of sitting in a metal cage for anything from fifteen minutes, to hours, unable to move because he or she is distracted by the actual act of driving. Such a distraction will cease to exist if the car is driven by Google.
What would happen under such circumstances? My guess is things may get worse before they get better. Successful self driving cars will need to larger than SUVs or minivans are today, and the risks associated with people getting up and walking around in these larger vehicles during a road trip will result in deadlier accidents, despite the reduction in accidents overall likely to result from reduced human error.
What we need are cheaper trains, better buses, and most of all changes to planning policies that make it illegal to build neighborhoods that would make cycling and public transportation desirable, and make the latter profitable.
You know, I'd like to know what the hell they actually did, because the article's short on details. I'm pretty sure that if I were Senator Al Franken, and while one military officer was talking to me, the other was blaring white noise, showering me with little leaflets showing Lorne Michaels in a tutu with "YOUR COMRADES ARE GAY! SURRENDER AND GIVE US $$$$$!!", and playing the Flight of the Valkyrie over a loud speaker, I notice...
But that only makes you better off if you don't actually care about sound quality beyond that point. Fair enough. I don't care about HD video, because my eyes aren't good enough to tell the difference. But personally I'm glad my ears and equipment are good enough. You may be better off, but I would be sad in your situation.
Yes I do care about sound quality. But, again, to repeat the point, to my ears 64kbps AAC+ sounds as good as a CD. To my ears, on my equipment, "upgrading" to 64bit 256kHz FLAC isn't going to make a blind bit of difference to the sound quality.
Interestingly enough, I can generally hear the difference between an 128kbps MP3 and CD. But my suspicion is that this has to do with encoder quality, rather than any inherent flaw in the format itself.
I don't think you'd be sad in my situation at all. I'm not. I think the music I listen to is beautiful. I don't hear anything that detracts from it. What I hear is rich, full, and free of artifacts.
I'm sorry to hear it. With my headphones (actually, multiple varieties), which sound really good to me, I can't tell the difference between a 64kbps AAC+, and a CD.
Trust me, that means I'm better off than you. Figure out why.
OK, let's look at it from the other side in terms of "How much am I prepared to pay", see what's possible, and see if it also works from another point of view.
I don't have the statistics available to me, but I would assume an average person is unlikely to buy more than one album a month, on average. Part of that's "$15 is quite a bit to spend on music", part of that is most of us spend some time getting to know an album before getting the next one, etc. In any case, $15 is also on the high end, it's what Rhapsody charges for a multiuser account, for example.
Using that, and assuming that I listen to music for six hours a day, five days a week [these are all based on personal usage], and with a song being three minutes, that's 2,400 song-impressions per month per user. Assuming half of the money goes on infrastructure, I calculate around 0.31c per song, which, I guess, is even worse for the artist than the penny a song.
But... and it's a big but, that's what I was paying back when I listened to bought, rather than rented, music. I had my iPad loaded up with music I'd ripped from my CD collection, and was buying one CD a month. And actually, when you factor in it was CD music, the "50% goes on infrastructure" thing goes out the window, artists typically get less than 10% of the revenue from a CD sale.
Were they being ripped off? Well, of course! I've always felt artists deserve more than they get from CD sales. But as a general principle, if we're switching from paying by impression rather than paying by sale, it doesn't appear to me at any rate that artists are worse off when people listen to their music via decent subscription services.
Indeed, it's an opportunity to double dip, to a certain extent. Subscription services have limitations, those limitations are not as bad as they used to be thanks to open systems like Android, but they're there. If you listen to an album and decide you really really really like it, you can buy it, either as a collection of MP3s, or as a CD. In all cases, the artist with the work that's worth buying gets more revenue.
A penny a song impression is probably more than most people would pay, But realistically, it's already much more than people were paying when they bought CDs, ripped them to their music players, and listened to them as background music at work. If subscription services can augment other revenue streams, rather than completely replace them, artists should be better off.
For regular day to day users of an Android phone there is very little difference in the "openness" vs. and iPhone or WP7 phone.
Well, apart from that "being able to install any app you want" difference.
Android phones usually have some form of security to prevent the operating system from being modified. That's regrettable, but hardly in the same class as being incapable of running software that doesn't fit the arbitrary whims of a hardware manufacturer.
I've always preferred NetBeans to Eclipse (in the same way that I'd prefer to be beaten with a baseball bat around the knees rather than the head), but those of us who prefer the environment have always been in a minority - the mindshare is with Eclipse and generally if you start to develop in any technology, there's normally an official Eclipse plug-in for it but only some blog posts and half finished third party plug-in projects to support Netbeans development - the exception being most Sun/Oracle Java technologies.
The problem with that is that unlike, say, OpenOffice.org, there's very little chance that there'll be a successful fork to pull NetBeans away from Oracle. There aren't enough non-Oracle people who depend on the environment and can't switch away if they have to.
What one has to hope for is that there'll be a reaction to Eclipse in the longer term strong enough to encourage the development of a sane, simpler, alternative.
Oracle's lawsuit is because Google created their own VM system rather than copying the JVM. Oracle believes that any VM system that infringes on their patents (basically any VM system more modern and efficient than the UCSD p-System) should either be compatible with the J2SE specification, or should be licensed with Oracle getting paid out of the deal.
If Microsoft announced a non-patent encumbered (to the best of their knowledge) codec and released the specification of the format to the IETF, we would not be screaming bloody murder.
And while I suspect the GP was merely referring to the technical limitations, the reality is that anyone wanting to roll a custom iOS would have more issues than simply the ability to modify it (without source code, without documentation, with technical measures imposed to make it hard to install, etc), they'd also have legal issues, especially if they wanted to redistribute the results.
I'm running CyanogenMod on my Slide. It's better than the stock ROM from HTC - more up to date and more reliable. I can do this because:
1. While the Slide does include technical measures to make it harder to install an unapproved update, in every other sense there are no technical limitations. HTC has published the source code to the device drivers needed to make the kernel work. The entire source code to the Android system is available to anyone who wants it. The code is relatively well documented, much of which having a heritage of two decades or more of open use.
2. All of the above is covered by one or more free software licenses, making it entirely legal to do these modifications.
3. The carrier genuinely has an open attitude towards such activities, including hosting a forum devoted to helping people root and update the operating systems of their phones. T-Mobile has a positive attitude towards those creating alternative Android distributions.
This is a very different situation to iOS. To put the differences bluntly:
While both systems contain technical measures preventing access to certain parts of the operating system, there are no technical constraints preventing you from installing your own apps under Android. iOS contains technical measures permitting you to only install apps approved by Apple.
If you wish to modify the Android operating system, you can obtain complete source code via Google and your phone's manufacturer. iOS does not contain any user modifiable components
If you wish to distribute your modifications to the Android operating system, you may freely do so. You may not redistribute modified copies of iOS and indeed can expect severe legal repercussions if you so much as try.
The Android world is a very different one from the iOS world, and Samsung's actions, ultimately, may be against the spirit of the system, but in any case are circumvented by the system. If Samsung can't step up to the plate, others will. That's the beauty of an open platform.
We're talking about changing the operating system, not installing an app.
Nobody's stopping you from installing an app of your choice on your Samsung/T-Mobile Android phone. Almost all hardware manufacturers these days place restrictions on how easy it is to change the firmware of a device - I agree it sucks that they do it, but there are legitimate reasons for doing so when it comes to the system software of a device that's always connected to managed wireless network.
The difference between the iPhone and Android phones is, and always has been, that you, and not the carrier, operating system author, or hardware manufacturer, choose the applications that actually run on your device. You're allowed to develop for them without getting permission from anyone. You're allowed to install your own software without getting permission from anyone. Nobody's ever argued anything else, nobody's ever claimed that the key advantage of Android is that you can install a different operating system (or different version of Android) on any Android phones. That doesn't even make any sense, as that'll never be possible to claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not enable IPv6 and find out?
If you have a modern router, the chances are it already allows you to use IPv6 irrespective of your ISP's support for it. Check the IPv6 settings.
Either 6to4, or the tunnel broker, should get you live, real, honest to goodness, IPv6 connectivity. Every computer on your network that has IPv6 enabled will suddenly have a real IP address, and a direct connection to the Internet. For those services that support it, there'll be no stupid tricks involving DMZs and port forwarding you have to do to get SIP, Bittorrent, online video games, or anything else working.
In fairness, Unicode requires quite a bit of testing to make sure it works, even if you're using tools that, out of the box, should support Unicode transparently. In Slashdot's case, a legacy of building the site on what was considered top of the line in the 1990s has left them with a lot of things that can go wrong.
IPv6, on the other hand... well, if you're using virtual hosting (and /. is), all that it takes is to turn on IPv6 on the front facing server, give it an IP address (which could just be a 6to4 address), update DNS, and, well, it either works or it doesn't. A half competent sysadmin should be able to do all that in less than ten minutes. I say that, because I am a half competent sysadmin, and adding IPv6 to the websites I host (on a third party VPS no less) took just that. I enabled 6to4 on the VPS itself, assigned the 6to4 address, and added the DNS record. And everything "just worked". Took me less than 15 minutes.
I'd be very interested to know why CT hasn't done this.
Big names like Google are:
But one tech website you'd expect to want to dabble in the new and good for some reason isn't:
Well, of course!
Well, that's not always true, as owners of the Wii Board can testify.
Shouldn't. With the exception of Android phones sold by AT&T, virtually all Android phones can install any application manually copied across (or downloaded) as a .apk file, without the need to root them. Typically you do have to enable the feature, in Settings -< Applications.
This is one major reason why Android (as delivered by Google, anyway) is considered open.
That doesn't make IndexedDB a good standard.
IndexedDB is supposed to be Mozilla's and Microsoft's answer to Web SQL Database, but it has no SQL API, and isn't relational. So how is it an answer? It isn't.
I fully agree that Web SQL Database is a bad standard. That doesn't mean that anything else is better.
Because it's not got a lot of momentum at this point, and other than compression quality it appears to be an inferior of JPEG - it lacks, apparently, the same degree of metadata.
If there's a major problem with the web right now it's the number of half-assed ill-thought out technologies that are already in there and that have to be supported permanently because someone out there might be still using it - and in many cases, they are, from GIFs to frames. Mozilla and Microsoft just threw IndexedDB into the mix, just to add another thing to fuck things up for another decade.
So yeah, I have to agree with Mozilla in this case that WebP shouldn't be accepted. Less is more.,
Look, you know all those stupid Slashdot threads where people just post stuff like "Oh yeah? Well I'm going to patent patenting, hahaha, I'm so funny, nobody's ever thought of that joke before", or "I'm going to copyright the wheel", or "I'm going to trademark 'searching'"?
Well, this is a trademark just as stupid as the examples above, except that Apple's being serious. People are coming up with the most bizarre justifications, including the utterly bizarre claim that "App" hasn't been in common usage for about 20-30 years (it most certainly has!), but in the real world, app store is an obvious, natural, generic way of describing the consumer interfacing side of a vendor of computer software, the kind of combination of words that people have naturally used many years before Apple did what it did without even thinking about it.
Apple kinda knows that already. They didn't call their music store the Music Store or even the Tunes Store, they originally called it the iTunes Music Store and then shortened it to iTunes Store once it became more generic in usage. It wouldn't take a lot to fix this, they're just being assholes.
What a load of crap.
First of all, classical Keynesian economics was pretty much the default until the mid-seventies in every western country, including the US.
Secondly, you defined "Keynesian" above - or implied it - as including pretty much all mainstream economics, whether they believe in classical Keynesian, Neo-Keynesianism, or Monetarism, or any of the other offshoots. And before you hit the Reply button claiming I'm misquoting you, you did this when you responded to the point that deflation is considered by economics as a disaster by implying that such economists are "Keynesian" and somehow as stupid as astrologists. And that's OK, because actually virtually all mainstream economic theories are built on Keynesianism, which isn't anything like as discredited as some like to pretend.
Outside of fringe kooks, be they pseudo-libertarians who make stuff up as they go along, or havens of unscientific thought and approaches like the Austrian school, I don't think you'll find many economists (or anyone else for that matter) who agree that depressions (which is what a period of deflation is) are a great thing.
It's not even hard to understand even if you put it in Austrian terms. You're thinking of setting up a business. You know that if you buy $1,000 worth of goods, in an environment with no deflation, you'll be able to sell them for $1,100 over the space of a year and make a profit.
But you're in a depression, so the value of the goods (relative to your stack of green pieces of paper) will decrease. You'll, perhaps, make $900 back. And while that $900 might be "worth" $1,100 in 2012's currency, wouldn't it make more sense for you to stick the money under the mattress instead? There's less work involved, AND you get more value at the end of it.
Deflation kills business. It's as simple as that. There's little reason to invest if those little green pieces of paper are going to be worth more than the goods and services you could buy instead.
Deflation helps one group of people, and one group alone: people who hoard green pieces of paper. It doesn't help anyone else. It destroys businesses, it destroys commerce, people lose their jobs and become even less able to buy goods and services, and so without massive Keynesian stimuli, it's very difficult to pull out of such a thing as the economy generally goes into free-fall.
Nah, the submitter is still an idiot. The original screenshot shows the original text, where it's obvious they're talking about sharing your Internet connection with others being risky because those users might commit copyright infringement with it appearing to be coming from your system.
"* Using a wireless router in your room; others may share illegal material through your router, giving the appearance that you are the guilty party."
Basically this story ought to be pulled. The wording could be better, but the college's advice is actually good advice.
It's actually licensed under the Apache license, the Linux kernel excepted.
To be honest, while it's disappointing, I'm hopeful it's a temporary thing based on what's been said thus far. Android gets much of its strength from being open source, and I'd assume Google wants that strength for its tablets too.
You use email? That's so 1990s. My wife uses this great technology called MMS all the time, sends the picture directly to the phones of anyone she messages. Has the added benefit you don't need to program everyone's email address into your phone.
The reason Microsoft attracts criticism and Google doesn't is because for the most part you don't have to use Google. They have obscene market shares in a very small number of fields, which require people do business with them in an even smaller number, but there's no evidence (I've seen) they're abusing their positions in those fields.
"Data mining" and "selling to advertisers" are not, by themselves, bad things. I have no objection to seeing ads beside the things I read, and Google's ads are unobtrusive and well designed. Data mining is only a concern if others can easily identify you and the information associated with you, rather than see you purely as a statistic. While Google's search engine has had its problems in that regard (as will any, from Bing to Altavista), there's no evidence its general ad-driven products have caused any problems.
So I don't think the two are exactly comparable. Microsoft did some unquestionably evil things in terms of how it kept its monopoly, and how it leveraged it. We're not seeing the same behavior from Google. And, to top it all, we're seeing an enormous amount of positive innovation, donated for free to the public, coming out of that organization.
Much as I'd like to believe this, it's not true. People own cars because they want to guarantee they can transport themselves at speed from any location to any other location, in a device they have overall control over. The selling points of taxis are not that they offer a way to do that, but trade driving for expense, but because they offer privacy and some degree of timeliness compared to public transport.
I, and most people in the country, wouldn't choose a taxi to go to work in the morning not because it's expensive but because it's a resource that's difficult to guarantee the availability of. Even a bus or train has a better guarantee of availability at peak periods. The idea of relying upon a version of cars
Would self driving cars kill cars? Maybe, but not because they'd be sharable - sharing doesn't come into it.
I'm a firm believer that cars are a terrible form of transport, and the only reason people tolerate them is because the person who makes the decision to buy and use them is inevitably the person driving them. That person overlooks the discomfort and inhuman conditions of sitting in a metal cage for anything from fifteen minutes, to hours, unable to move because he or she is distracted by the actual act of driving. Such a distraction will cease to exist if the car is driven by Google.
What would happen under such circumstances? My guess is things may get worse before they get better. Successful self driving cars will need to larger than SUVs or minivans are today, and the risks associated with people getting up and walking around in these larger vehicles during a road trip will result in deadlier accidents, despite the reduction in accidents overall likely to result from reduced human error.
What we need are cheaper trains, better buses, and most of all changes to planning policies that make it illegal to build neighborhoods that would make cycling and public transportation desirable, and make the latter profitable.
You know, I'd like to know what the hell they actually did, because the article's short on details. I'm pretty sure that if I were Senator Al Franken, and while one military officer was talking to me, the other was blaring white noise, showering me with little leaflets showing Lorne Michaels in a tutu with "YOUR COMRADES ARE GAY! SURRENDER AND GIVE US $$$$$!!", and playing the Flight of the Valkyrie over a loud speaker, I notice...
Yes I do care about sound quality. But, again, to repeat the point, to my ears 64kbps AAC+ sounds as good as a CD. To my ears, on my equipment, "upgrading" to 64bit 256kHz FLAC isn't going to make a blind bit of difference to the sound quality.
Interestingly enough, I can generally hear the difference between an 128kbps MP3 and CD. But my suspicion is that this has to do with encoder quality, rather than any inherent flaw in the format itself.
I don't think you'd be sad in my situation at all. I'm not. I think the music I listen to is beautiful. I don't hear anything that detracts from it. What I hear is rich, full, and free of artifacts.
I'm sorry to hear it. With my headphones (actually, multiple varieties), which sound really good to me, I can't tell the difference between a 64kbps AAC+, and a CD.
Trust me, that means I'm better off than you. Figure out why.
OK, let's look at it from the other side in terms of "How much am I prepared to pay", see what's possible, and see if it also works from another point of view.
I don't have the statistics available to me, but I would assume an average person is unlikely to buy more than one album a month, on average. Part of that's "$15 is quite a bit to spend on music", part of that is most of us spend some time getting to know an album before getting the next one, etc. In any case, $15 is also on the high end, it's what Rhapsody charges for a multiuser account, for example.
Using that, and assuming that I listen to music for six hours a day, five days a week [these are all based on personal usage], and with a song being three minutes, that's 2,400 song-impressions per month per user. Assuming half of the money goes on infrastructure, I calculate around 0.31c per song, which, I guess, is even worse for the artist than the penny a song.
But... and it's a big but, that's what I was paying back when I listened to bought, rather than rented, music. I had my iPad loaded up with music I'd ripped from my CD collection, and was buying one CD a month. And actually, when you factor in it was CD music, the "50% goes on infrastructure" thing goes out the window, artists typically get less than 10% of the revenue from a CD sale.
Were they being ripped off? Well, of course! I've always felt artists deserve more than they get from CD sales. But as a general principle, if we're switching from paying by impression rather than paying by sale, it doesn't appear to me at any rate that artists are worse off when people listen to their music via decent subscription services.
Indeed, it's an opportunity to double dip, to a certain extent. Subscription services have limitations, those limitations are not as bad as they used to be thanks to open systems like Android, but they're there. If you listen to an album and decide you really really really like it, you can buy it, either as a collection of MP3s, or as a CD. In all cases, the artist with the work that's worth buying gets more revenue.
A penny a song impression is probably more than most people would pay, But realistically, it's already much more than people were paying when they bought CDs, ripped them to their music players, and listened to them as background music at work. If subscription services can augment other revenue streams, rather than completely replace them, artists should be better off.
Well, apart from that "being able to install any app you want" difference.
Android phones usually have some form of security to prevent the operating system from being modified. That's regrettable, but hardly in the same class as being incapable of running software that doesn't fit the arbitrary whims of a hardware manufacturer.
BTW, T-Mobile even provides resources on disabling the firmware locks for its Android phones: http://forums.t-mobile.com/t5/Operating-System-Software/bd-p/AndroidDev
Really? I thought Oracle is trying to emulate SPECTRE...
I've always preferred NetBeans to Eclipse (in the same way that I'd prefer to be beaten with a baseball bat around the knees rather than the head), but those of us who prefer the environment have always been in a minority - the mindshare is with Eclipse and generally if you start to develop in any technology, there's normally an official Eclipse plug-in for it but only some blog posts and half finished third party plug-in projects to support Netbeans development - the exception being most Sun/Oracle Java technologies.
The problem with that is that unlike, say, OpenOffice.org, there's very little chance that there'll be a successful fork to pull NetBeans away from Oracle. There aren't enough non-Oracle people who depend on the environment and can't switch away if they have to.
What one has to hope for is that there'll be a reaction to Eclipse in the longer term strong enough to encourage the development of a sane, simpler, alternative.
Oracle's lawsuit is because Google created their own VM system rather than copying the JVM. Oracle believes that any VM system that infringes on their patents (basically any VM system more modern and efficient than the UCSD p-System) should either be compatible with the J2SE specification, or should be licensed with Oracle getting paid out of the deal.
If Microsoft announced a non-patent encumbered (to the best of their knowledge) codec and released the specification of the format to the IETF, we would not be screaming bloody murder.
I don't think that's what he's referring to.
And while I suspect the GP was merely referring to the technical limitations, the reality is that anyone wanting to roll a custom iOS would have more issues than simply the ability to modify it (without source code, without documentation, with technical measures imposed to make it hard to install, etc), they'd also have legal issues, especially if they wanted to redistribute the results.
I'm running CyanogenMod on my Slide. It's better than the stock ROM from HTC - more up to date and more reliable. I can do this because:
1. While the Slide does include technical measures to make it harder to install an unapproved update, in every other sense there are no technical limitations. HTC has published the source code to the device drivers needed to make the kernel work. The entire source code to the Android system is available to anyone who wants it. The code is relatively well documented, much of which having a heritage of two decades or more of open use.
2. All of the above is covered by one or more free software licenses, making it entirely legal to do these modifications.
3. The carrier genuinely has an open attitude towards such activities, including hosting a forum devoted to helping people root and update the operating systems of their phones. T-Mobile has a positive attitude towards those creating alternative Android distributions.
This is a very different situation to iOS. To put the differences bluntly:
The Android world is a very different one from the iOS world, and Samsung's actions, ultimately, may be against the spirit of the system, but in any case are circumvented by the system. If Samsung can't step up to the plate, others will. That's the beauty of an open platform.
We're talking about changing the operating system, not installing an app.
Nobody's stopping you from installing an app of your choice on your Samsung/T-Mobile Android phone. Almost all hardware manufacturers these days place restrictions on how easy it is to change the firmware of a device - I agree it sucks that they do it, but there are legitimate reasons for doing so when it comes to the system software of a device that's always connected to managed wireless network.
The difference between the iPhone and Android phones is, and always has been, that you, and not the carrier, operating system author, or hardware manufacturer, choose the applications that actually run on your device. You're allowed to develop for them without getting permission from anyone. You're allowed to install your own software without getting permission from anyone. Nobody's ever argued anything else, nobody's ever claimed that the key advantage of Android is that you can install a different operating system (or different version of Android) on any Android phones. That doesn't even make any sense, as that'll never be possible to claim.