"Continuing on that tangent, hollywood tells us from Independence Day "and turn one dangerous falling object into many?" In other words, blowing it up doesn't immediately lower it's total combined mass, so is it a good idea or a bad idea?"
Independence Day? That's the alien invasion movie, right? IIRC the aliens managed to park their starships well within Earth's cloud cover, so any crash would be at relatively low speed when compared to a meteor. I don't know which, but the more famous space boulder movies are Armageddon and Deep Impact.
Pun intended. TFA did say the tweet-to-order scheme requires the use of a special "synced" card. So as long as you don't acquire that special card distinct from your primary card, then you're safe.
If this becomes successful and gets deployed beyond this special arrangement, then I see the potential for abuse as a target of crackers and possibly shady commercial interests. Imagine Company X purchasing the hashtag #companyxeatschildren to indicate your interest in purchasing Product X. This would effectively kill the hashtag for critics of Company X. Alternatively, of course, this also opens the possibility for an Anonymous-style DDOS attack of bogus orders.
"Similar deals have been made with for instance donkeys, dogs, cats and falcons."
Eating your fellow carnivores is in general a bad idea, and that goes for zombies and cannibals. The concentration of poisons go up the higher the food chain you go. A falcon can suffer from eating rats not harmed by eating insecticide-laced insects.
"Unfortunately, that's also the reasonining behind a number of open source projects."
You replied:
"Call it spite, if you like.
If millions of users need an app, or a functionality, that is only available at prices up to ten thousand dollars per seat - you can expect an open source alternative to spring up, sooner or later."
Your comment is valid if we take the GP's post to refer to opensource as against expensive proprietary software. My own reading is that the GP was referring to two competing opensource projects, or maybe one dominant opensource project that some developers have decided to fork. There are many recent examples of this. The Gnome 3 desktop springs readily to mind, with competing groups of opensource developers trying to put out their versions of what they think is the most user-friendly desktop environment since... Gnome 2!
"The fact that the clip is fictional, was used for their own profit, and that it made up a major piece of their video (i.e. that they didn't contribute much, at least, based on the descriptions I've read"
Profit? These guys are old-line Commies, so profit is probably the least of their motives, unless they've become so bankrupt they need to cash in on their YouTube hits. As for "fictional", I'd say much of what politicians claim during election season falls under that same broad category.
While I suspect the video was done in poor taste, I'd say it pretty much falls under the standard definition of fair use. Add to this the fact that it's a government doing it. And as we all well know, governments, even presumably democratic ones, can get away with far many more criminal acts than the average Joe Blow or fringe group.
The chief academic attraction of Chromebooks is precisely their crippled nature. As true "netbooks", the ordinary users can do less harm with them than with laptops running a full OS. Would-be computer geeks can of course repurpose them. But I suspect that these classroom versions, classChromebooks, will include a "security" feature that will prevent casual modification.
And get a job that can pay the rent. Call me a philistine but that's the way lots of writers, photographers, and even free software programmers survive. My literature professor in college was a published writer. He made his money teaching Shakespeare and Hemmingway to us "illiterates". Many, if not most, free software programmers earn their keep working as system administrators, teaching, or doing other stuff not directly related to the art of writing beautiful code.
Another way is to treat your published works as a digital resume or business card for the people who can hire you for media projects that pay. It's a long shot, but how many classical musicians make more money selling records than performing live anyway? A jazz musician that doesn't play live is no jazz musician at all.
"but if you just want to make games as say, a hobbyist, and don't really care about sales figures or market reach then XNA is your best bet, especially if you work a full time job - XNA can mean the difference between having time to embark on such a project alongside work, and not."
This doesn't make sense. In your day job, you'd be a fool not to use the most efficient tool that your budget can afford. With hobbies, turnaround times and efficiency matter less than the pleasure you get from doing something you really like, even if it's more difficult and comes with more bugs than a trip to a nature reserve.
Any asteroid big enough to wipe out Cupertino is going to wipe out whatever economy is necessary to buy new WinPhones and RIMs. No, I think the winners of that civilization-altering event will be the makers of survivalist communication gear like walkie-talkies.
The time is coming when users can legally download Windows for free. The $35 Raspberry Pi is already as fast or faster than most computers when Windows XP was released. Microsoft's remaining chance at survival is to give away the crown jewels, while maintaining a tight, most likely non-opensource grip on it. That way it can use the OS to win users to its online services rather than lose them to Apple's or Google's iOS or Android-powered gateway devices.
As far as general-purpose operating systems are concerned, we have reached the point of diminished returns. There's simply no way you can improve operating systems for one set of users without reducing their usability for another set of users. That, or Microsoft quantum leaps to an entirely different UI paradigm. A brain interface? A VR interface powered by retinal movement? A metamorphic UI?
Unless Microsoft realizes the hard lesson that an OS is now just a gateway and no longer the center of most users' digital universe, it's doomed to fail.
A most insightful comment. I can only add that I don't intend to maintain an app past the point when its security holes is as large a meteor crater. I just want to have some time to prepare before I migrate to another app or live the life of a Luddite.
Abandoned apps can be salvaged by having apk back-ups, as a number of posters have already pointed out. That's another avenue worth exploring.
RE: "Also, with things like VLC and Firefox, the "world" itself, that is to say things like CODECs used, HTML versions, etc. can, and will change. Is he then going to chase THAT, too?!?"
Besides my above comment, I'd also like to point out that codecs and HTML version don't change arbitrarily. There tends to be a gradual migration to newer formats, if at all. For example, even as the world moves to Blu-Ray and 10-bit h264, you still get DVD XviD rips of the latest movies off Pirate Bay, perfectly readable with 5-year-old video players. And what audio format even comes close to the ubiquity of Mp3, whose essential patents are about to or have already lapsed? The horrible Flash plug-in has outlived the man that augured its demise.
I have a very simple solution to that: a DC power apaptor. As for your comments about A/V, I'll grant that Blender's a bad example for video editing. But Blender does have a video editing mode or whatever that's called. Just Google for Blender video editing. Here's the first hit I got:
"Video Editing with Blender, part 1 - YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sODml0PBlo5 Feb 2011 - 7 min - Uploaded by OpticalVampire A short video showing a start to finish cycle of editing video with blender, including..."
Simple video editing can be done efficiently using a touch interface. By simple I mean cutting out the ugly faces, riot, etc from your wedding/birthday video, or minor tweaks like improving the contrast/brightness. I don't mean the creation of a Hollywood blockbuster or Sundance cult classic, although it can be done, if your goal is to make a Blair Witch-type indie flick or comic sci-fi with deliberately cheesy "special effects".
Here's a BBC feature on smartphone film making, including, editing:
Unfortunately none of featured iPhone apps are FOSS.
BTW, I know about Android ebook readers. The two I have installed, FB Reader and Cool Reader, are good enough for reading eBooks formatted in the straightforward fashion of a Project Gutenberg eText, but appears to have a problem with eBooks with fancier formatting that includes sub-sections, epigraphs, graphics, and the like. The best FOSS ebook reader is, unfortunately, not available for Android, Calibre, described as primarily an ebook cataloging program that happens to have a "built-in ebook viewer". The "Calibre" program available at Google Play appears to be merely a sync program that connects to Calibre proper.
I know that there's this other social networking site called Google +, but hasn't FB already achieved a mass worthy of the attention of anti-trust regulators? This is the sort of action that got Microsoft and lately Google into trouble. Or does one need to pass a certain threshold of dominance to qualify as an evil monopoly?
I think the deceptive part is that G+ and YouTube were counted separately. There should be a huge overlap between users of G+, YouTube, GMail, and Android/Google Play activations. While still invariably spammed, YouTube stats should be a more reliable indicator of Google's worth as a social networking provider, No. 2 by a nose.
As far as businesses are concerned, a YouTube channel would be more valuable than a Twitter feed. Of course, as a raw source of user-generated, rather than machine-farmed, information, Twitter still leads the search giant, that is until Google figures out a way to convert its moving pictures into their proverbial thousand words.
The metadata for some random entry I clicked on reads like:
LETTER (WCP1.1)
A typical letter handwritten by author in English.
Held by: Natural History Museum Finding number: NHM WP1/1/1 Copyright owner: Copyright of the A. R. Wallace Literary Estate Record scrutiny: 01/12/2011 - Catchpole, Caroline;
I'm curious about the copyright field. Aren't the letters supposed to be public domain? Since Wallaced died in 1913, which is well past the 50-75 years after death clause of most countries' copyright regimes, shouldn't the copyright on the letters have lapsed already?
IANAL but I'm assuming that the letters have already been "published" by virtue of their having been snail-mailed and read by a second party. It's not as if they're some long-lost manuscript that's been hidden in some author's dusty drawer, which can arguably be considered as unpublished.
China wants stability. A war on their borders is bad for stability, the exception being the occasional skirmish with neighbors like India that amounts to little more than a military excercise. I think China is secretly "praying" for Korean unification under the more stable South tied to the withdrawal of US forces in the peninsula. China wants more food and energy, not land. It makes more sense for China to annex the South China because of its mineral deposits and other marine resources.
With both Redhat/Fedora and Canonical/Ubuntu determined to go the touchy-feely route, it's a wonder these two companies don't just roll out their own-branded/skinned Android fork similar to Amazon's Kindle Fire OS. Android 4.x is at least a bit more pleasant to look at and is not that MUCH harder to use with a mouse and a keyboard than Gnome 3.X/Unity. And you get the familiarity of an already widely dispersed graphical interface.
"Or, instead of forking, contribute a patch or two to improve things."
Good advice for non-desktop oriented projects or the random bug or two, but I don't think patches will work in this case.
Igor's pretty much charitable about the rough spots of the new Fedora release. He reserves his venom for the look-and-feel of the Gnome 3.x desktop that's at the heart of the default Fedora install. So how do you patch a GUI that you consider "counterintutive and confusing" unless you fork it?
Well, he might as well think about the artificial womb that would go along with his Frankensteinian project. For something more in the spirit of the mad doctor, he could go digging for zombies to reanimate. Another possibility embedding in the female of any of the larger primate species.
Slashdot Mirror
"Continuing on that tangent, hollywood tells us from Independence Day "and turn one dangerous falling object into many?" In other words, blowing it up doesn't immediately lower it's total combined mass, so is it a good idea or a bad idea?"
Independence Day? That's the alien invasion movie, right? IIRC the aliens managed to park their starships well within Earth's cloud cover, so any crash would be at relatively low speed when compared to a meteor. I don't know which, but the more famous space boulder movies are Armageddon and Deep Impact.
Pun intended. TFA did say the tweet-to-order scheme requires the use of a special "synced" card. So as long as you don't acquire that special card distinct from your primary card, then you're safe.
If this becomes successful and gets deployed beyond this special arrangement, then I see the potential for abuse as a target of crackers and possibly shady commercial interests. Imagine Company X purchasing the hashtag #companyxeatschildren to indicate your interest in purchasing Product X. This would effectively kill the hashtag for critics of Company X. Alternatively, of course, this also opens the possibility for an Anonymous-style DDOS attack of bogus orders.
Really dumb name. I read it as Rapist Scan, which could mean either it scans for perverts or the machine is operated by perverts.
"Similar deals have been made with for instance donkeys, dogs, cats and falcons."
Eating your fellow carnivores is in general a bad idea, and that goes for zombies and cannibals. The concentration of poisons go up the higher the food chain you go. A falcon can suffer from eating rats not harmed by eating insecticide-laced insects.
I'm definitely doing better than Sun.
The GP wrote:
"Unfortunately, that's also the reasonining behind a number of open source projects."
You replied:
"Call it spite, if you like.
If millions of users need an app, or a functionality, that is only available at prices up to ten thousand dollars per seat - you can expect an open source alternative to spring up, sooner or later."
Your comment is valid if we take the GP's post to refer to opensource as against expensive proprietary software. My own reading is that the GP was referring to two competing opensource projects, or maybe one dominant opensource project that some developers have decided to fork. There are many recent examples of this. The Gnome 3 desktop springs readily to mind, with competing groups of opensource developers trying to put out their versions of what they think is the most user-friendly desktop environment since ... Gnome 2!
"The fact that the clip is fictional, was used for their own profit, and that it made up a major piece of their video (i.e. that they didn't contribute much, at least, based on the descriptions I've read"
Profit? These guys are old-line Commies, so profit is probably the least of their motives, unless they've become so bankrupt they need to cash in on their YouTube hits. As for "fictional", I'd say much of what politicians claim during election season falls under that same broad category.
While I suspect the video was done in poor taste, I'd say it pretty much falls under the standard definition of fair use. Add to this the fact that it's a government doing it. And as we all well know, governments, even presumably democratic ones, can get away with far many more criminal acts than the average Joe Blow or fringe group.
The chief academic attraction of Chromebooks is precisely their crippled nature. As true "netbooks", the ordinary users can do less harm with them than with laptops running a full OS. Would-be computer geeks can of course repurpose them. But I suspect that these classroom versions, classChromebooks, will include a "security" feature that will prevent casual modification.
And get a job that can pay the rent. Call me a philistine but that's the way lots of writers, photographers, and even free software programmers survive. My literature professor in college was a published writer. He made his money teaching Shakespeare and Hemmingway to us "illiterates". Many, if not most, free software programmers earn their keep working as system administrators, teaching, or doing other stuff not directly related to the art of writing beautiful code.
Another way is to treat your published works as a digital resume or business card for the people who can hire you for media projects that pay. It's a long shot, but how many classical musicians make more money selling records than performing live anyway? A jazz musician that doesn't play live is no jazz musician at all.
"but if you just want to make games as say, a hobbyist, and don't really care about sales figures or market reach then XNA is your best bet, especially if you work a full time job - XNA can mean the difference between having time to embark on such a project alongside work, and not."
This doesn't make sense. In your day job, you'd be a fool not to use the most efficient tool that your budget can afford. With hobbies, turnaround times and efficiency matter less than the pleasure you get from doing something you really like, even if it's more difficult and comes with more bugs than a trip to a nature reserve.
Any asteroid big enough to wipe out Cupertino is going to wipe out whatever economy is necessary to buy new WinPhones and RIMs. No, I think the winners of that civilization-altering event will be the makers of survivalist communication gear like walkie-talkies.
thx 4 mkn me uz wkpdia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMV
The time is coming when users can legally download Windows for free. The $35 Raspberry Pi is already as fast or faster than most computers when Windows XP was released. Microsoft's remaining chance at survival is to give away the crown jewels, while maintaining a tight, most likely non-opensource grip on it. That way it can use the OS to win users to its online services rather than lose them to Apple's or Google's iOS or Android-powered gateway devices.
As far as general-purpose operating systems are concerned, we have reached the point of diminished returns. There's simply no way you can improve operating systems for one set of users without reducing their usability for another set of users. That, or Microsoft quantum leaps to an entirely different UI paradigm. A brain interface? A VR interface powered by retinal movement? A metamorphic UI?
Unless Microsoft realizes the hard lesson that an OS is now just a gateway and no longer the center of most users' digital universe, it's doomed to fail.
A most insightful comment. I can only add that I don't intend to maintain an app past the point when its security holes is as large a meteor crater. I just want to have some time to prepare before I migrate to another app or live the life of a Luddite.
Abandoned apps can be salvaged by having apk back-ups, as a number of posters have already pointed out. That's another avenue worth exploring.
RE: "Also, with things like VLC and Firefox, the "world" itself, that is to say things like CODECs used, HTML versions, etc. can, and will change. Is he then going to chase THAT, too?!?"
Besides my above comment, I'd also like to point out that codecs and HTML version don't change arbitrarily. There tends to be a gradual migration to newer formats, if at all. For example, even as the world moves to Blu-Ray and 10-bit h264, you still get DVD XviD rips of the latest movies off Pirate Bay, perfectly readable with 5-year-old video players. And what audio format even comes close to the ubiquity of Mp3, whose essential patents are about to or have already lapsed? The horrible Flash plug-in has outlived the man that augured its demise.
"The bigger problem is just power."
I have a very simple solution to that: a DC power apaptor. As for your comments about A/V, I'll grant that Blender's a bad example for video editing. But Blender does have a video editing mode or whatever that's called. Just Google for Blender video editing. Here's the first hit I got:
"Video Editing with Blender, part 1 - YouTube ..."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sODml0PBlo5
Feb 2011 - 7 min - Uploaded by OpticalVampire
A short video showing a start to finish cycle of editing video with blender, including
Simple video editing can be done efficiently using a touch interface. By simple I mean cutting out the ugly faces, riot, etc from your wedding/birthday video, or minor tweaks like improving the contrast/brightness. I don't mean the creation of a Hollywood blockbuster or Sundance cult classic, although it can be done, if your goal is to make a Blair Witch-type indie flick or comic sci-fi with deliberately cheesy "special effects".
Here's a BBC feature on smartphone film making, including, editing:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9710004.stm
Unfortunately none of featured iPhone apps are FOSS.
BTW, I know about Android ebook readers. The two I have installed, FB Reader and Cool Reader, are good enough for reading eBooks formatted in the straightforward fashion of a Project Gutenberg eText, but appears to have a problem with eBooks with fancier formatting that includes sub-sections, epigraphs, graphics, and the like. The best FOSS ebook reader is, unfortunately, not available for Android, Calibre, described as primarily an ebook cataloging program that happens to have a "built-in ebook viewer". The "Calibre" program available at Google Play appears to be merely a sync program that connects to Calibre proper.
I know that there's this other social networking site called Google +, but hasn't FB already achieved a mass worthy of the attention of anti-trust regulators? This is the sort of action that got Microsoft and lately Google into trouble. Or does one need to pass a certain threshold of dominance to qualify as an evil monopoly?
I think the deceptive part is that G+ and YouTube were counted separately. There should be a huge overlap between users of G+, YouTube, GMail, and Android/Google Play activations. While still invariably spammed, YouTube stats should be a more reliable indicator of Google's worth as a social networking provider, No. 2 by a nose.
As far as businesses are concerned, a YouTube channel would be more valuable than a Twitter feed. Of course, as a raw source of user-generated, rather than machine-farmed, information, Twitter still leads the search giant, that is until Google figures out a way to convert its moving pictures into their proverbial thousand words.
We settle for Pi when you can have Tau?
http://tauday.com/
Well I find this much, much more palatable than the iPotty, a product actually previewed at the venerable CES:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20957844
The metadata for some random entry I clicked on reads like:
LETTER (WCP1.1)
A typical letter handwritten by author in English.
Held by: Natural History Museum
Finding number: NHM WP1/1/1
Copyright owner: Copyright of the A. R. Wallace Literary Estate
Record scrutiny: 01/12/2011 - Catchpole, Caroline;
I'm curious about the copyright field. Aren't the letters supposed to be public domain? Since Wallaced died in 1913, which is well past the 50-75 years after death clause of most countries' copyright regimes, shouldn't the copyright on the letters have lapsed already?
IANAL but I'm assuming that the letters have already been "published" by virtue of their having been snail-mailed and read by a second party. It's not as if they're some long-lost manuscript that's been hidden in some author's dusty drawer, which can arguably be considered as unpublished.
China wants stability. A war on their borders is bad for stability, the exception being the occasional skirmish with neighbors like India that amounts to little more than a military excercise. I think China is secretly "praying" for Korean unification under the more stable South tied to the withdrawal of US forces in the peninsula. China wants more food and energy, not land. It makes more sense for China to annex the South China because of its mineral deposits and other marine resources.
With both Redhat/Fedora and Canonical/Ubuntu determined to go the touchy-feely route, it's a wonder these two companies don't just roll out their own-branded/skinned Android fork similar to Amazon's Kindle Fire OS. Android 4.x is at least a bit more pleasant to look at and is not that MUCH harder to use with a mouse and a keyboard than Gnome 3.X/Unity. And you get the familiarity of an already widely dispersed graphical interface.
PS: Cory probably thinks differently than you: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/17/computing-opensource
"Or, instead of forking, contribute a patch or two to improve things."
Good advice for non-desktop oriented projects or the random bug or two, but I don't think patches will work in this case.
Igor's pretty much charitable about the rough spots of the new Fedora release. He reserves his venom for the look-and-feel of the Gnome 3.x desktop that's at the heart of the default Fedora install. So how do you patch a GUI that you consider "counterintutive and confusing" unless you fork it?
Google: China "rare earths" Japan? You might even restrict the search to "site:slashdot.org", and you'll still get a number of relevant hits.
"He is just thinking out loud, what if..."
Well, he might as well think about the artificial womb that would go along with his Frankensteinian project. For something more in the spirit of the mad doctor, he could go digging for zombies to reanimate. Another possibility embedding in the female of any of the larger primate species.