"The big problem is that the USPS is horribly inefficient"
While this might be consistent with right-wing anti-government ideology, in reality the USPS is extremely efficient - they deliver a stunning volume of mail rapidly and reliably, at extremely low cost (15-30 cents/letter, vs $18 for a FedEx package). Their big problem is that Congress regulates the USPS, forcing them to lose money and then complaining that they're losing money. So, IMO, it's not the USPS that is broken, but Congress.
FedEx pays much more per package for labor. But as a percentage FedEx' labor costs are lower because FedEx delivers $18 packages, while the USPS delivers 15-30 cent letters.
The big problem for the USPS has is that they are required to do whatever Congress says, and prohibited from doing anything else. And, in particular, Congress has its own agenda, so even when the USPS knows what to do, it takes them years to decades to be allowed to make changes. For example, they were recently authorized to change smaller post offices from being dedicated buildings to being a service provided within an existing business - that took YEARS to pass, because congressmen didn't want to lose a "real post office" for their constituents, so the USPS was required by Congress to lose money on hundreds of tiny post offices. And if they need to raise the rates, or streamline operations, they are routinely blocked by Congress, because the voters don't care if the USPS is losing money, but they do care if the rates go up, or if people are laid off. Ideally the Congress should give the USPS more autonomy, to be able to manage itself without Congress imposing political concerns.
There will be (I hope) a push by Pakistani companies against this insane law because it makes it impossible for any Pakistani people or companies to do any work with any company outside Pakistan. It's unimaginable that any company would blow a hole in their security just to satisfy Pakistan's insecurity, so if they actually enforce this law all it will do is force everyone to shift their business from Pakistan to some other country.
Yes, their economy is in terrible shape. But IMO that means that they really cannot afford to destroy what little industry they do have doing business internationally.
And if that doesn't work, the embarassment of having written a law that forces businesses to work with (for example) India instead of Pakistan will (IMO) do the trick.
I'd agree that interpreted languages (with BASIC and Logo being examples) are great for programming. The edit/compile/run cycle causes too much friction, discouraging kids from experimenting.
But having taught hundreds of kids programming, there's a huge difference between BASIC and Logo. Logo is a simple but powerful language that teaches kids how to express what they want to a computer. BASIC is a complicated but limited language that mainly confuses kids and teaches them loads of incorrect beliefs that make it hard for them to eventually learn to express themselves clearly. Certainly starting with BASIC can be recovered from (Dykstra was being overly dramatic) but I would advocate doing that to anyone on purpose.
Of the introductory languages that I've taught, I think that Logo was the best introduction, because it's the simplest, most natural syntax, with the ability to easily generate graphics that engage students. And while most people don't notice, Logo is a fully expressive programming language.
For comparable, but more modern languages that are good for introducing kids to programming, there is Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), which is friendly and interpreted and visual. Also free and open source.
Reading the ClubCompy web site, they built something that is intended to be simple for kids to experiment, with no install, and thus is a "computer" interpreted in JavaScript. This seems like a nice idea. No real connection to BASIC or Logo, other than they want to achieve the simplicity and openness to experimentation that those languages represent. After giving it a look over, I like the fact that their language based on LOGO, but am not thrilled that they added LINE NUMBERS. I can't believe that it's a good idea to make kids learn about line numbers, with all of the associated complexity, rather than to use a simple text editor. The only reason that line numbers ever made sense is that back in the era when BASIC was invented, you couldn't assume a text editor, or even the ability to move a cursor on the screen (remember working on printing terminals?). But I think that limitation no longer applies. So while I like their goal quite a bit, I have a feeling that they would have been better off sticking with an existing simple language, such as python, lua, or even Logo.
MoldySpore: "They've been robbing their customers for years."
Pyite: "Their customers, who are by and large not idiots, would obviously leave them if this were the case. Yet, they do not leave. They realize the simple truth that Goldman is extremely good at what they do and that includes helping customers make money."
Pyite is right, GS hasn't been robbing their customers. They have been robbing from everyone ELSE, making money for themselves and (sometimes) their customers. So yes, GS is good at making money, but by doing things that are at best ethically questionable, and of no value to society or to the market.
"The primary function of a phone is to make phone calls."
Which the iPhone 4 does quite well, unless you hold the bottom left corner.
The issue is a real one, but it doesn't render the phone useless. You just can't hold it on one corner, unless you put your phone into a phone case (which is what most people do with expensive phones).
"Absolutely overstated! I mean, who really wants their phone to actually BEHAVE as a phone! Insanity, I tell you, insanity!"
That pretty much makes the parent article's point. In reality the iPhone 4 works fine as a phone - certainly better than the iPhone 3, due to the longer antenna. It has a limitation, in that if you bridge the antenna by holding one particular spot on the corner, the signal gets weaker. That is an annoyance, but in return for having to not hold that one spot (or get a case for your phone, which most people do), you get much better reception than phones with smaller, internal antennas. That doesn't sound like an unreasonable design trade-off to me.
"a company is quelling discussion about how their product has an easily demonstrated hardware issue, and you see nothing wrong with that?"
If that were what was going on, I would have a problem with that. But Apple is not deleting all posts that are critical of their antenna design/reception issues - it's easy to find such discussions in their forums, and in fact there are many more such discussions that the few that were deleted. Apple deleted some specific discussions that veered into trolling/flaming, including some highly negative discussions of Consumer Reports, which are off topic for a technical support forum.
So the initial claim was overblown and unsupported by the evidence. Still, it's posted by an anonymous reader, so shouldn't be taken too seriously without independent verification. Unfortunately, Slashdot's posting without any research has triggered a flood of posting by people eager to vent their personal opinion of Apple, without any particular relationship to what Apple actually did or didn't do.
A few years ago I was building a team to build a system (Pando, http://www.pando.com/ that needed to be efficient and small on both Mac and Windows (i.e. C++ code), plus a Java server side. I talked to plenty of recent graduates of CS programs, and it was easy to staff the server side work (Java, PHP), and at least find people who wanted to learn Mac development (ObjC), but nobody knew anything about C++/Win32 or was even willing to learn it. Luckily I found a fantastic old-school developer who did a great job, but it was quite an eye opener to find that schools weren't training CS students anything about what I thought was Microsoft's core asset (Win32).
"It seems to me that the main complaint about ePub is that it is text-centric, and doesn't do well with any book that requires a particular formatting, or includes anything other than text."
Actually, ePub supports graphics and other markup embedded in the text. The main difference between ePub and PDF is that PDF is page-oriented, which works great for documents that require specific page layout, and which will only be displayed in predefined page layouts (i.e. on large, high-resolution monitors). ePub, on the other hand, is designed for documents that are primarily text, with only simple markup (images, basic formatting, basic structure). That way the documents can reflow to suit different eReader resolutions, changing font settings, etc.
That being said, there are some kinds of books that don't work well as ePub. For example, a text book needs to look exactly the same to each student so that the teacher can refer to specific parts of the book (e.g. "read pages 14-17").
"what's wrong with plain old PDF? I know EPUB is good for text, but poorly suited for things demanding a specialized layout like comics, but PDF handles that just fine."
That's exactly what is wrong with PDF format. It is designed for capturing a precise page layout, which is great for moving printed documents around between fast computers with large monitors, but turns out to be terrible for documents to be displayed on ebook readers for several reasons. First, it does not allow text to be reflowed for rendering on smaller/lower resolution screens. Second, it's a very complex format, requiring far more software, CPU and RAM to render than is required to render a book that is primarily text.
This is why ePub was invented - it's a simple markup language that can be easily implemented on low-end hardware, and which supports reflowing text.
In case anyone is thinking that this is somehow a 'security flaw' in BitTorrent, we should be clear that privacy is not a design goal of BitTorrent; BitTorrent was designed to provide extremely reliable, efficient file delivery. So while BitTorrent has many strengths (efficiency, etc.) there is a tradeoff between its goals and the goals of a network such as Tor. Specifically, in order to maximize efficiency, BitTorrent distributes your IP address quite openly, has consistent and obvious torrent IDs, etc., which make it efficient and reliable, but pretty much the OPPOSITE of concealing what you are doing from your ISP and the rest of the p2p network. Anyone who was surprised that it's easy to monitor BitTorrent traffic hasn't read the protocol spec - it is EXTREMELY easy to monitor activity in BitTorrent networks, because BitTorrent intentionally distributes everyone's IP addresses, transfer activity, etc., in order to allow the protocol to operate efficiently. So if you want to monitor BitTorrent, you just find tracker addresses and torrent IDs (which are in the.torrent files) and ask the trackers and for the addresses of all of the peers in each torrent, and get back a nice list of peers.
There are other p2p networks that do attempt to conceal what you are doing in the network, but the cost of that is that they generally are inefficient (wasting tons of CPU and bandwidth) and thus perform badly, making them unpopular with people who want to rapidly download files.
And I will second the note that running BitTorrent through Tor is a terrible idea. You end up with the worst of both networks - terrible performance and not much security. Worse, doing so damages the rest of the Tor network, interfering with people who are using Tor for what it is designed for.
While I like getting stuff for free as much as anyone, I hope that this experiment in getting people to pay for content succeeds, because I think that having all content online (except for porn) free with advertising is too constraining. It costs real money to collect and report news, and if there is no real revenue stream the whole thing breaks down. And while I am a strong supporter of citizen journalism, and am in awe of the amazing coverage that people can generate around causes that make them passionate, I believe that there should also be full time, professional journalists and photographers covering news stories, which means that there needs to be some revenue stream associated with providing news.
That being said, I think that it's almost impossible for content distributors to individually charge for access to content, because it induces too much friction into the process. Specifically, people get content from many places, and it is inefficient for them to maintain a business relationship (with payment info, terms, etc.) individually for every content distributor. For example, I read a dozen web sites regularly (XKCD, Slashdot, daikykos,...) and I do not want to deal with the hassle of setting up accounts, billing, etc., for all of them. But if I could set up one account that could then send money to support the sites that I go to, I would not mind paying for that. Given that I already have a financial relationship with my ISP, and my ISP knows (theoretically) where I go online, I wouldn't mind having my ISP take, say, $1/month and send it to the web sites that I frequent. If you add up $1/month for everyone online, that would be a nice revenue stream to support sites, without the sites having to set up pay-walls, force people to register, etc., and by keeping the cost low and simple, it would encourage everyone to participate.
Admittedly this would require ISPs to collect money and give it away, but it could be a competitive advantage, in that web sites would encourage people to use ISPs that support them, and I would hope that people would go out of their way to use ISPs that support the web sites that they like.
I have a nook, and I like it quite a bit. In particular: - It's very open. Plug it into a computer and drag PDF or ePub files onto it. And MP3 files to listen to, or JPG or PNG image files (for 'wallpaper'). xkcd makes for great b&w 'wallpaper'. This means that you can easily write a script to (for example) pull down the latest news in an RSS feed into an ePub (via feedbooks), and drop it onto the nook. This is much nicer than having to pay Amazon to send files via wireless into the Kindle. - The color, touch display. eInk is great to read, but is so slow that it makes interaction painful. On the nook much of the interaction is on the color touch-screen, so you can tap on a button and see it respond immediately, etc. - it is an android device, so it is easy to write software for it, and to 'hack' it to run such software. So (http://www.nookdevs.com) there are already good RSS reader, web browser, etc. - It has WiFi and 3G data, so you can buy books anywhere, and (with lightweight hacking) read RSS feeds, etc., via WiFi. Apps don't use 3G (that would be costing b&n money, which would not be cool).
The other interesting development is that there are dozens of generic eReaders coming. Remember how last year digital picture frames popped up everywhere? This year it will be eReaders. Pretty soon, for $150 you will be able to buy eReaders with SD or MicroSD card slots that will play all of the standard formats (ePub, PDF). This may do for eBooks what the iPod did for music, which will be great for people who like reading books, but may not be good for people who sell books. Perhaps authors will start selling direct? These devices are coming from a wide range of companies, all with pretty much the same specs. So it is shaping up to be a large, competitive market. Fun for consumers!
Exactly. Getting something to run on an Xbox 360, a PS3 and a Wii is very hard because they are very different platforms. So while there are frameworks and tools that help get the code running on all platforms, so the differences between the hardware is less of a hassle than it used to be, it's a lot of work making the game run *well* on all platforms. For example, you can't use the same 3d models or textures on a Wii and a PS3 or Xbox 360, so you need to redo them (unless you want the PS3 and Xbox 360 to look like a Wii). And, of course, each company has its own approval process, with its own UI standards, etc., as well as unique hardware to be taken into account (e.g. Wiimote). What this means is that while you can reuse the core logic, level design, etc., there's still tons of work to do for each additional platform.
"I don't want to be inflammatory, but having "concerns regarding the future of their existing setups" when using a piece of free software in version 0.7 for something as important as data storage?"
You are kidding, right?
First, the meaning of version numbers is purely dependent on the project. There are plenty of pieces of software that were fine to use in production with version numbers less than 1.0, and there are plenty of pieces of software with larger version numbers (e.g. every other Linux kernel version) that should not be run in production. FreeNAS extremely stable.
Second, even if the version of the FreeNAS that people used was not stable, it is based on a solid OS, filesystem, file services, web server, etc., that are all quite reliable in production, so even if FreeNAS 0.7 had a problem, the problem would be with some UI or scripting, not with the ability to store and serve data, and the data itself would not be at risk. The reality, of course, is that FreeNAS is one of the more mature, reliable NAS projects, so it doesn't matter much that you don't like the number 0.7.
The real problem here isn't that people were stupid to use FreeNAS, but that the FreeNAS developer is making a controversial move of switching the underlying OS to one that doesn't support a previously supported, and very popular, filesystem. And since data storage is the point of a NAS, that change is unpopular with the users of FreeNAS. The same change would have the same impact whether it was numbered 0.7, 1.0 or 3.1. For example, look at the upgrades from XP (AKA Windows 5) to Windows 7, which requires a data backup and restore, and reinstallation of all applications. I suppose you could attempt to argue that XP was too unstable to rely on, and that upgraders were stupid to have relied on such an immature OS, but that isn't what actually happened. Just as with FreeBSD, the developer chose to make a somewhat incompatible upgrade, and the users have to deal with the fallout.
From my perspective, my data, which is all in ZFS, is more valuable than the particular web/admin tools used to serve the data, so it means that FreeNAS 0.8 won't be an option for me. Luckily there are plenty of options, and migration is easy.
"The GPL wins hands down for insisting that open source work remain open source"
That is exactly why he prefers the MSD and MIT licenses over the GPL licenses - they have different goals. The MIT and BSD licenses give your software away freely to anyone who wants it, which is what you want if you want your software widely used, and the GPL licenses give your software away only to people who agree to also give their software away for free, which is what you want if you want to promote free software. He prefers the former, and you prefer the latter. He stated his preference, and your reply said that he was wrong, which is (IMO) absurd, in that by definition he knows his own preferences better than you do.
"Comcast isn't going to be upgrading its network capacity because they HAVE NO SERIOUS COMPETITION."
This is incorrect. While cable operators don't compete with other cable operators (they almost always have geographical monopolies) they compete vigorously with other ISPs. So if Comcast's network were badly congested their customers could switch to FIOS, or satellite data, DSL, etc.
Compare this to British Telecom, where there isn't any real competition. Their publicly stated goal is to manage their network (using aggressive traffic shaping) so that the network is always saturated.
"It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media."
No, the iPhone is the subject of this article because people use it very differently from other phones, even other smart phones. So while you are right that most phones can technically run apps, and use data, and browse the web, the reality is that people rarely use their other smart phones to do those things. The result is that in the real world iPhone users consume 10x as much bandwidth (on average) as other smartphone users.
That being said, the iPhone should be viewed not as unique, but as a sign of where the industry is going. That is, if Palm and MS and Google and so on can make smartphones that people use as much as iPhones, then the users of those phones will have a similar network consumption model as iPhone users.
The real issue isn't that iPhone customers use the network. The real issue is that the telco's sell expensive smartphones with expensive data plans to their customers, with web browsing, media downloads, video chat, etc., as features. So if the telcos accept the revenue form selling those products and services, the telco's need to be prepared to for them to use those services. It sure looks like AT&T underestimated usage, and is under capacity. So as usual when ISPs screw up capacity planning they are trying to blame their customers. Hopefully they will end up building out capacity to match demand. This is all very familiar - Comcast went through the same routine last year, first blaming users for using their network too much, then (gradually) rolling out DOCSIS 3.0, with the capacity to satisfy demand.
As a number of telco network engineers have explained the situation, they are forced by competition to offer wireless services to customers at very low prices that don't cover the cost of providing those services. So rather than lose money building the capacity to deliver what they sell, their management has decided to run under-capacity.
Since the iPhone is exclusive to AT&T (in the US) AT&T might be able to run under-capacity without losing too many customers. But as other smartphones become more usable, I believe that the same issue will hit all carriers, at which point competition will force them to increase capacity.
"There's a clear parallel with Nintendo's case where reproducing their logo was necessary for interoperability, and although it's never gone to court, the same applies to browser vendors' user-agent strings, including Apple's. Apple's Safari browser claims to be Mozilla in its user-agent string for interoperability purposes. It's hard to see how that differs from what Palm are doing."
Actually, this is very clearly established law. Nintendo put a copyright notice in the ROM of their NES games and made the NES check for the presence of that string before running the game. If a copy didn't put the Nintendo copyright notice in their ROM it wouldn't run, and if they did, they got sued by Nintendo for violating copyright law. It was quite effective, because unlike the crypto-based protections, it was impossible to bypass.:-)
If the files are often the wrong size, it's probably something like CR/LF translation, or shifting reported file size due to filesystem block size. What do you see if you compare the files? Do they have the same checksum on both systems? My guess is that you don't have a tools problem (FTP, lame as it is, is probably not having as many transmission errors as you describe).
In terms of file copying tools, the options that come to mind are:
FTP doesn't check data integrity, but it's fairly reliable nonetheless, due to the TCP layer, which does retransmission, etc. But if there are transmission errors you may not be notified (i.e. you won't know if there's corruption, but you will be told if the connection dropped. So don't use it.
SCP does check data integrity, so if there's a problem in transmission it'll detect it and tell you, but it won't correct the error - you'll have to script re-sending if there's an error.
rsync checks the integrity of each delivered file, which is great. That being said, rsync is really designed to duplicate a directory tree from one machine to another, not copy individual files, so you may need to play with it a bit to do what you want.
Pando (http://www.pando.com) gives you the above plus data validation and retransmission, which might help in your situation. I've used it when sending very large files over unreliable connections (e.g. dial, weak wireless) and it'll keep hammering away until the data gets through. It's primarily a GUI app (Windows, Mac, Linux) so it's more of a consumer tool, but it can be scripted, etc., so depending on your application it might be what you want.
"The kicker of all this electronic voting is that is easy. It really is, it's a damn simple problem to solve. Even online voting."
Speaking as someone who has been involved in electronic voting for many years, this is a familiar claim made by people who haven't thought about voting. Yes, it looks easy to count votes, but it's hard to count votes in a way that leads to trustworthy elections.
Privacy is fundamental, because it prevents vote buying/coercion. It MUST be impossible for ANYONE to know how anyone else voted, even if the voter wants to let them. This is important because if it is possible to know how someone else votes, it is then possible to coerce them into voting "the right way". This is a real problem with mail-in ballots, which are a huge source of vote fraud now. This means that voters cannot retain a receipt for their votes. And it means that voter ID's cannot be known to the voting machine, and thus recorded in voting machine audit logs, so that individual votes cannot be reconstructed later.
Voter verification is important, of course, because only valid voters should be able to vote, and only once.
Transparency is also critical. That is, any interested party should be (at least in principle) able to observe the entire vote counting process without having to trust any "black box" process, software, etc.
Audibility is the basis of trusting the system. That is, it should be possible for an independent party to recount the voter-verified records of the votes (for an audit or recount) and achieve the same result as the official system.
There are some pretty obvious contradictions between the requirements, in the context of online voting. For example, you need to be able to verify voters, but are not allowed to know any unique identifier of voters.
Exactly. Congrat's on being the only person in the discussion to read the article.
Apple did not reject the app because of emulation. Apple rejected the app because it contains a C64 Store that looks like it bypasses the Apple Store, allowing users to download C64 software straight into the emulator. That's prohibited, whether it's interpreted or compiled.
All of this was clear in Apple's rejection notice, quoted in the actual article.
This article is extremely misleading, resulting in tons of off-target flaming.
Apple doesn't prohibit apps using emulation, they prohibit apps that download and run arbitrary code, bypassing the Apple Store. The mistakes that the developers made were (1) putting a C64 Store into the app, and (2) putting a BASIC interpreter in the emulator. If it's tweaked slightly so that the games are downloaded through the Apple Store 3, and the BASIC interpreter is removed (it's useless anyway), I'm sure that it would be approved.
The developers probably decided to push the boundaries a bit in order to generate some news/press coverage. Pretty clever, actually - now Slashdot and other geek news sites is promoting them, and their app will still get approved in a week or two.
Slashdot Mirror
"The big problem is that the USPS is horribly inefficient"
While this might be consistent with right-wing anti-government ideology, in reality the USPS is extremely efficient - they deliver a stunning volume of mail rapidly and reliably, at extremely low cost (15-30 cents/letter, vs $18 for a FedEx package). Their big problem is that Congress regulates the USPS, forcing them to lose money and then complaining that they're losing money. So, IMO, it's not the USPS that is broken, but Congress.
FedEx pays much more per package for labor. But as a percentage FedEx' labor costs are lower because FedEx delivers $18 packages, while the USPS delivers 15-30 cent letters.
The big problem for the USPS has is that they are required to do whatever Congress says, and prohibited from doing anything else. And, in particular, Congress has its own agenda, so even when the USPS knows what to do, it takes them years to decades to be allowed to make changes. For example, they were recently authorized to change smaller post offices from being dedicated buildings to being a service provided within an existing business - that took YEARS to pass, because congressmen didn't want to lose a "real post office" for their constituents, so the USPS was required by Congress to lose money on hundreds of tiny post offices. And if they need to raise the rates, or streamline operations, they are routinely blocked by Congress, because the voters don't care if the USPS is losing money, but they do care if the rates go up, or if people are laid off. Ideally the Congress should give the USPS more autonomy, to be able to manage itself without Congress imposing political concerns.
There will be (I hope) a push by Pakistani companies against this insane law because it makes it impossible for any Pakistani people or companies to do any work with any company outside Pakistan. It's unimaginable that any company would blow a hole in their security just to satisfy Pakistan's insecurity, so if they actually enforce this law all it will do is force everyone to shift their business from Pakistan to some other country.
Yes, their economy is in terrible shape. But IMO that means that they really cannot afford to destroy what little industry they do have doing business internationally.
And if that doesn't work, the embarassment of having written a law that forces businesses to work with (for example) India instead of Pakistan will (IMO) do the trick.
I'd agree that interpreted languages (with BASIC and Logo being examples) are great for programming. The edit/compile/run cycle causes too much friction, discouraging kids from experimenting.
But having taught hundreds of kids programming, there's a huge difference between BASIC and Logo. Logo is a simple but powerful language that teaches kids how to express what they want to a computer. BASIC is a complicated but limited language that mainly confuses kids and teaches them loads of incorrect beliefs that make it hard for them to eventually learn to express themselves clearly. Certainly starting with BASIC can be recovered from (Dykstra was being overly dramatic) but I would advocate doing that to anyone on purpose.
Of the introductory languages that I've taught, I think that Logo was the best introduction, because it's the simplest, most natural syntax, with the ability to easily generate graphics that engage students. And while most people don't notice, Logo is a fully expressive programming language.
For comparable, but more modern languages that are good for introducing kids to programming, there is Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), which is friendly and interpreted and visual. Also free and open source.
Reading the ClubCompy web site, they built something that is intended to be simple for kids to experiment, with no install, and thus is a "computer" interpreted in JavaScript. This seems like a nice idea. No real connection to BASIC or Logo, other than they want to achieve the simplicity and openness to experimentation that those languages represent. After giving it a look over, I like the fact that their language based on LOGO, but am not thrilled that they added LINE NUMBERS. I can't believe that it's a good idea to make kids learn about line numbers, with all of the associated complexity, rather than to use a simple text editor. The only reason that line numbers ever made sense is that back in the era when BASIC was invented, you couldn't assume a text editor, or even the ability to move a cursor on the screen (remember working on printing terminals?). But I think that limitation no longer applies. So while I like their goal quite a bit, I have a feeling that they would have been better off sticking with an existing simple language, such as python, lua, or even Logo.
MoldySpore: "They've been robbing their customers for years."
Pyite: "Their customers, who are by and large not idiots, would obviously leave them if this were the case. Yet, they do not leave. They realize the simple truth that Goldman is extremely good at what they do and that includes helping customers make money."
Pyite is right, GS hasn't been robbing their customers. They have been robbing from everyone ELSE, making money for themselves and (sometimes) their customers. So yes, GS is good at making money, but by doing things that are at best ethically questionable, and of no value to society or to the market.
"The primary function of a phone is to make phone calls."
Which the iPhone 4 does quite well, unless you hold the bottom left corner.
The issue is a real one, but it doesn't render the phone useless. You just can't hold it on one corner, unless you put your phone into a phone case (which is what most people do with expensive phones).
"Absolutely overstated! I mean, who really wants their phone to actually BEHAVE as a phone! Insanity, I tell you, insanity!"
That pretty much makes the parent article's point. In reality the iPhone 4 works fine as a phone - certainly better than the iPhone 3, due to the longer antenna. It has a limitation, in that if you bridge the antenna by holding one particular spot on the corner, the signal gets weaker. That is an annoyance, but in return for having to not hold that one spot (or get a case for your phone, which most people do), you get much better reception than phones with smaller, internal antennas. That doesn't sound like an unreasonable design trade-off to me.
"a company is quelling discussion about how their product has an easily demonstrated hardware issue, and you see nothing wrong with that?"
If that were what was going on, I would have a problem with that. But Apple is not deleting all posts that are critical of their antenna design/reception issues - it's easy to find such discussions in their forums, and in fact there are many more such discussions that the few that were deleted. Apple deleted some specific discussions that veered into trolling/flaming, including some highly negative discussions of Consumer Reports, which are off topic for a technical support forum.
So the initial claim was overblown and unsupported by the evidence. Still, it's posted by an anonymous reader, so shouldn't be taken too seriously without independent verification. Unfortunately, Slashdot's posting without any research has triggered a flood of posting by people eager to vent their personal opinion of Apple, without any particular relationship to what Apple actually did or didn't do.
A few years ago I was building a team to build a system (Pando, http://www.pando.com/ that needed to be efficient and small on both Mac and Windows (i.e. C++ code), plus a Java server side. I talked to plenty of recent graduates of CS programs, and it was easy to staff the server side work (Java, PHP), and at least find people who wanted to learn Mac development (ObjC), but nobody knew anything about C++/Win32 or was even willing to learn it. Luckily I found a fantastic old-school developer who did a great job, but it was quite an eye opener to find that schools weren't training CS students anything about what I thought was Microsoft's core asset (Win32).
"It seems to me that the main complaint about ePub is that it is text-centric, and doesn't do well with any book that requires a particular formatting, or includes anything other than text."
Actually, ePub supports graphics and other markup embedded in the text. The main difference between ePub and PDF is that PDF is page-oriented, which works great for documents that require specific page layout, and which will only be displayed in predefined page layouts (i.e. on large, high-resolution monitors). ePub, on the other hand, is designed for documents that are primarily text, with only simple markup (images, basic formatting, basic structure). That way the documents can reflow to suit different eReader resolutions, changing font settings, etc.
That being said, there are some kinds of books that don't work well as ePub. For example, a text book needs to look exactly the same to each student so that the teacher can refer to specific parts of the book (e.g. "read pages 14-17").
"what's wrong with plain old PDF? I know EPUB is good for text, but poorly suited for things demanding a specialized layout like comics, but PDF handles that just fine."
That's exactly what is wrong with PDF format. It is designed for capturing a precise page layout, which is great for moving printed documents around between fast computers with large monitors, but turns out to be terrible for documents to be displayed on ebook readers for several reasons. First, it does not allow text to be reflowed for rendering on smaller/lower resolution screens. Second, it's a very complex format, requiring far more software, CPU and RAM to render than is required to render a book that is primarily text.
This is why ePub was invented - it's a simple markup language that can be easily implemented on low-end hardware, and which supports reflowing text.
In case anyone is thinking that this is somehow a 'security flaw' in BitTorrent, we should be clear that privacy is not a design goal of BitTorrent; BitTorrent was designed to provide extremely reliable, efficient file delivery. So while BitTorrent has many strengths (efficiency, etc.) there is a tradeoff between its goals and the goals of a network such as Tor. Specifically, in order to maximize efficiency, BitTorrent distributes your IP address quite openly, has consistent and obvious torrent IDs, etc., which make it efficient and reliable, but pretty much the OPPOSITE of concealing what you are doing from your ISP and the rest of the p2p network. Anyone who was surprised that it's easy to monitor BitTorrent traffic hasn't read the protocol spec - it is EXTREMELY easy to monitor activity in BitTorrent networks, because BitTorrent intentionally distributes everyone's IP addresses, transfer activity, etc., in order to allow the protocol to operate efficiently. So if you want to monitor BitTorrent, you just find tracker addresses and torrent IDs (which are in the .torrent files) and ask the trackers and for the addresses of all of the peers in each torrent, and get back a nice list of peers.
There are other p2p networks that do attempt to conceal what you are doing in the network, but the cost of that is that they generally are inefficient (wasting tons of CPU and bandwidth) and thus perform badly, making them unpopular with people who want to rapidly download files.
And I will second the note that running BitTorrent through Tor is a terrible idea. You end up with the worst of both networks - terrible performance and not much security. Worse, doing so damages the rest of the Tor network, interfering with people who are using Tor for what it is designed for.
While I like getting stuff for free as much as anyone, I hope that this experiment in getting people to pay for content succeeds, because I think that having all content online (except for porn) free with advertising is too constraining. It costs real money to collect and report news, and if there is no real revenue stream the whole thing breaks down. And while I am a strong supporter of citizen journalism, and am in awe of the amazing coverage that people can generate around causes that make them passionate, I believe that there should also be full time, professional journalists and photographers covering news stories, which means that there needs to be some revenue stream associated with providing news.
That being said, I think that it's almost impossible for content distributors to individually charge for access to content, because it induces too much friction into the process. Specifically, people get content from many places, and it is inefficient for them to maintain a business relationship (with payment info, terms, etc.) individually for every content distributor. For example, I read a dozen web sites regularly (XKCD, Slashdot, daikykos, ...) and I do not want to deal with the hassle of setting up accounts, billing, etc., for all of them. But if I could set up one account that could then send money to support the sites that I go to, I would not mind paying for that. Given that I already have a financial relationship with my ISP, and my ISP knows (theoretically) where I go online, I wouldn't mind having my ISP take, say, $1/month and send it to the web sites that I frequent. If you add up $1/month for everyone online, that would be a nice revenue stream to support sites, without the sites having to set up pay-walls, force people to register, etc., and by keeping the cost low and simple, it would encourage everyone to participate.
Admittedly this would require ISPs to collect money and give it away, but it could be a competitive advantage, in that web sites would encourage people to use ISPs that support them, and I would hope that people would go out of their way to use ISPs that support the web sites that they like.
I have a nook, and I like it quite a bit. In particular:
- It's very open. Plug it into a computer and drag PDF or ePub files onto it. And MP3 files to listen to, or JPG or PNG image files (for 'wallpaper'). xkcd makes for great b&w 'wallpaper'. This means that you can easily write a script to (for example) pull down the latest news in an RSS feed into an ePub (via feedbooks), and drop it onto the nook. This is much nicer than having to pay Amazon to send files via wireless into the Kindle.
- The color, touch display. eInk is great to read, but is so slow that it makes interaction painful. On the nook much of the interaction is on the color touch-screen, so you can tap on a button and see it respond immediately, etc.
- it is an android device, so it is easy to write software for it, and to 'hack' it to run such software. So (http://www.nookdevs.com) there are already good RSS reader, web browser, etc.
- It has WiFi and 3G data, so you can buy books anywhere, and (with lightweight hacking) read RSS feeds, etc., via WiFi. Apps don't use 3G (that would be costing b&n money, which would not be cool).
The other interesting development is that there are dozens of generic eReaders coming. Remember how last year digital picture frames popped up everywhere? This year it will be eReaders. Pretty soon, for $150 you will be able to buy eReaders with SD or MicroSD card slots that will play all of the standard formats (ePub, PDF). This may do for eBooks what the iPod did for music, which will be great for people who like reading books, but may not be good for people who sell books. Perhaps authors will start selling direct? These devices are coming from a wide range of companies, all with pretty much the same specs. So it is shaping up to be a large, competitive market. Fun for consumers!
Exactly. Getting something to run on an Xbox 360, a PS3 and a Wii is very hard because they are very different platforms. So while there are frameworks and tools that help get the code running on all platforms, so the differences between the hardware is less of a hassle than it used to be, it's a lot of work making the game run *well* on all platforms. For example, you can't use the same 3d models or textures on a Wii and a PS3 or Xbox 360, so you need to redo them (unless you want the PS3 and Xbox 360 to look like a Wii). And, of course, each company has its own approval process, with its own UI standards, etc., as well as unique hardware to be taken into account (e.g. Wiimote). What this means is that while you can reuse the core logic, level design, etc., there's still tons of work to do for each additional platform.
"I don't want to be inflammatory, but having "concerns regarding the future of their existing setups" when using a piece of free software in version 0.7 for something as important as data storage?"
You are kidding, right?
First, the meaning of version numbers is purely dependent on the project. There are plenty of pieces of software that were fine to use in production with version numbers less than 1.0, and there are plenty of pieces of software with larger version numbers (e.g. every other Linux kernel version) that should not be run in production. FreeNAS extremely stable.
Second, even if the version of the FreeNAS that people used was not stable, it is based on a solid OS, filesystem, file services, web server, etc., that are all quite reliable in production, so even if FreeNAS 0.7 had a problem, the problem would be with some UI or scripting, not with the ability to store and serve data, and the data itself would not be at risk. The reality, of course, is that FreeNAS is one of the more mature, reliable NAS projects, so it doesn't matter much that you don't like the number 0.7.
The real problem here isn't that people were stupid to use FreeNAS, but that the FreeNAS developer is making a controversial move of switching the underlying OS to one that doesn't support a previously supported, and very popular, filesystem. And since data storage is the point of a NAS, that change is unpopular with the users of FreeNAS. The same change would have the same impact whether it was numbered 0.7, 1.0 or 3.1. For example, look at the upgrades from XP (AKA Windows 5) to Windows 7, which requires a data backup and restore, and reinstallation of all applications. I suppose you could attempt to argue that XP was too unstable to rely on, and that upgraders were stupid to have relied on such an immature OS, but that isn't what actually happened. Just as with FreeBSD, the developer chose to make a somewhat incompatible upgrade, and the users have to deal with the fallout.
From my perspective, my data, which is all in ZFS, is more valuable than the particular web/admin tools used to serve the data, so it means that FreeNAS 0.8 won't be an option for me. Luckily there are plenty of options, and migration is easy.
"The GPL wins hands down for insisting that open source work remain open source"
That is exactly why he prefers the MSD and MIT licenses over the GPL licenses - they have different goals. The MIT and BSD licenses give your software away freely to anyone who wants it, which is what you want if you want your software widely used, and the GPL licenses give your software away only to people who agree to also give their software away for free, which is what you want if you want to promote free software. He prefers the former, and you prefer the latter. He stated his preference, and your reply said that he was wrong, which is (IMO) absurd, in that by definition he knows his own preferences better than you do.
"Comcast isn't going to be upgrading its network capacity because they HAVE NO SERIOUS COMPETITION."
This is incorrect. While cable operators don't compete with other cable operators (they almost always have geographical monopolies) they compete vigorously with other ISPs. So if Comcast's network were badly congested their customers could switch to FIOS, or satellite data, DSL, etc.
Compare this to British Telecom, where there isn't any real competition. Their publicly stated goal is to manage their network (using aggressive traffic shaping) so that the network is always saturated.
"It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media."
No, the iPhone is the subject of this article because people use it very differently from other phones, even other smart phones. So while you are right that most phones can technically run apps, and use data, and browse the web, the reality is that people rarely use their other smart phones to do those things. The result is that in the real world iPhone users consume 10x as much bandwidth (on average) as other smartphone users.
That being said, the iPhone should be viewed not as unique, but as a sign of where the industry is going. That is, if Palm and MS and Google and so on can make smartphones that people use as much as iPhones, then the users of those phones will have a similar network consumption model as iPhone users.
The real issue isn't that iPhone customers use the network. The real issue is that the telco's sell expensive smartphones with expensive data plans to their customers, with web browsing, media downloads, video chat, etc., as features. So if the telcos accept the revenue form selling those products and services, the telco's need to be prepared to for them to use those services. It sure looks like AT&T underestimated usage, and is under capacity. So as usual when ISPs screw up capacity planning they are trying to blame their customers. Hopefully they will end up building out capacity to match demand. This is all very familiar - Comcast went through the same routine last year, first blaming users for using their network too much, then (gradually) rolling out DOCSIS 3.0, with the capacity to satisfy demand.
As a number of telco network engineers have explained the situation, they are forced by competition to offer wireless services to customers at very low prices that don't cover the cost of providing those services. So rather than lose money building the capacity to deliver what they sell, their management has decided to run under-capacity.
Since the iPhone is exclusive to AT&T (in the US) AT&T might be able to run under-capacity without losing too many customers. But as other smartphones become more usable, I believe that the same issue will hit all carriers, at which point competition will force them to increase capacity.
"There's a clear parallel with Nintendo's case where reproducing their logo was necessary for interoperability, and although it's never gone to court, the same applies to browser vendors' user-agent strings, including Apple's. Apple's Safari browser claims to be Mozilla in its user-agent string for interoperability purposes. It's hard to see how that differs from what Palm are doing."
Actually, this is very clearly established law. Nintendo put a copyright notice in the ROM of their NES games and made the NES check for the presence of that string before running the game. If a copy didn't put the Nintendo copyright notice in their ROM it wouldn't run, and if they did, they got sued by Nintendo for violating copyright law. It was quite effective, because unlike the crypto-based protections, it was impossible to bypass. :-)
If the files are often the wrong size, it's probably something like CR/LF translation, or shifting reported file size due to filesystem block size. What do you see if you compare the files? Do they have the same checksum on both systems? My guess is that you don't have a tools problem (FTP, lame as it is, is probably not having as many transmission errors as you describe).
In terms of file copying tools, the options that come to mind are:
FTP doesn't check data integrity, but it's fairly reliable nonetheless, due to the TCP layer, which does retransmission, etc. But if there are transmission errors you may not be notified (i.e. you won't know if there's corruption, but you will be told if the connection dropped. So don't use it.
SCP does check data integrity, so if there's a problem in transmission it'll detect it and tell you, but it won't correct the error - you'll have to script re-sending if there's an error.
rsync checks the integrity of each delivered file, which is great. That being said, rsync is really designed to duplicate a directory tree from one machine to another, not copy individual files, so you may need to play with it a bit to do what you want.
Pando (http://www.pando.com) gives you the above plus data validation and retransmission, which might help in your situation. I've used it when sending very large files over unreliable connections (e.g. dial, weak wireless) and it'll keep hammering away until the data gets through. It's primarily a GUI app (Windows, Mac, Linux) so it's more of a consumer tool, but it can be scripted, etc., so depending on your application it might be what you want.
"The kicker of all this electronic voting is that is easy. It really is, it's a damn simple problem to solve. Even online voting."
Speaking as someone who has been involved in electronic voting for many years, this is a familiar claim made by people who haven't thought about voting. Yes, it looks easy to count votes, but it's hard to count votes in a way that leads to trustworthy elections.
Privacy is fundamental, because it prevents vote buying/coercion. It MUST be impossible for ANYONE to know how anyone else voted, even if the voter wants to let them. This is important because if it is possible to know how someone else votes, it is then possible to coerce them into voting "the right way". This is a real problem with mail-in ballots, which are a huge source of vote fraud now. This means that voters cannot retain a receipt for their votes. And it means that voter ID's cannot be known to the voting machine, and thus recorded in voting machine audit logs, so that individual votes cannot be reconstructed later.
Voter verification is important, of course, because only valid voters should be able to vote, and only once.
Transparency is also critical. That is, any interested party should be (at least in principle) able to observe the entire vote counting process without having to trust any "black box" process, software, etc.
Audibility is the basis of trusting the system. That is, it should be possible for an independent party to recount the voter-verified records of the votes (for an audit or recount) and achieve the same result as the official system.
There are some pretty obvious contradictions between the requirements, in the context of online voting. For example, you need to be able to verify voters, but are not allowed to know any unique identifier of voters.
Exactly. Congrat's on being the only person in the discussion to read the article.
Apple did not reject the app because of emulation. Apple rejected the app because it contains a C64 Store that looks like it bypasses the Apple Store, allowing users to download C64 software straight into the emulator. That's prohibited, whether it's interpreted or compiled.
All of this was clear in Apple's rejection notice, quoted in the actual article.
This article is extremely misleading, resulting in tons of off-target flaming.
Apple doesn't prohibit apps using emulation, they prohibit apps that download and run arbitrary code, bypassing the Apple Store. The mistakes that the developers made were (1) putting a C64 Store into the app, and (2) putting a BASIC interpreter in the emulator. If it's tweaked slightly so that the games are downloaded through the Apple Store 3, and the BASIC interpreter is removed (it's useless anyway), I'm sure that it would be approved.
The developers probably decided to push the boundaries a bit in order to generate some news/press coverage. Pretty clever, actually - now Slashdot and other geek news sites is promoting them, and their app will still get approved in a week or two.