That's what I was thinking. I'm a bit ignorant on the specific issue with Java3D though, maybe you can set me straight. For any other library we just bundle everything up into a single (signed) jar file which can then be used with Java Web Start or as a stand-alone application. However, since Java3D requires native libraries to get decent performance, I have been under the impression that users had to run the Java3D installer separately (same for JMF). If we can get away without doing so, that would be nice.
Many of the Oracle enterprise applications are Web Start applications.
But they don't use Java3D or JAI, and thus won't have this problem. Honestly, I'm not surprised at this move. Java3D and JMF have been neglected by Sun for years, and are pretty much considered to be abandoned APIs (for example JMF has no x86-64 support, and Java3D only supports the software renderer for x86-64). We have been moving away from them wherever possible.
if I remember correctly they stated that they will put it inside cars and other embedded devices
Yeah, I read that too. Problem is that no-one has made any agreements with them to use the OS. So they are basically just pissing away money in the hope that someone somewhere might want to license the OS, without having any concrete plans for it.
Oh, and multitouch should be banned from car dashboards. It is the worst possible interface for that situation as requires constant focus on the display for the entire time it is being used, and thus causes far more driver distraction than physical knobs.
The target use case for something like this is CXOs tweaking their Powerpoint presentations while on the plane, or proof reading and correcting reports while on the subway. No, you wouldn't want to make the whole thing on the tablet, but being able to make minor changes on the go is a useful feature.
I think you misunderstand what sort of ToS he is talking about. A real contract signed with cable company, or a EULA that you agree to when installing software or a ToS that you agree to when creating an account at a website are almost always valid and enforcable. However, he is talking about the blanket ToS that you can find linked in small print at the bottom of almost any corporate website. Companies act like they are legally binding even though visitors of the site were never shown the ToS, never agreed with them, and the vast majority don't even know they exist.
They are every bit as invalid as the ToS that he is sending.
Netflix did better than I thought they would. They only lost 4% of their subscribers over this, and it looks like their revenue is going to go up. Pretending that everyone was on the cheapest plan, they used to have 25 million subscribers paying $10 a month for $250 million/month. Now they have 21.8 million paying for streaming and another 14.2 million paying for DVD, each at $8 a month for a total of $288 million/month. Since the price of the larger plans didn't change as much as the cheapest one, I think it is safe to say that they will be making more money when this is done than they did before.
Suppose they had given a $2 discount for people on both plans, like I thought they should. They would have increased revenue further by doing that if everyone stayed, and 2.6 million more people decided to go with both plans, or alternately if the same number left but 4 million decided to have both plans. Of course, that doesn't consider increased costs of both plans.
Look at page 25 of the Skien Whitepaper. Using C implementations, Skien-512 outperforms SHA-512 and Skien-256 is only about 75% slower than SHA-256 on a 32 bit CPU. That isn't unacceptably slow.
Research money has to come from somewhere. It can come from your taxes, it can come from university money, or it can (and does) come from a combination of the two.
The entire reason that we fund research is because we believe the knowledge will help advance society. Given that, more widely this knowledge is used, the greater effect it will have and the more it will improve the standard of living. By restricting who can use the knowledge we are artificially decreasing our return on investment for tax-funded research. I would argue that the opportunity cost of doing so far outweighs the money saved by university patent revenue.
It is -- in the same way that a public ampitheater paid for by the people is available "to the people." Not every person has the right to use the stage at any given time,
That is because it is impossible for everyone to use the same physical object by once. Knowledge doesn't have this limitation. It is one thing to artificially limit the use of knowledge in order to allow those who funded the research to recoup their costs (and some), but to artificially limit the use of knowledge by the very people who paid for is completely counter-productive.
In addition, the research is available -- that's the very purpose of encouraging patent disclosures -- it is merely the commercialization of the research that is temporarily restricted. Don' like it? Design around it.
You find work-arounds for the 250,000 patents that apply to your new device, or sufficient improvements to weigh against the thousands of rights holders. All work builds off what came before it, and it is impossible to design anything without it infringing on some patents. We have created an environment where it is impossible for a an entrepreneur to legally bring a product to market. Their only hope is to try and stay under the lawsuit radar until they are successful, and then be bought out by a large company with a patent war chest once they are. We shouldn't burden entrepreneurs any more than necessary, and making them pay to use research that their taxes already paid for does exactly that.
My bad. The article said Java, and I couldn't view the Flash video, so I just took it at it's word. I didn't visit the developers website till after I posted.
In order to obtain data without a warrant, the authorities must have a convincing argument that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to that data. By claiming the personal privacy exemption to the FOIA to prevent releasing the data, the government is contradicting it's previous claim that they didn't need a warrant to get the data in the first place.
They are still advertising monthly contract-free plans online. They are on the prepaid section of their website, but don't seem any different than the contract-free plan that my girlfriend is currently on.
Not competing on contract length, or better yet ditching contracts altogether.
T-Mobile does have contract-free plans, and are the only major carrier to do so.
Not competing on price with the big 3, and following Boost's lead.
T-Mobiles with contract prices are significantly cheaper than AT&T and Verizon, and their contract-free plans are even cheaper than that.
Not updating existing Android phones to newer builds in a timely fashion.
I agree with you there. They took the lead with the G1, and but since then all the flagship Android phones have gone to other carriers.
I don't know of a single person who is leaving them, and know a couple that have gotten sick of Verizon's prices and are moving to T-Mobile. Boost et al have such shitty coverage around here I might as well carry a walkie-talkie.
Larry is right. I have had to deal with this at work. Our applications create machine generated code, which is compiled and then loaded. I don't know about Java 1.7, but in 1.6 the default garbage collector does unload these classes when there are no more instances of them. The concurrent garbage collector doesn't by default but you can pass the "-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled" flag to the JVM to enable it.
I have two computers. A Windows 7 laptop with 4GB of memory and a Debian desktop with 3GB (maxed out). Both computers get unusably slow after a few days. Only then do I check the resource usage and find that Firefox has managed to grow to consume 70-80% of the physical memory. Worse, since it since it constantly touches all it's memory pages, it is the other applications that get pushed out to swap, not Firefox. I restart Firefox, and it's memory usage drops to a 1/3 of what it was using, with the same windows open.
Now I don't know exactly what is causing the memory growth. It could very well be memory leaks in the JavaScript that webpages are serving, and not in Firefox's code. However, they are the ones pushing for rich web applications, so they need to take responsibility for managing these rich applications, just like an OS does now.
At the start of the search for dark matter there were two major categories of potential mater; WIMPs and MACHOs. The later are large astronomical bodies made of standard matter that are just hard to see, like brown dwarfs, blackholes, and these.
While hard to see directly, we should be able to observe indirect evidence of their existence due to gravitational lensing of objects behind them, and so forth. Since then many surveys of the sky have been performed, using these techniques. If these objects existed in the quantity needed to make up all the missing mass then we would have detected a far greater number of them than we did (at least 2 orders of magnitude more).
So while they surely exist, they can't account for more than a small fraction of the missing mass problem, unless the universe has conspired to place them none of them between us and all the luminous mass in the universe.
The slow page change in an inherent limitation in current eInk technology, as it has to apply an electric charge to cause small colored balls to move through a viscous fluid to display the image.
LCD screens, be they transmissive (like the iPad), reflective (like the Eee Note), or tranflective (like OLPC one) don't have this problem, and the later two are almost as nice to read on as eInk.
There are already several companies selling Android tablets. What would HP have to bring to the table, that they don't? At least with WebOS they had an opportunity to do something different and better. My take is that they either should have committed more to WebOS or not bothered with "smartphone" tablet at all.
I'm with you. I usually stop a single player game after playing a single level more than a dozen times without beating it. Never finished SMB World, or Donkey Kong Country. I made it about half way through Metroid:Prime before going back to school, but was already getting tired of how many times I had to replay the bosses (but loved the rest of the game). I did eventually beat Psychonauts. I think it is the only platformer that I ever played to completion.
I never made it more than a third of the way any through Worms single player, and usually only unlock about half the stuff in the single player portion of Nintendo's multiplayer games.
Another pet peeve is making it appear as if you are doing worse than you are. For example in Pikimin, based on my rate of progress and the amount of time it said I had, there was no way I would complete it in time, so I kept restarting to try to eek out a little more efficiency each time. I finally got tired of it, only to find out years latter that I didn't need worry about all that.
I wish more games had the ability to change difficulty level without restarting the game. Like, Quake 3 where beating a level on any difficulty unlocked the next, but it still kept track of which difficulty you used to beat each level.
As soon as I read the (crappy) summary, I knew there would be posts like this:)
The way LCDs work is that you have a constant back-light (halogen, LED, whatever), and then the LCD matrix blocks light for pixels that should be dark, while allowing light to pass for pixels that should be bright. This modifies the LCD itself to have photovoltaic properties, thus recapturing (some of) the energy from blocked photons in dark pixels, rather than wasting it as heat.
Except John has already said the engine is not suitable for those sorts of games:
He added that id Tech 5 is "not magic," and the engine is good for certain kinds of games such as Rage, but not as much for games such as Grand Theft Auto that render cities with lots of surface area.
"The megatexture direction [in id Tech 5] has some big wins, but it's also fairly restrictive on certain types of games," he said. "It would be a completely unacceptable engine to do [Bethesda's Elder Scrolls V:] Skyrim in, where you've got the whole world, walking across these huge areas."
The problem is that they refuse to accept that fact. They deliberately decided not to license out their idTech 5 engine. Then they spent more than four years creating content for their new engine. But by all accounts this content isn't any good, and the engine that looked amazing when it was first demoed, is now not so impressive. They really need to learn how to leverage their strengths or they won't survive another release.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I was thinking. I'm a bit ignorant on the specific issue with Java3D though, maybe you can set me straight. For any other library we just bundle everything up into a single (signed) jar file which can then be used with Java Web Start or as a stand-alone application. However, since Java3D requires native libraries to get decent performance, I have been under the impression that users had to run the Java3D installer separately (same for JMF). If we can get away without doing so, that would be nice.
Many of the Oracle enterprise applications are Web Start applications.
But they don't use Java3D or JAI, and thus won't have this problem. Honestly, I'm not surprised at this move. Java3D and JMF have been neglected by Sun for years, and are pretty much considered to be abandoned APIs (for example JMF has no x86-64 support, and Java3D only supports the software renderer for x86-64). We have been moving away from them wherever possible.
if I remember correctly they stated that they will put it inside cars and other embedded devices
Yeah, I read that too. Problem is that no-one has made any agreements with them to use the OS. So they are basically just pissing away money in the hope that someone somewhere might want to license the OS, without having any concrete plans for it.
Oh, and multitouch should be banned from car dashboards. It is the worst possible interface for that situation as requires constant focus on the display for the entire time it is being used, and thus causes far more driver distraction than physical knobs.
Yeah, the working is misleading.
The target use case for something like this is CXOs tweaking their Powerpoint presentations while on the plane, or proof reading and correcting reports while on the subway. No, you wouldn't want to make the whole thing on the tablet, but being able to make minor changes on the go is a useful feature.
I think you misunderstand what sort of ToS he is talking about. A real contract signed with cable company, or a EULA that you agree to when installing software or a ToS that you agree to when creating an account at a website are almost always valid and enforcable. However, he is talking about the blanket ToS that you can find linked in small print at the bottom of almost any corporate website. Companies act like they are legally binding even though visitors of the site were never shown the ToS, never agreed with them, and the vast majority don't even know they exist.
They are every bit as invalid as the ToS that he is sending.
And here is the text of the bill in question S.1151.
You are making a poor assumption. Not everyone is going to automatically subscribe to both.
I'm not making that assumption. RTFA, it says exactly how many people opted to subscribe to both vs just one or the other.
Netflix did better than I thought they would. They only lost 4% of their subscribers over this, and it looks like their revenue is going to go up. Pretending that everyone was on the cheapest plan, they used to have 25 million subscribers paying $10 a month for $250 million/month. Now they have 21.8 million paying for streaming and another 14.2 million paying for DVD, each at $8 a month for a total of $288 million/month. Since the price of the larger plans didn't change as much as the cheapest one, I think it is safe to say that they will be making more money when this is done than they did before.
Suppose they had given a $2 discount for people on both plans, like I thought they should. They would have increased revenue further by doing that if everyone stayed, and 2.6 million more people decided to go with both plans, or alternately if the same number left but 4 million decided to have both plans. Of course, that doesn't consider increased costs of both plans.
Look at page 25 of the Skien Whitepaper. Using C implementations, Skien-512 outperforms SHA-512 and Skien-256 is only about 75% slower than SHA-256 on a 32 bit CPU. That isn't unacceptably slow.
Research money has to come from somewhere. It can come from your taxes, it can come from university money, or it can (and does) come from a combination of the two.
The entire reason that we fund research is because we believe the knowledge will help advance society. Given that, more widely this knowledge is used, the greater effect it will have and the more it will improve the standard of living. By restricting who can use the knowledge we are artificially decreasing our return on investment for tax-funded research. I would argue that the opportunity cost of doing so far outweighs the money saved by university patent revenue.
It is -- in the same way that a public ampitheater paid for by the people is available "to the people." Not every person has the right to use the stage at any given time,
That is because it is impossible for everyone to use the same physical object by once. Knowledge doesn't have this limitation. It is one thing to artificially limit the use of knowledge in order to allow those who funded the research to recoup their costs (and some), but to artificially limit the use of knowledge by the very people who paid for is completely counter-productive.
In addition, the research is available -- that's the very purpose of encouraging patent disclosures -- it is merely the commercialization of the research that is temporarily restricted. Don' like it? Design around it.
You find work-arounds for the 250,000 patents that apply to your new device, or sufficient improvements to weigh against the thousands of rights holders. All work builds off what came before it, and it is impossible to design anything without it infringing on some patents. We have created an environment where it is impossible for a an entrepreneur to legally bring a product to market. Their only hope is to try and stay under the lawsuit radar until they are successful, and then be bought out by a large company with a patent war chest once they are. We shouldn't burden entrepreneurs any more than necessary, and making them pay to use research that their taxes already paid for does exactly that.
My bad. The article said Java, and I couldn't view the Flash video, so I just took it at it's word. I didn't visit the developers website till after I posted.
public class Bomb
{
public static void main(String[] args) throws java.io.IOException {
while(true) {
String path = System.getProperty("java.class.path");
Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[]{"java", "-cp", path, class.getSimpleName()});
}
}
}
In order to obtain data without a warrant, the authorities must have a convincing argument that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to that data. By claiming the personal privacy exemption to the FOIA to prevent releasing the data, the government is contradicting it's previous claim that they didn't need a warrant to get the data in the first place.
They are still advertising monthly contract-free plans online. They are on the prepaid section of their website, but don't seem any different than the contract-free plan that my girlfriend is currently on.
What are talking about?
Not competing on contract length, or better yet ditching contracts altogether.
T-Mobile does have contract-free plans, and are the only major carrier to do so.
Not competing on price with the big 3, and following Boost's lead.
T-Mobiles with contract prices are significantly cheaper than AT&T and Verizon, and their contract-free plans are even cheaper than that.
Not updating existing Android phones to newer builds in a timely fashion.
I agree with you there. They took the lead with the G1, and but since then all the flagship Android phones have gone to other carriers.
I don't know of a single person who is leaving them, and know a couple that have gotten sick of Verizon's prices and are moving to T-Mobile. Boost et al have such shitty coverage around here I might as well carry a walkie-talkie.
Larry is right. I have had to deal with this at work. Our applications create machine generated code, which is compiled and then loaded. I don't know about Java 1.7, but in 1.6 the default garbage collector does unload these classes when there are no more instances of them. The concurrent garbage collector doesn't by default but you can pass the "-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled" flag to the JVM to enable it.
I have two computers. A Windows 7 laptop with 4GB of memory and a Debian desktop with 3GB (maxed out). Both computers get unusably slow after a few days. Only then do I check the resource usage and find that Firefox has managed to grow to consume 70-80% of the physical memory. Worse, since it since it constantly touches all it's memory pages, it is the other applications that get pushed out to swap, not Firefox. I restart Firefox, and it's memory usage drops to a 1/3 of what it was using, with the same windows open.
Now I don't know exactly what is causing the memory growth. It could very well be memory leaks in the JavaScript that webpages are serving, and not in Firefox's code. However, they are the ones pushing for rich web applications, so they need to take responsibility for managing these rich applications, just like an OS does now.
At the start of the search for dark matter there were two major categories of potential mater; WIMPs and MACHOs. The later are large astronomical bodies made of standard matter that are just hard to see, like brown dwarfs, blackholes, and these.
While hard to see directly, we should be able to observe indirect evidence of their existence due to gravitational lensing of objects behind them, and so forth. Since then many surveys of the sky have been performed, using these techniques. If these objects existed in the quantity needed to make up all the missing mass then we would have detected a far greater number of them than we did (at least 2 orders of magnitude more).
So while they surely exist, they can't account for more than a small fraction of the missing mass problem, unless the universe has conspired to place them none of them between us and all the luminous mass in the universe.
The slow page change in an inherent limitation in current eInk technology, as it has to apply an electric charge to cause small colored balls to move through a viscous fluid to display the image.
LCD screens, be they transmissive (like the iPad), reflective (like the Eee Note), or tranflective (like OLPC one) don't have this problem, and the later two are almost as nice to read on as eInk.
There are already several companies selling Android tablets. What would HP have to bring to the table, that they don't? At least with WebOS they had an opportunity to do something different and better. My take is that they either should have committed more to WebOS or not bothered with "smartphone" tablet at all.
I'm with you. I usually stop a single player game after playing a single level more than a dozen times without beating it. Never finished SMB World, or Donkey Kong Country. I made it about half way through Metroid:Prime before going back to school, but was already getting tired of how many times I had to replay the bosses (but loved the rest of the game). I did eventually beat Psychonauts. I think it is the only platformer that I ever played to completion.
I never made it more than a third of the way any through Worms single player, and usually only unlock about half the stuff in the single player portion of Nintendo's multiplayer games.
Another pet peeve is making it appear as if you are doing worse than you are. For example in Pikimin, based on my rate of progress and the amount of time it said I had, there was no way I would complete it in time, so I kept restarting to try to eek out a little more efficiency each time. I finally got tired of it, only to find out years latter that I didn't need worry about all that.
I wish more games had the ability to change difficulty level without restarting the game. Like, Quake 3 where beating a level on any difficulty unlocked the next, but it still kept track of which difficulty you used to beat each level.
As soon as I read the (crappy) summary, I knew there would be posts like this:)
The way LCDs work is that you have a constant back-light (halogen, LED, whatever), and then the LCD matrix blocks light for pixels that should be dark, while allowing light to pass for pixels that should be bright. This modifies the LCD itself to have photovoltaic properties, thus recapturing (some of) the energy from blocked photons in dark pixels, rather than wasting it as heat.
Except John has already said the engine is not suitable for those sorts of games:
He added that id Tech 5 is "not magic," and the engine is good for certain kinds of games such as Rage, but not as much for games such as Grand Theft Auto that render cities with lots of surface area.
"The megatexture direction [in id Tech 5] has some big wins, but it's also fairly restrictive on certain types of games," he said. "It would be a completely unacceptable engine to do [Bethesda's Elder Scrolls V:] Skyrim in, where you've got the whole world, walking across these huge areas."
The problem is that they refuse to accept that fact. They deliberately decided not to license out their idTech 5 engine. Then they spent more than four years creating content for their new engine. But by all accounts this content isn't any good, and the engine that looked amazing when it was first demoed, is now not so impressive. They really need to learn how to leverage their strengths or they won't survive another release.