The company is offering what Mr. Watson said was a standard split on app sales: 70 percent to the developers, 30 percent to Microsoft.
The 30% is indeed the normal amount that Microsoft takes on all WP7 apps, so it looks like that is what the summary is referring to, although the wording was very misleading.
Canonical modified the version of Banshee that it ships with Ubuntu to use their own Amazon affiliate code instead of Banshee's everytime a purchase is made. This is perfectly legal, since anyone can modify Banshee's source code. However, it is pretty shady IMHO; no better than the people that slap another name on OSS and try to sell it to unknowing consumers.
It's not naive, it's a documented fact. Most companies that bothered to release SACD or DVD-A did a much better job mixing and mastering them then they did on the CD. Here is just one example, but for the most part it's very rare to find a DVD-A that uses the same master as the CD.
The main problems with those formats was the fact that not enough albums are released in that format, and they are overpriced. Neither of these will change unless more people buy them, although if they did become mainstream there will probably be more companies that release the CD master on that format.
Yeah, I agree that the increased fidelity of the recording isn't going to make any difference in sound quality. However, as we have seen with DVD-A, the existence of an "Audiophile Format" means that studios that release them usually create a mix that doesn't compress and clip the audio to all hell, because they are catering to that market, not the FM radio market.
I'd pay a little more for a correctly mixed recording. I don't care whether it is 24-bit or 16-bit; I'll be re-encoding it to a 192kbps MP3, and it will still sound better than the CD release.
Assuming the domain in question is softegg.com, then reverse DNS is indeed not setup correctly, and it is no surprise that his email is getting blocked.
But that is not what the OP was arguing. I understand why people who are opposed to network neutrality regulations would consider this amendment to be a win. I don't understand why someone who supports it would think the same.
So how is going from rules that are not strict enough to no rules at all a win? Especially during a congress that will not pass stricter rules? That doesn't make any sense to me at all.
People make a big deal about this, but I have yet to see any evidence that OEM modifications cause people to choose one android handset over another. People chose which android phone to get based on what carrier they are with, how well the device performs, what features it has (physical keyboard, camera quality), the price, and how good the manufacturer is at providing updates. I haven't heard a single person say "I'm going to get the CLIQ over the myTouch, because I like Motoblur."
Furthermore, the agreement that they have with Microsoft allows Nokia to customize the OS as much as they could with Android. I agree that the Android interface is closer to Symbian, and could be made to look more like it, but I really don't think that would help them much. Relying on Symbian loyalty is what got them in this mess to begin with.
Finally, the android market is already saturated. Nokia is late to the game with either OS, but with WP7 they still have a chance of being a major player. They have a better chance of standing out in the market running WP7 than they do with android.
IMHO, the problem wasn't that they chose to use WP7 over Android, it is that they decided to go all in. Choosing to sell WP7 phones to keep them floating in the short/medium term is a smart move. However completely gutting development of both of their internal OSs doesn't bode well for the long term future of Nokia.
How do you get to the options to do this? Ever since the change, when I click on the Options link at the topp, the page flashes grey, then nothing happens. I had written user CSS that reverted D2 to it's old style, but the last tweak to the site broke it, and I'm tired of fighting with it.
So now Google says it will be the parent of what is 'rogue', or not? That's nonsense. What I consider useful, others may not.
Yes. The whole purpose of a search engine is to find the sites which it thinks are most useful based on the info the user has given. If these SPAM sites are not useful to people then then they shouldn't be getting high rankings.
You are already depending on search engines to guess what you think is going to be useful. This is no different.
Only to be replaced with thousands of other ones. If you want to fix this problem you have to remove the profit, which means you need to get them off the google index.
Hi, I was the one who posted comment #35176356 (while at a public terminal).
The OP was the non-sequitur. He is arguing that the CEO of MPEG-LA doesn't put the MobileMedia Idea patents into the MPEG-LA patent pool because he knows they are worthless and diluted. However, none of the patents that MobileMedia are trolling fit within the realm of the MPEG-LA patent pools, so he couldn't put them into the pool if he wanted to. Thus it is a completely invalid argument.
I don't support the MPEG-LA (look at my previous posts if you care). I just point out BS when I see it, whether it's for my side or not.
New TLDs serve no useful purpose, and make things worse for everyone but the registrars. Legitimate organizations will now have to buy even more TLDs to prevent impersonation or typos. Users who are accustomed to everything residing under.com,.org (or.co.XX) will now have to remember the TLD in addition to the domain name. While the total number of available domains will theoretically increase, when you consider that organizations will be buy their name under all of them, this isn't true in practice. The only people who win are the registrars who now get paid more since people have to register more domains.
As far as removing old domains, there are two reason. Removing.biz and all the other crap domains is for the same reason above, to undo damage that has already been done by creating worthless TLDs. Transitioning the.mil,.gov, and.edu domains is mostly just an aesthetic / fairness thing; they are US specific domains, and really ought to reside in the.us TLD, but I could tolerate them remaining for legacy reasons.
I'd like to amend that by stating that.arpa will need to stick around, and I also don't have any problems with other supra-national government TLDs like.int and.eu.
We don't need any more TLDs. We should be phasing out some of the existing ones, not creating new ones. The.mil and.gov TLDs should be transitioned to reside under.us, and.net and.edu should be transition to reside under the appropriate country. Everything else other than.com,.org, and country TLDs should be phased out.
Yeah, "different restrictions" where one restriction allows you to make games and the other does not. Seriously, show me a single decent homebrew game for the PS3. I know of an (illegal) Pong game made for GameOS, and the standard Linux solitare/minesweeper type games. Compared to thousands of XNA games that have been made for the 360.
Yeah, but the Other OS sandbox prevented it from accessing the GPU which made it completely unsuitable for homebrew games. The XNA dev kit is free, and games created with it can be freely distributed on windows computers. Distributing on XBox live requires a $99/year subscription, but that is pretty cheap for what you get. If you sell your game for $5, it only takes 20 sales to pay it off. Microsoft also does a good job of promoting good homebrew games. My only complaint about it is that it isn't compatible with open source development. Microsoft has done more to support homebrew game development on the 360 than any other console maker since the video game crash of '83.
At launch the iPad was running a version of iOS (3.2) customized specifically for it, and this version never was released for the iPhone. Furthermore, when Apple released iOS 4, it wasn't compatible with the iPad. It was 7 months before they released 4.2 which was compatible with both. Google could very well be taking the same route here; getting things right on the tablet while continuing to advance the phones, and merging in a later release.
But you aren't adding any more heat to the system as the sun is already hitting the snow; you are just making it warmer on one place and colder in other places. You also risk having the melted snow refreezing as ice once you move the deathray to another location. I wonder if there are inexpensive ways to change the albedo of snow, like sprinkling soot on the snow that would help in addition to salting it to lower the melting point.
No, that is different. In IRV you don't compare every candidate to every other candidate; You rank them according to how many people voted each candidate as their first choice. Furthermore, you don't use all the votes at once; your second choice (and lower) votes only matter if your first choice candidate was eliminated.
What he is talking about is Pair-Wise or Condorcet voting. In that method all the votes are used from the beginning and each candidate is compared to each other candidate simultaneously. This removes many undesirable characteristics of instant runoff voting that result from the fact that only some people's second choice vote matters. The difficulty is that there are corner cases where there is no clear "correct" way to determine a winner in all cases, so there are a bunch of variations of pairwise voting with different ideas on how to do this, and they are all much harder to explain to the general public than approval or instant-runoff voting.
The libertarian party is the one most likely to gain from this move, as they are one of (if not the) strongest third party in New Hampshire, so it makes sense that they are the ones mentioned in news reports. If the law was passed in another state like New Mexico, it would be the Greens that people would be talking about, who are definitely left. The last green we had running for Governor was proposing socializing all natural gas and oil extraction (not just taxing and regulating it), which goes farther than most European countries.
Yeah, this is a good step forward. However, contrary to the summary, it doesn't eliminate the need for strategic voting. With approval voting you can take the safe route and cast a token vote for a third party and the lesser of two evils. However, if everyone does that then the third party candidates will never win. So at some point you need to decide to only vote for the third party, with the risk that the greater of the two evils may win as a result. You need to gauge the chances of the third party winning when deciding how to vote.
Thus the need for strategic voting is merely deferred until third parties become more successful. This is still good, though, because it shows the real amount of support for third parties, and gives them more opportunity to build momentum in their campaigns over the years. Furthermore, I personally prefer for strategy to be the determining factor in corner cases, rather than the random outcomes that occur with IRV in the same circumstances.
The real problem with our voting system is the fact that there is only a single winner for each area. Suppose that 20% of people in a city support the Greens, %40 Republicans and %40 Democrats. Unless nearly all those greens live in a single voting district, they will never have a plurality in any district, and thus never get a single seat in the city council despite the fact that they should have 2/10 in all fairness. It would be much better to draw the lines such that there are two or three winners for each district. If you did that than even first past the fence voting would be tolerable.
The problem is that the old method is too lenient, and could accept the "wrong" password. For example suppose the user logged in with caps lock on, and didn't realize it because it was successful (compared using the old hashing algorithm). The new hash would be generated using all caps, then when the user tried to log in latter with caps lock off, it would fail even though he was using the same password as always. You would need to run both systems in parallel for some time and only eliminate the old hash after the new hash was successful several times in a row.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual quote from the (paywalled) article is
The company is offering what Mr. Watson said was a standard split on app sales: 70 percent to the developers, 30 percent to Microsoft.
The 30% is indeed the normal amount that Microsoft takes on all WP7 apps, so it looks like that is what the summary is referring to, although the wording was very misleading.
Canonical modified the version of Banshee that it ships with Ubuntu to use their own Amazon affiliate code instead of Banshee's everytime a purchase is made. This is perfectly legal, since anyone can modify Banshee's source code. However, it is pretty shady IMHO; no better than the people that slap another name on OSS and try to sell it to unknowing consumers.
It's not naive, it's a documented fact. Most companies that bothered to release SACD or DVD-A did a much better job mixing and mastering them then they did on the CD. Here is just one example, but for the most part it's very rare to find a DVD-A that uses the same master as the CD.
The main problems with those formats was the fact that not enough albums are released in that format, and they are overpriced. Neither of these will change unless more people buy them, although if they did become mainstream there will probably be more companies that release the CD master on that format.
Yeah, I agree that the increased fidelity of the recording isn't going to make any difference in sound quality. However, as we have seen with DVD-A, the existence of an "Audiophile Format" means that studios that release them usually create a mix that doesn't compress and clip the audio to all hell, because they are catering to that market, not the FM radio market.
I'd pay a little more for a correctly mixed recording. I don't care whether it is 24-bit or 16-bit; I'll be re-encoding it to a 192kbps MP3, and it will still sound better than the CD release.
Assuming the domain in question is softegg.com, then reverse DNS is indeed not setup correctly, and it is no surprise that his email is getting blocked.
But that is not what the OP was arguing. I understand why people who are opposed to network neutrality regulations would consider this amendment to be a win. I don't understand why someone who supports it would think the same.
So how is going from rules that are not strict enough to no rules at all a win? Especially during a congress that will not pass stricter rules? That doesn't make any sense to me at all.
People make a big deal about this, but I have yet to see any evidence that OEM modifications cause people to choose one android handset over another. People chose which android phone to get based on what carrier they are with, how well the device performs, what features it has (physical keyboard, camera quality), the price, and how good the manufacturer is at providing updates. I haven't heard a single person say "I'm going to get the CLIQ over the myTouch, because I like Motoblur."
Furthermore, the agreement that they have with Microsoft allows Nokia to customize the OS as much as they could with Android. I agree that the Android interface is closer to Symbian, and could be made to look more like it, but I really don't think that would help them much. Relying on Symbian loyalty is what got them in this mess to begin with.
Finally, the android market is already saturated. Nokia is late to the game with either OS, but with WP7 they still have a chance of being a major player. They have a better chance of standing out in the market running WP7 than they do with android.
IMHO, the problem wasn't that they chose to use WP7 over Android, it is that they decided to go all in. Choosing to sell WP7 phones to keep them floating in the short/medium term is a smart move. However completely gutting development of both of their internal OSs doesn't bode well for the long term future of Nokia.
How do you get to the options to do this? Ever since the change, when I click on the Options link at the topp, the page flashes grey, then nothing happens. I had written user CSS that reverted D2 to it's old style, but the last tweak to the site broke it, and I'm tired of fighting with it.
So now Google says it will be the parent of what is 'rogue', or not? That's nonsense. What I consider useful, others may not.
Yes. The whole purpose of a search engine is to find the sites which it thinks are most useful based on the info the user has given. If these SPAM sites are not useful to people then then they shouldn't be getting high rankings.
You are already depending on search engines to guess what you think is going to be useful. This is no different.
Only to be replaced with thousands of other ones. If you want to fix this problem you have to remove the profit, which means you need to get them off the google index.
I prefer not to break the law to watch videos online, nor support a codec that requires those websites to pay to encode it.
Hi, I was the one who posted comment #35176356 (while at a public terminal).
The OP was the non-sequitur. He is arguing that the CEO of MPEG-LA doesn't put the MobileMedia Idea patents into the MPEG-LA patent pool because he knows they are worthless and diluted. However, none of the patents that MobileMedia are trolling fit within the realm of the MPEG-LA patent pools, so he couldn't put them into the pool if he wanted to. Thus it is a completely invalid argument.
I don't support the MPEG-LA (look at my previous posts if you care). I just point out BS when I see it, whether it's for my side or not.
New TLDs serve no useful purpose, and make things worse for everyone but the registrars. Legitimate organizations will now have to buy even more TLDs to prevent impersonation or typos. Users who are accustomed to everything residing under .com, .org (or .co.XX) will now have to remember the TLD in addition to the domain name. While the total number of available domains will theoretically increase, when you consider that organizations will be buy their name under all of them, this isn't true in practice. The only people who win are the registrars who now get paid more since people have to register more domains.
As far as removing old domains, there are two reason. Removing .biz and all the other crap domains is for the same reason above, to undo damage that has already been done by creating worthless TLDs. Transitioning the .mil, .gov, and .edu domains is mostly just an aesthetic / fairness thing; they are US specific domains, and really ought to reside in the .us TLD, but I could tolerate them remaining for legacy reasons.
I'd like to amend that by stating that .arpa will need to stick around, and I also don't have any problems with other supra-national government TLDs like .int and .eu.
We don't need any more TLDs. We should be phasing out some of the existing ones, not creating new ones. The .mil and .gov TLDs should be transitioned to reside under .us, and .net and .edu should be transition to reside under the appropriate country. Everything else other than .com, .org, and country TLDs should be phased out.
Yeah, "different restrictions" where one restriction allows you to make games and the other does not. Seriously, show me a single decent homebrew game for the PS3. I know of an (illegal) Pong game made for GameOS, and the standard Linux solitare/minesweeper type games. Compared to thousands of XNA games that have been made for the 360.
Yeah, but the Other OS sandbox prevented it from accessing the GPU which made it completely unsuitable for homebrew games. The XNA dev kit is free, and games created with it can be freely distributed on windows computers. Distributing on XBox live requires a $99/year subscription, but that is pretty cheap for what you get. If you sell your game for $5, it only takes 20 sales to pay it off. Microsoft also does a good job of promoting good homebrew games. My only complaint about it is that it isn't compatible with open source development. Microsoft has done more to support homebrew game development on the 360 than any other console maker since the video game crash of '83.
Yeah everyone knows Wired has a time machine. They can't be trusted.
At launch the iPad was running a version of iOS (3.2) customized specifically for it, and this version never was released for the iPhone. Furthermore, when Apple released iOS 4, it wasn't compatible with the iPad. It was 7 months before they released 4.2 which was compatible with both. Google could very well be taking the same route here; getting things right on the tablet while continuing to advance the phones, and merging in a later release.
But you aren't adding any more heat to the system as the sun is already hitting the snow; you are just making it warmer on one place and colder in other places. You also risk having the melted snow refreezing as ice once you move the deathray to another location. I wonder if there are inexpensive ways to change the albedo of snow, like sprinkling soot on the snow that would help in addition to salting it to lower the melting point.
No, that is different. In IRV you don't compare every candidate to every other candidate; You rank them according to how many people voted each candidate as their first choice. Furthermore, you don't use all the votes at once; your second choice (and lower) votes only matter if your first choice candidate was eliminated.
What he is talking about is Pair-Wise or Condorcet voting. In that method all the votes are used from the beginning and each candidate is compared to each other candidate simultaneously. This removes many undesirable characteristics of instant runoff voting that result from the fact that only some people's second choice vote matters. The difficulty is that there are corner cases where there is no clear "correct" way to determine a winner in all cases, so there are a bunch of variations of pairwise voting with different ideas on how to do this, and they are all much harder to explain to the general public than approval or instant-runoff voting.
The libertarian party is the one most likely to gain from this move, as they are one of (if not the) strongest third party in New Hampshire, so it makes sense that they are the ones mentioned in news reports. If the law was passed in another state like New Mexico, it would be the Greens that people would be talking about, who are definitely left. The last green we had running for Governor was proposing socializing all natural gas and oil extraction (not just taxing and regulating it), which goes farther than most European countries.
Yeah, this is a good step forward. However, contrary to the summary, it doesn't eliminate the need for strategic voting. With approval voting you can take the safe route and cast a token vote for a third party and the lesser of two evils. However, if everyone does that then the third party candidates will never win. So at some point you need to decide to only vote for the third party, with the risk that the greater of the two evils may win as a result. You need to gauge the chances of the third party winning when deciding how to vote.
Thus the need for strategic voting is merely deferred until third parties become more successful. This is still good, though, because it shows the real amount of support for third parties, and gives them more opportunity to build momentum in their campaigns over the years. Furthermore, I personally prefer for strategy to be the determining factor in corner cases, rather than the random outcomes that occur with IRV in the same circumstances.
The real problem with our voting system is the fact that there is only a single winner for each area. Suppose that 20% of people in a city support the Greens, %40 Republicans and %40 Democrats. Unless nearly all those greens live in a single voting district, they will never have a plurality in any district, and thus never get a single seat in the city council despite the fact that they should have 2/10 in all fairness. It would be much better to draw the lines such that there are two or three winners for each district. If you did that than even first past the fence voting would be tolerable.
The problem is that the old method is too lenient, and could accept the "wrong" password. For example suppose the user logged in with caps lock on, and didn't realize it because it was successful (compared using the old hashing algorithm). The new hash would be generated using all caps, then when the user tried to log in latter with caps lock off, it would fail even though he was using the same password as always. You would need to run both systems in parallel for some time and only eliminate the old hash after the new hash was successful several times in a row.