I don't want instant context assistance, what I want is for the context assistance, and whatever else is going on in the background, to not delay my normal typing.
Anyway, I don't have Eclipse installed at the moment. I might try it out again next time I start a new java project at home to see if it has improved, but it was intolerably slow when I tried it a year ago.
This current crop is different. The previous tablets were just laptops minus the keyboard (or full laptops with a rotating display), which weighed as much as a laptop, cost more than a laptop, and ran a mostly standard version of Windows. This current crop about to be released are lightweight, inexpensive, and run customized software (some of which may be worse for the job than a desktop OS, but some will be better).
You comment is akin to saying that there were ultrasmall notebooks in the past, therefore the netbook was bound to fail.
Here is how I think of it. Tablet:eBook reader as SmartPhone:Cellphone.
When I first got a cellphone, it was nice, but there were many areas for improvement. I would enter a phone number into my address book on the phone, and then into my real address book as well. Wouldn't it be nice if the phone address books was fully featured enough that I could do away with my real address book, or relegate it to a backup copy. In general, wouldn't it be nice if it could do everything my palm pilot could do?
The same thing happens with the eBook reader. It sure is convenient for reading eBooks, but it would be nice if it had better annotation features, and a good web-browser for content that isn't in eBook format. And sometimes I don't feel like reading, so playing games or watching movies would be nice too.
Laptops (event the hybrid tablets) are horrible for reading - they are too heavy, hot, and don't have good displays for the job (although neither does the iPad). It isn't that tablets or smart phones are intended to replace the PC, it is that they are useful for certain types of interaction. Given that they will exist to serve these niches, it is a no-brainer to allow allowing third-party developers to write additional software to push the format to it's greatest potential.
There were a ton of tablet prototypes shown at CES this year, months before the iPad was announced. Everyone and their mother independently came to the conclusion that tablets were going to be the next big thing after the success of netbooks.
If reading documents is one of your main uses for a tablet, then you should keep an eye out for the Adam by NotionInk.
It will be (one of ?) the first shipping device to use the PixelQi transflective display, which is an improvement of the OLPC display. It is a reflective display, like eInk, but with fast refresh rates like LCD. It also can display color which is far more saturated than color eInk (although not as good as LCD), as well as switching to ultra-high resolution greyscale.
The Adam uses the Tegra Chipset (ARM Cortex A9 + Nvidia graphics), and they are advertizing 16 hours of HD video playback, compared to 9 on the iPad. It will run Android, and will be an open development environment. It was demo at recent trade shows, and is definitely not vaporware.
As for supporting the VP8 CODEC on iPhone, I don't recall seeing anything that specifically bans third party CODECs on the phone itself. In fact, given that the hardware encoder in slingbox appears to be either WMV9 or VC-1 (I haven't verified it, but I read it somewhere), SlingPlayer for iPhone almost certainly is delivering a 3rd party CODEC to the device. It might simply be an issue of making a new player that triggers on VP8 media.
Applications can not upgrade system capabilities, nor can the register themselves as helper applications to the browser. So there is no problem writing your own application that uses whatever codec you want, but the HTML5 video player in Safari will not support it, nor will it trigger another application that does support it.
Older cable boxes and and some of the new ATSC tuners have a feature where you can program the box to change channels at a specific time. It is kind of a pain because you have to program both the cable box and the VCR for each show you want to record, but it is the only way possible to use existing VCRs with these boxes.
This is especially important for the ATSC boxes because they are mandated by law* to ship with a feature that shuts them off after a certain amount of inactive time, so even if you switch the box to the correct channel before you leave the house, your VCR will still end up recording garbage if you didn't have the box programed to wakeup and change channels at the correct time. I don't know if Comcast's boxes have this problem.
I use a Tivo which uses an IR blaster to change the set-top box.
That is nice for Tivo but 99% of VCR's out there don't have this feature. Besides an even bigger problem is the fact that Comcast updated people's cable boxes remotely, removing this feature. People had a perfectly functional setup and now without any warning their VCR is worthless thanks to Comcast's actions.
* or was it just required to be eligible for the government rebate? I don't remember.
When you say that a software ecosystem is fragmented, it means that applications written for one target device/distro/whatever, won't work on another without changes. The degree of fragmentation is how much effort is required to support each target.
Having separate app stores does not create fragmentation, as any user can still get the applications elsewhere. This is like saying the sky is falling because Walmart and Target both exist and sell different products, rather than there being one official retailer at which all comrades must shop. There is convenience in having everything in one place, but it also has problems with consolidation of power. This can be abused to force people out of the market, as Apple has demonstrated wonderfully. Even if the one true app store has an open and fair policy at first, time changes everything, so the ability to get apps in other manners is essential.
For the convenience of their customers, Google should open the main app store to worldwide ASAP, but it does take time to wade through the legalities of that. Till then, these other repositories can fill the gap, and the fact that they can exist at all is great.
No, this has not been the normal plugin architecture. When Linux moved to 64-bit, firefox was ported to 64-bit but all of the proprietary plugins were still 32-bit. The solution to this problem was to create nspluginwrapper which would run the apps in a separate process. It had some bugs of it's own, wasn't always reliable about letting you restart crashed plugins, and has itself crashed the browser on me, but it largely prevented plugins from crashing the browser as a side effect.
Older 32-bit versions of firefox on linux, and all versions on windows did not have this capability.
Office 13 existed as a skunkworks project within MS. It fully supported the ODF 1.1 standard, and was crossplatform to Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BeOS (which MS also had plans to revive). It had clean, standards compliant HTML output. Even more surprisingly, it was decided that the project would be released as open source. Everything was going great until orders from the top led them to try and include Clippy. During the initial commit of the Office 2007 Clippy source there was a large bitsplosion leaving the GIT repository in waste. Forensic analysis concluded that the disaster was the result of the collision of evil bits and non-evil bits, which annihilated one another on contact, releasing huge reserves of pure information, scrambling anything in proximity. Furthermore, due to quantum entanglement, all backup copies of the promising office suite also disappeared, along with any instances of Clippy in Office 2007.
After this incident, MS abandoned any attempts at supporting open source and open standards projects. Ms Gates still bitches about the loss of Clippy in Office 2010.
My understanding of contempt of court, which wikipedia confirms is that the following have to be shown * Existence of a lawful order * The contemnor's knowledge of the order * The contemnor's ability to comply * The contemnor's failure to comply
The lawful order can be a specific order by the judge, or an existing rule or law concerning the operation of the court. There is such a rule in place - except in limited circumstances, discussing the case with the judge outside of the official proceedings of the court is not allowed. This is to prevent biasing the judge, putting forth arguments to which the other side cannot respond, and limiting opportunities for bribery or blackmail. The judge can be punished if he allows any of this sort of communication to occur, and repeated attempts to contact the judge outside of court have resulted in contempt of court rulings in the past. Furthermore, inciting someone to break the rules of the court can absolutely land you contempt charges yourself.
The second criteria is where I think there may be problems. Lawyers are assumed to know the rules of court and can be issued contempt charges without warning. However, it is not generally assumed that the defendant does, and it is customary to warn them and only charge them with contempt if they continue. If the judge can't prove that that Trudeau was aware that this action was breaking a rule of the court, then it may likely be overturned in appeal (which is being heard right now).
You aren't being alarmist you are just ignorant of history and think that today is somehow unique.
The ruling yesterday changes nothing. The FCC intentionally decreased it's role in regulating DSL when it reclassified it as a Title I information service, rather than a Title II telecommunication service 6 years ago. Cable modem was always classified as an information service. There was nothing preventing them from setting their prices however they wish before, and there is nothing to prevent it now except that it is unpopular.
Corporations have always had their fingers in the political process. It has arguably been worse, such as during the "robber baron" era. The internet grew from a government experiment into a commercial entity in this environment, and it isn't going to devolve to the "dark ages" over night. There are always threats to freedom and they always need to be resisted.
Furthermore, I don't see any problem with a tiered pricing model. Why should my grandma who only needs broadband to get photos that her children send her (they don't know how to resize their 8 megapixel images before sending them), subsidize someone who watches Hulu 30 hours a week, and constantly has bitorrent running in the background? It is wrong for ISPs to place caps on services which they advertised as unlimited, but there is nothing wrong with creating different price tiers if they let you know upfront what you are getting.
Except the clothing is intended to be worn on people, so how can you judge if it will actually look good if you design it for aliens? It's like car designers intentionally doing all their drawings such that only 3' midgets can use the car or furniture designers intentionally drawing things out of proportion to the human form. The purpose of sketches is to develop and test ideas before a prototype is made, but if you have to completely rework the proportions between sketching and prototyping then the sketch is worthless for the purpose of judging the aesthetic appeal of the design. It is like the entire fashion industry is in denial about what medium they working in.
The FCC does have a great deal of authority when it comes to the telecommunication industry, and it used this power to force line sharing of DSL service. However, this never extended to cable-modem, because the FCC did not have that authority. In fact, the unfairness of having one set of rules for DSL and another for cable modem was one of the justifications for ending line sharing.
For the record, I do think that we need some network neutrality laws that cover all ISPs regardless of technology, but the FCC does not currently have the power to regulate in that area, nor should they have broad powers to make up any law they wish.
The FCC has never had any authority to regulate internet service providers, no matter how much you think it ought to. Seriously, point me to anywhere in the Comunications act of 1934 or 1996, or any other law that gives them this authority. The FCC couldn't do so when asked by the Judge, and I doubt you can either.
The constitution gives congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. However, congress had passed no law prohibiting what Comcast had done, nor had they delegated power to the FCC to regulate the internet in the manner that they did. Government officials can't make up their own laws, nor can they punish people for breaking nonexistent laws.
I agree that net neutrality regulation, if created, would absolutely fall within both the letter and spirit of the interstate commerce clause (unlike many other laws that are justified by it).
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
That doesn't give the government the power to do whatever it wants just because it thinks that it insures domestic tranquility. It is just a non-binding purpose of statement, and the specific grants of power follow. The same is true of the section you quoted from the FCC charter.
The FCC are not the communication dictators of the US. They don't get to do whatever they want just because they think it is good idea. They have been granted specific powers to regulate specific aspects related to communication, and that is it.
In this case they had sanctioned Comcast for violating the FCC's Internet Policy Statement. The statement itself states that it is not legally binding, just a set of guidelines. In court, the FCC could not point to a single statute that gave them the power to regulate the internet in this manner. They were blatantly operating out of their granted powers and the judge ruled accordingly.
This is not a setback for net-neutrality, because net-neutrality doesn't exist yet. This ruling does nothing to prevent us from creating net-neutrality laws, nor is there any reason that it will sway popular opinion against them.
This is a win for the rule-of-law and should be applauded.
The purpose of something like this is to push the boundaries of what can be done in web development as a means of determining where it falls short, and what needs to be done to allow efficient practical applications in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
No need to find a link. The demo is embedded in TFA.
I think this would be legal regardless of what the ToS says. See the exemptions given to libraries and archives in 17 USC 108.
I don't want instant context assistance, what I want is for the context assistance, and whatever else is going on in the background, to not delay my normal typing.
Anyway, I don't have Eclipse installed at the moment. I might try it out again next time I start a new java project at home to see if it has improved, but it was intolerably slow when I tried it a year ago.
No, it's not. When I type and intermittently have to wait upto 3 seconds for the text to appear on the screen, it is not snappy.
This current crop is different. The previous tablets were just laptops minus the keyboard (or full laptops with a rotating display), which weighed as much as a laptop, cost more than a laptop, and ran a mostly standard version of Windows. This current crop about to be released are lightweight, inexpensive, and run customized software (some of which may be worse for the job than a desktop OS, but some will be better).
You comment is akin to saying that there were ultrasmall notebooks in the past, therefore the netbook was bound to fail.
nt
Also, for those at work without headphones, they require audio - no dialog buttons.
Here is how I think of it. Tablet:eBook reader as SmartPhone:Cellphone.
When I first got a cellphone, it was nice, but there were many areas for improvement. I would enter a phone number into my address book on the phone, and then into my real address book as well. Wouldn't it be nice if the phone address books was fully featured enough that I could do away with my real address book, or relegate it to a backup copy. In general, wouldn't it be nice if it could do everything my palm pilot could do?
The same thing happens with the eBook reader. It sure is convenient for reading eBooks, but it would be nice if it had better annotation features, and a good web-browser for content that isn't in eBook format. And sometimes I don't feel like reading, so playing games or watching movies would be nice too.
Laptops (event the hybrid tablets) are horrible for reading - they are too heavy, hot, and don't have good displays for the job (although neither does the iPad). It isn't that tablets or smart phones are intended to replace the PC, it is that they are useful for certain types of interaction. Given that they will exist to serve these niches, it is a no-brainer to allow allowing third-party developers to write additional software to push the format to it's greatest potential.
There were a ton of tablet prototypes shown at CES this year, months before the iPad was announced. Everyone and their mother independently came to the conclusion that tablets were going to be the next big thing after the success of netbooks.
If reading documents is one of your main uses for a tablet, then you should keep an eye out for the Adam by NotionInk.
It will be (one of ?) the first shipping device to use the PixelQi transflective display, which is an improvement of the OLPC display. It is a reflective display, like eInk, but with fast refresh rates like LCD. It also can display color which is far more saturated than color eInk (although not as good as LCD), as well as switching to ultra-high resolution greyscale.
The Adam uses the Tegra Chipset (ARM Cortex A9 + Nvidia graphics), and they are advertizing 16 hours of HD video playback, compared to 9 on the iPad.
It will run Android, and will be an open development environment. It was demo at recent trade shows, and is definitely not vaporware.
This one works: UntinyFox.
Reading the source, it appears to use this website to convert the URLs.
As for supporting the VP8 CODEC on iPhone, I don't recall seeing anything that specifically bans third party CODECs on the phone itself. In fact, given that the hardware encoder in slingbox appears to be either WMV9 or VC-1 (I haven't verified it, but I read it somewhere), SlingPlayer for iPhone almost certainly is delivering a 3rd party CODEC to the device. It might simply be an issue of making a new player that triggers on VP8 media.
Applications can not upgrade system capabilities, nor can the register themselves as helper applications to the browser. So there is no problem writing your own application that uses whatever codec you want, but the HTML5 video player in Safari will not support it, nor will it trigger another application that does support it.
Older cable boxes and and some of the new ATSC tuners have a feature where you can program the box to change channels at a specific time. It is kind of a pain because you have to program both the cable box and the VCR for each show you want to record, but it is the only way possible to use existing VCRs with these boxes.
This is especially important for the ATSC boxes because they are mandated by law* to ship with a feature that shuts them off after a certain amount of inactive time, so even if you switch the box to the correct channel before you leave the house, your VCR will still end up recording garbage if you didn't have the box programed to wakeup and change channels at the correct time. I don't know if Comcast's boxes have this problem.
I use a Tivo which uses an IR blaster to change the set-top box.
That is nice for Tivo but 99% of VCR's out there don't have this feature. Besides an even bigger problem is the fact that Comcast updated people's cable boxes remotely, removing this feature. People had a perfectly functional setup and now without any warning their VCR is worthless thanks to Comcast's actions.
* or was it just required to be eligible for the government rebate? I don't remember.
When you say that a software ecosystem is fragmented, it means that applications written for one target device/distro/whatever, won't work on another without changes. The degree of fragmentation is how much effort is required to support each target.
Having separate app stores does not create fragmentation, as any user can still get the applications elsewhere. This is like saying the sky is falling because Walmart and Target both exist and sell different products, rather than there being one official retailer at which all comrades must shop. There is convenience in having everything in one place, but it also has problems with consolidation of power. This can be abused to force people out of the market, as Apple has demonstrated wonderfully. Even if the one true app store has an open and fair policy at first, time changes everything, so the ability to get apps in other manners is essential.
For the convenience of their customers, Google should open the main app store to worldwide ASAP, but it does take time to wade through the legalities of that. Till then, these other repositories can fill the gap, and the fact that they can exist at all is great.
No, this has not been the normal plugin architecture. When Linux moved to 64-bit, firefox was ported to 64-bit but all of the proprietary plugins were still 32-bit. The solution to this problem was to create nspluginwrapper which would run the apps in a separate process. It had some bugs of it's own, wasn't always reliable about letting you restart crashed plugins, and has itself crashed the browser on me, but it largely prevented plugins from crashing the browser as a side effect.
Older 32-bit versions of firefox on linux, and all versions on windows did not have this capability.
Office 13 existed as a skunkworks project within MS. It fully supported the ODF 1.1 standard, and was crossplatform to Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BeOS (which MS also had plans to revive). It had clean, standards compliant HTML output. Even more surprisingly, it was decided that the project would be released as open source. Everything was going great until orders from the top led them to try and include Clippy. During the initial commit of the Office 2007 Clippy source there was a large bitsplosion leaving the GIT repository in waste. Forensic analysis concluded that the disaster was the result of the collision of evil bits and non-evil bits, which annihilated one another on contact, releasing huge reserves of pure information, scrambling anything in proximity. Furthermore, due to quantum entanglement, all backup copies of the promising office suite also disappeared, along with any instances of Clippy in Office 2007.
After this incident, MS abandoned any attempts at supporting open source and open standards projects. Ms Gates still bitches about the loss of Clippy in Office 2010.
My understanding of contempt of court, which wikipedia confirms is that the following have to be shown
* Existence of a lawful order
* The contemnor's knowledge of the order
* The contemnor's ability to comply
* The contemnor's failure to comply
The lawful order can be a specific order by the judge, or an existing rule or law concerning the operation of the court. There is such a rule in place - except in limited circumstances, discussing the case with the judge outside of the official proceedings of the court is not allowed. This is to prevent biasing the judge, putting forth arguments to which the other side cannot respond, and limiting opportunities for bribery or blackmail. The judge can be punished if he allows any of this sort of communication to occur, and repeated attempts to contact the judge outside of court have resulted in contempt of court rulings in the past. Furthermore, inciting someone to break the rules of the court can absolutely land you contempt charges yourself.
The second criteria is where I think there may be problems. Lawyers are assumed to know the rules of court and can be issued contempt charges without warning. However, it is not generally assumed that the defendant does, and it is customary to warn them and only charge them with contempt if they continue. If the judge can't prove that that Trudeau was aware that this action was breaking a rule of the court, then it may likely be overturned in appeal (which is being heard right now).
You aren't being alarmist you are just ignorant of history and think that today is somehow unique.
The ruling yesterday changes nothing. The FCC intentionally decreased it's role in regulating DSL when it reclassified it as a Title I information service, rather than a Title II telecommunication service 6 years ago. Cable modem was always classified as an information service. There was nothing preventing them from setting their prices however they wish before, and there is nothing to prevent it now except that it is unpopular.
Corporations have always had their fingers in the political process. It has arguably been worse, such as during the "robber baron" era. The internet grew from a government experiment into a commercial entity in this environment, and it isn't going to devolve to the "dark ages" over night. There are always threats to freedom and they always need to be resisted.
Furthermore, I don't see any problem with a tiered pricing model. Why should my grandma who only needs broadband to get photos that her children send her (they don't know how to resize their 8 megapixel images before sending them), subsidize someone who watches Hulu 30 hours a week, and constantly has bitorrent running in the background? It is wrong for ISPs to place caps on services which they advertised as unlimited, but there is nothing wrong with creating different price tiers if they let you know upfront what you are getting.
Could something like this be useful for experiments like the CDMS, which are searching for non-baryonic particles?
Except the clothing is intended to be worn on people, so how can you judge if it will actually look good if you design it for aliens? It's like car designers intentionally doing all their drawings such that only 3' midgets can use the car or furniture designers intentionally drawing things out of proportion to the human form. The purpose of sketches is to develop and test ideas before a prototype is made, but if you have to completely rework the proportions between sketching and prototyping then the sketch is worthless for the purpose of judging the aesthetic appeal of the design. It is like the entire fashion industry is in denial about what medium they working in.
The FCC does have a great deal of authority when it comes to the telecommunication industry, and it used this power to force line sharing of DSL service. However, this never extended to cable-modem, because the FCC did not have that authority. In fact, the unfairness of having one set of rules for DSL and another for cable modem was one of the justifications for ending line sharing.
For the record, I do think that we need some network neutrality laws that cover all ISPs regardless of technology, but the FCC does not currently have the power to regulate in that area, nor should they have broad powers to make up any law they wish.
The FCC has never had any authority to regulate internet service providers, no matter how much you think it ought to. Seriously, point me to anywhere in the Comunications act of 1934 or 1996, or any other law that gives them this authority. The FCC couldn't do so when asked by the Judge, and I doubt you can either.
The constitution gives congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. However, congress had passed no law prohibiting what Comcast had done, nor had they delegated power to the FCC to regulate the internet in the manner that they did. Government officials can't make up their own laws, nor can they punish people for breaking nonexistent laws.
I agree that net neutrality regulation, if created, would absolutely fall within both the letter and spirit of the interstate commerce clause (unlike many other laws that are justified by it).
The preample of the constitution begins:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
That doesn't give the government the power to do whatever it wants just because it thinks that it insures domestic tranquility. It is just a non-binding purpose of statement, and the specific grants of power follow. The same is true of the section you quoted from the FCC charter.
The FCC are not the communication dictators of the US. They don't get to do whatever they want just because they think it is good idea. They have been granted specific powers to regulate specific aspects related to communication, and that is it.
In this case they had sanctioned Comcast for violating the FCC's Internet Policy Statement. The statement itself states that it is not legally binding, just a set of guidelines. In court, the FCC could not point to a single statute that gave them the power to regulate the internet in this manner. They were blatantly operating out of their granted powers and the judge ruled accordingly.
This is not a setback for net-neutrality, because net-neutrality doesn't exist yet. This ruling does nothing to prevent us from creating net-neutrality laws, nor is there any reason that it will sway popular opinion against them.
This is a win for the rule-of-law and should be applauded.
The purpose of something like this is to push the boundaries of what can be done in web development as a means of determining where it falls short, and what needs to be done to allow efficient practical applications in the future.