Now, who really thinks iphone users have a net worth three times that of Android users?
The most popular Android phone sold was the Samsung Galaxy S III. Which is around 60M units. Google says there are 900M Android devices out there. Which puts the SGS3 at under 10% marketshare. Given it was THE flagship phone to get, there's a good bet the vast majority of Android phones out there are the crappy free ones. Because people see the iPhone, they see the $200 price tag, then the salesperson shows them the collection of Android phones you can have for free. Who cares if it runs Gingerbread, has a crappy screen, a lousy CPU, tiny RAM, whatever. It's free, and "it works like an iPhone".
And therein lies the problem - the market for someone who buys an iPhone or an SGS3 is completely different from the market who buys whatever the carrier is giving away for free.
If we were to isolate the markets - the ones who paid and bought flagship phones versus the iPhone - I have a very strong suspicion that the "worth" is the same. If you're willing to pay for it, the demographics pretty much say you're also willing to pay for apps and all the other stuff.
But if you were too cheap for an iPhone or SGS3 or whatever, then you'd probably be just as cheap with apps. Heck, you might even try to get paid apps for free (and be one to install non-Play apps that may be infected). Or not even bother with the whole thing after seeing dollar signs everywhere.
Even though iPhones have price ranges, few buy the cheaper ones. Hell, any iPhone display almost always are going to have only iPhone 5s on show. But your carrier will have dozens of brand new just-came-out-today Android phones that are free.
The problem is, you can't segregate the market on Android - e.g., you'd pay more to advertise on iPhone because the match the demographic you want, but on Android, you'd pay less than half because you can't tell if you're advertising to a cheapskate or someone who will appreciate it.
And free apps are nonsense - the reason Android has more is because of Google's incompetence at taking people's money, so paid apps are at a disadvantage over free ones since if Google can't take your money, your paid app won't show up.
Stuff like Freemium and ad-supported apps really started on Android for this reason.
Obviously someone who thinks Unicode is just an extended character set. Unfortunately, it isn't, and it's why characters are referred to as "codepoints" (because you may need multiple codepoints to actually produce a character).
First comes the many ways of expressing a codepoint as a string - UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 are just the most common variations (and there's also the whole big and little endian thing). And there's plenty of reasons why you'd want say, UTF-16 over UTF-8 (especially if you want to move backwards through text).
Next is to support the expressiveness, Unicode has a LOT of character modifier values - things like right-to-left override (after that character, text is forced to be printed right to left), applying diacriticals and other such embellishments on text. For one character printed, you can easily have half a dozen or more codepoints associated with it. (Note: This also makes copy and paste hard, because while the user may have only selected 1 character, that one character may have a few codepoints associated with it).
And don't forget all sorts of typography related things that need to be done - hinting/leading/kerning needs to be done in order to at least make the text presentable. It's why TeX was created - because the general state of computer generated text and typography was degrading compared to traditional manual typesetting.
About the only way to make it "easy" is to abandon Unicode for ASCII and to enforce everything to be monospaced font. Which generally makes text look ugly.
(a) Awareness of NSA surveillance has caused people to seek out TOR, or
(b) Increased awareness of TOR, thanks to the coverage of NSA surveillance, has caused people to try to evade said surveillance?
Probably both.
And probably a field day for the NSA as well because well, it's so easy to pick up on TOR traffic if you're an exit node. (Especially since most "dumb" people use it so the traffic being sent out the node would have tons of identifying stuff on it).
Hell, the NSA probably runs quite a few monitored exit nodes themselves just for that purpose. (Wasn't it somewhere that said the US government had some of the large numbers of exit nodes?).
Without a discrete GPU, a Mini is a pretty generic system that can be replicated by any number of mITX boards.
True.
However, there aren't many complete systems readily available, and that's key. You can build a small computer using a mini-ITX board, but you still have to add processor, cooling solution (this one is fairly big) and all the other stuff (WiFi, Bluetooth,...), and THEN build the camera. Plus being completely self contained means if it fails, all one really does is take it out, go to an Apple store, buy a new Mac Mini and shove it in. It's a lot tougher to go and buy a mini-ITX system to shove in (or run around town finding a computer store with the requisite parts).
In this case, the mini comes self contained and working out of the box - so they can concentrate on building a camera, and not on building a PC.
For its size, a mini makes a nice self-contained fully functional PC you can carry around.
Plus, as a bonus, it can run OS X, because there's still plenty who do use stuff like Final Cut Pro. And a lot of filmmakers are keen on Apple stuff - if you look, a lot of the film crew are lugging around MacBook Pros or increasingly these days, iPads.
Both Google and the USPTO are officially insane. Can anyone see where the patent wildly crosses the the line? Whilst the GMail user has agreed to have the privacy reamed the other person or persons at the end of the email or those who replay to a GMail address have not, thus an extreme invasion of privacy. This would be akin to the patents office granting the US postal service a patent for the ability to scan and read al mail that passes through it's service on the claim that buying a stamp means you agreed to all the terms and conditions of service of the US postal service.
There is always another party to that email, so at which point does the sender own the rights to privacy and at which point does the receiver take over that right or can it be legally implied that both own the right to that privacy and both must agreed to have it reamed prior to any company being allowed to do it.
Especially consider this on the reply, fuck Google, just because I send an email to a GMail address does absolutely not mean, I gave them the right to have my privacy reamed by the to their greedy and perverted little heart's content.
Technically, email is like sending postcards - it's complete;y open for anyone to read. (Although few do because who has the time to really read every single postcard sent through the mail? The NSA, perhaps).
Email has no technical privacy - it never has. Even in the beginning it was typically available to anyone who had access to the system it's on (back when people logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins would have free reign over the entire firesystem).
If you wanted privacy, use encryption - it's one of the initial uses of PGP - for encrypting email!
And you're technically correct - in fact there's a class action over this by non-Google users finding that they're being profiled and tracked because they interact with GMail users and even worse, they aren't covered by any of Google's privacy policies because they never agreed to them.
"Hey Bob are you coming to the party?"
"Yep, on my way, driving down the freeway."
"Ok great. When you get here, go through the back door."
Now I expect bob to not answer my text or read it until he can safely do so. I've sent him a message I expect him to read when he arrives, or stops. But somehow I am responsible?
Only if Bob replies back and you continue the conversation.
As it is, you won't be liable. But if the following happens...
"Did you manage to get Alice and Chuck to come as well?" You're fine here, Bob asked you a question. HOWEVER, if you reply at all, you know he's going to read your text (since he's already read your other texts while driving), and that he's driving, so you're going to be liable if you hit reply.
Leave the question hanging until Bob drives up and enters, and you're fine. You can probably get away with "Talk when you arrive" as it shows you're trying to not continue the conversation at all.
The whole point of text messages is to allow for asynchronous communications with someone. Texting someone while they're driving is one of the best times to do it because it means they can get back to you whenever they're done. It's the driver's fault completely for looking at the text. Could you blame Facebook for pushing an update to your phone while you're driving if you looked at it and crashed?
Unfortunately, that was the point of SMS - to be able to send a message asynchronously.
The problem is people are using it as an alternate form of instant messaging, and with that brings the same expectations - you're considered "rude" and "ignoring them" if you don't respond in 20 seconds.
Yes, real world expectations are unrealistic but a lot of significant others do get rather pissy if you do not respond in a timely fashion.
And we may have Apple to blame for making SMS appear like a chat session rather than say, an email session.
My first thought was that this isn't very good idea: it will strongly discourage developers from making games which do interesting things with the 3D effects because they know that some of their audience won't be able to use it. But then I skimmed the Wikipedia articles of the top selling 3DS games looking for examples of interesting uses of 3D and this (from Super Mario 3D Land) is the "best" such feature I found:
While the game is designed to not require the 3D effect, some obstacles or points of interest are deliberately more noticeable or easier when the 3D is switched on.
So the 3D is just a gimmick, a 2D version will be fine.
Because of the potential for screwing up young kid's eyes, Nintendo has made it a certification requirement for all 3DS games (ever since the 3DS was released) that it be playable in 2D mode. So you can't really hide stuff in 3D that you can't see in 2D because the game will never be approved like that.
It was a huge disappointment when it was revealed, and with reports on whether it will or it won't screw up growing eyes, well, I'm guessing they don't want huge class actions from families with cokebottle glasses years down the line.
So yes, in effect the 3D is just a gimmick. Especially since it's required to be playable in 2D.
These "smart watches" seem completely without utility to me. What use do you find for it?
They've got plenty of utility, given how big screens on phones are. I mean, if you've received a text, and one hand is busy doing something else, it can be difficult to dig your phone out of your pocket, unlock it and then see the text with your remaining hand. (I'll leave the question of why you can't use both hands up to the imagination - but say, you're carrying a bag or an umbrella...).
Android innovation in hardware drives new markets! People used to use their cellphones as watches, now they need watches to use their smartphones on the go.
What they didn't change, and really can't as a practical matter, is they did not declare that a new invention magically becomes "not new" if it uses a computer. If I invent a way to resurrect dinosaurs ala Jurassic Park, and they key invention for doing so is a gene sequencing computer program, that's a new invention. The fact that I use software for it neither makes it new nor makes it "not new".
That's the key.
Because in the current IP framework we have, software patents are necessary. Here's an example.
I create a machine to do something in a new and novel fashion. I do it using mechanical parts and gears (which are an implementation detail - the individual gears and such aren't really new or novel, just the way the machine works overall). I should be able to get a patent for that.
Now, I rip out the gears and put in motors and software to do the same thing the gears did, except instead of a bunch of gears doing what I invented, it's a computer program replicating the functionality. Is it suddenly unpatentable just because it's software rather than hardware?
Of course, the real solution to the IP mess is ot realize that software is its own IP category in and of itself. Copyrights and patents were easier before software - copyrights affected creative works that people did to communicate with other people. Patents affected things. You write a book, a song, a play, whatever and you copyrighted that because it was meant to be enjoyed by other humans. You can't really patent it because enjoyment isn't a utility. You can patent the printing press used to create the book, the machines used to record and play back, because those are things.
But now software comes and muddies the waters - because software isn't created to be normally enjoyed by others, but to be understood by machines. But it's created by humans and can have utility, which screws things up horribly.
Hence the need for new IP classification - because we're bending copyright and patent laws in ways they really never were meant to in order to accommodate software. I mean, think about it - what does it mean to 'copyright" software - is it the source code? Or the binary? Should the binary even be protected because it was a mechanical transformation? Instead software can be protected in its own category - we can have algorithmic protections used to protect algorithms (what is normally patented), and implementation protections used to protect specific implementation (copyrighted) including mechanically transformed versions. These terms can be remarkably short because of the speed at which software obsoletes itself - algorithms really only need 5 years tops, and the actual implementations, 10 years. (10 years is ages in software, but 5 years is much too short for stuff to lose protection. 10 years ago, the early versions of Windows XP and early 2.4 Linux kernels would be completely open. But not the later ones still protected. I don't think there's much contemporary hardware that can even use such old software)
The Gillette Company today announced plans to create element 117. A Gillette spokesperson was quoted as saying "115 protons? Screw it boys, we'll go to 117 protons!"
Of course,the first few postings about it in a lot of public forums at the time was to name it after Master Chief (who goes by either John-117 or Spartan-117).
Either way, I lived through the blackout... it was actually really fun. Block parties everywhere and biking around downtown in the dark. Great experience.
What?!?!?!?
Parties?!
I thought the end result of losing power was total anarchy and lawlessness and if you don't have your guns a-blazing, prepare to get completely robbed of anything and everything.
Society's supposed to break down and cannibalization is supposed to start as the unwashed masses start to realize that without electricity, they have no more life and must wander the streets aimlessly wreaking havoc...
But will never be able to answer questions like: does a 29-er mtb fit the trunk without folding the back seats.
This is the sort of question that the expert system is good at. It may not be able to answer it NOW, but it can generate enough analytical data to see if it's an important question to ask or even design around. It's actually valuable feedback to the company to know what is important for the people who plan on buying the car.
Most salespeople won't be able to answer it either.
So today it might not be able to answer the question, but tomorrow it might because it was so important they researched the answer.
Most people that have the money for a BMW electric live 45 miles from work in the suburbs and will need at LEAST a comfort zone of charge. If I drive 90 miles plus 15 miles for lunch each day I need a 200 mile range car just in case I need to get groceries on the way home, or take the family to Starbucks for an evening overpriced coffee buzz.
Get your employer/community to provide a fueling station everywhere you stop. It doesn't have to be a FAST fuelling station - just realizing that your car is sitting around for hours a day when you can be fuelling it up during that time.
For the vast majority of cars I see in the office park parking lot, the owner comes in, and the car sits there for 8-9 hours. Which even at slow charge can still give you enough power for at least half the commute.
That's the big thing with electric cars - for the most part the car is driven to places where there's enough infrastructure to offer a fuelling station. One simply needs to realize that they don't go to places to fuel up, you can fuel up (for the vast majority of trips where an electric car is practical) anywhere.
It's a difficult concept given we've been driving to gas stations for over a century to realizing that a "gas station" is now anywhere and everywhere and that parking is fuelling time.
A lot of times their errors are errors of omission. Who in the '50s was predicting the Internet? Asimov went with the "one giant computer to do everything" idea, without any clue of user-generated content being important. Or even how you would wire up every house in the world to Multivac.
Sounds a lot like the Internet to me. Wiring up every house has pretty much happened between phone lines, broadband, satellite, etc. The "one big computer" thing is gone, though we're exploring "Cloud Computing" which is pretty similar (and the vast majority of use is accessing various cloud services - either hosted websites, Netflix, etc).
Look at your list of Facebook friends if you use it. How many of them have anything to do with your credit worthiness or do you have any idea about their financial lives?
Do you have any high school friends on there? A friend you knew when you were 14 who was cool then but has since become a dead beat? You both share a hobby that you shared at 14 so still talk about that a lot and you should be dinged for his bad decisions?
You have a couple of brothers/cousins/family members who have made horrible financial decisions and declared bankruptcy a couple of times. You have done everything right and are responsible financially and so you are penalized for that?
Well it could be argued that you let them default on their loans and such. After all, if they were clearly struggling, and you failed to help, then it's likely that if you are struggling, you will be unlikely to receive help.
True, some bankruptcies and all that cannot be helped - some people make such stupid decisions that well, no matter what you do, they're going to hit the brick wall anyways (so the question becomes - why are you friends with people like this?).
And there's always the peer pressure angle - perhaps if you have friends who declared bankruptcy, then maybe if you run into trouble, they'll say to declare bankruptcy and make your life easier.
Also, it isn't a scientific study - the banks don't need solid evidence. They just need a correleation and circumstantial evidence - if some study says that people who have friends who declared bankruptcy are more likely to declare bankruptcy, that's good enough.
One should note that we're inching towards driverless cars faster than you can imagine.
Things like cruise control were the first step. Now we have lane awareness (where it alerts you If you start to drift from your lane), forward accident detection and prevention (applies brakes if you start approaching an obstacle in front), auto-cruise control (keeps you paced with the car in front automatically), parallel parking assistance, radar, etc.
The driverless car probably won't come as one go, but all the technology spinoffs are coming fast and furious now.
And it'll be popular when people realize they could text and do other things during the otherwise boring commute (boredom was one of the most cited reasons for distracted driving, or why people text and drive).
Geek community is stupidfied... we read all the articles about PRISM and you STILL recommend *skype*? WTF. Why not jabber, jinny, linphone, anything else?!
Because it's easy to use?
There's a certain point to paranoia, but beyond that, it makes one look silly. Everyone goes ape-shit about wanting to encrypt everything, but don't realize that it simply makes your traffic look even MORE interesting to the feds? I mean, one day you're doing everything in the clear, then "oh shit they're spying!" and you encrypt it all. Damn, now you look guilty as hell.
Especially if they're keeping track of metadata (encryption won't fix that), and only keeping non-American intelligence (in which case, by encrypting it, they can't determine if you're an American and thus, even more likely your information is logged).
Instead, given it's going to be hours of sweet nothings and silence and other boring crap.
The thing to realize is that the crap you do is of no interest to government. Unless you're into making bombs or other stuff without a permit, the porn and other crap you do online is of no interest.
There are two ways to have privacy - you can choose to hide it, or you can choose to keep it in plain sight. For a lot of things, the latter works extremely well.
Another example would be Kodak who leapt on digital photography very early on, and haven't really been able to reap the rewards, due in part to the fact technologies they pioneered ended up being sold as part of more universal widgets (like cameraphones.)
Kodak invented the digital camera. They didn't reap the rewards because they didn't want to cannibalize existing sales.
One has to remember that Kodak sells chemicals (solid(as film), and liquid(for processing film and paper prints)). Digital photography doesn't need the chemicals Kodak sells. If they sold digital cameras, it would eat into their chemical business. So they shelved the project, fearing it would eat into their bread and butter.
The problem with avoiding cannibalization is well, if you don't do it, someone else will. Everyone else started making decent digital cameras and film sales declined. Kodak, instead of being at the forefront for being the inventor and first mover, became a company that brought up the rear of the pack, playing catch up on a technology they invented. At the same time, film and chemical sales were falling because people were using digital cameras and archiving photos on hard drives and printing very few out.
Heck, all Kodak had to do was work with hard drive companies to develop better storage media (chemicals!) and inkjet ink (more chemicals!), and they'd probably have some viability.
Not difficult at all. It's called an air gap. You buy a laptop specifically for the purpose of decrypting the messages. You set it up without connecting it to the Internet. You generate your private-public key pair on this machine and use a flash drive to manually copy the public key to a different machine so that you can provide it to whoever needs it. When you receive a message, you copy that to a flash drive, then copy it to the other machine, then extract it.
That doesn't work as well as it seems - see stuff like Stuxnet and Flame for proof that you can have an airgapped network, and STILL be infected.
In fact, without proper data diode type handling, you'll never get protection as long as there's a two way communication of data between the networks. And yes, your reuse of flash drives is a communications medium. The PC connected to the internet gets infected, puts an infection vector on your flash drive, infects your "clean PC" and grabs the private key. That key is then carried back on the "public" flash drive for the internet connected PC to access.
Data should flow one way only.
If you need to send a response, you compose it on a "responding" computer (but you won't be able to quote. Encrypt it, then copy it off. That data is transmitted using the internet PC and ht media may be reused for copying to the receiving PC. Once it hits the receiving PC, the media is destroyed - you cannot trust its contents. You compose a reply on the responding PC - there is no data flow from the receiving PC and the responding PC other than visual.
A determined person will be patient enough to wait.
The reason why Apple phones couldn't run Flash while Android phones could...is the something useful
Except Adobe abandoned Flash on mobile devices - the latest you can get is 11.1 for Android 4.0.x. You can probably install it on Jelly Bean, but it isn't supported and given the way the default browser is Chrome...
And they abandoned it because of the iPhone.
The real question is - how does this phone compare to the Androids sold today. As in what Androids are currently selling. Is it going to move as many as the SGS3 (60M - best selling Android phone model) out of 900M Androids? It seems the vast majority of them aren't the flagship devices that we keep seeing, but all the various free ones (including the SGS*2* derived ones).
Then there's the whole screen thing - if you want any Android phone with a screen smaller than 4.5", you're SOL. Poor processors, poor screens, poor memory... seems like no one wants a flagship phone with a smaller screen for those of us who prefer to use phones single-handedly.
Like it or not, studios are out to make money, not great movies. For all they're concerned, every movie could be a Chipmunks sequel.
Exactly. The goal of a movie is to put asses in seats. That's it.
It's why summer blockbusters are practically all the same, no-content visual effects fluff full of violence (but not sex! can't have that!). That stuff sells - and having a simplistic story means even the simplest of minds can follow.
Great movies.... they're good and they last, but often it flies over the heads of most moviegoers who want to be entertained for 2 hours, not be left pondering the subtexts and meaning of the movie. I go in, get entertained for 2 hours and forget about the world, then come back out thinking about the silliness of what transpired.
An awesome ebook that really details what the big problems are with spacesuits, or a pressure suit, really.
It's mobility - and it's not mobility while deflated (when you see those photos of early astronauts playing golf or baseball), but when inflated.
So much technology has been used in controlling ballooning, ensuring the helmet doesn't rise above your eyes, trying to get breathing air to where you want it, and also trying to minimize extra exertion because the suit wants to conform to the shape in which it was sewn, so every deviation costs energy.
And how trying to get zippers to seal right, or bearings that roll without leaking too much air (very hard problem), etc. etc.
It's easy to make an airtight suit. You can make one easily at home using stuff you probably already have. But make one that can keep you from sweating excessively or getting cold extremities, to allow you to move as free as possible when inflated 3-5psi above ambient, takes a lot of work.
And the first attempts were basically practically iron-maiden like devices - when deflated they were hot and uncomfortable. When inflated they were stiff and inflexible.
Or, more recently the residents of Quebec, Canada, in 1989 where the power grid was disrupted due magnetic induction caused by the solar storm (the store interacts with Earth's magnetic field, the varying magnetic field then induces currents into the long transmission lines).
Given today's society is even MORE dependent on the power grid and even MORE dependent on satellites, they are of somewhat more worry. Heck, the east coast blackout of 2003 was fairly disruptive. Now imagine what fun to be had when GPS goes down (which can take out seemingly unrelated things like cellphones, since GPS is used for precise timing purposes)
While not quite a superstorm, it's still something to monitor.
Re:Good news for stockholders
on
Ballmer To Retire
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's closing, but only very slowly. Check the number of Mac games on Steam and it's still tiny.
If one or two big publishers were to say "we no longer target Windows as a platform, instead we target Steam, which means PC, Mac (plus Linux?)" that might change things.
But publishers generally need a lot of convincing to do that kind of thing and Apple's attitude is such that they will never even put out the feelers.
No, gaming is moving away from computers, period. Mostly due to high piracy rates. It's also helped by Apple's more... favorable stance towards gaming (Jobs was not a fan of games, and in fact, wanted to ban games from the Mac way back in 1984).
Thing is, gaming's moved on. The PC had high piracy rates and extreme avoidance of DRM, so AAA publishers started moving towards consoles (which were getting more powerful at the time that it was doable).
Then Apple opened the App Store, which despite its approval requirements, thousands of indie devs flocked there and made mobile gaming a huge thing. In fact, a casualty of this was the casual arcade - a $2B industry in 2007, which collapsed to a mere $300M in 2008. These were from arcade machines that were put in places like a Laundromat and such and were played while people waited. In 2008, with the release of the App Store, people were gaming on their phones instead of putting quarters in the machine.
Sure we all mock how mobile games are crap (like anything, 90% of it IS crap), but it's a powerful force - how indie devs have prospered on the PC, and now iOS and Android. And the platforms have shifted too - fewer games are Windows-only and use of cross platform (iOS/Android/Windows/OS X/Linux/etc) tools have made most indie games available on at least three platforms - either Windows/iOS/Android, or Windows/OS X/Linux.
Gaming on Windows is mostly due to it "just being there" - we're talking desktop OS with 90+% marketshare. But a number of hours spent playing is taken up on iOS and Android as well. And AAA titles are more or less mostly on consoles now - few PC only devs exist (Valve, Blizzard being most prominent, but Valve now makes for OS X and Linux, and Blizzard is going to consoles).
Windows' days as a gaming platform are heavily numbered - most games are available on other platforms or even completely platform independent (browser based gaming).
Slashdot Mirror
The most popular Android phone sold was the Samsung Galaxy S III. Which is around 60M units. Google says there are 900M Android devices out there. Which puts the SGS3 at under 10% marketshare. Given it was THE flagship phone to get, there's a good bet the vast majority of Android phones out there are the crappy free ones. Because people see the iPhone, they see the $200 price tag, then the salesperson shows them the collection of Android phones you can have for free. Who cares if it runs Gingerbread, has a crappy screen, a lousy CPU, tiny RAM, whatever. It's free, and "it works like an iPhone".
And therein lies the problem - the market for someone who buys an iPhone or an SGS3 is completely different from the market who buys whatever the carrier is giving away for free.
If we were to isolate the markets - the ones who paid and bought flagship phones versus the iPhone - I have a very strong suspicion that the "worth" is the same. If you're willing to pay for it, the demographics pretty much say you're also willing to pay for apps and all the other stuff.
But if you were too cheap for an iPhone or SGS3 or whatever, then you'd probably be just as cheap with apps. Heck, you might even try to get paid apps for free (and be one to install non-Play apps that may be infected). Or not even bother with the whole thing after seeing dollar signs everywhere.
Even though iPhones have price ranges, few buy the cheaper ones. Hell, any iPhone display almost always are going to have only iPhone 5s on show. But your carrier will have dozens of brand new just-came-out-today Android phones that are free.
The problem is, you can't segregate the market on Android - e.g., you'd pay more to advertise on iPhone because the match the demographic you want, but on Android, you'd pay less than half because you can't tell if you're advertising to a cheapskate or someone who will appreciate it.
And free apps are nonsense - the reason Android has more is because of Google's incompetence at taking people's money, so paid apps are at a disadvantage over free ones since if Google can't take your money, your paid app won't show up.
Stuff like Freemium and ad-supported apps really started on Android for this reason.
Obviously someone who thinks Unicode is just an extended character set. Unfortunately, it isn't, and it's why characters are referred to as "codepoints" (because you may need multiple codepoints to actually produce a character).
First comes the many ways of expressing a codepoint as a string - UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 are just the most common variations (and there's also the whole big and little endian thing). And there's plenty of reasons why you'd want say, UTF-16 over UTF-8 (especially if you want to move backwards through text).
Next is to support the expressiveness, Unicode has a LOT of character modifier values - things like right-to-left override (after that character, text is forced to be printed right to left), applying diacriticals and other such embellishments on text. For one character printed, you can easily have half a dozen or more codepoints associated with it. (Note: This also makes copy and paste hard, because while the user may have only selected 1 character, that one character may have a few codepoints associated with it).
And don't forget all sorts of typography related things that need to be done - hinting/leading/kerning needs to be done in order to at least make the text presentable. It's why TeX was created - because the general state of computer generated text and typography was degrading compared to traditional manual typesetting.
About the only way to make it "easy" is to abandon Unicode for ASCII and to enforce everything to be monospaced font. Which generally makes text look ugly.
Probably both.
And probably a field day for the NSA as well because well, it's so easy to pick up on TOR traffic if you're an exit node. (Especially since most "dumb" people use it so the traffic being sent out the node would have tons of identifying stuff on it).
Hell, the NSA probably runs quite a few monitored exit nodes themselves just for that purpose. (Wasn't it somewhere that said the US government had some of the large numbers of exit nodes?).
True.
However, there aren't many complete systems readily available, and that's key. You can build a small computer using a mini-ITX board, but you still have to add processor, cooling solution (this one is fairly big) and all the other stuff (WiFi, Bluetooth, ...), and THEN build the camera. Plus being completely self contained means if it fails, all one really does is take it out, go to an Apple store, buy a new Mac Mini and shove it in. It's a lot tougher to go and buy a mini-ITX system to shove in (or run around town finding a computer store with the requisite parts).
In this case, the mini comes self contained and working out of the box - so they can concentrate on building a camera, and not on building a PC.
For its size, a mini makes a nice self-contained fully functional PC you can carry around.
Plus, as a bonus, it can run OS X, because there's still plenty who do use stuff like Final Cut Pro. And a lot of filmmakers are keen on Apple stuff - if you look, a lot of the film crew are lugging around MacBook Pros or increasingly these days, iPads.
Technically, email is like sending postcards - it's complete;y open for anyone to read. (Although few do because who has the time to really read every single postcard sent through the mail? The NSA, perhaps).
Email has no technical privacy - it never has. Even in the beginning it was typically available to anyone who had access to the system it's on (back when people logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins would have free reign over the entire firesystem).
If you wanted privacy, use encryption - it's one of the initial uses of PGP - for encrypting email!
And you're technically correct - in fact there's a class action over this by non-Google users finding that they're being profiled and tracked because they interact with GMail users and even worse, they aren't covered by any of Google's privacy policies because they never agreed to them.
Unfortunately, that was the point of SMS - to be able to send a message asynchronously.
The problem is people are using it as an alternate form of instant messaging, and with that brings the same expectations - you're considered "rude" and "ignoring them" if you don't respond in 20 seconds.
Yes, real world expectations are unrealistic but a lot of significant others do get rather pissy if you do not respond in a timely fashion.
And we may have Apple to blame for making SMS appear like a chat session rather than say, an email session.
Because of the potential for screwing up young kid's eyes, Nintendo has made it a certification requirement for all 3DS games (ever since the 3DS was released) that it be playable in 2D mode. So you can't really hide stuff in 3D that you can't see in 2D because the game will never be approved like that.
It was a huge disappointment when it was revealed, and with reports on whether it will or it won't screw up growing eyes, well, I'm guessing they don't want huge class actions from families with cokebottle glasses years down the line.
So yes, in effect the 3D is just a gimmick. Especially since it's required to be playable in 2D.
They've got plenty of utility, given how big screens on phones are. I mean, if you've received a text, and one hand is busy doing something else, it can be difficult to dig your phone out of your pocket, unlock it and then see the text with your remaining hand. (I'll leave the question of why you can't use both hands up to the imagination - but say, you're carrying a bag or an umbrella...).
Android innovation in hardware drives new markets! People used to use their cellphones as watches, now they need watches to use their smartphones on the go.
That's the key.
Because in the current IP framework we have, software patents are necessary. Here's an example.
I create a machine to do something in a new and novel fashion. I do it using mechanical parts and gears (which are an implementation detail - the individual gears and such aren't really new or novel, just the way the machine works overall). I should be able to get a patent for that.
Now, I rip out the gears and put in motors and software to do the same thing the gears did, except instead of a bunch of gears doing what I invented, it's a computer program replicating the functionality. Is it suddenly unpatentable just because it's software rather than hardware?
Of course, the real solution to the IP mess is ot realize that software is its own IP category in and of itself. Copyrights and patents were easier before software - copyrights affected creative works that people did to communicate with other people. Patents affected things. You write a book, a song, a play, whatever and you copyrighted that because it was meant to be enjoyed by other humans. You can't really patent it because enjoyment isn't a utility. You can patent the printing press used to create the book, the machines used to record and play back, because those are things.
But now software comes and muddies the waters - because software isn't created to be normally enjoyed by others, but to be understood by machines. But it's created by humans and can have utility, which screws things up horribly.
Hence the need for new IP classification - because we're bending copyright and patent laws in ways they really never were meant to in order to accommodate software. I mean, think about it - what does it mean to 'copyright" software - is it the source code? Or the binary? Should the binary even be protected because it was a mechanical transformation? Instead software can be protected in its own category - we can have algorithmic protections used to protect algorithms (what is normally patented), and implementation protections used to protect specific implementation (copyrighted) including mechanically transformed versions. These terms can be remarkably short because of the speed at which software obsoletes itself - algorithms really only need 5 years tops, and the actual implementations, 10 years. (10 years is ages in software, but 5 years is much too short for stuff to lose protection. 10 years ago, the early versions of Windows XP and early 2.4 Linux kernels would be completely open. But not the later ones still protected. I don't think there's much contemporary hardware that can even use such old software)
Except that ununseptium was created in 2011.
Of course ,the first few postings about it in a lot of public forums at the time was to name it after Master Chief (who goes by either John-117 or Spartan-117).
What?!?!?!?
Parties?!
I thought the end result of losing power was total anarchy and lawlessness and if you don't have your guns a-blazing, prepare to get completely robbed of anything and everything.
Society's supposed to break down and cannibalization is supposed to start as the unwashed masses start to realize that without electricity, they have no more life and must wander the streets aimlessly wreaking havoc...
This is the sort of question that the expert system is good at. It may not be able to answer it NOW, but it can generate enough analytical data to see if it's an important question to ask or even design around. It's actually valuable feedback to the company to know what is important for the people who plan on buying the car.
Most salespeople won't be able to answer it either.
So today it might not be able to answer the question, but tomorrow it might because it was so important they researched the answer.
Get your employer/community to provide a fueling station everywhere you stop. It doesn't have to be a FAST fuelling station - just realizing that your car is sitting around for hours a day when you can be fuelling it up during that time.
For the vast majority of cars I see in the office park parking lot, the owner comes in, and the car sits there for 8-9 hours. Which even at slow charge can still give you enough power for at least half the commute.
That's the big thing with electric cars - for the most part the car is driven to places where there's enough infrastructure to offer a fuelling station. One simply needs to realize that they don't go to places to fuel up, you can fuel up (for the vast majority of trips where an electric car is practical) anywhere.
It's a difficult concept given we've been driving to gas stations for over a century to realizing that a "gas station" is now anywhere and everywhere and that parking is fuelling time.
Sounds a lot like the Internet to me. Wiring up every house has pretty much happened between phone lines, broadband, satellite, etc. The "one big computer" thing is gone, though we're exploring "Cloud Computing" which is pretty similar (and the vast majority of use is accessing various cloud services - either hosted websites, Netflix, etc).
Well it could be argued that you let them default on their loans and such. After all, if they were clearly struggling, and you failed to help, then it's likely that if you are struggling, you will be unlikely to receive help.
True, some bankruptcies and all that cannot be helped - some people make such stupid decisions that well, no matter what you do, they're going to hit the brick wall anyways (so the question becomes - why are you friends with people like this?).
And there's always the peer pressure angle - perhaps if you have friends who declared bankruptcy, then maybe if you run into trouble, they'll say to declare bankruptcy and make your life easier.
Also, it isn't a scientific study - the banks don't need solid evidence. They just need a correleation and circumstantial evidence - if some study says that people who have friends who declared bankruptcy are more likely to declare bankruptcy, that's good enough.
One should note that we're inching towards driverless cars faster than you can imagine.
Things like cruise control were the first step. Now we have lane awareness (where it alerts you If you start to drift from your lane), forward accident detection and prevention (applies brakes if you start approaching an obstacle in front), auto-cruise control (keeps you paced with the car in front automatically), parallel parking assistance, radar, etc.
The driverless car probably won't come as one go, but all the technology spinoffs are coming fast and furious now.
And it'll be popular when people realize they could text and do other things during the otherwise boring commute (boredom was one of the most cited reasons for distracted driving, or why people text and drive).
Because it's easy to use?
There's a certain point to paranoia, but beyond that, it makes one look silly. Everyone goes ape-shit about wanting to encrypt everything, but don't realize that it simply makes your traffic look even MORE interesting to the feds? I mean, one day you're doing everything in the clear, then "oh shit they're spying!" and you encrypt it all. Damn, now you look guilty as hell.
Especially if they're keeping track of metadata (encryption won't fix that), and only keeping non-American intelligence (in which case, by encrypting it, they can't determine if you're an American and thus, even more likely your information is logged).
Instead, given it's going to be hours of sweet nothings and silence and other boring crap.
The thing to realize is that the crap you do is of no interest to government. Unless you're into making bombs or other stuff without a permit, the porn and other crap you do online is of no interest.
There are two ways to have privacy - you can choose to hide it, or you can choose to keep it in plain sight. For a lot of things, the latter works extremely well.
Kodak invented the digital camera. They didn't reap the rewards because they didn't want to cannibalize existing sales.
One has to remember that Kodak sells chemicals (solid(as film), and liquid(for processing film and paper prints)). Digital photography doesn't need the chemicals Kodak sells. If they sold digital cameras, it would eat into their chemical business. So they shelved the project, fearing it would eat into their bread and butter.
The problem with avoiding cannibalization is well, if you don't do it, someone else will. Everyone else started making decent digital cameras and film sales declined. Kodak, instead of being at the forefront for being the inventor and first mover, became a company that brought up the rear of the pack, playing catch up on a technology they invented. At the same time, film and chemical sales were falling because people were using digital cameras and archiving photos on hard drives and printing very few out.
Heck, all Kodak had to do was work with hard drive companies to develop better storage media (chemicals!) and inkjet ink (more chemicals!), and they'd probably have some viability.
History is full of such examples, too.
That doesn't work as well as it seems - see stuff like Stuxnet and Flame for proof that you can have an airgapped network, and STILL be infected.
In fact, without proper data diode type handling, you'll never get protection as long as there's a two way communication of data between the networks. And yes, your reuse of flash drives is a communications medium. The PC connected to the internet gets infected, puts an infection vector on your flash drive, infects your "clean PC" and grabs the private key. That key is then carried back on the "public" flash drive for the internet connected PC to access.
Data should flow one way only.
If you need to send a response, you compose it on a "responding" computer (but you won't be able to quote. Encrypt it, then copy it off. That data is transmitted using the internet PC and ht media may be reused for copying to the receiving PC. Once it hits the receiving PC, the media is destroyed - you cannot trust its contents. You compose a reply on the responding PC - there is no data flow from the receiving PC and the responding PC other than visual.
A determined person will be patient enough to wait.
Except Adobe abandoned Flash on mobile devices - the latest you can get is 11.1 for Android 4.0.x. You can probably install it on Jelly Bean, but it isn't supported and given the way the default browser is Chrome...
And they abandoned it because of the iPhone.
The real question is - how does this phone compare to the Androids sold today. As in what Androids are currently selling. Is it going to move as many as the SGS3 (60M - best selling Android phone model) out of 900M Androids? It seems the vast majority of them aren't the flagship devices that we keep seeing, but all the various free ones (including the SGS*2* derived ones).
Then there's the whole screen thing - if you want any Android phone with a screen smaller than 4.5", you're SOL. Poor processors, poor screens, poor memory... seems like no one wants a flagship phone with a smaller screen for those of us who prefer to use phones single-handedly.
Exactly. The goal of a movie is to put asses in seats. That's it.
It's why summer blockbusters are practically all the same, no-content visual effects fluff full of violence (but not sex! can't have that!). That stuff sells - and having a simplistic story means even the simplest of minds can follow.
Great movies.... they're good and they last, but often it flies over the heads of most moviegoers who want to be entertained for 2 hours, not be left pondering the subtexts and meaning of the movie. I go in, get entertained for 2 hours and forget about the world, then come back out thinking about the silliness of what transpired.
An awesome ebook that really details what the big problems are with spacesuits, or a pressure suit, really.
It's mobility - and it's not mobility while deflated (when you see those photos of early astronauts playing golf or baseball), but when inflated.
So much technology has been used in controlling ballooning, ensuring the helmet doesn't rise above your eyes, trying to get breathing air to where you want it, and also trying to minimize extra exertion because the suit wants to conform to the shape in which it was sewn, so every deviation costs energy.
And how trying to get zippers to seal right, or bearings that roll without leaking too much air (very hard problem), etc. etc.
It's easy to make an airtight suit. You can make one easily at home using stuff you probably already have. But make one that can keep you from sweating excessively or getting cold extremities, to allow you to move as free as possible when inflated 3-5psi above ambient, takes a lot of work.
And the first attempts were basically practically iron-maiden like devices - when deflated they were hot and uncomfortable. When inflated they were stiff and inflexible.
Or, more recently the residents of Quebec, Canada, in 1989 where the power grid was disrupted due magnetic induction caused by the solar storm (the store interacts with Earth's magnetic field, the varying magnetic field then induces currents into the long transmission lines).
Given today's society is even MORE dependent on the power grid and even MORE dependent on satellites, they are of somewhat more worry. Heck, the east coast blackout of 2003 was fairly disruptive. Now imagine what fun to be had when GPS goes down (which can take out seemingly unrelated things like cellphones, since GPS is used for precise timing purposes)
While not quite a superstorm, it's still something to monitor.
No, gaming is moving away from computers, period. Mostly due to high piracy rates. It's also helped by Apple's more... favorable stance towards gaming (Jobs was not a fan of games, and in fact, wanted to ban games from the Mac way back in 1984).
Thing is, gaming's moved on. The PC had high piracy rates and extreme avoidance of DRM, so AAA publishers started moving towards consoles (which were getting more powerful at the time that it was doable).
Then Apple opened the App Store, which despite its approval requirements, thousands of indie devs flocked there and made mobile gaming a huge thing. In fact, a casualty of this was the casual arcade - a $2B industry in 2007, which collapsed to a mere $300M in 2008. These were from arcade machines that were put in places like a Laundromat and such and were played while people waited. In 2008, with the release of the App Store, people were gaming on their phones instead of putting quarters in the machine.
Sure we all mock how mobile games are crap (like anything, 90% of it IS crap), but it's a powerful force - how indie devs have prospered on the PC, and now iOS and Android. And the platforms have shifted too - fewer games are Windows-only and use of cross platform (iOS/Android/Windows/OS X/Linux/etc) tools have made most indie games available on at least three platforms - either Windows/iOS/Android, or Windows/OS X/Linux.
Gaming on Windows is mostly due to it "just being there" - we're talking desktop OS with 90+% marketshare. But a number of hours spent playing is taken up on iOS and Android as well. And AAA titles are more or less mostly on consoles now - few PC only devs exist (Valve, Blizzard being most prominent, but Valve now makes for OS X and Linux, and Blizzard is going to consoles).
Windows' days as a gaming platform are heavily numbered - most games are available on other platforms or even completely platform independent (browser based gaming).