"... how many UI ideas don't have more than one inventor?"
Anything "invented" by Apple. Duh! Just ask their legal team!
Woz basically invented overlapping windows - he was puzzling over how the Alto did it, and worked out regions (patented Woz) for how to handle when windows overlapped each other. It wasn't until much later that the Alto guys admitted that they didn't allow overlapping windows.
After his plane crash (but before he had a chance to code it or patent it) the first thing Woz said to Jobs in the hospital was "Relax, I remember regions".
Or use Windows or possibly Gnome...or do OpenCl or OpenGl programming...or-
The list goes on. The fact that people are still selling craptacular integrated video chipsets in this day and age saddens me greatly. Guys, it's 2012...pony up for a dedicated video card with dedicated video ram. Quit trying to save a buck or two on a component you really don't want to be cheap on.
Well, I think you can do OpenCL on Intel HD3xxx/4xxx chips these days. At least Apple seems to (on the retina MBP, they have a custom shader to handle the scaling from the double-size framebuffers to native panel size (if you're running at the higher-than-half size modes, e.g., 1920x1200) so that when you switch between GPUs, you don't notice it happening like you would if you wanted native.
As for why integrated graphics - easy - price. The customer sees $500 laptops, and they end up demanding cheap laptops. Think of all those/. arguments where "Apple is expensive! Their laptops start at $1000 when everyone elses is at $500!".
Hell, we call PCs (desktops and laptops) costing over $1000 "premium" nowadays. Expensive even, when we're constantly inundated with sub-$500 laptops and PCs.
It's why netbooks died quickly after the launch of the iPad (no manufacturer wanted to build no-profit PCs, and tablets at $500 were far more profitable), why you can get i7 laptops with integrated graphics and 1366x768 screens. Why "ultrabooks" costing $1000+ seem to be the ones everyone's dumping money into making product for (with high-res screens!), etc.
The race to the bottom has led manufacturers to focus on what everyone says they should look for in a PC - GHz (more is better), GB (more is better), GB (more is better) (one is RAM, other is HDD). Which means stuff like graphics and screen resolution (two of the most expensive parts) get ignored and skimped on because consumers don't care.
Hell, a retina MBP fully tricked out costs under $4000. Which only over a half-decade ago would've been considered normal for high-end PCs. These days it puts it basically at the top end "for 1%ers only" category.
People used to talk all the time. To random strangers. People didn't used to fear everything and everyone around them. Now, everyone you meet is a potential rapist, terrorist, or something else. Thank the news media and the politicians.
I suppose it's an irony of life - we're all too scared to talk to random strangers, yet talking to random strangers is probably one of the ways to build a stronger, safer community. Heck, I'm sure most people these days rarely say more than a simple hello to their neighbours, if they even know their names.
And hell, it's why people constantly talk about the weather - because it's something random strangers will easily talk about or relate to (despite being completely ordinary or boring topic).
Once the sense of community fades and people want to become isolated and insular (this includes you and I who prefer to hang out in front of the screen too), fear starts setting in, compounded by talking heads on TV who prefer a one-way conversation trying to get you to look at them.
Just think of all the people who drive their kids to school when they really could just walk there. (Heck, walking school "buses" often show kids that their friends are often only a few houses down).
You may discover that you can't have what you want. There are real physical limitations we have to deal with. One issue, with regards to copper Ethernet, that we are having is keeping something that remains compatible with older style wiring. Sticking with 8P8C and UTP is becoming a real issue for higher speeds. At some point we may have to have a break where new standards require a different kind of jack and connector.
Actually, the biggest limitation for Ethernet right now isn't the wiring (all the new fancy high-speed interconnects never use UTP - usually fiber or other, then ported backwards to cable.
The biggest issue right now is that if you want 100m, you have to increase the minimum packet size at the faster speeds - 64 bytes is barely able to meet it at GigE speeds, nevermind 10G or faster. The thing is, at the faster speeds, you can send out a minimum-sized packet and it'll be completely "on the wire" before the other end gets it (the host would've finished the last bit before the remote end has even got the first sync bit!). It's one reason why hubs aren't defined faster than GigE - besides the inefficiency, you can have every host transmitting packets and not seeing the results for the packet (collision or not) until many packets later (remember a collision is detected when a host receives back a bit different from what it sent).
Also each order of magnitude you go up with Ethernet makes the next matter less. It's going to be awhile before there's any real need for 10gbps to the desktop. 1gbps is just plenty fast enough for most things. You can use things over a 1gbps link like they were on your local system and not see much of a performance penalty (latency is a bigger issue than speed in most things at that point). I mean consider that the original SATA spec is only 1.5gbps.
As for 100gbps, it'll take some major increases in what we do before there is a need for that to the desktop, if ever. 10gbps is just an amazing amount of bandwidth to a single computer. It is enough to do multiple uncompressed 1080p60 video streams, almost enough to do a 4k uncompressed video stream.
Perhaps you don't realize how slow standards card to produce - every company is fighting to include their technology in the standard (because it guarantees patent royalties - e.g., HP gets paid for every GigE port thanks to Auto-MDI/X, and there's a patent on autonegotiation as well I believe). A lot of back scratching, technical analysis, backwards compatibility handling, etc, you have a standard. This can take 5 years or more. Then after the standard is approved, it can take another 2-3 years for chips and equipment to hit the market, and years after that for enough volume to build up that it becomes cheaper.
Heck, we've had GigE for probably over a decade, and high-end PCs shipped with GigE ports over half a decade ago (Apple was one of the first to start making it standard in their computers). GigE switches were still pricey until a few years ago, and these days, it's now affordable to run a GigE network at home with switches falling under the $50 mark.
Just because it's "fine now" doesn't mean it'll be fine later, and the process is a slow grind.
Of course, the other thing holding back adoption of 10G and 40G is cabling - CAT6 or fiber, few of which people have, but I'm sure you'll start finding high-end PCs shipping with 10G ports in the next couple of years.
You'd think engineers'd know that 1/x is a curve, but nooooo...
Still it's not as bad as measuring rainfall in liters per square meter like we do here in Spain.
Bottom line: Getting the basic math right would mean the public wouldn't have to. Or at least, not so much.
You do realize the metric equivalent ot MPG is... L/100km! Which is just a minor variation on GPM.
Engineers do use the right units. It's just that MPG is a much nicer "more intuitive" unit for shoppers - as in "bigger is better!" while if you use the standard L/100km, it's "smaller is better". (Note we're still using "people sized" units, using L/m is more correct SI, but turns the numbers meaningless
And L/m^2 is a valid unit - it tells you how much liquid fell per unit area. We normally use mm (or inches for imperial folk), but tehcnically L/m^2 is the correct unit (even though it simplifies down to mm in the end).
It's just like how we use kWh for our electrical meters, when the correct unit is J (it simplifies down to that - a watt is J/s, so you have time on top and time on the bottom which cancel through a conversion). Or AH/WH for battery capacity. We could use the correct units, but the alternative units do make it easier to intuitively grasp the concept.
Apple has just been careful to hide the problem by not shipping any hardware that exposes it. Their own high-dpi displays were carefully chosen to be exact multiples of the traditional resolution, so that they could scale things with pixel doubling.
But as soon as you get outside of that little box, and ask OSX to do 125% or 150% scaling of pretty much anything and you get the same mess.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Have you seen the Retina MacBook Pro running at a scaled mode? You have a variety of settings - from the 2x 1440x900 mode to the decidedly non-integral 1920x1200 mode.
And 1920x1200 is, despite not being a nice integral factor of the native resolutoin, looks practically native. As in, no scaling artifacts.
What happens is that internally, OS X creates a double height frame buffer - 3840x2400, renders to that "retina style" 2x mode, then runs a scaler (custom-designed by Apple so both the 650M and Intel 4000 scale it identically) to bring it back down to 2880x1800. And the results are DAMN good - you can't tell, other than the fact that the GPU is now too underpowered to do 60fps.
And this is 150% scaling (1920x1200 -> 2880x1800), and looks awesome - you definitely don't get the "non-native resolution" crap you see on other displays.
OTOH, the low end mode, I think there's one where it runs at something like 1366x768 or so. It looks awful because even in 2x mode, the virtual framebuffer is smaller than the screen resolution, leading to the hardware having to scale the image up again.
But going from logical 1440x900 to 1920x1200 on the same 2880x1800 panel? Looks damn nice for a 150% scale up.
You can get all the functionality of a Nook tablet by installing the Nook app to a Nexus 7.
I've tried it the other way around - turning a Nook tablet into an Android tablet - but it's an annoying process. Further, B&N likes to un-root your device by forcing you to update. There are ways around this, but you have to be pretty devoted to keep a Nook Tablet rooted. The Nexus 7 is cheaper and does more.
Also - why in the heck does processor speed and RAM matter on a device whose primary function is to read books?!
True, but the Nook HD+ has a nicer screen (1440x900 in a 7" form factor). And the 9" is 1080p+ already (1920x1280 - vs. 1920x1200 for Kindle HD). That 9" Nook has a higher screen resolution that most laptops out there (even the ones with 1920x1200)!
It's funny they're concentrating on the specs and yet ignore the screen - but then again, specs seem to matter to geeks and people who complain about the lack thereof on Apple products. Though you do need some pretty good one to drive all those pixels.
Stop trying to explicitely criminalize individual behaviours. Doesn't work. Distracted driving is distracted driving. How is texting different from arguing with your passenger or yelling at your kids in the back, or any number of other things people regularly do that do not involve cell phones or texting? All are equally dangerous to texting, and perfectly legal. But being caught with a cell phone stuck to your ear is pretty obvious. Much harder to catch "distracted driving". It's all about politicians being seen "doing something about it". Causing an accident while texting is punitively punished, but causing an accident because your girlfriend was giving you shit is just something unfortunate that could have happened to anyone.
A cellphone is, unfortunately, more distracting than the same person beside you. First, if they're beside you, they're in the same position you're in, and can adapt their conversation to suit the situation. Second, there's less human inhibition to just ask for quiet for a moment while you execute a tricky driving maneuver.
For example, let's say you're talking to your boss on your phone. You're far less likely to ask him to shut up, ask him to repeat or make him pause as you try to change lanes or merge onto the freeway, and he's not in the car so he can't pause to let you execute these tasks without you saying so. But if he was in the car, he could see you're trying to merge or change lanes and pause appropriately, as well as repeat what he was saying before. Or if he spots some idiot who cut you off way too close, or sees you're struggling with holding both the impromptu meeting and driving, postpone the conversation until later.
There are some considerate people who realize the person on the other end is driving and ask if it's a good time or if they should call back later, but most assume that they have your full attention (and get seriously annoyed if you ask them to repeat - forcing you to concentrate on the conversation even while executing more complex maneuvers). Hell, they can get offended if you politely remind them you're driving and would they please call back later.
Even the radio isn't as distracting - turn on some talk radio, put on an audiobook, and you'll find drivers tune it out when necessary. If you ask them what they heard, most will admit to not listening because they were concentrating.
If you really want proof - observe traffic sometime - you'll find those idiot drivers who slow down and drive erratically these days are on the phone - yapping away or texting, while being completely oblivious to traffic. Most aren't aware they do it either, but the fact it happens shows that they're slowing down as they can't process the road as fast and are doing so to be safer. Erratic driving the same - they're so engrossed with texting or their conversation that they don't realize traffic is moving or slowing down or even aware of lane boundaries.
This is something that bugs me no end: ever since setting lead type, I've known that there is a fairly strict rule in typeface design: all digits are the same width. You can't typeset a useful ledger sheet if the 1 is narrow and the 5 is wide. Usually, all digits are an "en space", the same as the letter N, which is in turn half the "em space" or width of M.
It depends - there's "table type" and "text type" for numbers. For table type, yes, all numbers have to be the same width and more importantly, have no descenders or ascenders, so all the numbers are lined up in neat rows and columns, required for tables.
For text, though, numbers can be proportionally spaced AND have ascenders and descenders to keep them looking more like text (e.g., 169 would have the top of the 6 above the rest, the bottom of the 9 below, and the 1 about the size of the circular parts).
Of course, it's rather annoying to have to have two sets of number keys - one for entering numbers as a tabular format and one for entering it in text, so the fixed-width and fixed-height seem to have stuck (though not as pretty in text). Which is annoying as some fonts implement proportional spacing and ascenders and decenders, which is fine for text, not so much for tables.
Fixed width/height numbers is the lesser of the two evils though as numbers are used far more often in tabular data than in the middle of text. But it would be nice if typesetters (and e-book readers) would allow both.
Agreed. If I had mod points, this is how I'd explain version control to an apple user. I mean, a non-technical user. Besides, everyone likes backups, and playing the "scare" card should get some buy-in on your implementation.
If they're an Apple user, you just say it's a finer-grained version of "Time Machine" or with Lion and Mountain Lion, revisions (the OS auto-saves for you, maintaining previous versions you can cut and paste from at any time).
Or you can explain it by detailing a typical document production process. You know, say they need to write a technical manual or a product brochure. Detail the process and the editing, and then how the version control system lets you go back to a previous version at will (in case there's something you want or if you completely screw something up and need to go back). Merging can be explained by having two people edit the document and putting both their changes in and fixing conflicts, etc.
Version control doesn't just apply to source code - it can apply to anything that undergoes the create-edit cycle. And anyone who's edited a document knows about deleting a paragraph and realizing 2 days later that it was the best version.
But when you're shipping hundreds of millions of units of hardware, and you're trying to pack as much processing power in a small and efficient form factor, you don't go with VLSI for the same reason you don't go with a compiler for realtime code: You need that extra few percent.
The problem with hand-tuned assembly is the same as hand laying out transistors - it gets complicated quickly and if you're not careful, you end up with a horrible mess.
You can argue if you're shipping millions of copies of things, you should hand-tune the code in assembly so it runs the absolute fastest. But there are two costs - programmer timer (development costs) and time to market. There's always one more optimization that can be done. Perfection is the enemy of good.
With VLSI, the same thing applies - you can always reroute/resize transistors and wiring around to squeeze out some more performance out of it. The problem though is the more hand routing you do, the greater the chance of making an error, and often you can miss some transistors or logic. Most of it can be caught during schematic checks, but there's a very good chance of missing out logic blocks in the schematics and ending up with bugs. Or you can miss an extra body contact and end up with very odd bugs.
Then there's trying to fit it in the floorplan - and there's always a wire that won't fit in the space. You're dealing with probably close to a million transistors, after all.
Fonts annoy me. So many licences, variability and availability and differences machine to machine. Like standards I suppose so many to choose from and non completely compatible.
Well, the standard is pretty much the Microsoft-Apple TrueType (designed as a competing standard to Adobe PostScript fonts). (Yes, Microsoft and Apple worked on TrueType together, during the 90s when they were fierce enemies). Even then it's not a simple spec because it's actually quite difficult to lay out text nicely.
One of the jobs of a typesetter is to actually arrange the page so the text flows properly, and it's more of an art than a science. It's why TrueType implements a virtual machine to help with the automatic arrangement of characters.
It's also why designing a font is damn hard - creating the character shapes is the easiest part, but doing the necessary back end work to ensure it looks pleasant to the eye no matter the word/letter combinations is difficult (hence the virtual machine). And then there's Unicode, so you have to way more shapes to contend with (luckily a lot of them get by with monospace).
Finally, the licenses reflect the fact that fonts are a tool - so there's a lot of complexity in them. First, printing them out means having to send the font over at times (if it's not rasterized locally), so you need to enable translation of the font to the printer's natively language. Then you need to consider that electronic documents may need to embed fonts in them to look the same on every computer, even the ones without the font, but that embedding is now distribution of the font.
The license is complex purely because copyright law doesn't cover it terribly well. Embedding is a form of distribution and derivative work. Printing can mean creating a derivative work so the printer can rasterize it. Then there may be distribution if you want to send it to a printing press so they need the font as well...
As for raster fonts - they're great, but when you're dealing with high res screens, they start to show their chunkiness. I just wish some of the nice raster fonts were availble as TrueType so they can scale up nicely and be razor sharp on high res "retina" screens.
iOS6 has an *amazing* panoramic mode. I haven't seen anything anywhere that resembles it in terms of ease of use and quality of the shots produced.
It even works on my iPhone 4S.
While I use an iPhone as it works well for me, I'd like to point out that the panorama mode isn't exactly new. There were panorama apps that did the same thing, and if we count "bulit into the OS", Android 4.0 ICS has it built in which works the same way as well (at least on the Galaxy Nexus I also have).
It's neat, but I've not taken more than a few for novelty purposes, though I do see it being potentially useful.
There already is a built in tax. Buy the less efficient bulb, pay more for energy costs. Some people prefer incandescent bulbs, do you want to take away their freedom to choose? Let the market decide the issue, keep government out of it.
Actually, if you follow human behavior, you'd find that the "choice" would be limited to incandescent bulbs. Necessity is the mother of invention, and without these bans, we'd still be using incandescents - CFLs would be a niche, and white LEDs a purely decorative thing. Instead we have CFLs of all shapes, sizes, instant-on, dimmable, "cool" vs. "warm". And we have LED lights that are practically indistinguisable from incandescent (which are actually getting cheaper - from $100 to under $40 and much less on sale).
And the ban wasn't on incandescents, it was a ban on inefficiency. If you can make a more efficient incandescent (I believe GE has - it's nowhere near as efficient as a CFL or LED, but it is above the efficiency threshold), it can still be sold.
So even incandescents have improved in efficiency. How is that a bad thing? More innovation in the humble light bulb.
If you don't force companies to adapt, they'll continue doing the same old thing every day. Even giant rich ones - remember the Montreal Protocol and CFC-free asthma inhalers? They had a quarter of a decade to phase out CFC usage, and they only complain about "tight" deadlines a couple of years prior to when their exemption expires. Well, yes it's a tight deadline if you only started at the second half of the first decade of the millennium, but you did have well over a decade prior to develop new propellants in time for approvals.
It's very rare that industries see change coming and start to embrace it, though even that came with pushes and shoves. E.g., general aviation currently uses 100LL avgas - it's still a leaded fuel and demand is quite low (basically the only refinery can produce the annual supply in a day), requires special handling (leaded and unleaded gas require separate processing equipment to prevent contamination), and special licensing. Plus, there's only one source in the world of tetraethyl lead, from the UK. And with environmentalists clamoring with the EPA over regulation of leaded fuels (FAA is overriding that for safety reasons), the writing's on the wall for leaded gas. So what happened is the entire industry is getting together to do a pile of R&D to produce the next-gen unleaded avgas, compatible with 100LL and leaded engines. (The requirements are different enough that while the auto fleet switched to unleaded in a few years in the 80s, a lot more work would go in recertifying aircraft to use unleaded).
Hell, see telephone and cable companies with what's happening with VoIP and streaming. Or the music and movie industry.
You'd think that people involved with the IEEE are a group that should know better, and yet the most common passwords according to the analysis reads like the usual suspects list from other breaches. They're still common, easily guessable passwords. Hashing wouldn't have protected them very long, as these are on the short list for any cracking program to test.
It should be a wake up call that our current methods of trying to get users to pick secure passwords are a total failure. We need to go back to the drawing board and figure out a better way to get the message across, including tools to make it easy for people to get it right.
The question becomes though - what benefit does it do me to have a strong password on sites I don't value?
Like say,/. - why not use "password" or "123456"? If someone breaks in, BFD.
Likewise, many forums and blogs require registration to do basic things - seems like "password" or "123456" is useful for a one-time throwaway account.
The IEEE has a similar problem. Sometimes it protects great assets (member-only access to papers/journals/standards), othertimes, it's used because some guy wanted the 802.x spec (available for free, registration required), in which case they'd just pick some throwaway password because so what if it's compromised?
And that's the thing - I've seen websites host some files I wanted require changing passwords every 30 days with upper case, lower case, numbers AND symbols. Secure, sure, but everytime I used it (every few months), I needed to reset it. In the end I just ended up using their temporary password, remembered in browser. To me, it wasn't terribly important files (they still needed a license key, available separately). Hell, if I looked, I could've found the same files off a torrent site.
Oh, and "value" of a site is a personal judgement - if you asked a bunch of websites, you'd find they'd value their content "above average".
If I want it preserved, I'll copy it to local storage or upload it to the cloud if I so choose.
I think in some instances, it may be safer on the phone as it isits than in the cloud.
Take an iPhone, say. It's got some very strong protections and all that. But you could get at the same data by looking at the user's iTunes folder if they backed up there and didn't encrypt it. Or subpoena Apple who can dig it out (while the actual disks may be encrypted, the data is not when accessed).
Just knowing there's another copy available may make it easier to access said copy than the original.
MPEG LA claims to manage 346 patents (in the USA alone) which are necessary for anyone who wants to write a video player that can play this very widely used format.
Eliminating 5%, or even 95% of these patents will change nothing. Software developers will still have to ask MPEG LA for permission, and MPEG LA will continue to prohibit free software implementations.
Why bother with these complicated, time-consuming ideas? The way to fix the problem (and unblock the patent office), is to make software simply non-eligible.
Incorrect. The MPEG-LA licenses a pool of patents to you under FRAND terms that everyone contributing to the pool agreed upon.
You DO NOT have to license from the MPEG-LA at all. You can choose to go to every one of those patent holders and license the patent yourself under your own terms. It's just the MPEG-LA helps speed up adoption because it's a one-stop shop for licensing.
Compare this with how the 3GPP is running things. If you want to make a cellphone, you have to acquire patent licenses from lots of people - Nokia, Apple, Samsung, RIM, Intel (Infineon), Microsoft, Qualcomm among many others. There's no one-stop shop to buy licenses to a bunch of patents at once, and while it's FRAND licensed, it's still a huge PITA. Perhaps that's why there's only really 3 or so manufacturers of chipsets for cellular telephony - Qualcomm, Infineon, Broadcom.
Basically it's two standards groups that have gone different ways with respect to licensing. One chooses to offer everyone a way to buy a license easily with no fuss, the other a way to be very flexible on licensing and royalty payments (at the expense of possibly missing a license).
Hell, to implement Ethernet requires licensing patents from HP among others (auto-MDIX, patented HP). And WiFi is just full of patents all around as well.
Call me a scrooge, but the idea of donating money to projects that will eventually charge you to purchase the product they produce seems ridiculous to me. On top of that, there is no guarantee that the project you donate to will see the light of day. Honestly, can someone tell me why this is such an appealing option?
It's a way of getting money required to do something.
Developing a game often requires some capital input in order to produce said game. Likewise, going from prototype to productoin requires a large input of capital in order to make it manufacturable, as well as tying up cash in buying large quantities of parts and such.
Traditionally, a company would either scale back production to sell a little and use the proceeds to fund larger and large production runs. Or if they're rich, self-fund. Or go out and seek investment capital from the large players.
Kickstarter is basically an investment site - you're investing in the inventor to produce their product, and if you give enough money, you often get back the production result (game or hardware or something).
Of course, like all investments, it can also go horribly wrong and you end up losing your money, but such is life.
It's just an alternative way of raising capital that taps on the many rather than having to wine and dine VCs and other such institutional investors. The general goal is that the community is either a better judge of a project's success, or that small inventors need not have to whore themselves out to get their invention into production. Or that small inventors can raise capital at all - if you're too small, the big guys just ignore you, and your invention dies on the vine.
That said...WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE????? What? Why? Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to turn the fricking Pi, a device designed to be cheap above all, into a fricking MEDIA CENTER? Now robotics, UAVs, remote control systems of all sorts? yeah I can see that. But looking at these things you pretty much have to massage the fuck out of your media to make it run on the thing and even then its hit or miss...why? Why would you do that?
The purpose of the chip is primarily the GPU - it's got a very powerful GPU capable of 1080p video decoding and 3D accellerated graphics. Normally though, you'd pair this up with a processor on your board to have a complete system.
Broadcom decided putting on a relatively weak processor (ARM11) would for the vast majority of use cases be sufficient - say for a media center box (which is what the chip was intended for). The ARM would handle the UI and network bits and the care and feeding of the video processor which crunches the video out.
The chip is a high-end graphics chip first. Broadcom tacked on a simple ARM11 so customers could basically have a single-chip solution. I wouldn't be surprised to find that chip inside a Roku box, for example (or a WDTV, or other media player). Saves the cost of a second processor and ancillary hardware required to drive the graphics, thus making it much cheaper.
When the CPU only has to handle basic UI stuff (reading/writing filesystems, networking), a weak processor is just fine, especially if it can feed the grpahics side.
You could always use a more powerful processor with it if you wanted to make a more premium device (and disable the ARM11), but if you wanted a cheap device for media center use, this was it.
A very small number, perhaps 2 and a half worth considering for a global mapping and navigation product - I only count Google as a half, because they are still reliant on other suppliers for some of their data, meaning they don't have complete freedom to license it to you for all purposes (turn by turn navigation for example). Of those, Google and Nokia are Apple's direct competition in the smartphone industry, so Tom Tom makes the most sense for them.
There are three companies. Google (from streetview data), Tele Atlas (Nokia) and Navteq (TomTom).
Every GPS provider runs to Nokia or TomTom for mapping data.
In fact, for a period of time Google's maps were awful - the first when they switched from Navteq to Tele Atlas, and the biggest one happened around 2009-2010 when Google decided to dump Tele Atlas whereever possible and go with their own streetview data. Hilarity includes the traditional ones - typos in names (street, town/city), odd mismatched maps, etc.
Of course, it's faster for Google to update their map data as they just have to update their maps directly. When they license Tele Atlas, they have to send the request to Tele Atlas and then wait for it to update (Navteq and Tele-Atlas only update once a quarter or so).
Of course, Google STILL hasn't got my old house address up (nevermind my new one), despite numerous attempts at requesting they fix it. (The streets are there, but they're unlabelled).
Apple has auto-update enabled and often forced on their products and their target audience is not the technically adept. The average person doesn't go into options or configuration menus often, if ever. A lot of techies disable auto-update for a number of reasons, including hacking their phones so that leaving auto-update enabled could cause accidental bricking.
iOS devices have never automatically updated. The worst is you get notified that there's an update available, but you have to acknowledge that yes, you want the update. Upon which it then downloads and installs the update.
No auto-downloads. No auto-installs. You don't have to disable a thing because it won't do it automatically
If you use iTunes, iTunes will pop up a message saying an update is available, which you can choose to ignore (and optionally, never remind you again).
At least, I have yet to see any of my iDevices mysteriously auto-update on me. I've been warned, but I've got devices that are now "obsolete" (iPhone and iPhone 3G) that aren't even on the latest iOS available for them.
Heck, I've not gotten any notification that iOS 6 is available at all on any iDevice. not that I plan on upgrading until 6.0.1 and jailbreak.
I have however found out how to try to force Android to download an update by clearing the Android Services Framework data and hitting Check for Update whenever a new OS update comes out. I suppose Google staggers the release of the OS updates out to prevent the internet from dying the moment it releases a new OS version...
OTOH, while Jelly Bean only has 1-2% penetration, ICS finally approached 25% of all Androids out there.
Exactly what I was thinking--does the iPhone 4 have a CDMA and GSM radio in it?? That'd be a boost to its already ridiculous market domination...and might make me consider one when my current Android gives up the ghost...
Not the iPhone 4. There are two models of iPhone 4 - the GSM (Infineon chipset) and CDMA (Verizon iPhone 4 - Qualcomm chipset). The GSM part is not enabled on the Qualcomm chipset, so it's Verizon-only. (You can tell the difference by looking at the back - the Verizon one lacks all the regulatory markings other than FCC (the others were EU or Asia regulatory markings).
The iPhone 4S, though, is "universal" - it used a Qualcomm chipset that went on any network - CDMA or GSM. The only thing it lacks is support for 3G on the AWS band.
The iPhone 5 I believe is universal for 3G and below (still no AWS, though I think), but LTE is only on a few supported frequencies (it's one of those how many antennas and amps can you stuff in there problem).
I wonder how badly detuned the antennas are - a lot of the bands aren't running at an optimal wavelength on the antanna (they're "close enough").
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Woz basically invented overlapping windows - he was puzzling over how the Alto did it, and worked out regions (patented Woz) for how to handle when windows overlapped each other. It wasn't until much later that the Alto guys admitted that they didn't allow overlapping windows.
After his plane crash (but before he had a chance to code it or patent it) the first thing Woz said to Jobs in the hospital was "Relax, I remember regions".
Well, I think you can do OpenCL on Intel HD3xxx/4xxx chips these days. At least Apple seems to (on the retina MBP, they have a custom shader to handle the scaling from the double-size framebuffers to native panel size (if you're running at the higher-than-half size modes, e.g., 1920x1200) so that when you switch between GPUs, you don't notice it happening like you would if you wanted native.
As for why integrated graphics - easy - price. The customer sees $500 laptops, and they end up demanding cheap laptops. Think of all those /. arguments where "Apple is expensive! Their laptops start at $1000 when everyone elses is at $500!".
Hell, we call PCs (desktops and laptops) costing over $1000 "premium" nowadays. Expensive even, when we're constantly inundated with sub-$500 laptops and PCs.
It's why netbooks died quickly after the launch of the iPad (no manufacturer wanted to build no-profit PCs, and tablets at $500 were far more profitable), why you can get i7 laptops with integrated graphics and 1366x768 screens. Why "ultrabooks" costing $1000+ seem to be the ones everyone's dumping money into making product for (with high-res screens!), etc.
The race to the bottom has led manufacturers to focus on what everyone says they should look for in a PC - GHz (more is better), GB (more is better), GB (more is better) (one is RAM, other is HDD). Which means stuff like graphics and screen resolution (two of the most expensive parts) get ignored and skimped on because consumers don't care.
Hell, a retina MBP fully tricked out costs under $4000. Which only over a half-decade ago would've been considered normal for high-end PCs. These days it puts it basically at the top end "for 1%ers only" category.
I suppose it's an irony of life - we're all too scared to talk to random strangers, yet talking to random strangers is probably one of the ways to build a stronger, safer community. Heck, I'm sure most people these days rarely say more than a simple hello to their neighbours, if they even know their names.
And hell, it's why people constantly talk about the weather - because it's something random strangers will easily talk about or relate to (despite being completely ordinary or boring topic).
Once the sense of community fades and people want to become isolated and insular (this includes you and I who prefer to hang out in front of the screen too), fear starts setting in, compounded by talking heads on TV who prefer a one-way conversation trying to get you to look at them.
Just think of all the people who drive their kids to school when they really could just walk there. (Heck, walking school "buses" often show kids that their friends are often only a few houses down).
Actually, the biggest limitation for Ethernet right now isn't the wiring (all the new fancy high-speed interconnects never use UTP - usually fiber or other, then ported backwards to cable.
The biggest issue right now is that if you want 100m, you have to increase the minimum packet size at the faster speeds - 64 bytes is barely able to meet it at GigE speeds, nevermind 10G or faster. The thing is, at the faster speeds, you can send out a minimum-sized packet and it'll be completely "on the wire" before the other end gets it (the host would've finished the last bit before the remote end has even got the first sync bit!). It's one reason why hubs aren't defined faster than GigE - besides the inefficiency, you can have every host transmitting packets and not seeing the results for the packet (collision or not) until many packets later (remember a collision is detected when a host receives back a bit different from what it sent).
Perhaps you don't realize how slow standards card to produce - every company is fighting to include their technology in the standard (because it guarantees patent royalties - e.g., HP gets paid for every GigE port thanks to Auto-MDI/X, and there's a patent on autonegotiation as well I believe). A lot of back scratching, technical analysis, backwards compatibility handling, etc, you have a standard. This can take 5 years or more. Then after the standard is approved, it can take another 2-3 years for chips and equipment to hit the market, and years after that for enough volume to build up that it becomes cheaper.
Heck, we've had GigE for probably over a decade, and high-end PCs shipped with GigE ports over half a decade ago (Apple was one of the first to start making it standard in their computers). GigE switches were still pricey until a few years ago, and these days, it's now affordable to run a GigE network at home with switches falling under the $50 mark.
Just because it's "fine now" doesn't mean it'll be fine later, and the process is a slow grind.
Of course, the other thing holding back adoption of 10G and 40G is cabling - CAT6 or fiber, few of which people have, but I'm sure you'll start finding high-end PCs shipping with 10G ports in the next couple of years.
Yeah, it's not like there's a unit or something named after him...
You do realize the metric equivalent ot MPG is... L/100km! Which is just a minor variation on GPM.
Engineers do use the right units. It's just that MPG is a much nicer "more intuitive" unit for shoppers - as in "bigger is better!" while if you use the standard L/100km, it's "smaller is better". (Note we're still using "people sized" units, using L/m is more correct SI, but turns the numbers meaningless
And L/m^2 is a valid unit - it tells you how much liquid fell per unit area. We normally use mm (or inches for imperial folk), but tehcnically L/m^2 is the correct unit (even though it simplifies down to mm in the end).
It's just like how we use kWh for our electrical meters, when the correct unit is J (it simplifies down to that - a watt is J/s, so you have time on top and time on the bottom which cancel through a conversion). Or AH/WH for battery capacity. We could use the correct units, but the alternative units do make it easier to intuitively grasp the concept.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Have you seen the Retina MacBook Pro running at a scaled mode? You have a variety of settings - from the 2x 1440x900 mode to the decidedly non-integral 1920x1200 mode.
And 1920x1200 is, despite not being a nice integral factor of the native resolutoin, looks practically native. As in, no scaling artifacts.
What happens is that internally, OS X creates a double height frame buffer - 3840x2400, renders to that "retina style" 2x mode, then runs a scaler (custom-designed by Apple so both the 650M and Intel 4000 scale it identically) to bring it back down to 2880x1800. And the results are DAMN good - you can't tell, other than the fact that the GPU is now too underpowered to do 60fps.
And this is 150% scaling (1920x1200 -> 2880x1800), and looks awesome - you definitely don't get the "non-native resolution" crap you see on other displays.
OTOH, the low end mode, I think there's one where it runs at something like 1366x768 or so. It looks awful because even in 2x mode, the virtual framebuffer is smaller than the screen resolution, leading to the hardware having to scale the image up again.
But going from logical 1440x900 to 1920x1200 on the same 2880x1800 panel? Looks damn nice for a 150% scale up.
True, but the Nook HD+ has a nicer screen (1440x900 in a 7" form factor). And the 9" is 1080p+ already (1920x1280 - vs. 1920x1200 for Kindle HD). That 9" Nook has a higher screen resolution that most laptops out there (even the ones with 1920x1200)!
It's funny they're concentrating on the specs and yet ignore the screen - but then again, specs seem to matter to geeks and people who complain about the lack thereof on Apple products. Though you do need some pretty good one to drive all those pixels.
A cellphone is, unfortunately, more distracting than the same person beside you. First, if they're beside you, they're in the same position you're in, and can adapt their conversation to suit the situation. Second, there's less human inhibition to just ask for quiet for a moment while you execute a tricky driving maneuver.
For example, let's say you're talking to your boss on your phone. You're far less likely to ask him to shut up, ask him to repeat or make him pause as you try to change lanes or merge onto the freeway, and he's not in the car so he can't pause to let you execute these tasks without you saying so. But if he was in the car, he could see you're trying to merge or change lanes and pause appropriately, as well as repeat what he was saying before. Or if he spots some idiot who cut you off way too close, or sees you're struggling with holding both the impromptu meeting and driving, postpone the conversation until later.
There are some considerate people who realize the person on the other end is driving and ask if it's a good time or if they should call back later, but most assume that they have your full attention (and get seriously annoyed if you ask them to repeat - forcing you to concentrate on the conversation even while executing more complex maneuvers). Hell, they can get offended if you politely remind them you're driving and would they please call back later.
Even the radio isn't as distracting - turn on some talk radio, put on an audiobook, and you'll find drivers tune it out when necessary. If you ask them what they heard, most will admit to not listening because they were concentrating.
If you really want proof - observe traffic sometime - you'll find those idiot drivers who slow down and drive erratically these days are on the phone - yapping away or texting, while being completely oblivious to traffic. Most aren't aware they do it either, but the fact it happens shows that they're slowing down as they can't process the road as fast and are doing so to be safer. Erratic driving the same - they're so engrossed with texting or their conversation that they don't realize traffic is moving or slowing down or even aware of lane boundaries.
It depends - there's "table type" and "text type" for numbers. For table type, yes, all numbers have to be the same width and more importantly, have no descenders or ascenders, so all the numbers are lined up in neat rows and columns, required for tables.
For text, though, numbers can be proportionally spaced AND have ascenders and descenders to keep them looking more like text (e.g., 169 would have the top of the 6 above the rest, the bottom of the 9 below, and the 1 about the size of the circular parts).
Of course, it's rather annoying to have to have two sets of number keys - one for entering numbers as a tabular format and one for entering it in text, so the fixed-width and fixed-height seem to have stuck (though not as pretty in text). Which is annoying as some fonts implement proportional spacing and ascenders and decenders, which is fine for text, not so much for tables.
Fixed width/height numbers is the lesser of the two evils though as numbers are used far more often in tabular data than in the middle of text. But it would be nice if typesetters (and e-book readers) would allow both.
If they're an Apple user, you just say it's a finer-grained version of "Time Machine" or with Lion and Mountain Lion, revisions (the OS auto-saves for you, maintaining previous versions you can cut and paste from at any time).
Or you can explain it by detailing a typical document production process. You know, say they need to write a technical manual or a product brochure. Detail the process and the editing, and then how the version control system lets you go back to a previous version at will (in case there's something you want or if you completely screw something up and need to go back). Merging can be explained by having two people edit the document and putting both their changes in and fixing conflicts, etc.
Version control doesn't just apply to source code - it can apply to anything that undergoes the create-edit cycle. And anyone who's edited a document knows about deleting a paragraph and realizing 2 days later that it was the best version.
The problem with hand-tuned assembly is the same as hand laying out transistors - it gets complicated quickly and if you're not careful, you end up with a horrible mess.
You can argue if you're shipping millions of copies of things, you should hand-tune the code in assembly so it runs the absolute fastest. But there are two costs - programmer timer (development costs) and time to market. There's always one more optimization that can be done. Perfection is the enemy of good.
With VLSI, the same thing applies - you can always reroute/resize transistors and wiring around to squeeze out some more performance out of it. The problem though is the more hand routing you do, the greater the chance of making an error, and often you can miss some transistors or logic. Most of it can be caught during schematic checks, but there's a very good chance of missing out logic blocks in the schematics and ending up with bugs. Or you can miss an extra body contact and end up with very odd bugs.
Then there's trying to fit it in the floorplan - and there's always a wire that won't fit in the space. You're dealing with probably close to a million transistors, after all.
Well, the standard is pretty much the Microsoft-Apple TrueType (designed as a competing standard to Adobe PostScript fonts). (Yes, Microsoft and Apple worked on TrueType together, during the 90s when they were fierce enemies). Even then it's not a simple spec because it's actually quite difficult to lay out text nicely.
One of the jobs of a typesetter is to actually arrange the page so the text flows properly, and it's more of an art than a science. It's why TrueType implements a virtual machine to help with the automatic arrangement of characters.
It's also why designing a font is damn hard - creating the character shapes is the easiest part, but doing the necessary back end work to ensure it looks pleasant to the eye no matter the word/letter combinations is difficult (hence the virtual machine). And then there's Unicode, so you have to way more shapes to contend with (luckily a lot of them get by with monospace).
Finally, the licenses reflect the fact that fonts are a tool - so there's a lot of complexity in them. First, printing them out means having to send the font over at times (if it's not rasterized locally), so you need to enable translation of the font to the printer's natively language. Then you need to consider that electronic documents may need to embed fonts in them to look the same on every computer, even the ones without the font, but that embedding is now distribution of the font.
The license is complex purely because copyright law doesn't cover it terribly well. Embedding is a form of distribution and derivative work. Printing can mean creating a derivative work so the printer can rasterize it. Then there may be distribution if you want to send it to a printing press so they need the font as well...
As for raster fonts - they're great, but when you're dealing with high res screens, they start to show their chunkiness. I just wish some of the nice raster fonts were availble as TrueType so they can scale up nicely and be razor sharp on high res "retina" screens.
While I use an iPhone as it works well for me, I'd like to point out that the panorama mode isn't exactly new. There were panorama apps that did the same thing, and if we count "bulit into the OS", Android 4.0 ICS has it built in which works the same way as well (at least on the Galaxy Nexus I also have).
It's neat, but I've not taken more than a few for novelty purposes, though I do see it being potentially useful.
Actually, if you follow human behavior, you'd find that the "choice" would be limited to incandescent bulbs. Necessity is the mother of invention, and without these bans, we'd still be using incandescents - CFLs would be a niche, and white LEDs a purely decorative thing. Instead we have CFLs of all shapes, sizes, instant-on, dimmable, "cool" vs. "warm". And we have LED lights that are practically indistinguisable from incandescent (which are actually getting cheaper - from $100 to under $40 and much less on sale).
And the ban wasn't on incandescents, it was a ban on inefficiency. If you can make a more efficient incandescent (I believe GE has - it's nowhere near as efficient as a CFL or LED, but it is above the efficiency threshold), it can still be sold.
So even incandescents have improved in efficiency. How is that a bad thing? More innovation in the humble light bulb.
If you don't force companies to adapt, they'll continue doing the same old thing every day. Even giant rich ones - remember the Montreal Protocol and CFC-free asthma inhalers? They had a quarter of a decade to phase out CFC usage, and they only complain about "tight" deadlines a couple of years prior to when their exemption expires. Well, yes it's a tight deadline if you only started at the second half of the first decade of the millennium, but you did have well over a decade prior to develop new propellants in time for approvals.
It's very rare that industries see change coming and start to embrace it, though even that came with pushes and shoves. E.g., general aviation currently uses 100LL avgas - it's still a leaded fuel and demand is quite low (basically the only refinery can produce the annual supply in a day), requires special handling (leaded and unleaded gas require separate processing equipment to prevent contamination), and special licensing. Plus, there's only one source in the world of tetraethyl lead, from the UK. And with environmentalists clamoring with the EPA over regulation of leaded fuels (FAA is overriding that for safety reasons), the writing's on the wall for leaded gas. So what happened is the entire industry is getting together to do a pile of R&D to produce the next-gen unleaded avgas, compatible with 100LL and leaded engines. (The requirements are different enough that while the auto fleet switched to unleaded in a few years in the 80s, a lot more work would go in recertifying aircraft to use unleaded).
Hell, see telephone and cable companies with what's happening with VoIP and streaming. Or the music and movie industry.
Industries have to be pushed to change.
The question becomes though - what benefit does it do me to have a strong password on sites I don't value?
Like say, /. - why not use "password" or "123456"? If someone breaks in, BFD.
Likewise, many forums and blogs require registration to do basic things - seems like "password" or "123456" is useful for a one-time throwaway account.
The IEEE has a similar problem. Sometimes it protects great assets (member-only access to papers/journals/standards), othertimes, it's used because some guy wanted the 802.x spec (available for free, registration required), in which case they'd just pick some throwaway password because so what if it's compromised?
And that's the thing - I've seen websites host some files I wanted require changing passwords every 30 days with upper case, lower case, numbers AND symbols. Secure, sure, but everytime I used it (every few months), I needed to reset it. In the end I just ended up using their temporary password, remembered in browser. To me, it wasn't terribly important files (they still needed a license key, available separately). Hell, if I looked, I could've found the same files off a torrent site.
Oh, and "value" of a site is a personal judgement - if you asked a bunch of websites, you'd find they'd value their content "above average".
No need to develop, just license Siri. Done.
I think in some instances, it may be safer on the phone as it isits than in the cloud.
Take an iPhone, say. It's got some very strong protections and all that. But you could get at the same data by looking at the user's iTunes folder if they backed up there and didn't encrypt it. Or subpoena Apple who can dig it out (while the actual disks may be encrypted, the data is not when accessed).
Just knowing there's another copy available may make it easier to access said copy than the original.
Incorrect. The MPEG-LA licenses a pool of patents to you under FRAND terms that everyone contributing to the pool agreed upon.
You DO NOT have to license from the MPEG-LA at all. You can choose to go to every one of those patent holders and license the patent yourself under your own terms. It's just the MPEG-LA helps speed up adoption because it's a one-stop shop for licensing.
Compare this with how the 3GPP is running things. If you want to make a cellphone, you have to acquire patent licenses from lots of people - Nokia, Apple, Samsung, RIM, Intel (Infineon), Microsoft, Qualcomm among many others. There's no one-stop shop to buy licenses to a bunch of patents at once, and while it's FRAND licensed, it's still a huge PITA. Perhaps that's why there's only really 3 or so manufacturers of chipsets for cellular telephony - Qualcomm, Infineon, Broadcom.
Basically it's two standards groups that have gone different ways with respect to licensing. One chooses to offer everyone a way to buy a license easily with no fuss, the other a way to be very flexible on licensing and royalty payments (at the expense of possibly missing a license).
Hell, to implement Ethernet requires licensing patents from HP among others (auto-MDIX, patented HP). And WiFi is just full of patents all around as well.
It's a way of getting money required to do something.
Developing a game often requires some capital input in order to produce said game. Likewise, going from prototype to productoin requires a large input of capital in order to make it manufacturable, as well as tying up cash in buying large quantities of parts and such.
Traditionally, a company would either scale back production to sell a little and use the proceeds to fund larger and large production runs. Or if they're rich, self-fund. Or go out and seek investment capital from the large players.
Kickstarter is basically an investment site - you're investing in the inventor to produce their product, and if you give enough money, you often get back the production result (game or hardware or something).
Of course, like all investments, it can also go horribly wrong and you end up losing your money, but such is life.
It's just an alternative way of raising capital that taps on the many rather than having to wine and dine VCs and other such institutional investors. The general goal is that the community is either a better judge of a project's success, or that small inventors need not have to whore themselves out to get their invention into production. Or that small inventors can raise capital at all - if you're too small, the big guys just ignore you, and your invention dies on the vine.
The purpose of the chip is primarily the GPU - it's got a very powerful GPU capable of 1080p video decoding and 3D accellerated graphics. Normally though, you'd pair this up with a processor on your board to have a complete system.
Broadcom decided putting on a relatively weak processor (ARM11) would for the vast majority of use cases be sufficient - say for a media center box (which is what the chip was intended for). The ARM would handle the UI and network bits and the care and feeding of the video processor which crunches the video out.
The chip is a high-end graphics chip first. Broadcom tacked on a simple ARM11 so customers could basically have a single-chip solution. I wouldn't be surprised to find that chip inside a Roku box, for example (or a WDTV, or other media player). Saves the cost of a second processor and ancillary hardware required to drive the graphics, thus making it much cheaper.
When the CPU only has to handle basic UI stuff (reading/writing filesystems, networking), a weak processor is just fine, especially if it can feed the grpahics side.
You could always use a more powerful processor with it if you wanted to make a more premium device (and disable the ARM11), but if you wanted a cheap device for media center use, this was it.
There are three companies. Google (from streetview data), Tele Atlas (Nokia) and Navteq (TomTom).
Every GPS provider runs to Nokia or TomTom for mapping data.
In fact, for a period of time Google's maps were awful - the first when they switched from Navteq to Tele Atlas, and the biggest one happened around 2009-2010 when Google decided to dump Tele Atlas whereever possible and go with their own streetview data. Hilarity includes the traditional ones - typos in names (street, town/city), odd mismatched maps, etc.
Of course, it's faster for Google to update their map data as they just have to update their maps directly. When they license Tele Atlas, they have to send the request to Tele Atlas and then wait for it to update (Navteq and Tele-Atlas only update once a quarter or so).
Of course, Google STILL hasn't got my old house address up (nevermind my new one), despite numerous attempts at requesting they fix it. (The streets are there, but they're unlabelled).
iOS devices have never automatically updated. The worst is you get notified that there's an update available, but you have to acknowledge that yes, you want the update. Upon which it then downloads and installs the update.
No auto-downloads. No auto-installs. You don't have to disable a thing because it won't do it automatically
If you use iTunes, iTunes will pop up a message saying an update is available, which you can choose to ignore (and optionally, never remind you again).
At least, I have yet to see any of my iDevices mysteriously auto-update on me. I've been warned, but I've got devices that are now "obsolete" (iPhone and iPhone 3G) that aren't even on the latest iOS available for them.
Heck, I've not gotten any notification that iOS 6 is available at all on any iDevice. not that I plan on upgrading until 6.0.1 and jailbreak.
I have however found out how to try to force Android to download an update by clearing the Android Services Framework data and hitting Check for Update whenever a new OS update comes out. I suppose Google staggers the release of the OS updates out to prevent the internet from dying the moment it releases a new OS version...
OTOH, while Jelly Bean only has 1-2% penetration, ICS finally approached 25% of all Androids out there.
Not the iPhone 4. There are two models of iPhone 4 - the GSM (Infineon chipset) and CDMA (Verizon iPhone 4 - Qualcomm chipset). The GSM part is not enabled on the Qualcomm chipset, so it's Verizon-only. (You can tell the difference by looking at the back - the Verizon one lacks all the regulatory markings other than FCC (the others were EU or Asia regulatory markings).
The iPhone 4S, though, is "universal" - it used a Qualcomm chipset that went on any network - CDMA or GSM. The only thing it lacks is support for 3G on the AWS band.
The iPhone 5 I believe is universal for 3G and below (still no AWS, though I think), but LTE is only on a few supported frequencies (it's one of those how many antennas and amps can you stuff in there problem).
I wonder how badly detuned the antennas are - a lot of the bands aren't running at an optimal wavelength on the antanna (they're "close enough").
That was the announcement that it was going open-source. This is the actual release you can download right now and play with.
Close, though.