That's probably what they're doing, to some extent. They've already said that their goal isn't a 1:1 remake of Half-Life (that's what Half-Life: Source is for after all), but that they're aiming to improve on the few places where Half-Life could use improvement.
HL: Source is i just a port of HL to the Source engine. A good goal, but it also means the graphics of HL Source are a bit low-res purely because they're just using the same textures. In fact, this who mod started as a way to improve the HL graphics just a bit to look better.
And probably fix a few issues that came up.
Do, however, resist the urge to jump right into Opposing Force and Blue shift. They're decent, but not as good, a bit tedious if you've JUST played HL1, and never reaches the heights of HL1 or HL2.
Blue Shift and Opposing Force aren't by Valve, but by some other company, so they won't be as good. But they are canon I believe (Blue Shift is about the the Black Mesa security guards - it starts out by being the guy you see on HL trying ot open the door. Opposing Force is about the guys sent in to kill Freeman).
by jedidiah (1196) Friend of a Friend on Monday September 03, @11:03AM (#41214839) Homepage
I dunno. Apple and it's users seem entirely full of themselves. It's nice to put things into perspective and point out how Apple is occassionally a failure. It's not infallible. It has some rather spectacular failures to it's name and it yet may lose the current platform war. There's precedent for it.
Depends on which platform war.
OS X? That was lost long ago if you go by marketshare. Not so much if you're going by profit - a Mac sells very little (optimists say Dell outsells Apple in PCs by 10:1 at least), but they certainly seem to make it up (Mac profits ar higher than Dell's). So Dell sells more, but Apple makes more money. Who's the winner? Dell for selling the most, or Apple for making the most?
Ditto iOS vs. Android - Apple sells far less than Android (going by entirety). Though, Apple probalby makes more off each iOS device than everyone else (the vast majority of Android sales are cheap crapphones running 2.3 if you're lucky, 2.2 or lower being more common - I still found it funny you can buy an Android phone with 2.1/2.2 on contract today). Or by developer ecosystems (Android devs should be making more profit because of larger market, right? I mean, with 60% marketshare vs. 30% for iOS, the market's twice as big and should be twice as much profit... especially with only a $25 fixed fee vs. $99 a year, no approvals and all that.).
It's also pretty much the reason why a TV made by Apple is unlikely - the margins aren't in it (why do you think they throw in "Smart TVs" or "3D TV"? They're looking for value-add into what otherwise is a sea of identical TVs).
Apple's MO is not to provide products for every price point (it nearly killed them the first time around), but to concentrate on markets where they can make some of the largest margins in the business and move the most product.
>>>place a small inflatable pool on the ground where the wheels will go.
I'd rather live in a hotel. Oh wait. I already do that. You can find hotels that have Cable, internet, and of course hot showers, for the same price as renting an apartment would be. (In contrast an RV is expensive to buy and the camping rent is not exactly cheap.)
Some people want to stay where there are no hotels. You can get a RV site with full hookups (water, sewer + power, sometimes cable TV and internet too) for around $20 - $50/day. Can you get a hotel room with full cooking facilities, separate sleeping and living areas, your own clothes hanging in the closet, etc for under $50/day? And if you want seclusion, you can find isolated camping areas where there are no neighbors within sight or earshot and you can live quite comfortably for a week or so using the water tanks and generator built-in to your RV.
Depending on how much time you spend on the road versus parked (fuel is expensive), if you already own the RV, it can be more cost effective, more convenient and more comfortable than a hotel room.
It's definitely a different lifestyle and it's not for everyone, much live live-aboard sailing.
Another reason is well, you don't have to pack up so much when travelling by RV - you just put your stuff away so it doesn't present a hazard while on the road - which can basically mean putting the laptop on the floor so it doesn't slide around, or on the rear-facing seat in the dinette, or whatever.
No worries that you left the charger behind, or forgot a cable, etc. Plus, if you have some larger equipment to haul around, it beats having to pack it up into the car, and driving it with constantly there.
It's obvious the BBC crapped their pants over this but that is what they get for using a proprietary solution. They need to focus on not being cheap and rewriting it in something else.
Funny thing, I saw this over at the App Store... BBC iPlayer. So the platform that never had Flash can play iPlayer videos.
What was the problem again? I would assume the BBC is smart enough to be able to do an Android version of the app as well. Maybe the only problem I can see is DRM issues with Android, but I'm sure it can be resolved easily enough like Netflix.
I am expensive, but not that expensive. I don't charge a customer $235 to click a full disk encryption check box while installing Fedora Linux. Maybe I should...
I understand full disk encryption, but actual usage of a customer provided laptop (to meet their security requirements) has given that cost to be on the "low' end.
First, we've suffered odd "delayed write failures" on Windows when we acquired a set of brand new i7 laptops. It mostly affects our VirtualBox disk images, and gotten so bad some of my coworkers lose half a day while they delete the old disks, reinstall the VirtualBox Appliance image (which lays down a preinstalled OS image so we're up faster) and reconfigures everything, including removing the appliance provided disks and restoring a backup of the disk files. IT did some things which mostly restored things, but it took several days.
Next, we came into some oddball BSoDs which IT a week later figured it was an interaction between a Windows update, the disk encryption software, and the virus scanner. Worse yet, not everyone saw the BSoD - as part of the investigation in the first issue, my system got updated to the new virus scanner which solved my delayed write failure problems. So I never saw that, while IT was figuring it out.
In the end, the blame fell int he combination of FDE software, antivirus, and monitoring software.
Of course, they don't use TrueCrypt, which I think would've solved half the problems...
Ya I'll be honest I was going to come on here and write some intelligent insightful comment on how the article was wrong and stretching in it's comparison but that seems like pointing out the sky is blue or water is wet.
This article is just so dumb I'm amazed it is on the front page of slashdot, sometimes stupid stuff gets on the front page but typically it isn't something like this that has no substance at all.
Easy. Apple stories sell. Why did you think Gawker Media went apeshit two years ago with the iPhone 4 prototype they purchased? They probably made tons of money off that series of articles that they kept rerunning it for months afterwards. (Alas, they seem to have decided to waste that money on site redesigns that are worse than ever before and even unfriendlier to users which has steadily decreashed until the only ones left are trolls and such).
Slashdot knows that any Apple article would generate 300+ comments, even if it's something along the lines of "Apple announces nothing today, again." That's guaranteed advertiser gold. (It's Apple's turn - even all the flamewars and generally pro-Android sentiment still generates enough page views to be profitable. Enough that even pro-Android articles don't make so much money.).
How soon they forget. When Steve Jobs came back Microsoft was having to prop up the company to avoid monopoly charges and Apple was still trying to sell slower technology for twice the money. Say it takes a team all you want, without Jobs Apple would have likely gone bankrupt so I'd give him some credit for their success.
Well, Microsoft's investment was $150M. Apple bought NeXT for $430M. The money Microsoft put in could be far less (they could've bought Be for half that or so, which was using Gassee's inflated value of the company).
No, what Jobs did with Microsoft was basically pure investor relations. Investors tend to be like sheep - if a company is going downhill, investment money may not flow even if you come up with a killer product. By naving Microsoft BUY $150M worth of Apple stock (Microsoft never put money into Apple, they just bought stock), it signalled the markets that Apple was a company worthy of investment.
In addition, by having Microsoft re-invest in their Mac business unit, it signalled developers that the Mac was worthy platform to develop for, not another one to ignore.
Jobs' credit was basically counting on the ability of Apple fans to look the other way - this was a time when anti-Microsoft sentiment was high, that the Mac was merely the underdog in the Windows war, etc. So that keynote where Bill Gates towered over Jobs (on the large screen), it was a well-choreographed marketing moment - signalling developers and investors that Apple was viable, and hoping that the fanbase won't be alienated.
That would be all she wrote, except for being in the right place and right time with the iPod - being able to produce a device as big as a flash-based player, but the capacity of a hard drive player that could be loaded in minutes, not hours, and doing so just before MP3 players became commonplace, effectively being there from the get-go when the market took off. (Then having the RIAA embrace digital album sales...).
The switch to Intel came after Apple basically got spurned by both Motorola and IBM over PowerPC chip supplies (PowerPC AIM Alliance - Apple, IBM, Motorola). Motorola found it far more profitable to sell lower-end chips to the military, and IBM for embedded systems, and Apple always couldn't buy enough.
Why did anyone mod you up? When someone abandons a copyrighted property of any sort then it should enter the public domain. If the book, dvd, or whatever goes out of print then you should lose the copyright. If a game is no longer available for purchase or play then you should lose the copyright.
Who gains when the government protects a monopoly on content that you refuse to provide to anyone? How is that promoting the arts in any way?
If you want to keep the copyright then just make it available for purchase. If you care so little about the product then you lose rights to the product. I can't imagine any reasonable argument against this.
People in favor of copyright are always saying that the creators should get paid for their creations. How are they being paid if they stop making it available for sale? The only possible response is that they want to restrict access to the content so that new content has less competition. That's a pretty poor argument for continuing a government enforced monopoly.
Given the practicality of duplicating copyrighted materials these days, I say we don't lose copyright protection.
Instead, the instant something is no longer for sale by the creator, it becomes mandatory licensed, as in, a government-set fee schedule kicks in to compensate the creator, but anyone can then sell the good, as long as they had an original. And yes, any and all DRM can be broken in order to sell it.
So the moment a book goes out of print, anyone who has it can freely scan it and sell it for whatever they want, paying the original creator the fixed per-copy fee. Ditto music, movies, etc.
Creators still get their fees, public still has the goods, and libraries and other resources can make use of their immense collections to sell copies and make some money to support themselves. Google Books can continue to sell access or copies, etc.
It also keeps copyright intact so open-source doesn't go public-domain accidentally - it's still copyrighted and users can pay the per-copy fee to use it under standard copyright laws, or obey the open-source license.
Abandoned works can have standardized collection agencies (e.g., libraries) who can hold the fees in trust and use the profits and investments of it to help fund operations
Once a work enters mandatory licensing, it cannot leave it, so if the original creator wishes to re-release it, he can compete with everyone else. The government set fee will be less than the average per-copy royalty (say, 70%) for that type of work (this is to encourage authors who wish not to participate to simply keep said book available for sale). So if all book authors earned on average (including first time authors through to bestselling authors) of $5 per copy of the book (probably a bit on the high side but it's just a number I picked out of thin air), the per-copy fee for any book will be $3.50. Ebook websites can compete against each other - I suspect after costs the price will be $3.75 or so for out of print, but not out of copyright books.
Not broken, defective by design... from the public's POV anyway. The creators of the system are quite happy with it and want more, stronger legislation.
It's like democracy, really. It's a flawed system, but it's around purely because it's better than the alternatives, and getting rid of patents will NOT lead to more innovation.
It will have the opposite effect as companies basically go into "copy" mode. The only thing they can "innovate" on is perhaps cutting corners to make a cheaper product. It's cheaper to copy than to do any actual R&D. Leave the R&D to the small guys who are fed up and let them build something you can copy immediately (there will always be itches to scratch). Or the latecomer to the copying game who wants to temporarily make his product stand out amongst the other clones.
It's annoying, but most businesses are lazy and will do as little as possible to make a buck. And hell, when people do it on open-source they get angry (see Tangibot as a 30% cheaper version of the Makerbot replicator). It's not advancing state of the art, other than perhaps how to cut corners or showing what margins people are asking for.
And copying has the highest ROI for a company - the investment is purely what's required to reverse engineer the product to copy it, the return being well, not having first-mover advantage, but if you can do it quick enough and cut enough corners, you can be second and win purely by undercutting the first-mover.
I've been posting this link since it came out. This was originally written on a website called "pointless waste of time". I guess cracked bought them. Anyway, point 1, 5 years ago called this:
Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
Wow... that's a whole pile of steaming turd.
"In order" and "Out of order" just mean how the inter internal CPU treats instructions when executing them on the processor.
An in-order processor processes each instruction as it comes in - in order. An out-of-order processor searches through the instruction stream identifying instructions that aren't dependent on one another and to run those in parallel (super scalar architecture - more than one instruction executed at a time).
For example, your code may load a value from memory into a register, perform some arithmetic on it, then write it back to memory. The code following that may do something else - perhaps issue some I/O, but due to the way it's coded, they both use the same registers for the operation, creating an artificial dependency. An out-of-order processor will detect that, and while the load from memory is happening (loads take a little while), the processor can see it can do the other block (the one doing I/O) at the same time and executes it while the first part waits for the results to come back.
It's a way to make processors faster - in-order processors are simpler to produce and are smaller (no instruction buffers to scan, no huge banks of rename registers, and all the associated book-keeping hardware), plus are also much more predictable in operation.
It has zilch to do with AI or randomness. A smart AI can run on an in-order processor or an out-of-order one with no differences (other than ones due to processor errata). It will probably run a little faster on the out-of-order one, but that's it. Sure you could imply that a slower processor means your AI could be dumbed down so it runs "fast enough", but a dumb AI run on either kind of processor is still a dumb AI (which happens to run faster on an out-of-order processor).
And it also has zilch to do with wide open dynamic worlds. If you want randomness, you use a random number generator which either comes from randomness hardware, or you use a pseudo-random number generator, neither of which are affected by the processor execution type, other than because the in-order one executes more predictably (you can count clocks), ones based on CPU clock timers might be more predictable because a fixed number of clocks execute each loop. Maybe.
I don't think anyone can take that article seriously.
Making airplanes isn't about technology, it is all about regulation and certification of components and complete product. Open sourcing wont help you with that.
For experimental aircraft (of which homebuilts/kit builts/etc are a part of) the regulations are far more lax - basically it's just a sequence of inspections to make sure you're doing things "the right way" and avoiding obvious faults. I.e., you plane has a decent chance of flying and you used parts that are strong enough to withstand the rigors of such flight.
After that, it's mostly hands off - you build it how you think it should be built. It's basically anything goes to encourage innovation in aircraft. You're allowed to design your own completely from scratch, buy a set of plans and build it yourself (following as much or as little of the plans as you desire), buy a kit and build it, etc.
Nothing you use needs to be certified - it's why experimental aircraft have much more advanced avionics available (they aren't certified yet - it takes years) and much more advanced technology available.
The only things that need to be certified are certified aircraft - those mass produced in a factory and such, because well, you didn't build it, so you are trusting someone else to have built it right and not produce pieces of crap, so the use of certified materials is mandatory.
Definitely not sure what open-sourcing gives over traditional experimental plane building. Other than perhaps you don't have to buy a set of plans and can instead download them? Or are forced to document all your modifications and publish them?
Only idiots believe that patents encourage innovation. Patents strangle innovation. In the absence of patents, innovation would flourish because it confers advantage
Actually, Android is proof this is not true, as Google actually has worked around most of the patents, leading to the innovation and differences you see between iOS and Android (for better or worse - there are things iOS does better, and things Android does better). And face it - why do many high end Androids end up being slates? Where's the innovation in that? Why doesn't the Note/S III or such come with a hardware keyboard? Given the low-end ones have 'em, why not the high end? Or why not combine the Xperia Play with a real hardware keyboard to create a high end gaming phone with real controls?
The stupid thing is, in the absence of patents to work around, innovation slows down and stops because all tha that happens is people end up copying. Copying the right strategy in the general case. (You can see this in the various App Stores where for every original app, there's a dozen copies).
Of course, there will be SOME innovation that happens - there's always a scratch that needs itching, and a latecomer to the copying game needs to bring something else to the mix to get people ot buy HIS copy rather than the dozens of other versions that were on the market beforehand.
Businesses are, unfortunately, pretty damn lazy. (See all the recent movies that rehash plots, "re-imaginings", sequels, or Hollywood's favorite, re-doing movies made a decade or so earlier. Ditto video games also - how few new and original games there are versus rehashes, sequels and other stuff).
And also, no reasonable company will invest in any R&D other than how to tear apart a competitor's product and copy it to make it cheaper.
Therein lies the rub. Either way you're screwed. (And put a little perspective on it - many great advances in technology in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have had torrents of patent lawsuits flying around. What we're seeing in software is no different than the internal combustion engine, the telephone, television, radio, cars, etc.
And yes, the little guy needs protection as well - anyone remember intermittent windshield wipers? The lawsuits over that were only settled in the early 80s, long after the patents expired in the 70s (and long after cars were built with it using the "stolen" technology - they started appearing in the mid-late 50s or so).
Does iOS or Android even have the native ability to add website shortcuts to the home screens or application menu? If they did, I think people might be more willing to use them.
Not sure about Android, but iOS definitely has web apps - it was there even before the App Store was around. It's effectively a bookmark, but I believe it runs a separate instance so do it right and it can feel all "native".
In fact, you can pin any web site to the home screen.
Apple has always suggested that apps that don't want to be approved be done this way. I'm not sure how far Apple has gone with their proposals to have sensor capabilities (accellerometer, gyros, location, etc) available via HTML5 so they can be used by webapps...
Unless they are targeting a lower end of the market. If you look at the low-end NetApp and Equilogic systems, I'm betting those could be (and may already be) powered by ARM chips.
One of EMC's competitors (Engenio, owned by NetApp now), had boxes in a variety of price ranges. The high-end boxes were all Xeons, while going down in price you would find PowerPC, and ARM chips (specifically XScale) inside.
I could swear the NAS appliance sitting on my desk at home had the EMC logo on it. And I know it has an ARM processor in it, specifically a Marvell XScale chip. It runs a modified version of Linux, but it's an EMC box (and even has some approved for VMWare thing on it).
So yes, EMC has gone ARM on the low end, specifically the stuff they market under their consumer brand as Iomega ("An EMC company").
Plenty fast for the home user, probalby sufficient for a mom and pop company, but will be woefully insufficient for anything larger. But nothing wrong - ARM makes it cheap and decently performing.
Great! Now that there is a temporary shortage of supply, I can sell mine and trade up to a Kindle 2 or a Google Nexus 7. Once the new ones are announced, I'm sure demand for the old ones will drop to zero. Thanks for the alert!
Not really, there are enough people who probably are waiting for the KF2 to come out so they can pick up used KF's for under $100, hoping people will upgrade and force a glut on the market.
Of course, Amazon probably doesn't want to risk having ot sell out the old stock at super low prices that they can't make up the loss through content sales. Better to leave it to upgraders doing so as part of the early adopter premium.
I'm just wondering about length of time needed to build spacecraft. Is there a possibility of trying to develop full-on robot automated manufacturing of spacecraft to try and reduce cost and increase speed of manufacture? Or is it just that the current combination of no money up front, pushing the envelope, and needing human brainpower for testing and imagining failure modes? Are there any parts of spacecraft these days that are assembled robotically or is it 100% bespoke? Which is still cool but not space operaish yet. You see automated manufacturing attached to automated mining and supply lines means we can set up a remote site on the Moon or Mars.
Excepting very few use cases, most spacecraft are bespoke because each mission is different. There are very few times when a spacecraft is constructed en masse - basically the same spacecraft churned out in multiple copies, and even then the number tends to be extremely limited (usually below 10), so setting up assembly lines doesn't generally justify the overhead.
Now, there are efforts to componentize spacecraft so building one is basically like snapping together Lego. Including having flight software automatically reconfigure itself to handle those blocks like modern OSes do when you plug in USB devices.
The main problem is that it's extremely expensive to launch spacecraft - easily $1B per launch. Neverminding the large fraction that don't make it at all. As such, equipment sent up there has to put up with some of the worst scenarios in the world - little projectiles whizzing along and handling all the damage it causes, limited weight (too heavy and it costs way more $$$), the fact that there's no way to practically repair it (very few get the Hubble treatment), and that it has to last many years (because you don't want to launch its replacement and spend another billion soon aferwards)
When you've got billion(s) on the line, spending a few years ensuring that failures are minimized and tolerated is just part of the game. Cube sats and such only have to last a few weeks - which is a much easier thing to do than making one last at least a decade or more.
The same problem is apparent in Wikipedia. There are clearly many Wikipedia authors who either know the established parts of their field well or who know where to find relevant information. But it is so rare to find people who are good at presenting information. There is, alas, a modern notion that it is sufficient to merely know something but unnecessary to be able to understand and articulate your factoid. I have have never seen people more angry at me than when I ask them to explain themselves.
Same goes for many things, software included. There's lots of technically brilliant pieces of software (e.g., Linux), but they tend to "speak" only to those in the field (i.e., Linux users). Attempts to try to "explain" it to others leads to complaints of "dumbing down" and "too different" (see all the comments about people replacing X with Wayland or other window system, Unity, etc).
Or hell, everytime Apple comes up - how their stuff is not technically very advanced, as Apple concentrates more on the presentation of said technology to those outside the field (i.e., user interface).
The real problem is that those in the field believe they are the ones who are so important because they do the work, disrespecting those who merely "parrot" their work as doing nothing (as in, it's easy to communicate said work to the general public). Of course it's never that simple (it just appears that way) as the communicators have to be both fluent in the field and able to relate the subject matter to those outside the field, which is actually an extraordinarily difficult job that everyone thinks is easy. (Try UI design, for example - software engineers think it's easy, but creating a good UI is actually exremely complicated - it is simple enough to toss a few buttons and text fields on a screen, but it's hard to properly figure out where and how each button and field has to be arranged).
It's also the reason why science journalism typically sucks. The people doing the research think they can talk to the press and the press understands the entire field of research that was their life-long project, but the journalist's only experience they can relate to is their own and details end up being reported incorrectly (usually big ones too because they get understated). The flip side also happens - said jouralists avoid the communicators because they're scripted and "dumb down" the information (even though they explain it clearer), and want to get to the source, thinking they can understand it all).
Texts will go through even if your phone connects for a fraction of a second,
Yes. There are strong arguments for emergency calls via text. They are a more robust form of delivery than voice calls and can work on a very overloaded network or one with reception which is too poor to take voice calls. The only problem is that you can't be sure if the text got through.
False. Texts are unreliable as all heck. First, it's "best effort" delivery, similar to e-mail. While 99% of all e-mail and texts probably make it through the network in a timely fashion, there's still a significant portion that doesn't (usually only delayed a few minutes), but there's no guarantee.
Sending a text is like sending a UDP packet. The other end may get it, they may get it delayed (sometimes significantly - minutes/hours/days delayed texts aren't uncommon), they can be duplicated in flight (recipient gets mulitple - sometimes combined with the delays means they keep receiving the same text for days), or simply disappear.
Of course, in an emergency situation, who knows what failure mode will be seen? And overloaded control channels is a significant issue - the cell may have plenty of voice capacity, but the control channel is so overloaded it's effectively useless. It's the problem AT&T has with their network consistently (leading to oddball situations as having worst connectivity, but damn fast network speeds - if you can get a channel, it'll be clear, the problem being acquiring the channel to begin with).
As for social media - well, everyone's been talking about it for ages. Back when Second Life (remember that?) was the hot new thing, everyone was probalby considering ways to do emergency notifications through that.
On ios they have instructions for how to setup wajam as your proxy.
I don't know about you - but what is restricting use of that to iPhones?
Did this company really just open up a huge free proxy server on the 'net for everyone to use? If they're in the US, it's basically a free proxy server to all those US services that everyone whines about... if not, it's a free proxy server that lets you "hide" your IP...
Depending on the proxy, it might be worthwhile to shove your torrent traffic through there?
Of course, the other thing is - you still have to install configuration profiles through iTunes? If you're not using it, you have to manually enter the settings? Hrm...
Yes, 3rd party developers are at the mercy of Apple and this is not some anti-Apple bullshit. See: Gatekeeper.
Gatekeeper merely asks if the binary you downloaded came from the 'net, not from the output of the compiler or some other means. And it only asks if the file is flagged with a "downloaded" extended attribute in the filesystem (easily cleared).
Gatekeeper isn't involved at all if you clear the flag, use a browser that doesn't set the flag to begin with (Firefox used to not do it - they were among the last to actually do it), copy the program to another location (which destroys extended attributes), etc.
And developers need to develop apps so the output of the compiler will probably never need verification (since developers need to test). Which means in the worst case, if you want to avoid the Apple taxes fo having to buy a signing cert (of which many popular open-source projects already have, both for Windows AND OS X), well, you can always release it as source code and have the user compile it.
Thus ensuring the longevity of open-source because instead of people distributing binaries, all software distribution takes place as... source. And no BS "look but don't touch" - but buildable source. (Oddly, it's also GPLv3 compliant because if you don't provide build tools, users can't use your program!).
Hell, if the user wishes to pass on their modifications, they too have to do it as... source code.
CPUs don't really drive software development that much. Or else we would have migrated off x86 years ago. If intel can get the same/similar performance without a paradigm shift in development methodology, developers won't bother.
The migration from x86 has already started, actually - the architecture they're moving to is ARM. (After all, there are more ARM-based SoCs shipped than x86 CPUs - every PC includes one or more ARM cores doing something).
But on a more user level - tablets, smartphones are becoming the computing platforms of the day, all running ARM processors. Regardless of whether they run iOS or Android. Developers have embraced it and cranking out tons of apps and games and other stuff for this. It's so scary that Intel's investing a lot of money bringing Android to x86 because the writing's on the wall (when more phones and tablets ship than PCs...)
But x86 won't die - it has a raw performance advantage that ARM has yet to reach, so for computation-heavy operations like databases, it'll be the heavy lifter. Perhaps serving an entire array of ARM frontend webservers.
Sounds like you're just not using the right kind of paper for a large image. Switch to paper made for printing large images with inkjet and you'll see a world of difference.
At which point it becomes prohibitively expensive to own and operate an inkjet.
I mean, for photos, between Costco and Walmart (and who use real photo paper), it's pretty damn cheap to have extremely high quality prints made - better than an inkjet and probably an order of magnitude cheaper if you went with the special inkjet paper.
For black and white printing, a mono laser is extremely cheap, and even the consumer "half size" toner carts are still pushing 2,500+ pages for barely more than twice the cost of an inkjet black cartridge (which getting 500 pages is a struggle). Plus the output is nicer and doesn't smudge.
I haven't printed enough "other" stuff to really want to print in color (in a move, I found the old inkjet I had that the mono laser replaced - a Canon, which I hadn't touched in years).
About the only defense for an inkjet these days is that they are cheap - usually pretty damn close to free ($20-ish?). A reasonable laser is still pushing over $100 on sale.
That is an excellent question and one that directly relates to my use of the 'NC' licence. When releasing educational materials I'm happy with everyone getting to use them for free and sharing them with others but I do not want to see them get incorporated into a text book or used as supporting material for a textbook which publishers are charging students obscene prices for (especially as those prices are one of the primary motivations for making the material in the first place!).
While you might be able to argue that a textbook which incorporates pages of text and/or questions is a derivative work many publishers now offer flexible publishing options where you can pick and choose what chapters and sections of a book are included for your course. In such a case does all the book count as a derivative work or just the sections or chapters where they use CC content adapted to the book?
While the term 'non-commercial' might be ambiguous so is the term 'derivative works' so if ambiguity is an argument to drop the term both should be dropped. Personally I thing the argument for dropping the 'NC' clause is more to do with the author's political persuasions than any other argument given. I think keeping the option to give us a choice is important. Looking at open source there is clear support for both BSD-like and GPL-like licences. What is nice with CC is that it accommodates both camps under one umbrella. If they drop the 'NC' I predict a licence fork to fix the omission.
What you want is a standard "all rights reserved" copyright, then. NOT CC.
A standard copyright gives you, the author complete control of the work. If someone wants to include it in their training materials, fair use applies, otherwise they have to contact you for permission.
Just because you published it on the web does NOT give anyone the right to rip it off - it's still a copyright violation.
"Non-commercial" really is non-free. A GPL'd project cannot include NC'd art, for example because the GPL forbids further restrictions (and one of the restrictions is restriction from sale, i.e., commercial use).
If you want to give your work to little guys but prevent the large corps from using it, it's best to use a standard copyright. The little guy will have to ask for permission to incorporate your work, at which point you can give him an acceptable license (e.g., you may use the assets in a GPL'd project, as long as further usage of the assets are under the GPL).
CC means you're giving the work to the public at large to make use of. It's the open source spirit embodied for content other than source code. "NC" really makes it useless to the public because it cannot be incorporated in any form as it is, and is as useful as a normal copyrighted work that doesn't have CC on it.
"ND" works are the same - it too makes it impossible to use - if I was doing a GPL'd project, I can't use an ND'd work as well because I might have to modify the content ot suit my purpose better, and I can't. It too is as good as a standard copyright.
And that's the thing people confuse - CC gives you more rights than a standard copyright. ND and NC terms bring it back down to standard copyright and in general makes the work not open at all.
The only thing ND/NC possibly offer is if someone wants your content for their personal website because they like it then they can do it without asking. That's it, really. Which could still be done under standard copyright, if the author merely asked you. (Though, if it's a personal website, they could probably just take the content and violate the license anyhow without you noticing).
Dropping NC and ND is a good idea - because really, it's just during "creative commons" into "open source" rather than "free software". (And if you don't know the difference - the former includes look-but-don't-touch licenses that you can get for bits of Windows and such). But i nthis case, you're not really helping the "commons", you're just using it as a mark
If you're arguing that it's too small to be definitive, you're right. It's too small to generalize to the general population.
However, if it's an initial study to see if there *might* be something worth studying (people have been arguing that exposure to screens before bed ruins sleep, after all), then a small sample might be fine to see if it's even worth studying. Rather than spend lots of money studying lots of people and controlling for all variables - try to see if a small subset even matches the hypothesis.
This study is small to determine if the general agreement that screens-before-sleep might be an issue. If it proved otherwise, it means the hypothesis was invalid and needs to be revised, as per the scientific method (it could be you were completely unlucky and picked people who happened to disprove the hypothesis, but if it's as common as you believe, it would be unlikely).
This study has proved that there might be something to that, but it's not definitive. In other words, more comprehensive studies are required (perhaps you got lucky and picked the 13 people who were affected).
There's nothing wrong with small sample sizes - it's just used to cheaply identify if the hypothesis is remotely correct before spending the time, effort and money studying a much larger sample that may generate inconclusive results.
Also, if you're depending on grant money, it means you can walk to the grant committee and show them that you have results that prove interesting, but need further study to confirm. Grant committees don't like hypothesis, they like preliminary studies.
I want a phone that I can leisurely play music on my stereo with, without being tethered with wires or using lossy-codec A2DP Bluetooth
Strangely enough, that exists already, regardless of your platform.
It's called Airplay, and while an Apple technology, apparently it's been taken up with enthusiam in the Android community, and is, last I checked, using lossless codecs.
You will need an Airplay-compatible receiver (network receiver), or an Airplay-compatible target (say, AppleTV), but it works. And Android can be both an Airplay sender and Airplay receiver with the appropriate apps.
Forget the Nexus Q which promises to work, but only does if you store your music in the cloud.
The only downside is its limited to 44kHz, 16 bit.
In short, Apple is still bitter about Microsoft stealing their UI, back in the late 80's. Bla Bla Apple took it from Xerox... Apple felt like Windows took their thunder away. After that Apple has gotten much harder in protecting their UI.
To Microsoft's credit though, Bill Gates was an excellent businessperson (better than Jobs ever was). The only reason Microsoft "won" that case was that Jobs needed apps on the Mac, and ended up signing a contract crafted by Gates where Microsoft would write the apps, and inherit a license to the UI.
That was why Microsoft won - Apple licensed the UI stuff to Microsoft. All Microsoft did was point out the contract that said so, game over. Perfectly legal transaction.
Windows stealing the thunder? The joke that was Windows 1.0 would've dissuaded you on that (no overlapping windows, to begin with. It was actually closer to the Xerox model (also no overlapping windows) than Mac). Windows 2.0 wasn't much better. Windows 3 got somewhere, and Windows 95 and NT blew OS X out of the water (mock all you want, at least 95 had protected memory and preemptive multitasking, two things that MacOS lacked until OS X's release 6 years later. And the NT line...). All Apple had was a crusty OS, a dead-in-the-water rewrite (Copland) and really nowhere to go. They had to buy the next MacOS (from NeXT) to get this stuff (after attempts to buy BeOS failed when Be got a bit greedy).
Though, you can be sure Apple was not going to do THAT again. (And Apple didn't take it from Xerox - they licensed it for Apple stock).
Slashdot Mirror
HL: Source is i just a port of HL to the Source engine. A good goal, but it also means the graphics of HL Source are a bit low-res purely because they're just using the same textures. In fact, this who mod started as a way to improve the HL graphics just a bit to look better.
And probably fix a few issues that came up.
Blue Shift and Opposing Force aren't by Valve, but by some other company, so they won't be as good. But they are canon I believe (Blue Shift is about the the Black Mesa security guards - it starts out by being the guy you see on HL trying ot open the door. Opposing Force is about the guys sent in to kill Freeman).
Depends on which platform war.
OS X? That was lost long ago if you go by marketshare. Not so much if you're going by profit - a Mac sells very little (optimists say Dell outsells Apple in PCs by 10:1 at least), but they certainly seem to make it up (Mac profits ar higher than Dell's). So Dell sells more, but Apple makes more money. Who's the winner? Dell for selling the most, or Apple for making the most?
Ditto iOS vs. Android - Apple sells far less than Android (going by entirety). Though, Apple probalby makes more off each iOS device than everyone else (the vast majority of Android sales are cheap crapphones running 2.3 if you're lucky, 2.2 or lower being more common - I still found it funny you can buy an Android phone with 2.1/2.2 on contract today). Or by developer ecosystems (Android devs should be making more profit because of larger market, right? I mean, with 60% marketshare vs. 30% for iOS, the market's twice as big and should be twice as much profit... especially with only a $25 fixed fee vs. $99 a year, no approvals and all that.).
It's also pretty much the reason why a TV made by Apple is unlikely - the margins aren't in it (why do you think they throw in "Smart TVs" or "3D TV"? They're looking for value-add into what otherwise is a sea of identical TVs).
Apple's MO is not to provide products for every price point (it nearly killed them the first time around), but to concentrate on markets where they can make some of the largest margins in the business and move the most product.
Another reason is well, you don't have to pack up so much when travelling by RV - you just put your stuff away so it doesn't present a hazard while on the road - which can basically mean putting the laptop on the floor so it doesn't slide around, or on the rear-facing seat in the dinette, or whatever.
No worries that you left the charger behind, or forgot a cable, etc. Plus, if you have some larger equipment to haul around, it beats having to pack it up into the car, and driving it with constantly there.
Funny thing, I saw this over at the App Store... BBC iPlayer. So the platform that never had Flash can play iPlayer videos.
What was the problem again? I would assume the BBC is smart enough to be able to do an Android version of the app as well. Maybe the only problem I can see is DRM issues with Android, but I'm sure it can be resolved easily enough like Netflix.
I understand full disk encryption, but actual usage of a customer provided laptop (to meet their security requirements) has given that cost to be on the "low' end.
First, we've suffered odd "delayed write failures" on Windows when we acquired a set of brand new i7 laptops. It mostly affects our VirtualBox disk images, and gotten so bad some of my coworkers lose half a day while they delete the old disks, reinstall the VirtualBox Appliance image (which lays down a preinstalled OS image so we're up faster) and reconfigures everything, including removing the appliance provided disks and restoring a backup of the disk files. IT did some things which mostly restored things, but it took several days.
Next, we came into some oddball BSoDs which IT a week later figured it was an interaction between a Windows update, the disk encryption software, and the virus scanner. Worse yet, not everyone saw the BSoD - as part of the investigation in the first issue, my system got updated to the new virus scanner which solved my delayed write failure problems. So I never saw that, while IT was figuring it out.
In the end, the blame fell int he combination of FDE software, antivirus, and monitoring software.
Of course, they don't use TrueCrypt, which I think would've solved half the problems...
Easy. Apple stories sell. Why did you think Gawker Media went apeshit two years ago with the iPhone 4 prototype they purchased? They probably made tons of money off that series of articles that they kept rerunning it for months afterwards. (Alas, they seem to have decided to waste that money on site redesigns that are worse than ever before and even unfriendlier to users which has steadily decreashed until the only ones left are trolls and such).
Slashdot knows that any Apple article would generate 300+ comments, even if it's something along the lines of "Apple announces nothing today, again." That's guaranteed advertiser gold. (It's Apple's turn - even all the flamewars and generally pro-Android sentiment still generates enough page views to be profitable. Enough that even pro-Android articles don't make so much money.).
Well, Microsoft's investment was $150M. Apple bought NeXT for $430M. The money Microsoft put in could be far less (they could've bought Be for half that or so, which was using Gassee's inflated value of the company).
No, what Jobs did with Microsoft was basically pure investor relations. Investors tend to be like sheep - if a company is going downhill, investment money may not flow even if you come up with a killer product. By naving Microsoft BUY $150M worth of Apple stock (Microsoft never put money into Apple, they just bought stock), it signalled the markets that Apple was a company worthy of investment.
In addition, by having Microsoft re-invest in their Mac business unit, it signalled developers that the Mac was worthy platform to develop for, not another one to ignore.
Jobs' credit was basically counting on the ability of Apple fans to look the other way - this was a time when anti-Microsoft sentiment was high, that the Mac was merely the underdog in the Windows war, etc. So that keynote where Bill Gates towered over Jobs (on the large screen), it was a well-choreographed marketing moment - signalling developers and investors that Apple was viable, and hoping that the fanbase won't be alienated.
That would be all she wrote, except for being in the right place and right time with the iPod - being able to produce a device as big as a flash-based player, but the capacity of a hard drive player that could be loaded in minutes, not hours, and doing so just before MP3 players became commonplace, effectively being there from the get-go when the market took off. (Then having the RIAA embrace digital album sales...).
The switch to Intel came after Apple basically got spurned by both Motorola and IBM over PowerPC chip supplies (PowerPC AIM Alliance - Apple, IBM, Motorola). Motorola found it far more profitable to sell lower-end chips to the military, and IBM for embedded systems, and Apple always couldn't buy enough.
Given the practicality of duplicating copyrighted materials these days, I say we don't lose copyright protection.
Instead, the instant something is no longer for sale by the creator, it becomes mandatory licensed, as in, a government-set fee schedule kicks in to compensate the creator, but anyone can then sell the good, as long as they had an original. And yes, any and all DRM can be broken in order to sell it.
So the moment a book goes out of print, anyone who has it can freely scan it and sell it for whatever they want, paying the original creator the fixed per-copy fee. Ditto music, movies, etc.
Creators still get their fees, public still has the goods, and libraries and other resources can make use of their immense collections to sell copies and make some money to support themselves. Google Books can continue to sell access or copies, etc.
It also keeps copyright intact so open-source doesn't go public-domain accidentally - it's still copyrighted and users can pay the per-copy fee to use it under standard copyright laws, or obey the open-source license.
Abandoned works can have standardized collection agencies (e.g., libraries) who can hold the fees in trust and use the profits and investments of it to help fund operations
Once a work enters mandatory licensing, it cannot leave it, so if the original creator wishes to re-release it, he can compete with everyone else. The government set fee will be less than the average per-copy royalty (say, 70%) for that type of work (this is to encourage authors who wish not to participate to simply keep said book available for sale). So if all book authors earned on average (including first time authors through to bestselling authors) of $5 per copy of the book (probably a bit on the high side but it's just a number I picked out of thin air), the per-copy fee for any book will be $3.50. Ebook websites can compete against each other - I suspect after costs the price will be $3.75 or so for out of print, but not out of copyright books.
Same goes for other works.
It's like democracy, really. It's a flawed system, but it's around purely because it's better than the alternatives, and getting rid of patents will NOT lead to more innovation.
It will have the opposite effect as companies basically go into "copy" mode. The only thing they can "innovate" on is perhaps cutting corners to make a cheaper product. It's cheaper to copy than to do any actual R&D. Leave the R&D to the small guys who are fed up and let them build something you can copy immediately (there will always be itches to scratch). Or the latecomer to the copying game who wants to temporarily make his product stand out amongst the other clones.
It's annoying, but most businesses are lazy and will do as little as possible to make a buck. And hell, when people do it on open-source they get angry (see Tangibot as a 30% cheaper version of the Makerbot replicator). It's not advancing state of the art, other than perhaps how to cut corners or showing what margins people are asking for.
And copying has the highest ROI for a company - the investment is purely what's required to reverse engineer the product to copy it, the return being well, not having first-mover advantage, but if you can do it quick enough and cut enough corners, you can be second and win purely by undercutting the first-mover.
Wow... that's a whole pile of steaming turd.
"In order" and "Out of order" just mean how the inter internal CPU treats instructions when executing them on the processor.
An in-order processor processes each instruction as it comes in - in order. An out-of-order processor searches through the instruction stream identifying instructions that aren't dependent on one another and to run those in parallel (super scalar architecture - more than one instruction executed at a time).
For example, your code may load a value from memory into a register, perform some arithmetic on it, then write it back to memory. The code following that may do something else - perhaps issue some I/O, but due to the way it's coded, they both use the same registers for the operation, creating an artificial dependency. An out-of-order processor will detect that, and while the load from memory is happening (loads take a little while), the processor can see it can do the other block (the one doing I/O) at the same time and executes it while the first part waits for the results to come back.
It's a way to make processors faster - in-order processors are simpler to produce and are smaller (no instruction buffers to scan, no huge banks of rename registers, and all the associated book-keeping hardware), plus are also much more predictable in operation.
It has zilch to do with AI or randomness. A smart AI can run on an in-order processor or an out-of-order one with no differences (other than ones due to processor errata). It will probably run a little faster on the out-of-order one, but that's it. Sure you could imply that a slower processor means your AI could be dumbed down so it runs "fast enough", but a dumb AI run on either kind of processor is still a dumb AI (which happens to run faster on an out-of-order processor).
And it also has zilch to do with wide open dynamic worlds. If you want randomness, you use a random number generator which either comes from randomness hardware, or you use a pseudo-random number generator, neither of which are affected by the processor execution type, other than because the in-order one executes more predictably (you can count clocks), ones based on CPU clock timers might be more predictable because a fixed number of clocks execute each loop. Maybe.
I don't think anyone can take that article seriously.
For experimental aircraft (of which homebuilts/kit builts/etc are a part of) the regulations are far more lax - basically it's just a sequence of inspections to make sure you're doing things "the right way" and avoiding obvious faults. I.e., you plane has a decent chance of flying and you used parts that are strong enough to withstand the rigors of such flight.
After that, it's mostly hands off - you build it how you think it should be built. It's basically anything goes to encourage innovation in aircraft. You're allowed to design your own completely from scratch, buy a set of plans and build it yourself (following as much or as little of the plans as you desire), buy a kit and build it, etc.
Nothing you use needs to be certified - it's why experimental aircraft have much more advanced avionics available (they aren't certified yet - it takes years) and much more advanced technology available.
The only things that need to be certified are certified aircraft - those mass produced in a factory and such, because well, you didn't build it, so you are trusting someone else to have built it right and not produce pieces of crap, so the use of certified materials is mandatory.
Definitely not sure what open-sourcing gives over traditional experimental plane building. Other than perhaps you don't have to buy a set of plans and can instead download them? Or are forced to document all your modifications and publish them?
Actually, Android is proof this is not true, as Google actually has worked around most of the patents, leading to the innovation and differences you see between iOS and Android (for better or worse - there are things iOS does better, and things Android does better). And face it - why do many high end Androids end up being slates? Where's the innovation in that? Why doesn't the Note/S III or such come with a hardware keyboard? Given the low-end ones have 'em, why not the high end? Or why not combine the Xperia Play with a real hardware keyboard to create a high end gaming phone with real controls?
The stupid thing is, in the absence of patents to work around, innovation slows down and stops because all tha that happens is people end up copying. Copying the right strategy in the general case. (You can see this in the various App Stores where for every original app, there's a dozen copies).
Of course, there will be SOME innovation that happens - there's always a scratch that needs itching, and a latecomer to the copying game needs to bring something else to the mix to get people ot buy HIS copy rather than the dozens of other versions that were on the market beforehand.
Businesses are, unfortunately, pretty damn lazy. (See all the recent movies that rehash plots, "re-imaginings", sequels, or Hollywood's favorite, re-doing movies made a decade or so earlier. Ditto video games also - how few new and original games there are versus rehashes, sequels and other stuff).
And also, no reasonable company will invest in any R&D other than how to tear apart a competitor's product and copy it to make it cheaper.
Therein lies the rub. Either way you're screwed. (And put a little perspective on it - many great advances in technology in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have had torrents of patent lawsuits flying around. What we're seeing in software is no different than the internal combustion engine, the telephone, television, radio, cars, etc.
And yes, the little guy needs protection as well - anyone remember intermittent windshield wipers? The lawsuits over that were only settled in the early 80s, long after the patents expired in the 70s (and long after cars were built with it using the "stolen" technology - they started appearing in the mid-late 50s or so).
Not sure about Android, but iOS definitely has web apps - it was there even before the App Store was around. It's effectively a bookmark, but I believe it runs a separate instance so do it right and it can feel all "native".
In fact, you can pin any web site to the home screen.
Apple has always suggested that apps that don't want to be approved be done this way. I'm not sure how far Apple has gone with their proposals to have sensor capabilities (accellerometer, gyros, location, etc) available via HTML5 so they can be used by webapps...
I would assume Android has similar functionality.
I could swear the NAS appliance sitting on my desk at home had the EMC logo on it. And I know it has an ARM processor in it, specifically a Marvell XScale chip. It runs a modified version of Linux, but it's an EMC box (and even has some approved for VMWare thing on it).
So yes, EMC has gone ARM on the low end, specifically the stuff they market under their consumer brand as Iomega ("An EMC company").
Plenty fast for the home user, probalby sufficient for a mom and pop company, but will be woefully insufficient for anything larger. But nothing wrong - ARM makes it cheap and decently performing.
Not really, there are enough people who probably are waiting for the KF2 to come out so they can pick up used KF's for under $100, hoping people will upgrade and force a glut on the market.
Of course, Amazon probably doesn't want to risk having ot sell out the old stock at super low prices that they can't make up the loss through content sales. Better to leave it to upgraders doing so as part of the early adopter premium.
Excepting very few use cases, most spacecraft are bespoke because each mission is different. There are very few times when a spacecraft is constructed en masse - basically the same spacecraft churned out in multiple copies, and even then the number tends to be extremely limited (usually below 10), so setting up assembly lines doesn't generally justify the overhead.
Now, there are efforts to componentize spacecraft so building one is basically like snapping together Lego. Including having flight software automatically reconfigure itself to handle those blocks like modern OSes do when you plug in USB devices.
The main problem is that it's extremely expensive to launch spacecraft - easily $1B per launch. Neverminding the large fraction that don't make it at all. As such, equipment sent up there has to put up with some of the worst scenarios in the world - little projectiles whizzing along and handling all the damage it causes, limited weight (too heavy and it costs way more $$$), the fact that there's no way to practically repair it (very few get the Hubble treatment), and that it has to last many years (because you don't want to launch its replacement and spend another billion soon aferwards)
When you've got billion(s) on the line, spending a few years ensuring that failures are minimized and tolerated is just part of the game. Cube sats and such only have to last a few weeks - which is a much easier thing to do than making one last at least a decade or more.
Same goes for many things, software included. There's lots of technically brilliant pieces of software (e.g., Linux), but they tend to "speak" only to those in the field (i.e., Linux users). Attempts to try to "explain" it to others leads to complaints of "dumbing down" and "too different" (see all the comments about people replacing X with Wayland or other window system, Unity, etc).
Or hell, everytime Apple comes up - how their stuff is not technically very advanced, as Apple concentrates more on the presentation of said technology to those outside the field (i.e., user interface).
The real problem is that those in the field believe they are the ones who are so important because they do the work, disrespecting those who merely "parrot" their work as doing nothing (as in, it's easy to communicate said work to the general public). Of course it's never that simple (it just appears that way) as the communicators have to be both fluent in the field and able to relate the subject matter to those outside the field, which is actually an extraordinarily difficult job that everyone thinks is easy. (Try UI design, for example - software engineers think it's easy, but creating a good UI is actually exremely complicated - it is simple enough to toss a few buttons and text fields on a screen, but it's hard to properly figure out where and how each button and field has to be arranged).
It's also the reason why science journalism typically sucks. The people doing the research think they can talk to the press and the press understands the entire field of research that was their life-long project, but the journalist's only experience they can relate to is their own and details end up being reported incorrectly (usually big ones too because they get understated). The flip side also happens - said jouralists avoid the communicators because they're scripted and "dumb down" the information (even though they explain it clearer), and want to get to the source, thinking they can understand it all).
False. Texts are unreliable as all heck. First, it's "best effort" delivery, similar to e-mail. While 99% of all e-mail and texts probably make it through the network in a timely fashion, there's still a significant portion that doesn't (usually only delayed a few minutes), but there's no guarantee.
Sending a text is like sending a UDP packet. The other end may get it, they may get it delayed (sometimes significantly - minutes/hours/days delayed texts aren't uncommon), they can be duplicated in flight (recipient gets mulitple - sometimes combined with the delays means they keep receiving the same text for days), or simply disappear.
Of course, in an emergency situation, who knows what failure mode will be seen? And overloaded control channels is a significant issue - the cell may have plenty of voice capacity, but the control channel is so overloaded it's effectively useless. It's the problem AT&T has with their network consistently (leading to oddball situations as having worst connectivity, but damn fast network speeds - if you can get a channel, it'll be clear, the problem being acquiring the channel to begin with).
As for social media - well, everyone's been talking about it for ages. Back when Second Life (remember that?) was the hot new thing, everyone was probalby considering ways to do emergency notifications through that.
I don't know about you - but what is restricting use of that to iPhones?
Did this company really just open up a huge free proxy server on the 'net for everyone to use? If they're in the US, it's basically a free proxy server to all those US services that everyone whines about... if not, it's a free proxy server that lets you "hide" your IP...
Depending on the proxy, it might be worthwhile to shove your torrent traffic through there?
Of course, the other thing is - you still have to install configuration profiles through iTunes? If you're not using it, you have to manually enter the settings? Hrm...
Gatekeeper merely asks if the binary you downloaded came from the 'net, not from the output of the compiler or some other means. And it only asks if the file is flagged with a "downloaded" extended attribute in the filesystem (easily cleared).
Gatekeeper isn't involved at all if you clear the flag, use a browser that doesn't set the flag to begin with (Firefox used to not do it - they were among the last to actually do it), copy the program to another location (which destroys extended attributes), etc.
And developers need to develop apps so the output of the compiler will probably never need verification (since developers need to test). Which means in the worst case, if you want to avoid the Apple taxes fo having to buy a signing cert (of which many popular open-source projects already have, both for Windows AND OS X), well, you can always release it as source code and have the user compile it.
Thus ensuring the longevity of open-source because instead of people distributing binaries, all software distribution takes place as ... source. And no BS "look but don't touch" - but buildable source. (Oddly, it's also GPLv3 compliant because if you don't provide build tools, users can't use your program!).
Hell, if the user wishes to pass on their modifications, they too have to do it as... source code.
The migration from x86 has already started, actually - the architecture they're moving to is ARM. (After all, there are more ARM-based SoCs shipped than x86 CPUs - every PC includes one or more ARM cores doing something).
But on a more user level - tablets, smartphones are becoming the computing platforms of the day, all running ARM processors. Regardless of whether they run iOS or Android. Developers have embraced it and cranking out tons of apps and games and other stuff for this. It's so scary that Intel's investing a lot of money bringing Android to x86 because the writing's on the wall (when more phones and tablets ship than PCs...)
But x86 won't die - it has a raw performance advantage that ARM has yet to reach, so for computation-heavy operations like databases, it'll be the heavy lifter. Perhaps serving an entire array of ARM frontend webservers.
At which point it becomes prohibitively expensive to own and operate an inkjet.
I mean, for photos, between Costco and Walmart (and who use real photo paper), it's pretty damn cheap to have extremely high quality prints made - better than an inkjet and probably an order of magnitude cheaper if you went with the special inkjet paper.
For black and white printing, a mono laser is extremely cheap, and even the consumer "half size" toner carts are still pushing 2,500+ pages for barely more than twice the cost of an inkjet black cartridge (which getting 500 pages is a struggle). Plus the output is nicer and doesn't smudge.
I haven't printed enough "other" stuff to really want to print in color (in a move, I found the old inkjet I had that the mono laser replaced - a Canon, which I hadn't touched in years).
About the only defense for an inkjet these days is that they are cheap - usually pretty damn close to free ($20-ish?). A reasonable laser is still pushing over $100 on sale.
What you want is a standard "all rights reserved" copyright, then. NOT CC.
A standard copyright gives you, the author complete control of the work. If someone wants to include it in their training materials, fair use applies, otherwise they have to contact you for permission.
Just because you published it on the web does NOT give anyone the right to rip it off - it's still a copyright violation.
"Non-commercial" really is non-free. A GPL'd project cannot include NC'd art, for example because the GPL forbids further restrictions (and one of the restrictions is restriction from sale, i.e., commercial use).
If you want to give your work to little guys but prevent the large corps from using it, it's best to use a standard copyright. The little guy will have to ask for permission to incorporate your work, at which point you can give him an acceptable license (e.g., you may use the assets in a GPL'd project, as long as further usage of the assets are under the GPL).
CC means you're giving the work to the public at large to make use of. It's the open source spirit embodied for content other than source code. "NC" really makes it useless to the public because it cannot be incorporated in any form as it is, and is as useful as a normal copyrighted work that doesn't have CC on it.
"ND" works are the same - it too makes it impossible to use - if I was doing a GPL'd project, I can't use an ND'd work as well because I might have to modify the content ot suit my purpose better, and I can't. It too is as good as a standard copyright.
And that's the thing people confuse - CC gives you more rights than a standard copyright. ND and NC terms bring it back down to standard copyright and in general makes the work not open at all.
The only thing ND/NC possibly offer is if someone wants your content for their personal website because they like it then they can do it without asking. That's it, really. Which could still be done under standard copyright, if the author merely asked you. (Though, if it's a personal website, they could probably just take the content and violate the license anyhow without you noticing).
Dropping NC and ND is a good idea - because really, it's just during "creative commons" into "open source" rather than "free software". (And if you don't know the difference - the former includes look-but-don't-touch licenses that you can get for bits of Windows and such). But i nthis case, you're not really helping the "commons", you're just using it as a mark
Depends what you're using the results for.
If you're arguing that it's too small to be definitive, you're right. It's too small to generalize to the general population.
However, if it's an initial study to see if there *might* be something worth studying (people have been arguing that exposure to screens before bed ruins sleep, after all), then a small sample might be fine to see if it's even worth studying. Rather than spend lots of money studying lots of people and controlling for all variables - try to see if a small subset even matches the hypothesis.
This study is small to determine if the general agreement that screens-before-sleep might be an issue. If it proved otherwise, it means the hypothesis was invalid and needs to be revised, as per the scientific method (it could be you were completely unlucky and picked people who happened to disprove the hypothesis, but if it's as common as you believe, it would be unlikely).
This study has proved that there might be something to that, but it's not definitive. In other words, more comprehensive studies are required (perhaps you got lucky and picked the 13 people who were affected).
There's nothing wrong with small sample sizes - it's just used to cheaply identify if the hypothesis is remotely correct before spending the time, effort and money studying a much larger sample that may generate inconclusive results.
Also, if you're depending on grant money, it means you can walk to the grant committee and show them that you have results that prove interesting, but need further study to confirm. Grant committees don't like hypothesis, they like preliminary studies.
Strangely enough, that exists already, regardless of your platform.
It's called Airplay, and while an Apple technology, apparently it's been taken up with enthusiam in the Android community, and is, last I checked, using lossless codecs.
You will need an Airplay-compatible receiver (network receiver), or an Airplay-compatible target (say, AppleTV), but it works. And Android can be both an Airplay sender and Airplay receiver with the appropriate apps.
Forget the Nexus Q which promises to work, but only does if you store your music in the cloud.
The only downside is its limited to 44kHz, 16 bit.
To Microsoft's credit though, Bill Gates was an excellent businessperson (better than Jobs ever was). The only reason Microsoft "won" that case was that Jobs needed apps on the Mac, and ended up signing a contract crafted by Gates where Microsoft would write the apps, and inherit a license to the UI.
That was why Microsoft won - Apple licensed the UI stuff to Microsoft. All Microsoft did was point out the contract that said so, game over. Perfectly legal transaction.
Windows stealing the thunder? The joke that was Windows 1.0 would've dissuaded you on that (no overlapping windows, to begin with. It was actually closer to the Xerox model (also no overlapping windows) than Mac). Windows 2.0 wasn't much better. Windows 3 got somewhere, and Windows 95 and NT blew OS X out of the water (mock all you want, at least 95 had protected memory and preemptive multitasking, two things that MacOS lacked until OS X's release 6 years later. And the NT line...). All Apple had was a crusty OS, a dead-in-the-water rewrite (Copland) and really nowhere to go. They had to buy the next MacOS (from NeXT) to get this stuff (after attempts to buy BeOS failed when Be got a bit greedy).
Though, you can be sure Apple was not going to do THAT again. (And Apple didn't take it from Xerox - they licensed it for Apple stock).