Mergers like Comcast/NBC should be illegal. Once content providers are also content distributers, they can pull shenanigans like these.
I say, "look north". When Global TV foundered here, Shaw, Rogers and Bell bought up bits and pieces of it, and this happened way quicker than the whole Comcast/NBC merger!
It's why Canadians get screwed - the CRTC is in the pockets of the big guys and has no balls to demand consumer-friendly regulations.
UBB was just the beginning, and only when the government threatened to pass legislation did people back down again.
Heck, we don't have CableCARDs so every company gets to make incompatible boxes and refuse to activate any 3rd party boxes that you didn't buy from them. (Even though said boxes have CableCARDs inside them). It's either crappy DVR or crappy cablebox for TV because again, other than basic cable, they got rid of analogs and encrypted ALL channels, even locals.
This is why I don't publish an app for my web services. Safari's rich enough for an appropriately formatted and scripted web interface, and it avoids the 30% haircut.
Everyone's forgotten already.
Apple's original intention was for iOS to only run web apps. In fact, they're still supported to this day as the only allowed mechanism to get applications without approval from Apple.
It was only the howl and cry from developers that Apple released a native SDK a year later (and jailbreakers created some innovative apps).
It's why Apple pushed for so many extensions in HTML5 - location awareness, local storage, sensor APIs etc. - to make web apps have a decent chance of working like native apps.
Like Motorolla would be happy letting you download and use a HTML 5 browser for free. Obviously you simply can't.
Well, you can if you use the built-in licensed decoder.
An interesting question is the details - h.264, unlike cellphones, is licensed under a patent pool. That you, you can either do like we have in cellphones and license all the patents one-by-one (have fun!), or decide to license the whole group of them together in one fell swoop. This is done because the MPEG standards group created the MPEG licensing authority (MPEG-LA) that basically has the authority to license the patents used all at once.
Pay that license fee, and you're done. If Motorola's patents are in that patent pool, then Microsoft would already HAVE a license since they're paying for the other h.264 patents anyhow.
So something is not quite adding up here. They're effectively FRAND patents (since anyone can come up to the MPEG-LA, say they want to license to do X with h.264, pay the fee (on the fee schedule) and walk away), so...
As for WebM - it never had a chance. It was announced and standardized only a couple of years ago. Thing is, it takes YEARS for it to make it in hardware. The first GPUs with WebM support would probably hit late 2012-2013, with expected mass shipments by holiday 2013 (i.e., when you and I can buy stuff with it in).
Yes, it takes that long - hell, I was playing with h.264 back in 2003 (when DivX reigned supreme).
So something is not quite right here - if Microsoft paid their h.264 licensing fees, the Motorola patents should automatically be included as part of the deal.
This is not your father's leaded gas. It is 100 Octane Low Lead gas. It is pretty expensive because it is in relatively low demand and so many refineries just do a batch once in a while, and it keeps getting more expensive because more and more refineries consider it not worth the effort.
In North America, there is ONE refinery still producing it. And they pretty much only run a batch once a year - an entire day's production is sufficient for an entire year. Something like all the avgas used in a year is equal to all the regular gas used by cars in a day.
And the reason most refineries don't do it? They need special equipment - the equipment handling leaded fuel must be separated from the normal unleaded stuff. And there is only ONE company in the world licensed to handle tetraethyl lead (the lead in leaded gasoline), and they're in the UK.
If it wasn't for the importance of GA and small planes for the economy, it really would be uneconomical to continue producing leaded avgas. (And yes, GA is important - for every idiotic CEO asking for a handout from their multimillion dollar jets, there are hundreds more middle-income people flying for fun/recreation as well as business in little single engine Cessnas and Pipers. Even more with some very neat Light Sport aircraft...).
Small aircraft engines are decades behind automotive engines in terms of technology. Fuel injection and particularly computer controlled fuel injection are relatively new in small aircraft engines. Some of this is to blame on the immense cost of certification. If you have an engine that works and it will cost 45 million to certify a new engine with new technology and you are going to take X years to make up the cost, then it may not be worth the money and time.
The problem with aircraft engines is that they're expected to deliver rated power continuously. Car engines don't - that 450bhp monster under the hood of that muscle car would probably break down if you tried to run it at 75+% power for hours on end. It just doesn't take much horsepower for very long to get a car moving and keep it moving down the highway.
And yes, certification is an issue - a lot of promising technology comes from the experimental aviation sector - homebuilts and such - because a lot less certification is required.
So for all transit operators out there, the apparent takeaway from all this is to not provide any form of cell service in weak areas. Offering a repeater that you can control, and disabling it can be considered a breech of freedoms and make you liable.
Better to just avoid the whole issue and not do anything that'll make your commuters happier. If they want cell service, they can lobby their cell carriers to point antennas directed into the tunnels themselves. And nevermind emergencies - there's always the emergency phones in the trains.
Anyone who wants to text and use their cellphone, can drive instead.
They aren't lying about not enforcing it in private copying matters, because it is actually entirely UNenforceable... (and the biggest reason why so many were pushing for its removal from the bill) How could they possibly prosecute a crime that nobody other than the perpetrator could ever possibly know had occurred?
Easy. Strike it off the bill then. If it's unenforcable, remove it!
If it's in the books, it's enforcable.
Think of it like the speed limit - I'm sure there's a stretch of road where everyone speeds through, it's just the police don't bother. Doesn't mean the law doesn't exist nor that they can't prosecute you for it. Or decide that you will be the one caught even though everyone else is doing the same 20kph over the limit.
If the law's on the books, it doesn't mean it's unenforcable, they're just choosing not to enforce it. If they have reason to "get you" (perhaps say, you're a charity doing environmental work), the law's on the books so they can sieze your computer to find other material as well.
Otherwise if it's so unenforcable, why bother having it in the bill in the first place? Removing it is easy, after all (the bill hasn't passed and can be modified and debated).
The fact it's still in there means that as long as you're an oil-loving damn-the-environment type person, you're fine. But give the government any reason to search your computer, and they can throw this in as well.
The fact that the government chooses to not enforce a law doesn't make said law invalid - you can argue it in court, but you're taking a risk on whether the judge decides to agree or disagree on that point.
The recycling of once-conflict materials doesn't supply the conflict with money.
True, but laws requiring use of conflict-free minerals don't make that distinction and regard it still as conflict minerals. They often just say "agree to not use parts with components sourced from conflict areas". Just like say, conflict diamonds - if you buy a used one ("recycled"), it's still a conflict diamond even though the slaveowners got paid decades ago.
The other side is the documentation issue - see aviation where most of the cost of a 10 cent screw costing $10 is in the paperwork behind it, not the part itself.
Pay Pal seems to work quite well for ebay purchases. I must have made 100 purchases at Ebay and have never had much of a problem with anything at all. I did have one trivial misrepresentation of the completeness of an older musical instrument. I love shopping on Ebay.
Paypal and eBay are complimentary businesses. eBay lets random Joes hawk stuff online that other random Joes may want. Paypal lets them do it the Internet way - by using credit cards. Because otherwise, the only way to pay for the sale is cash, cheque or money order, and in an age where a buyer just clicks "buy now" enters in a credit card number and has it delivered in a few days, what's the deal with having to break out the chequebook (or going to the damned post office to get a money order), putting it all in an envelope and then sticking it in the mail? Seems anachronistic that one has to use snail mail in order to buy stuff online.
Paypal's also one of the only companies that lets a random person accept a credit card payment without a merchant account and its subsequent restrictions. (The problem is most people don't realize that the issues they have with Paypal stem from these restrictions - if you have a merchant account, you know all the stories and details).
Asking someone who wants to sell their collection of comics online to set up a merchant account isn't likely to happen (and most merchant banks probably won't offer very favorable terms, if they even let you - they want people who will constantly generate card traffic, not one-off sales).
There are only 18 smelters worldwide that can transform coltan into tantalum. In fact, they've all agreed to not purchase conflict minerals.
The problem for everyone else is there's a LOT of recycling of electronics - the tantalum is re-smelted from recycled electronics (mining recycled electronics is far easier and more productive than trying to extract it out of the earth).
The problem is that previous tantalum caps were made with conflict minerals, so it's technically impossible to say if the cap you're using is completely free of conflict minerals. Short of throwing away all the recycled electronics, that is.
So a manufacturer really cannot say if their product was conflict-free. They can say that no NEW conflict mineral was added, but recycled content may very well be conflict.
Actually, there is ONE industry that might be able to trace all the way back - aviation. Given the strict tracability demands (they can trace screws back to the smelter and maybe the mine that dug it out), it's possible a similar amount of paperwork exists for the avionics. (It partially explains the cost of aviation parts - just having someone file paperwork all day).
The thing is, I don't want my e-reader to "integrate" with my PC. (I'm in the Kindle lock-in camp rather than the Nook lock-in camp, but that's not the point.) I want the device to be able to function completely independently. If I ever need to plug it into my computer at all, I consider that a usability failure. I feel the same way about my smartphone.
I disagree for one reason - BACKUPS.
Right now, it's easy to backup an iOS device - ignoring iCloud, you plug your iDevice into your Mac/Windows PC and iTunes backs it up. It copies over apps you may have bought (thus ensuring that even if Apple removes them or they otherwise disappear, you always can reinstall - viz. that tricorder app).
Sure my contacts and such can be synced, but it's as good a backup as say, RAID is. One false flip of the finger and boom, that contact can disappear and be promptly synced everywhere. (Alas, with everything going cloud and sync, this will destroy backups as well).
Of course, you could argue about backing up to a local SD card or other storage media, but then you lose the device, you lose the backup (oops).
It's also one of my biggest frustrations with Android - until recently there wasn't a really good way to do it without rooting (ICS has a special "adb backup" and "adb restore" hidden option). I want to wipe one of my Androids and the thought of having to back it up makes me pause (Google's restore leaves something to be desired, especially w.r.t. free apps).
There was a time when everyone thought this was the future (along with virtual reality and other such things). I bought into it. I figured by now Iâ(TM)d be casually shouting orders at the various appliances in my house.
Which is a great reason for IPv6... until you realize that most of the envisioned applications require them to access the Internet. Including all requisite security issues (they are embedded devices after all) and not finding out that the fridge didn't order new groceries because your ISP decided to change your prefix and the fridge failed to update properly and lost access to the internet. (Meanwhile, it can display local stuff just fine, as link-local works great)
We now have the technology to do all the cool stuff we dreamed about in the early 90s. The big problem however, is once you automate the lights, temperature, and coffee pot what else is there that makes any sense (and even the lights are more of a novelty than much practical benefit). The âoehouse of the futureâ feeling is cool and itâ(TM)s fun to play with... but most of it is impractical and would seem to add very little benefit for a whole lot of complexity.
Well, there are other things you can do. For example, centralize your media - you can have things set up so you can pause your Blu-Ray in the living room, and continue watching in the bedroom, or distribute your TV throughout the house. Basically all the screens pull media from all sources (cable, OTA, internet, DVD/Blu-Ray libraries, other stored media) and present it to any screen. Netflix available on every screen, no netflix-compatible box required for everyone, etc.
Heck, maybe gaming as well - you can play games on any screen with just a controller, so when dad kicks you off the nice big TV to watch sports, you can pause and continue somewhere else.
And integrate it all together - the lights dim and windows close when watching movies, etc.
The deal right now is - all this technology is available right now, just in various discrete non-integrated forms (the integration systems are $$$).
I've seen a remarkable change in business use of open-source once the GPLv3 came out, which may explain why.
Businesses were pretty much ambivalent towards open-source - it was neat, it was nifty, and as long as they provided source, they could stay on the right side of the license.
Then the GPLv3 came out, and suddenly their obligations became much greater and businesses got worried that GPLv3 may "taint" everything.
Suddenly open-source usage policies started becoming the norm - and by usage, it includes both internal use (build tools, etc) and using code in the product. Open-source projects now need to be "reviewed" by legal for license compliance in all usage (because internal tools may be shared with outside contractors) and other such business.
Some have gotten to the point where there's a narrow subset of what's allowed (pre-approved software and versions), and explicitly banned some licenses - BSD and MIT licenses are A-OK, Apache is iffy, and GPLv3 is a definite cannot use don't even ask. Heck, even the GPL can be iffy since GPLv2+ code can be GPLV3 in some instances because of what code is included (exception - v2-only code is OK because that code cannot be v3 at all - GPLv2-only is incompatible with GPLv3).
Even Apple have been moving away from GPL - they ditched GCC after the patches to support Grand Central Dispatch for LLVM, among other things.
Also, most of the kids today have NO IDEA that a computer can be programmed to do your bidding and do more that web, boring office stuff & games and there's no one to tell them this.
And how many kids CARE that they can make computers do more? We tech geeks love to think that the public must love computers when they're buying it up by the truckload, but the reality is a computer is something required in day-to-day life. They don't care how it works, what makes it work, etc.
Take say, a mechanic - he fixes your car, and uses computers to help diagnose what's wrong and to figure out what else needs to be done (work order) and filling in the proper field in the billing app so you get billed properly. You'd be pretty upset if he needed to recompile the kernel on his PC because the diagnostic tool doesn't work anymore (and no, that stuff is NOT free, if you're the unlucky sap, you get billed the hours). But more normally, he'd just expect these systems to Just Work(tm), and would be extremely upset if a change to one of the systems makes him have to learn a new system and be inefficient at the same time. (Eliminating redundancies is good, so he'll be happier if he only has to enter information once, but changing stuff like which screens to enter stuff in and such can be like pulling teeth).
At best, he doesn't care how it works. If he's inclined he might try to see if there's a way to automate some of his work so he doesn't have to click 100 times to do one stupid thing. If it breaks, he calls in his supervisor and gets him to deal with it.
It's just like everything else in life - those that are interested will learn, those that don't, won't and forcing them just makes matters worse. Modern society has achieved the progress it has because we've left concerns by the wayside - since everyone doesn't have to be a hunter-gatherer anymore to survive, or have to pump water from a creek, etc., to even rocket scientists not having to worry about fixing their broken PC.
So, be warned if you're outside the USA and decide to import one yourself. You might end up paying for what adds up to an iPad. While I hope that Amazon will start selling the Kindle Fire outside of the USA, and hopefully within my 1 year of warranty, I somehow doubt this is going to happen. At least not with the current Kindle Fire. And with rumours of a smaller iPad I wonder if a Kindle Fire 2 is going to be an option for Amazon.
Unlikely in the near future, because outside the US, the Fire is merely a cheap LCD-based e-reader. No other content is available for it outside the US - you can't get video, music nor apps, making it fairly useless.
You could, of course, hack it, but out of the box it's little more than an ebook reader. Heck, I don't think you can even access the free apps to get Kobo or Nook books.
O.K. - this is a selfish request for info I'm too lazy to look up for myself...
What's the ETA and source for direct connect digital camera support? I know there's USB support through the standard Linux stack, but there's that tantalizing little camera port on the Pi that gets mentioned every so often.
Will it support multiple cameras?
Will it support higher bandwidth than USB?
Will it have any decent general purpose driver support?
Is it just a phantom port like the one on the Beagle/Panda boards where there's not actually any camera on the market that connects to it?
My future four-eyed autonomous rover wants to know!
Don't get too excited. It's a standard camera *module* port. Something you'd connect those itty-bitty camera sensors to that you find in cellphones and the like.
Yes, it's higher bandwidth, and you need to use I2C to control the camera and maybe autofocus module (if you use it for your lens).
Other than that, that's all it is. You're not gonna hook your dSLR to it as that's not what it's for (nor do any regular "good cameras" have such a port). It's a plain ol' camera sensor port from the like of Omnivision and like.
Just imagine all the mandates they can fund if they had all this money
The flip side is Apple employs a lot of highly paid people in California, who also pay signficant amounts of income tax and other taxes in order to work and live in California. I'm sure California would be really happy if all those people left the state. Heck, I'm sure Nevada would be more than happy to host Silicon Valley 2.0 as all the big companies move there with their employees.
a solution might be to show the movie at 48 fps but keep most of the source 24 fps... ramping up to 48 fps during scenes that require it (such as camera panning)
So basically what you'd do is shoot everything in 48 fps, but for most scenes take out every other frame, and just show the remaining frames twice. Then it would look like a regular 24 fps movie.
For scenes with lots of motion, DON'T take out every other frame, show the full 48 fps.
Won't work. You can't change a 48fps film to a 24fps film by dropping frames. You'll make the image even jerkier than if you filmed it at 24fps.
The reason is at 24fps, each frame is exposed at 1/24th of a second. At 48fps, the frame is exposed at 1/48th a of second. If you take film exposed at 48fps and show it at 24fps, you'll induce jerkiness due to the lack of motion blur, making it worse. (and motion blur is why 24fps doesn't look as bad as say, 30fps gaming - the game doesn't render motion blur so you get jerkiness).
So if you film at 48 and want to show it at 24, you must digitally combine the images to produce a proper 24 frame. Or film it at 24 to begin with, and film high motion/pans at 48. The 24 can easily be frame doubled to 48.
And 24fps movies are double-shuttered at least (the projector shows each frame twice, 1/48th of a second apart). At 24fps, single-shuttering makes for awful flicker (hence the term "flicks" when referenced to movies or the uber-cool "flix" (like netflix)). So showing a scene double-framed at 24fps through a 48fps project looks normal because it's doing what a normal projector does.
As for 48fps looking "strange" - it's just like the 120/240Hz refresh on TVs if you crank up the frame interpolation mode. It looks *strange*. (I disable it - I prefer frame-repeat mode to frame-interpolate). Fast motion looks especially weird.
Always shoot my hard drives with 9mm hollow point before disposing them. Good luck recovering my files. Really, I can't understand why people don't think something so obvious as the need to shoot some holes in your hard drives before disposing them.
Wrong tool for the job.
A couple of decent blows with a hammer or the back of an axe will do the same job. There's no need to break out the firearms.
Obviously not from the US, I take it. Sure there's no need to use a firearm to destroy hard drives, but damn, if you have the weapon, the time and opportunity, why not?
Maybe I'm weird, but I got more of a college education outside of college than in it.. For instance, my school dropped their compiler design course due to lack of enrollment, so I bought a textbook and taught myself. I learned physics and linear algebra through MIT OCW (though I admit I didn't retain much of either after 5 years). I got a C in discrete math because the prof refused to give the homework until 5-10 minutes after the bell rang, and I didn't have time to stick around that long, but I practice my knowledge of algorithms by doing Project Euler problems..
Not exactly a bad thing - after all the whole point of undergraduate studies is to learn how to learn. The fact that you ended up teaching yourself is a Good Thing(tm) and meant the primary purpose of college is fulfilled. The reason for the subjects is to provide background to expand your horizons. After all, once you have a bachelor's, your next step could be research (so you need background on what to research and current state-of-the-art to advance it), or a job in industry (where you'll learn the non-academic, practical skills).
Most people will say they learned far more after graduating.
I'm not sure what Apple's goals with Qucktime Player are - version X is a step backwards from version 7 on OS X, and I keep both installed concurrently and prefer to use v7 where possible.
Easy - it's time for a rewrite. QuickTime, like Final Cut Pro and Logic before it, was getting somewhat crufty and time to start anew. Apple generally likes to introduce a stable brand new version of the software first, then re-add back missing features (we see this happening with Final Cut). OS X was another such "victim" - 10.0/10.1 were pretty featureless compared to Classic (OS 9) back in the day - hell, things like DVD Player only were on OS 9 (and didn't work in Classic mode on OS X). Eventually Apple started fixing things up until it was usable for day to day work and booting into OS 9 was reserved for the oddball compatibility thing that couldn't be handled with Classic.
So Apple ships v7 with QT X for that reason - QT X doesn't have all the features of 7. (Too bad they didn't do this with Final Cut, but you can buy it over the phone still).
Of course, having said that, it's time for iTunes X. A full rewrite.
The QuickTime format will live on even if you don't use QuickTime. The MP4 container format is a subset of QuickTime's MOV container. 3GP is a more limited version of MP4. There's not much more to MOV that a proper MP4 container parser couldn't implement and handle all three formats. Heck, most of the time you can just rename them (if the container splitter is braindead) and it'll work.
Though, I haven't really run into MOVs all that often anymore - the h.264 ones are all MP4s anyhow.
As for WebM - the problem was Mozilla did not wait long enough. Google acquired WebM only a couple of years ago and specs for it were released then. It takes YEARS before it'll start to come out.with hardware decoders. (I remember dealing with h.264 encoded files back in what, 2004? When practically nothing played it, and DivX was the popular codec of the day). WebM in hardware will probably start happening around 2013-2014 at the earliest (as in - you can buy devices with webm support).
Most users won't be affected by this malware - the play store won't have it, and most of those that install apps from outside the store are techs who know what they are doing. The few affected will be the usual ones, those who think they can ignore the warning when they allow install from untrusted sources, and then ignore the permissions requested by the app. If you're dumb enough to do that, to install games from a suspicious site, that want to make calls and send SMS, then no anti-virus will save you. And it isn't the OS fault if you choose to ignore all safety precautions and disable all protections.
The problem is, a lot of users don't have the play store. The best selling Android tablet certainly doesn't have it. And places like China have other stores set up becaues AOSP is huge (probably bigger than official Android). And since many devs do NOT sell anywhere but Play (SlideME, AppsLib, Amazon, etc have very few apps - no more than 10%), especially free apps, if you don't have it, you need to find the APK somewhere else.
Why do you think people who buy Archose/Nook/Kindle Fire/other Android Tablet immediately go to xda-devs to see if there's a Market/Play hack for it? THOSE are the techies. Everyone else googles for the APK.
Finally, well, apps can cost money on Play. There's a natural human tendency to not want to pay for stuff like software (especially in places like Asia), so if they can get a Angry Birds Space for free from some other site, they would. (If it wasn't lucrative, do you think malware devs would spend all that time and effort?).
Apple is a different beast - since it's so hard to sideload apps (and you should see the howls of people complaining they can't load pirated apps on the new iPad). Probalby why people resort to phishing for iTunes credentials.
So what you're advocating is... peace of mind/security through obscurity?
No, it's a rethink of security from the ground up, except with a deep understanding of the audience. It's called Dancing Pigs and it explains why people constantly get malware on their PCs and why the Android security model, while great for techies, is positively lousy for general users.
Think of it this way - user wants Angry Birds Space. I just checked (what I think was) the official app (free one - because who pays for apps?) - here are the permissions it wants
- Modify/Delete USB storage contents - Read phone state and identity - Full internet access - Coarse (network-based) location - View Wi-Fi State, view network state.
Well crap, I want to play a game of Angry Birds, and you want me to go through all that? (And you only see the first two anyhow, and the last is hidden behind a "More"). Ah, the download button is so big and right there, and I got it, screw what that intermediate screen said.
After all, how many people really READ a EULA that's passed to them during an install? Heck, did anyone read the EULA for the Play store that pops up the first time you use it?
Overall, the "Customer Premises Equipment" or CPE in industry parlance, aka the user's NAT/home router and associated WiFi, is a nightmare of bad design and forever day bugs.
With Netalyzr we have been starting to probe for information about the CPE: we use UPnP to try to identify the NAT and we also do DNS queries that may indicate what software is running. The resulting picture, which we've only started to analyze, is dismal. We see NATs which are running versions of DNSmasq that were released in 2003/2004! So almost decade-old code that just never ever ever got upgraded.
Customers almost never buy CPE. It's usually provided by the provider. As such, it's demanded to be the cheapest crap available because CPE isn't something the provider wants to pay a lot of money on (it eats into subscrpition revenue).
So a company is basically forced to build a $20 cablemodem-router (or DSL router) with wireless. The hardware cost is already around $10-15 (you want the router part to at least be able to provide what the provider claims - 250Mbps+ in some stupid configuration), so there's very little money in the software. So it's cheaped out (and yes, they may use ancient Linuxes with smaller memory footprints). And no, there's no money for software support.
Me personally, I had my provider disable the router/wireless part and put the modem they have into bridge mode (i.e., cablemodem only) which required them to flash a special firmware on it to do just that. Connected it to my router (a much more capable piece of hardware).
There's a reason you can walk into Best Buy and pick up a $20 router that sells alongside $100, $150, and $200+ routers (and bet that Best Buy is STILL making a profit on the $20 one). And guess which router they're gonna throw into the "free" modem they provide you. Any problems like disconnections and such, sure they'll replace it (and pass your old one to someone who hopefully wouldn't care).
Very laudable, and this is a great move that I hope more publishers adopt, but one side-effect of this kind of enthusiasm is that the Tor experiment will be hailed as a resounding success because of people exuberantly rushing to support the first major mover in this direction.
Actually, the cynic in me has it that Tor simply wants to keep the money for itself. I've been annoyed at times to find some sci-fi books are unavailable on Kindle/Nook/iBookstore, then I remember that they're published through Baen.
Great, since they're DRM-free and all that (and really quite generous - they often include a CD of tons of ebooks with their deadtree with permission to share them). Their CEO has denounced DRM for many years now so it's not completely unusual.
Tor's move though could be to simply avoid leaving money on the table. Why put up with the agency model of ebooks, when you can sell them yourself and keep the 30%? Of course, there'll be higher expenses (that 30% covers a lot - payment (credit card/gift cards - stores don't stock gift cards out of goodness of heart - they often buy them 20+% off face value), servers, bandwidth, support (being now a user has to get the ebook from their computer to their reader - something Amazon realized which is why the Kindle was the first autonomous ebook reader)).
It's just like how the music industry went DRM-free in order to break out from the tough Apple contracts being imposed in order to sell music on iTunes. With a competitive marketplace, the music industry can dictate the terms to their customers (Apple, Amazon) rather than Apple calling the shots. Same thing here - rather than having to be beholden to Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc., they can do it themselves and keep the cash they would've spent managing all those customers and pocket the 30% as well.
All the benefits of the agency model, without having to deal with middlemen. Apple won't care (do people buy books from the iBookstore?) since iTunes is but a secondary business that happens to do a little more than break even. Amazon, B&N, and Kobo will be affected most since they sell content.
As for can the experiment be repeated? It's hard to say. I'd say sci-fi enthusiasts probably are among the more technically inclined part of the population, so beying direct from Tor and loading your ebook reader is a minor inconvenience (unless you're stuck without your computer - though tablets (iPad, Android) both let you download e-books and import them autonomously). For someone who prefers romance novels or other reading public, it might be a foreign concept.
And hey, the Halo books were surprisingly good. I just wish Tor didn't hold back e-book releases at times, especially on the reprints.
Making source available for everyone to view doesn't mean that you have to integrate any code changes that anyone else sends you.
I do feel quite insulted by the "only big customers see the source" model tho, source should be available to everyone on equal terms even if they release it under non open terms (eg you can build/view/modify internally, but not distribute it in any way).
It's more of a risk thing. When you release the source to your crown jewel product, you're trusting the other side to abide by the terms of the license. If they're a big company, they'd want to because it's a lot easier to go after ONE big company that has money.
If they released it to all customers, then you're trusting that the person who asks for it will abide by the license. If it turns out to be some student who decided to share with his 1,000,000 "friends" over BitTorrent, you're possibly sunk - there's no way to recover any money from them and now it's spread.
That's the main reason. Plus if five of your customers have it and it leaks out, there's only 6 possible origins for the leak - you and the 5 companies. A lot easier than say, 100.
And yes, it extends to open-source as well - I'm sure there are tons of GPL violations out there, but it's so small scale and such that it goes unnoticed. The big open-source guys already respect the license, and the guys with money settle.
My guess is they'll just say "meh", and shrug their shoulders.
Most creationists don't have a problem with "evolution" as an adaptive mechanism, just the particular application of evolution that posits that trillions of iterations of evolution moved life from primordial sludge to sentient life.
The idea that the species existed in a "perfect" unchanged state from the point of creation until the present time was rejected as religious dogma even before Darwin.
I will agree. One of my coworkers (who's a great worker, just a bit too religious but at least keeps it to himself unless you ask) explained it to me one day. He believes in "micro evolution" where species adapt to their environment. He doesn't believe in "macro evolution" where humans descended from apes and from sea creatures, etc.
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I say, "look north". When Global TV foundered here, Shaw, Rogers and Bell bought up bits and pieces of it, and this happened way quicker than the whole Comcast/NBC merger!
It's why Canadians get screwed - the CRTC is in the pockets of the big guys and has no balls to demand consumer-friendly regulations.
UBB was just the beginning, and only when the government threatened to pass legislation did people back down again.
Heck, we don't have CableCARDs so every company gets to make incompatible boxes and refuse to activate any 3rd party boxes that you didn't buy from them. (Even though said boxes have CableCARDs inside them). It's either crappy DVR or crappy cablebox for TV because again, other than basic cable, they got rid of analogs and encrypted ALL channels, even locals.
Everyone's forgotten already.
Apple's original intention was for iOS to only run web apps. In fact, they're still supported to this day as the only allowed mechanism to get applications without approval from Apple.
It was only the howl and cry from developers that Apple released a native SDK a year later (and jailbreakers created some innovative apps).
It's why Apple pushed for so many extensions in HTML5 - location awareness, local storage, sensor APIs etc. - to make web apps have a decent chance of working like native apps.
Well, you can if you use the built-in licensed decoder.
An interesting question is the details - h.264, unlike cellphones, is licensed under a patent pool. That you, you can either do like we have in cellphones and license all the patents one-by-one (have fun!), or decide to license the whole group of them together in one fell swoop. This is done because the MPEG standards group created the MPEG licensing authority (MPEG-LA) that basically has the authority to license the patents used all at once.
Pay that license fee, and you're done. If Motorola's patents are in that patent pool, then Microsoft would already HAVE a license since they're paying for the other h.264 patents anyhow.
So something is not quite adding up here. They're effectively FRAND patents (since anyone can come up to the MPEG-LA, say they want to license to do X with h.264, pay the fee (on the fee schedule) and walk away), so...
As for WebM - it never had a chance. It was announced and standardized only a couple of years ago. Thing is, it takes YEARS for it to make it in hardware. The first GPUs with WebM support would probably hit late 2012-2013, with expected mass shipments by holiday 2013 (i.e., when you and I can buy stuff with it in).
Yes, it takes that long - hell, I was playing with h.264 back in 2003 (when DivX reigned supreme).
So something is not quite right here - if Microsoft paid their h.264 licensing fees, the Motorola patents should automatically be included as part of the deal.
In North America, there is ONE refinery still producing it. And they pretty much only run a batch once a year - an entire day's production is sufficient for an entire year. Something like all the avgas used in a year is equal to all the regular gas used by cars in a day.
And the reason most refineries don't do it? They need special equipment - the equipment handling leaded fuel must be separated from the normal unleaded stuff. And there is only ONE company in the world licensed to handle tetraethyl lead (the lead in leaded gasoline), and they're in the UK.
If it wasn't for the importance of GA and small planes for the economy, it really would be uneconomical to continue producing leaded avgas. (And yes, GA is important - for every idiotic CEO asking for a handout from their multimillion dollar jets, there are hundreds more middle-income people flying for fun/recreation as well as business in little single engine Cessnas and Pipers. Even more with some very neat Light Sport aircraft...).
The problem with aircraft engines is that they're expected to deliver rated power continuously. Car engines don't - that 450bhp monster under the hood of that muscle car would probably break down if you tried to run it at 75+% power for hours on end. It just doesn't take much horsepower for very long to get a car moving and keep it moving down the highway.
And yes, certification is an issue - a lot of promising technology comes from the experimental aviation sector - homebuilts and such - because a lot less certification is required.
So for all transit operators out there, the apparent takeaway from all this is to not provide any form of cell service in weak areas. Offering a repeater that you can control, and disabling it can be considered a breech of freedoms and make you liable.
Better to just avoid the whole issue and not do anything that'll make your commuters happier. If they want cell service, they can lobby their cell carriers to point antennas directed into the tunnels themselves. And nevermind emergencies - there's always the emergency phones in the trains.
Anyone who wants to text and use their cellphone, can drive instead.
Easy. Strike it off the bill then. If it's unenforcable, remove it!
If it's in the books, it's enforcable.
Think of it like the speed limit - I'm sure there's a stretch of road where everyone speeds through, it's just the police don't bother. Doesn't mean the law doesn't exist nor that they can't prosecute you for it. Or decide that you will be the one caught even though everyone else is doing the same 20kph over the limit.
If the law's on the books, it doesn't mean it's unenforcable, they're just choosing not to enforce it. If they have reason to "get you" (perhaps say, you're a charity doing environmental work), the law's on the books so they can sieze your computer to find other material as well.
Otherwise if it's so unenforcable, why bother having it in the bill in the first place? Removing it is easy, after all (the bill hasn't passed and can be modified and debated).
The fact it's still in there means that as long as you're an oil-loving damn-the-environment type person, you're fine. But give the government any reason to search your computer, and they can throw this in as well.
The fact that the government chooses to not enforce a law doesn't make said law invalid - you can argue it in court, but you're taking a risk on whether the judge decides to agree or disagree on that point.
True, but laws requiring use of conflict-free minerals don't make that distinction and regard it still as conflict minerals. They often just say "agree to not use parts with components sourced from conflict areas". Just like say, conflict diamonds - if you buy a used one ("recycled"), it's still a conflict diamond even though the slaveowners got paid decades ago.
The other side is the documentation issue - see aviation where most of the cost of a 10 cent screw costing $10 is in the paperwork behind it, not the part itself.
Paypal and eBay are complimentary businesses. eBay lets random Joes hawk stuff online that other random Joes may want. Paypal lets them do it the Internet way - by using credit cards. Because otherwise, the only way to pay for the sale is cash, cheque or money order, and in an age where a buyer just clicks "buy now" enters in a credit card number and has it delivered in a few days, what's the deal with having to break out the chequebook (or going to the damned post office to get a money order), putting it all in an envelope and then sticking it in the mail? Seems anachronistic that one has to use snail mail in order to buy stuff online.
Paypal's also one of the only companies that lets a random person accept a credit card payment without a merchant account and its subsequent restrictions. (The problem is most people don't realize that the issues they have with Paypal stem from these restrictions - if you have a merchant account, you know all the stories and details).
Asking someone who wants to sell their collection of comics online to set up a merchant account isn't likely to happen (and most merchant banks probably won't offer very favorable terms, if they even let you - they want people who will constantly generate card traffic, not one-off sales).
There are only 18 smelters worldwide that can transform coltan into tantalum. In fact, they've all agreed to not purchase conflict minerals.
The problem for everyone else is there's a LOT of recycling of electronics - the tantalum is re-smelted from recycled electronics (mining recycled electronics is far easier and more productive than trying to extract it out of the earth).
The problem is that previous tantalum caps were made with conflict minerals, so it's technically impossible to say if the cap you're using is completely free of conflict minerals. Short of throwing away all the recycled electronics, that is.
So a manufacturer really cannot say if their product was conflict-free. They can say that no NEW conflict mineral was added, but recycled content may very well be conflict.
Actually, there is ONE industry that might be able to trace all the way back - aviation. Given the strict tracability demands (they can trace screws back to the smelter and maybe the mine that dug it out), it's possible a similar amount of paperwork exists for the avionics. (It partially explains the cost of aviation parts - just having someone file paperwork all day).
I disagree for one reason - BACKUPS.
Right now, it's easy to backup an iOS device - ignoring iCloud, you plug your iDevice into your Mac/Windows PC and iTunes backs it up. It copies over apps you may have bought (thus ensuring that even if Apple removes them or they otherwise disappear, you always can reinstall - viz. that tricorder app).
Sure my contacts and such can be synced, but it's as good a backup as say, RAID is. One false flip of the finger and boom, that contact can disappear and be promptly synced everywhere. (Alas, with everything going cloud and sync, this will destroy backups as well).
Of course, you could argue about backing up to a local SD card or other storage media, but then you lose the device, you lose the backup (oops).
It's also one of my biggest frustrations with Android - until recently there wasn't a really good way to do it without rooting (ICS has a special "adb backup" and "adb restore" hidden option). I want to wipe one of my Androids and the thought of having to back it up makes me pause (Google's restore leaves something to be desired, especially w.r.t. free apps).
Which is a great reason for IPv6... until you realize that most of the envisioned applications require them to access the Internet. Including all requisite security issues (they are embedded devices after all) and not finding out that the fridge didn't order new groceries because your ISP decided to change your prefix and the fridge failed to update properly and lost access to the internet. (Meanwhile, it can display local stuff just fine, as link-local works great)
Well, there are other things you can do. For example, centralize your media - you can have things set up so you can pause your Blu-Ray in the living room, and continue watching in the bedroom, or distribute your TV throughout the house. Basically all the screens pull media from all sources (cable, OTA, internet, DVD/Blu-Ray libraries, other stored media) and present it to any screen. Netflix available on every screen, no netflix-compatible box required for everyone, etc.
Heck, maybe gaming as well - you can play games on any screen with just a controller, so when dad kicks you off the nice big TV to watch sports, you can pause and continue somewhere else.
And integrate it all together - the lights dim and windows close when watching movies, etc.
The deal right now is - all this technology is available right now, just in various discrete non-integrated forms (the integration systems are $$$).
I've seen a remarkable change in business use of open-source once the GPLv3 came out, which may explain why.
Businesses were pretty much ambivalent towards open-source - it was neat, it was nifty, and as long as they provided source, they could stay on the right side of the license.
Then the GPLv3 came out, and suddenly their obligations became much greater and businesses got worried that GPLv3 may "taint" everything.
Suddenly open-source usage policies started becoming the norm - and by usage, it includes both internal use (build tools, etc) and using code in the product. Open-source projects now need to be "reviewed" by legal for license compliance in all usage (because internal tools may be shared with outside contractors) and other such business.
Some have gotten to the point where there's a narrow subset of what's allowed (pre-approved software and versions), and explicitly banned some licenses - BSD and MIT licenses are A-OK, Apache is iffy, and GPLv3 is a definite cannot use don't even ask. Heck, even the GPL can be iffy since GPLv2+ code can be GPLV3 in some instances because of what code is included (exception - v2-only code is OK because that code cannot be v3 at all - GPLv2-only is incompatible with GPLv3).
Even Apple have been moving away from GPL - they ditched GCC after the patches to support Grand Central Dispatch for LLVM, among other things.
And how many kids CARE that they can make computers do more? We tech geeks love to think that the public must love computers when they're buying it up by the truckload, but the reality is a computer is something required in day-to-day life. They don't care how it works, what makes it work, etc.
Take say, a mechanic - he fixes your car, and uses computers to help diagnose what's wrong and to figure out what else needs to be done (work order) and filling in the proper field in the billing app so you get billed properly. You'd be pretty upset if he needed to recompile the kernel on his PC because the diagnostic tool doesn't work anymore (and no, that stuff is NOT free, if you're the unlucky sap, you get billed the hours). But more normally, he'd just expect these systems to Just Work(tm), and would be extremely upset if a change to one of the systems makes him have to learn a new system and be inefficient at the same time. (Eliminating redundancies is good, so he'll be happier if he only has to enter information once, but changing stuff like which screens to enter stuff in and such can be like pulling teeth).
At best, he doesn't care how it works. If he's inclined he might try to see if there's a way to automate some of his work so he doesn't have to click 100 times to do one stupid thing. If it breaks, he calls in his supervisor and gets him to deal with it.
It's just like everything else in life - those that are interested will learn, those that don't, won't and forcing them just makes matters worse. Modern society has achieved the progress it has because we've left concerns by the wayside - since everyone doesn't have to be a hunter-gatherer anymore to survive, or have to pump water from a creek, etc., to even rocket scientists not having to worry about fixing their broken PC.
Unlikely in the near future, because outside the US, the Fire is merely a cheap LCD-based e-reader. No other content is available for it outside the US - you can't get video, music nor apps, making it fairly useless.
You could, of course, hack it, but out of the box it's little more than an ebook reader. Heck, I don't think you can even access the free apps to get Kobo or Nook books.
Don't get too excited. It's a standard camera *module* port. Something you'd connect those itty-bitty camera sensors to that you find in cellphones and the like.
Yes, it's higher bandwidth, and you need to use I2C to control the camera and maybe autofocus module (if you use it for your lens).
Other than that, that's all it is. You're not gonna hook your dSLR to it as that's not what it's for (nor do any regular "good cameras" have such a port). It's a plain ol' camera sensor port from the like of Omnivision and like.
The flip side is Apple employs a lot of highly paid people in California, who also pay signficant amounts of income tax and other taxes in order to work and live in California. I'm sure California would be really happy if all those people left the state. Heck, I'm sure Nevada would be more than happy to host Silicon Valley 2.0 as all the big companies move there with their employees.
Won't work. You can't change a 48fps film to a 24fps film by dropping frames. You'll make the image even jerkier than if you filmed it at 24fps.
The reason is at 24fps, each frame is exposed at 1/24th of a second. At 48fps, the frame is exposed at 1/48th a of second. If you take film exposed at 48fps and show it at 24fps, you'll induce jerkiness due to the lack of motion blur, making it worse. (and motion blur is why 24fps doesn't look as bad as say, 30fps gaming - the game doesn't render motion blur so you get jerkiness).
So if you film at 48 and want to show it at 24, you must digitally combine the images to produce a proper 24 frame. Or film it at 24 to begin with, and film high motion/pans at 48. The 24 can easily be frame doubled to 48.
And 24fps movies are double-shuttered at least (the projector shows each frame twice, 1/48th of a second apart). At 24fps, single-shuttering makes for awful flicker (hence the term "flicks" when referenced to movies or the uber-cool "flix" (like netflix)). So showing a scene double-framed at 24fps through a 48fps project looks normal because it's doing what a normal projector does.
As for 48fps looking "strange" - it's just like the 120/240Hz refresh on TVs if you crank up the frame interpolation mode. It looks *strange*. (I disable it - I prefer frame-repeat mode to frame-interpolate). Fast motion looks especially weird.
Obviously not from the US, I take it. Sure there's no need to use a firearm to destroy hard drives, but damn, if you have the weapon, the time and opportunity, why not?
Hammers work, yes, but still.
Not exactly a bad thing - after all the whole point of undergraduate studies is to learn how to learn. The fact that you ended up teaching yourself is a Good Thing(tm) and meant the primary purpose of college is fulfilled. The reason for the subjects is to provide background to expand your horizons. After all, once you have a bachelor's, your next step could be research (so you need background on what to research and current state-of-the-art to advance it), or a job in industry (where you'll learn the non-academic, practical skills).
Most people will say they learned far more after graduating.
Easy - it's time for a rewrite. QuickTime, like Final Cut Pro and Logic before it, was getting somewhat crufty and time to start anew. Apple generally likes to introduce a stable brand new version of the software first, then re-add back missing features (we see this happening with Final Cut). OS X was another such "victim" - 10.0/10.1 were pretty featureless compared to Classic (OS 9) back in the day - hell, things like DVD Player only were on OS 9 (and didn't work in Classic mode on OS X). Eventually Apple started fixing things up until it was usable for day to day work and booting into OS 9 was reserved for the oddball compatibility thing that couldn't be handled with Classic.
So Apple ships v7 with QT X for that reason - QT X doesn't have all the features of 7. (Too bad they didn't do this with Final Cut, but you can buy it over the phone still).
Of course, having said that, it's time for iTunes X. A full rewrite.
The QuickTime format will live on even if you don't use QuickTime. The MP4 container format is a subset of QuickTime's MOV container. 3GP is a more limited version of MP4. There's not much more to MOV that a proper MP4 container parser couldn't implement and handle all three formats. Heck, most of the time you can just rename them (if the container splitter is braindead) and it'll work.
Though, I haven't really run into MOVs all that often anymore - the h.264 ones are all MP4s anyhow.
As for WebM - the problem was Mozilla did not wait long enough. Google acquired WebM only a couple of years ago and specs for it were released then. It takes YEARS before it'll start to come out.with hardware decoders. (I remember dealing with h.264 encoded files back in what, 2004? When practically nothing played it, and DivX was the popular codec of the day). WebM in hardware will probably start happening around 2013-2014 at the earliest (as in - you can buy devices with webm support).
The problem is, a lot of users don't have the play store. The best selling Android tablet certainly doesn't have it. And places like China have other stores set up becaues AOSP is huge (probably bigger than official Android). And since many devs do NOT sell anywhere but Play (SlideME, AppsLib, Amazon, etc have very few apps - no more than 10%), especially free apps, if you don't have it, you need to find the APK somewhere else.
Why do you think people who buy Archose/Nook/Kindle Fire/other Android Tablet immediately go to xda-devs to see if there's a Market/Play hack for it? THOSE are the techies. Everyone else googles for the APK.
Finally, well, apps can cost money on Play. There's a natural human tendency to not want to pay for stuff like software (especially in places like Asia), so if they can get a Angry Birds Space for free from some other site, they would. (If it wasn't lucrative, do you think malware devs would spend all that time and effort?).
Apple is a different beast - since it's so hard to sideload apps (and you should see the howls of people complaining they can't load pirated apps on the new iPad). Probalby why people resort to phishing for iTunes credentials.
No, it's a rethink of security from the ground up, except with a deep understanding of the audience. It's called Dancing Pigs and it explains why people constantly get malware on their PCs and why the Android security model, while great for techies, is positively lousy for general users.
Think of it this way - user wants Angry Birds Space. I just checked (what I think was) the official app (free one - because who pays for apps?) - here are the permissions it wants
- Modify/Delete USB storage contents
- Read phone state and identity
- Full internet access
- Coarse (network-based) location
- View Wi-Fi State, view network state.
Well crap, I want to play a game of Angry Birds, and you want me to go through all that? (And you only see the first two anyhow, and the last is hidden behind a "More"). Ah, the download button is so big and right there, and I got it, screw what that intermediate screen said.
After all, how many people really READ a EULA that's passed to them during an install? Heck, did anyone read the EULA for the Play store that pops up the first time you use it?
Actually, the cynic in me has it that Tor simply wants to keep the money for itself. I've been annoyed at times to find some sci-fi books are unavailable on Kindle/Nook/iBookstore, then I remember that they're published through Baen.
Great, since they're DRM-free and all that (and really quite generous - they often include a CD of tons of ebooks with their deadtree with permission to share them). Their CEO has denounced DRM for many years now so it's not completely unusual.
Tor's move though could be to simply avoid leaving money on the table. Why put up with the agency model of ebooks, when you can sell them yourself and keep the 30%? Of course, there'll be higher expenses (that 30% covers a lot - payment (credit card/gift cards - stores don't stock gift cards out of goodness of heart - they often buy them 20+% off face value), servers, bandwidth, support (being now a user has to get the ebook from their computer to their reader - something Amazon realized which is why the Kindle was the first autonomous ebook reader)).
It's just like how the music industry went DRM-free in order to break out from the tough Apple contracts being imposed in order to sell music on iTunes. With a competitive marketplace, the music industry can dictate the terms to their customers (Apple, Amazon) rather than Apple calling the shots. Same thing here - rather than having to be beholden to Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc., they can do it themselves and keep the cash they would've spent managing all those customers and pocket the 30% as well.
All the benefits of the agency model, without having to deal with middlemen. Apple won't care (do people buy books from the iBookstore?) since iTunes is but a secondary business that happens to do a little more than break even. Amazon, B&N, and Kobo will be affected most since they sell content.
As for can the experiment be repeated? It's hard to say. I'd say sci-fi enthusiasts probably are among the more technically inclined part of the population, so beying direct from Tor and loading your ebook reader is a minor inconvenience (unless you're stuck without your computer - though tablets (iPad, Android) both let you download e-books and import them autonomously). For someone who prefers romance novels or other reading public, it might be a foreign concept.
And hey, the Halo books were surprisingly good. I just wish Tor didn't hold back e-book releases at times, especially on the reprints.
It's more of a risk thing. When you release the source to your crown jewel product, you're trusting the other side to abide by the terms of the license. If they're a big company, they'd want to because it's a lot easier to go after ONE big company that has money.
If they released it to all customers, then you're trusting that the person who asks for it will abide by the license. If it turns out to be some student who decided to share with his 1,000,000 "friends" over BitTorrent, you're possibly sunk - there's no way to recover any money from them and now it's spread.
That's the main reason. Plus if five of your customers have it and it leaks out, there's only 6 possible origins for the leak - you and the 5 companies. A lot easier than say, 100.
And yes, it extends to open-source as well - I'm sure there are tons of GPL violations out there, but it's so small scale and such that it goes unnoticed. The big open-source guys already respect the license, and the guys with money settle.
I will agree. One of my coworkers (who's a great worker, just a bit too religious but at least keeps it to himself unless you ask) explained it to me one day. He believes in "micro evolution" where species adapt to their environment. He doesn't believe in "macro evolution" where humans descended from apes and from sea creatures, etc.