Ok, so some disgruntled employees of Google have been caught munging and corrupting data intentionally.
That's a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
But it misses the most important question to me: WHY would someone do this? [snip]
What would POSSIBLY be the purpose of messing up street map data?
Easy - to discredit OpenStreetMap.
OSM produces a product that compets with Google Maps. Except, well, it's got several advantages.
First, it's free to download and use, while Google Maps requires an internet connection. For those on limited 3G plans, this can be a godsend.
Second, if people start using OSM data for navigation, it peels away Google's revenue of selling ads.
Why don't they do it with Bing Maps? Bing Maps is in competition with Google Maps. Google Maps has pretty much wiped out the whole portable turn-by-turn GPS business (who would pay $100 for a GPS unit when your smartphone can direct you for free? There isn't enough of the US where lack of coverage is a significant issue for a good majority of users). (This disregards those who don't have smartphones and who could use a portable GPS).
In addition, by corrupting OSM data, it makes OSM less reliable. Navigation apps using OSM would therefore be less reliable and people wouldn't trust it so much, so they'd come back to Google.
I don't know if OSM is doing POI stuff, but it could very well be to discredit OSM to have those businesses pay Google to be listed on the map rather than getting listed on OSM for free.
Honestly, it's probably the result of some manager forced ot increase revenue from Google Maps - by selling more ads and getting businesses to pay for being listed on the map. And when there's a worthy free competitor, well, dirty tricks.
I have 8gb of memory on my main computer. I want firefox to use up as much of it as it can to improve my browsing experience. On my netbook, I have 1, I want it to sip as little as it can. There should be an easy way to tell the browser how much memory I want used for certain tasks such as caching and whatnot. Addons should have their own seperate allocation, and each individual addon should be configurable for how much memory it can use.
You can adjust the disk and memory caches on firefox still.
The problem firefox had with gobbling up RAM was poor RAM utilization. When firefox gets swapped out, swapping it back in (intentionally or accidentally bringing up the window) causes the disk to start churning for minutes before something gets drawn, then churn for more minutes as it then draws tabs, then maybe 5 minutes later the current tab pops up.
Efficient use would mean the current tab shows after a brief page in and it's practically usable (if a touch slower as it brings pages from swap). As it is, it appears that firefox needs to page itself in its entirety (its working set is much too large) before becoming responsive.
This is especially evident on Windows, where you can see it page in practically 4kiB at a time.
Or, you could just get an SSD.
People want efficient use of memory - which makes hitting swap bearable. And unfortunately, it's the old systems and low end ones that suffer most.
If Politico actually believes that it can get useful information from the statistics alone, they paid a ton of money for absolutely nothing. People can hawk the social media tools all they want, but all they do is keyword analysis with some language heuristics thrown in. The vendors themselves will tell you (if they are honest) that they cannot tell you what the accuracy of their tool is, because nobody knows for sure how the training posts correlate with the posts in the wild.
You do realize that they can't get statistics on stuff they can't see, right? It's all fine and well to gather statistics on the public stuff, but what about the private stuff? That's where the analytics behind Google and Facebook come in, because that information isn't supposed to be released, and if it can't be released, it means any third party wanting it needs to pay the company to run the analytics for them.
Heck, sometimes just the keyword search differences between public posts and private posts can be revealing,
Stop suing Google and get a fair license for Android if they choose to stay with SUN java and not OpenJDK..
You do realize that J2ME (what Android uses) is the primary source of revenue for Java, right? It's why the patents are royalty free for J2SE and J2EE, but not for J2ME. All those featurephones pay to have that little-used JVM on them.
So yeah, Google can license J2ME from Oracle, but not for free, otherwise Java really would die because it won't make any money at all.
Of course, if Android implements full J2SE (using OpenJDK), then all that patent nonsense goes away because it's under the free patent licensing...
I'm sure the determined thief can find their way around these. But then they can already sell to a pawn broker or on ebay. A few of the dumber criminals might get caught.
eBay's far less risky. A pawnshop and this machine have very good reasons to want to make their systems either lowball stolen phones or not accept them at all - it costs the company money.
Stolen property may be taken to be returned to the owner. This means the new owner (the pawnshop or the company behind this machine) will lose possession of the device, AND be out the money they paid for it, and have no legal recourse except going after the person who defrauded them (i.e., the thief).
So if this machine becomes a haven for stolen phones,the company won't be in business for very long paying out money and not getting anything in return.
eBay things are murkier - the theif may be able to get away, though Paypal will probalby have a record of the sale, and the payment - who they sent the money to and where the money came from. Or the bank information they sent the payment to. But it's murkier as eBay leaves the local area - most pawns and this device, the phone will be from the local area.
I'd think the TV makers would be scrambling for ways to differentiate. I mean, the buzz of last year's CES was the ill-conceived push for "3d tv". I get the sense most people had the same "meh" reaction I did.
Actually, 2011 CES was all about tablets and e-readers. The 3DTV one was 2010. Which got the "meh" until Apple decided to showcase the iPad a couple of weeks later.
Of course, this year's CES was more 3DTV/tablet/something-anything meh.
And while I agree with the gp, that I'd rather have that functionality in a roku (etc), more ways to get content sounds nice to everyone. Standardized ways of doing so might just be a byproduct of manufacturers trying to offer as many services as possible in their devices' feature lists.
And it's pretty much true. The stuff that they can differentiate their TV on (video/color quality, lag, etc), is really, really, really hard to sell. And since "connected TVs" are easy to add features to (hello Netflix, hello Amazon, hello Hulu), it's easy to add to feature lists and emblazon the Netflix, Amazon and Hulu logos all over the box. Add in WiFi support built in and that makes people happy.
And the common consumer wants less set top boxes and configuration - TV needs to be simple. Not messing with a half dozen remotes and inputs and key maps and such (and they refuse to buy a Harmony because "they're too expensive").
I don't agree w/ the GP though - getting rid of NAT is the main reason for IPv6, and if nodes are IPv6 capable, why NAT them? If the networks are IPv4, tunnel the IPv6 packets in them (the reverse of the above scenario). Or do what Microsoft does, and use a Teredo (Miredo for Linux) solution.
Two reasons NAT is nice.
1) It insulates the "inside" network from the "outside" network. If my ISP decides to give me a new prefix (and you know they will, even in IPv4 land, "static" IPs tend to change), I really don't want to have to go and figure out why some pesky device suddenly lost access because it somehow refused to inherit the new prefix and new router. It'll happen on the days you're super busy and just want stuff to work, and now you play network admin trying to figure it all out. With NAT, if the connection goes down, rebooting the router usually does it. One device. Instead of many. Oh, and don't forget the PC that always fails will be your parents or other relatives, and the only way to fix it is to drive over there and fix their damn PC. And enterprises of hundreds or maybe thousands of PCs? (And no, IPv6 is not well tested in the wild. We'll be hitting issues for years to come...)
Second, end-to-end connectivity isn't guaranteed anyhow. At least with IPv4, applications can't always assume they can connect to every other host since most hosts are behind NAT. With IPv6, things may appear to work, but all it takes is some firewall in-between. And most people will be running firewalls, most likely with deny-default just to keep the crap on the internet from infecting their PCs. (People assume viruses and trojans can't infect by scanning - they will adapt at scanning IPv6 networks en masse - sparse address space is really just security by obscurity).
After years of explaining this to people, I have come to the conclusion that no matter what people are going to do it. Simply put, if banks allow people to log in to their accounts from random computers, people are going to do so without any regard for security. It is convenient, and the one thing you can expect people to do is something that is convenient.
It's called Dancing Pigs. A user will most likely pick convenience over security.
And any bank that prevents logging in from public computers will be laughed out of business - people expect to be able to bank anywhere and everywhere. Even on their cellphones (they can't wait to go home and do it then...).
No way around it, unfortunately, and educating the user is a pointless exercise because they'll just go back to their old ways.
Perhaps if the bank issued them special keypad calculators that could compute transaction hashes (for two-factor authorization) things would help. But no.
The problem is that the ISP / Mobile operator can no longer give each subscriber and IPv4 address since they have run out. Yes, there will be NAT64 for the legacy things that require IPv4, but IPv6 flows will be supported end to end... Most Mobile phones and PCs in homes sit behind either a carrier NAT or a home NAT. With IPv6, there are enough address for everyone.... but the legacy IPv4 will be behind a NAT64... which is a punishment for failing to get to Ipv6
Most mobile phones/smartphones/laptops on mobile data plans do NOT get an IPv4 address. They're NAT'ed. They may be transparently proxied too. Unless you go for the mega-expensive laptop data plans that offer a real IP (e.g., "VPN" support), then you're likely stuck behind several layers of NAT.
As for IPv6 having enough addresses for all - it's a great concept, but what I really want is just NATv6. Something that isolates the internal network numbering from my ISP. I mean, all that needs to happen is your ISP decides change your prefix and you'll spend the next day and a half trying to get everything back up on the network as they lose access, and fail to get the new address. In a company with 1,000 PCs, this could give the IT department headaches as various computers and devices fail to get the new prefix and lose access to email/internet/etc.
When this hits your parents house, it's going to be really fun rebooting routers and computers and devices.
At least with NATv6, if the ISP decides to renumber their networks, at worse you reboot your router. Inside network doing IPv6 Everything else still talks to the router since the gateway address didn't change, and everyone's happy.
Hell, people bitch and complain when their static IPv4 address changes and they have to update their DNS and IPs of all their servers. Heaven forbid you miss a config file and now some services can't start up.
NAT is a hack, but it's a nice one that isolates external world changes from the internal ones. Given most places will have firewalls that break end-to-end connectivity. Hell, mobile providers may firewall mobile devices "for their protection".
I suspect that both C# and Objective-C market share will only continue - probably even taking the top spots. Windows Phone 7 uses mainly C# and so will Metro apps on Windows 8. Frankly, it is a really good language and beautiful to work with. Likewise Objective-C is strong because of iOS and OS X. Java is slowly dropping from enterprise usage and is being replaced by C#.
So Objective-C is rising because of iOS. And C# is rising becaues of Windows Phone 7. And Java is dropping.
What about Android? You have to code in Java - and Android is the top mobile OS out there, outselling iOS. There should be huge buzz for people writing Android apps - a huge market awaits.
The drop in Java makes no sense if the rise in C#/Obj-C is due to mobile OSes, because Java is huge in the mobile space, especially since the top-selling mobile OS uses it for app development.
"For this âoedelay,â Oracle has no one to blame but itself, given that twice now it has advanced improper methodologies obviously calculated to reach stratospheric numbers." - Judge Alsup He isn't pulling any punches, is he?
Well, it's an indefinite hold. Which means that the longer it goes on, the more painful it can get. Oracle may simple just wait until the numbers are right.
Given $2B in damagers, and Google has admitted to at least 200M Android devices have been activated, that's $10/device. One reasonable method is to see how much Oracle charges for a J2ME license to begin with (it's one of the biggest sources of money in Java - given all the featurephones out there with a JVM).
Oracle may argue that since Samsung/LG/HTC pay Microsoft around $5 per Android to license Microsoft's patents, perhaps since Oracle's is more fundamental to Android (being possibly related to the whole runtime system), they ought to get $10 per device.
And they can argue that since the true number of Android devices out there isn't known because of its open-source nature, blah blah blah...
The MPAA/RIAA can ask for huge numbers becaues there isn't concrete numbers to base their numbers off of. Here there are, at least official Google Android numbers, and they don't work out to something completely crazy like $150,000 per 99 cent track.
I really do try my best to be an honest person, but more and more I'm seeing stuff that makes me think I'm a sucker for playing fair when so many people (especially our government) are stacking the deck in their favor as much as possible
In a strictly free market, capitalistic mindset, yes playing fair makes you a sucker - you should lie, cheat and steal in order to get ahead.
In a more holistic view though, playing fair lets you sleep at night, or to look at your children (or significant other) and admit to no wrongdoing. They won't suddenly discover what you did in order to buy that huge diamond, but that everything is as you said it is and there's no guilt nor trouble.
The problem is, government and corporations have no such conscience. Maybe if you can get enough shareholders together to instill one, but that's about it. It's why companies pollute (polluting costs nothing - not polluting costs money, and the benefit is so some humans down the road can breathe?) and try to screw over as many people as possible.
If it's throwaway code, don't waste time and effort on documentation. If you plan to use it for some time, chances are very high it will need fixes, updates and changes, and documentation will make those a lot easier, faster and cheaper.
Throwaway code has a nasty habit of becoming production code, unfortunately. Even the one-off utility written to convert some data input file into something usable elsewhere has a nasty habit of suddenly being pushed into production.
It's an unfortunate reality in life - but really it should all be documented. Even exercise code where you're trying to figure out how to use an API, because someone may ask and you may end up providing code to show them how. Or a year later re-read it trying to refresh your memory on the API.
Imagine what damage this will do to the industry. Everybody making their own things, nobody buying toys, nobody buying anything. Heavy copyright lawsuits must kick in to prevent this horrible scenario. Every model copyrighted, every 3D printer with online DRM.
As with music and movie industries, we're going to see this continue to 3D printing as well. It's only just started, since 3D printing is still a relative novelty for most people and everything's concentrated in just a few providers.
Actually, as of December, 55% of Androids ran 2.3. 0.6% ran ICS, and around 0.6% or so ran Honeycomb (i.e., tablets). The rest were older Androids, most of which are probably 2.2, but of the remainder 2.1 or prior. (These were Google's numbers).
2.3 phones are a majority of devices, and with over 200M Androids out there (Google's numbers), that's around 110M Gingerbreads. Just under 90M devices though were 2.2 or older.
Though, I have to admit that it really sucks because I STILL see brand new 2.2 phones for sale (with contract).
Actually, from a signal processing perspective, that is almost trivial. Treat the room accoustics as a FIR filter (Which it is), and it becomes a simple problem of taking signal (filter(audio) + uservoice) and (audio) and then calculating (uservoice). The only tricky part is updating your FIR model to account for changes in accoustics caused by opening/closing doors, moving furniture, people walking in front of the TV and so forth. Tricky, but entirely doable. Mobile phones use exactly the same method to prevent the noise from the ear-speaker being transmitted back to the microphone.
Kinect already does this as part of the tuner process. It plays some audio, and uses its microphone array to figure out room acoustics. It's used to help the media playback cancellation (it knows what is being played, but it needs to apply the room transformation to generate a cancellation signal so the microphone array can hear better).
From my experience, it works remarkably well. Especially when you consider it's hearing you from a distance and there's speakers all around it blasting audio. (The array helps by also helping to locate the audio and zero in on it).
Even more so if you've played with microphones and realize that hearing something at a distance is a lot harder because of the lower SNR. The brain does a remarkable job of it, but if you've watched YouTube videos of people who are far from the camera speaking, it can be quite difficult to make out what they're saying.
Well, I can assure you that at the kernel level, Nokia's linux phones have no such back doors in. You don't have to take my word for it, I'm only the gatekeeper who vets every patch that gets included in the kernel, you can freely grab the source and diff it against upstream and check for yourself.
Of course, there would be ways of adding back doors to the phone subsystem which is a separate core running its own OS. But all communication to the modem goes via the AP, so you could easily modify our kernel and sniff all communication between userspace and modem.
Who said a backdoor had to be kernel level?
And who said that the kernel distributed with Android and/or other Linux based phones was the same as what the "GPL release" gives? Sure there's the GPL, but if you're installing backdoors, you probably don't care. Then there's binary modules and such.
And finally - a back door doesn't have to be kernel level, as Carrier IQ demonstrated. It can be just an application - many "Remote Access Tools" used by botnets often originated as applications. The kernel part only serves to hide the application process.
Finally - who's to really say that there isn't one hiding in Android? Either one added by the carriers to the Android code directly (i.e., someone embeds something like Carrier IQ directly into the Android source code), forcing people to seek out alternative ROMs to fix it, or maybe embedded in the millions of lines of Android code.
The entire stack has to be verified - if we ignore compiler and other hidden ways of inserting bugs, it still means we have to go through the bootloader code, kernel code, and the user land stack code (including the RIL/telephony stacks, but also the application environment).
They already do this on all the non-smart phones. They all have "apps" and "Games" but you can only buy them from the carrier. This, in fact, is exactly the sort of thing they want to do. You can only get video from them. You can only get apps from them. It's all for your own security of course. Those nasty viruses and hackers oh my!
All carriers do that. In fact, "featurephones" have always been walled gardens of pain. If you're a developer, you have to make individual contracts with every carrier if you want to publish a mobile game. And every phone has its own quirks, so even though a carrier may offer say, 20 different phones right now, you really only can support 4 or 5, and none of last month's series of phones.
Ditto media. Hell, some carriers charged to have you download your photos from your cameraphone (before everyone standardized on USB - proprietary cables were everywhere and cost a ton of money just to copy your photos off).
With the proliferation of smartphones though, even walled gardens like Apple's are much easier to break into for the average joe than for featurephones.
The thing is, every single person vaguely familiar with the Tech world already knows this. It's everybody else that needs convincing, and I'm pretty sure neither Google nor Facebook, 2 Tech giants, are the right pick the counter this.
Sure they are. Google and Facebook probably experience close to 95% of the entire web traffic, especially those who you want to educate.
All Google has to do is simply put in an interstital page of censored results with the overlay "The Stop Online Piracy Act has will remove many sites from the Internet, including the ones you probably were looking for. Write your congressperson and then click here for the full internet." which redirects to the proper search.
Facebook is similar. "Posting this on your wall could remove your Facebook access due to the Stop Online Piracy Act. Click here to object to this law and continue posting."
For Google, it presents a borked listing of sites - perhaps culled from the pages near the end, and completely useless results.
For Facebook, it threatens people to loss of access. Given how people are addicted to it, that could be quite scary.
The advent of touchscreens means people are bending their necks downward for extended periods. For many/most it may not be a problem.
I doubt that. People have been reporting problems before touch screens. Blackberry users, for example, but also people who text a lot on their non-touchscreen phones.
The medical condition is real, but the cause is not - it's not a recent thing brought on the explosion of touch screens - it's been around for years. Notably brought on because the folks with blackberries (out over a decade) tend to be older businesspeople and thus experienced it years before. Or people texting on their phones for nearly two decades now. And young kids have been glued to their Nintendo portables for nearly 2 1/2 decades.
Medfield with 2.6W idle, and 3.6W playing 720p video? Numbres they they "hope" to get down to 2W and 2.6W early this year. If they haven't had a breakthrough in their power consumption, expect those phones and tablets to fail in the market as quickly as the Kin & TouchPad, or, if they're persistent, maybe they'll be out as long as the Original Xoom or PlayBook.
The whole iPad takes 2.5W going full tilt. That includes the screen and backlight (1.5W) and the electronics (1W).
Now the SoC itself is taking 2-2.5W best case? Add in a nice screen (for a phone, probably 0.5-1W or so with backlight at a decent value) and other ancillary peripherals (like modem, WiFi, bluetooth, GPS) of maybe 0.5W total.
Most cellphone batteries are 1500mAh or smaller, or around 5Wh or so. If the phone is taking 3W, that's a little over an hour of battery life.
You won't need any special effects - the battery gauge is animated simply because it's draining that quickly.
720p video encoding, 1080p video decoding and 1080p via HDMI are considered stunning features?
Heck, Apple's been conservative, and the iPhone 4s has got 1080p video encoding, 1080p video decode and 1080p via HDMI. Androids have had it in 2010-2011 (and were mocking Apple the whole time).
So... the bigger question is - what's the battery life? The performance looks spectacular, but x86 is a notable power hog. And more worringly, I see nothing in the articles about battery life, power consumption, or battery size.
Perhaps this gives us a clue about KodakÃ(TM)s future plans to be solvent: Patent Troll? They have already sued Apple and RIM recently...
Well, they're currently offering their patent portfolio for sale, so I'm guessing it's a general sales tactic.
Of course, it also means a REAL patent troll may come about and pick it up. Or perhaps Apple may buy the portfolio and extract money from everyone. Or Google. Or Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy - to discredit OpenStreetMap.
OSM produces a product that compets with Google Maps. Except, well, it's got several advantages.
First, it's free to download and use, while Google Maps requires an internet connection. For those on limited 3G plans, this can be a godsend.
Second, if people start using OSM data for navigation, it peels away Google's revenue of selling ads.
Why don't they do it with Bing Maps? Bing Maps is in competition with Google Maps. Google Maps has pretty much wiped out the whole portable turn-by-turn GPS business (who would pay $100 for a GPS unit when your smartphone can direct you for free? There isn't enough of the US where lack of coverage is a significant issue for a good majority of users). (This disregards those who don't have smartphones and who could use a portable GPS).
In addition, by corrupting OSM data, it makes OSM less reliable. Navigation apps using OSM would therefore be less reliable and people wouldn't trust it so much, so they'd come back to Google.
I don't know if OSM is doing POI stuff, but it could very well be to discredit OSM to have those businesses pay Google to be listed on the map rather than getting listed on OSM for free.
Honestly, it's probably the result of some manager forced ot increase revenue from Google Maps - by selling more ads and getting businesses to pay for being listed on the map. And when there's a worthy free competitor, well, dirty tricks.
You can adjust the disk and memory caches on firefox still.
The problem firefox had with gobbling up RAM was poor RAM utilization. When firefox gets swapped out, swapping it back in (intentionally or accidentally bringing up the window) causes the disk to start churning for minutes before something gets drawn, then churn for more minutes as it then draws tabs, then maybe 5 minutes later the current tab pops up.
Efficient use would mean the current tab shows after a brief page in and it's practically usable (if a touch slower as it brings pages from swap). As it is, it appears that firefox needs to page itself in its entirety (its working set is much too large) before becoming responsive.
This is especially evident on Windows, where you can see it page in practically 4kiB at a time.
Or, you could just get an SSD.
People want efficient use of memory - which makes hitting swap bearable. And unfortunately, it's the old systems and low end ones that suffer most.
You do realize that they can't get statistics on stuff they can't see, right? It's all fine and well to gather statistics on the public stuff, but what about the private stuff? That's where the analytics behind Google and Facebook come in, because that information isn't supposed to be released, and if it can't be released, it means any third party wanting it needs to pay the company to run the analytics for them.
Heck, sometimes just the keyword search differences between public posts and private posts can be revealing,
You do realize that J2ME (what Android uses) is the primary source of revenue for Java, right? It's why the patents are royalty free for J2SE and J2EE, but not for J2ME. All those featurephones pay to have that little-used JVM on them.
So yeah, Google can license J2ME from Oracle, but not for free, otherwise Java really would die because it won't make any money at all.
Of course, if Android implements full J2SE (using OpenJDK), then all that patent nonsense goes away because it's under the free patent licensing...
eBay's far less risky. A pawnshop and this machine have very good reasons to want to make their systems either lowball stolen phones or not accept them at all - it costs the company money.
Stolen property may be taken to be returned to the owner. This means the new owner (the pawnshop or the company behind this machine) will lose possession of the device, AND be out the money they paid for it, and have no legal recourse except going after the person who defrauded them (i.e., the thief).
So if this machine becomes a haven for stolen phones ,the company won't be in business for very long paying out money and not getting anything in return.
eBay things are murkier - the theif may be able to get away, though Paypal will probalby have a record of the sale, and the payment - who they sent the money to and where the money came from. Or the bank information they sent the payment to. But it's murkier as eBay leaves the local area - most pawns and this device, the phone will be from the local area.
Actually, 2011 CES was all about tablets and e-readers. The 3DTV one was 2010. Which got the "meh" until Apple decided to showcase the iPad a couple of weeks later.
Of course, this year's CES was more 3DTV/tablet/something-anything meh.
And it's pretty much true. The stuff that they can differentiate their TV on (video/color quality, lag, etc), is really, really, really hard to sell. And since "connected TVs" are easy to add features to (hello Netflix, hello Amazon, hello Hulu), it's easy to add to feature lists and emblazon the Netflix, Amazon and Hulu logos all over the box. Add in WiFi support built in and that makes people happy.
And the common consumer wants less set top boxes and configuration - TV needs to be simple. Not messing with a half dozen remotes and inputs and key maps and such (and they refuse to buy a Harmony because "they're too expensive").
Two reasons NAT is nice.
1) It insulates the "inside" network from the "outside" network. If my ISP decides to give me a new prefix (and you know they will, even in IPv4 land, "static" IPs tend to change), I really don't want to have to go and figure out why some pesky device suddenly lost access because it somehow refused to inherit the new prefix and new router. It'll happen on the days you're super busy and just want stuff to work, and now you play network admin trying to figure it all out. With NAT, if the connection goes down, rebooting the router usually does it. One device. Instead of many. Oh, and don't forget the PC that always fails will be your parents or other relatives, and the only way to fix it is to drive over there and fix their damn PC. And enterprises of hundreds or maybe thousands of PCs? (And no, IPv6 is not well tested in the wild. We'll be hitting issues for years to come...)
Second, end-to-end connectivity isn't guaranteed anyhow. At least with IPv4, applications can't always assume they can connect to every other host since most hosts are behind NAT. With IPv6, things may appear to work, but all it takes is some firewall in-between. And most people will be running firewalls, most likely with deny-default just to keep the crap on the internet from infecting their PCs. (People assume viruses and trojans can't infect by scanning - they will adapt at scanning IPv6 networks en masse - sparse address space is really just security by obscurity).
It's called Dancing Pigs. A user will most likely pick convenience over security.
And any bank that prevents logging in from public computers will be laughed out of business - people expect to be able to bank anywhere and everywhere. Even on their cellphones (they can't wait to go home and do it then...).
No way around it, unfortunately, and educating the user is a pointless exercise because they'll just go back to their old ways.
Perhaps if the bank issued them special keypad calculators that could compute transaction hashes (for two-factor authorization) things would help. But no.
And given banks already use Wish It Was Two-Factor, things won't be improving at all.
Most mobile phones/smartphones/laptops on mobile data plans do NOT get an IPv4 address. They're NAT'ed. They may be transparently proxied too. Unless you go for the mega-expensive laptop data plans that offer a real IP (e.g., "VPN" support), then you're likely stuck behind several layers of NAT.
As for IPv6 having enough addresses for all - it's a great concept, but what I really want is just NATv6. Something that isolates the internal network numbering from my ISP. I mean, all that needs to happen is your ISP decides change your prefix and you'll spend the next day and a half trying to get everything back up on the network as they lose access, and fail to get the new address. In a company with 1,000 PCs, this could give the IT department headaches as various computers and devices fail to get the new prefix and lose access to email/internet/etc.
When this hits your parents house, it's going to be really fun rebooting routers and computers and devices.
At least with NATv6, if the ISP decides to renumber their networks, at worse you reboot your router. Inside network doing IPv6 Everything else still talks to the router since the gateway address didn't change, and everyone's happy.
Hell, people bitch and complain when their static IPv4 address changes and they have to update their DNS and IPs of all their servers. Heaven forbid you miss a config file and now some services can't start up.
NAT is a hack, but it's a nice one that isolates external world changes from the internal ones. Given most places will have firewalls that break end-to-end connectivity. Hell, mobile providers may firewall mobile devices "for their protection".
Has happened before. Bill Atkinson wrote -2000 lines of code whilst working on a graphics toolbox at Apple.
So Objective-C is rising because of iOS. And C# is rising becaues of Windows Phone 7. And Java is dropping.
What about Android? You have to code in Java - and Android is the top mobile OS out there, outselling iOS. There should be huge buzz for people writing Android apps - a huge market awaits.
The drop in Java makes no sense if the rise in C#/Obj-C is due to mobile OSes, because Java is huge in the mobile space, especially since the top-selling mobile OS uses it for app development.
Well, it's an indefinite hold. Which means that the longer it goes on, the more painful it can get. Oracle may simple just wait until the numbers are right.
Given $2B in damagers, and Google has admitted to at least 200M Android devices have been activated, that's $10/device. One reasonable method is to see how much Oracle charges for a J2ME license to begin with (it's one of the biggest sources of money in Java - given all the featurephones out there with a JVM).
Oracle may argue that since Samsung/LG/HTC pay Microsoft around $5 per Android to license Microsoft's patents, perhaps since Oracle's is more fundamental to Android (being possibly related to the whole runtime system), they ought to get $10 per device.
And they can argue that since the true number of Android devices out there isn't known because of its open-source nature, blah blah blah...
The MPAA/RIAA can ask for huge numbers becaues there isn't concrete numbers to base their numbers off of. Here there are, at least official Google Android numbers, and they don't work out to something completely crazy like $150,000 per 99 cent track.
In a strictly free market, capitalistic mindset, yes playing fair makes you a sucker - you should lie, cheat and steal in order to get ahead.
In a more holistic view though, playing fair lets you sleep at night, or to look at your children (or significant other) and admit to no wrongdoing. They won't suddenly discover what you did in order to buy that huge diamond, but that everything is as you said it is and there's no guilt nor trouble.
The problem is, government and corporations have no such conscience. Maybe if you can get enough shareholders together to instill one, but that's about it. It's why companies pollute (polluting costs nothing - not polluting costs money, and the benefit is so some humans down the road can breathe?) and try to screw over as many people as possible.
Throwaway code has a nasty habit of becoming production code, unfortunately. Even the one-off utility written to convert some data input file into something usable elsewhere has a nasty habit of suddenly being pushed into production.
It's an unfortunate reality in life - but really it should all be documented. Even exercise code where you're trying to figure out how to use an API, because someone may ask and you may end up providing code to show them how. Or a year later re-read it trying to refresh your memory on the API.
It's already started happening. The DMCA has been used to take down 3D models.
As with music and movie industries, we're going to see this continue to 3D printing as well. It's only just started, since 3D printing is still a relative novelty for most people and everything's concentrated in just a few providers.
Actually, as of December, 55% of Androids ran 2.3. 0.6% ran ICS, and around 0.6% or so ran Honeycomb (i.e., tablets). The rest were older Androids, most of which are probably 2.2, but of the remainder 2.1 or prior. (These were Google's numbers).
2.3 phones are a majority of devices, and with over 200M Androids out there (Google's numbers), that's around 110M Gingerbreads. Just under 90M devices though were 2.2 or older.
Though, I have to admit that it really sucks because I STILL see brand new 2.2 phones for sale (with contract).
It was Lupus. Once. It was touched off with "I finally have a case of lupus".
That's why "It could be lupus" never comes up anymore.
Kinect already does this as part of the tuner process. It plays some audio, and uses its microphone array to figure out room acoustics. It's used to help the media playback cancellation (it knows what is being played, but it needs to apply the room transformation to generate a cancellation signal so the microphone array can hear better).
From my experience, it works remarkably well. Especially when you consider it's hearing you from a distance and there's speakers all around it blasting audio. (The array helps by also helping to locate the audio and zero in on it).
Even more so if you've played with microphones and realize that hearing something at a distance is a lot harder because of the lower SNR. The brain does a remarkable job of it, but if you've watched YouTube videos of people who are far from the camera speaking, it can be quite difficult to make out what they're saying.
Who said a backdoor had to be kernel level?
And who said that the kernel distributed with Android and/or other Linux based phones was the same as what the "GPL release" gives? Sure there's the GPL, but if you're installing backdoors, you probably don't care. Then there's binary modules and such.
And finally - a back door doesn't have to be kernel level, as Carrier IQ demonstrated. It can be just an application - many "Remote Access Tools" used by botnets often originated as applications. The kernel part only serves to hide the application process.
Finally - who's to really say that there isn't one hiding in Android? Either one added by the carriers to the Android code directly (i.e., someone embeds something like Carrier IQ directly into the Android source code), forcing people to seek out alternative ROMs to fix it, or maybe embedded in the millions of lines of Android code.
The entire stack has to be verified - if we ignore compiler and other hidden ways of inserting bugs, it still means we have to go through the bootloader code, kernel code, and the user land stack code (including the RIL/telephony stacks, but also the application environment).
All carriers do that. In fact, "featurephones" have always been walled gardens of pain. If you're a developer, you have to make individual contracts with every carrier if you want to publish a mobile game. And every phone has its own quirks, so even though a carrier may offer say, 20 different phones right now, you really only can support 4 or 5, and none of last month's series of phones.
Ditto media. Hell, some carriers charged to have you download your photos from your cameraphone (before everyone standardized on USB - proprietary cables were everywhere and cost a ton of money just to copy your photos off).
With the proliferation of smartphones though, even walled gardens like Apple's are much easier to break into for the average joe than for featurephones.
Sure they are. Google and Facebook probably experience close to 95% of the entire web traffic, especially those who you want to educate.
All Google has to do is simply put in an interstital page of censored results with the overlay "The Stop Online Piracy Act has will remove many sites from the Internet, including the ones you probably were looking for. Write your congressperson and then click here for the full internet." which redirects to the proper search.
Facebook is similar. "Posting this on your wall could remove your Facebook access due to the Stop Online Piracy Act. Click here to object to this law and continue posting."
For Google, it presents a borked listing of sites - perhaps culled from the pages near the end, and completely useless results.
For Facebook, it threatens people to loss of access. Given how people are addicted to it, that could be quite scary.
I doubt that. People have been reporting problems before touch screens. Blackberry users, for example, but also people who text a lot on their non-touchscreen phones.
The medical condition is real, but the cause is not - it's not a recent thing brought on the explosion of touch screens - it's been around for years. Notably brought on because the folks with blackberries (out over a decade) tend to be older businesspeople and thus experienced it years before. Or people texting on their phones for nearly two decades now. And young kids have been glued to their Nintendo portables for nearly 2 1/2 decades.
The whole iPad takes 2.5W going full tilt. That includes the screen and backlight (1.5W) and the electronics (1W).
Now the SoC itself is taking 2-2.5W best case? Add in a nice screen (for a phone, probably 0.5-1W or so with backlight at a decent value) and other ancillary peripherals (like modem, WiFi, bluetooth, GPS) of maybe 0.5W total.
Most cellphone batteries are 1500mAh or smaller, or around 5Wh or so. If the phone is taking 3W, that's a little over an hour of battery life.
You won't need any special effects - the battery gauge is animated simply because it's draining that quickly.
720p video encoding, 1080p video decoding and 1080p via HDMI are considered stunning features?
Heck, Apple's been conservative, and the iPhone 4s has got 1080p video encoding, 1080p video decode and 1080p via HDMI. Androids have had it in 2010-2011 (and were mocking Apple the whole time).
So... the bigger question is - what's the battery life? The performance looks spectacular, but x86 is a notable power hog. And more worringly, I see nothing in the articles about battery life, power consumption, or battery size.
Well, they're currently offering their patent portfolio for sale, so I'm guessing it's a general sales tactic.
Of course, it also means a REAL patent troll may come about and pick it up. Or perhaps Apple may buy the portfolio and extract money from everyone. Or Google. Or Microsoft.