It's pretty obvious to me that if you're paying a premium for showing your product at that show, you don't want 2 bit operations setting up in the hotel rooms above you trying to swindle your viewers up to their private quarters. You're there for those people to see your flashy setup. That's why you pay, isn't it? Management and CES could very well have been protecting the interests and quality of the show. Also, I don't think if CES moved it would hurt Vegas all that much.
That's a pretty crazy exaggeration/analogy. You are practically comparing the 100's of small startup tech companies who rent suites at CES to hookers or swindlers. Nice.
Further, your description is not very accurate. The Las Vegas Convention Center is not a hotel, so there is no "swindling viewers up to their private quarters" - in fact, the hotels that rent the largest number of suites to companies (Venetian, Bellagio, Wynn, etc) are no where near the convention center. Many of these companies have no presence at the convention, so how are they "swindling away" anyone? Many of the meetings/demos are private, have no interest/intention of showing their products in public yet, and have been set up between various parties well in advance, so it's not even taking away revenue from the CEA.
In fact, much of the reason the companies schedule these meetings at CES not to "steal" from the CEA, but simply because that's when all of the executives, press, etc who they want to meet with are in one place at the same time. They save a lot of money and time not having to inefficiently fly everyone around the world for weeks holding one painful meeting at a time. I suppose that is now stealing from the airlines, though...
Ironic that in responding to an article bemoaning a misuse of statistics you would infer so much from a sample consisting only of yourself, isn't it?:-)
Not sure if you were referring to me or you in that comment, but to quote the article...
"I really can't blame them since they were probably told in college that logic and reason are superior to evidence and observation.'"
Ie I'm not all that sure the article had anything to do with statistics in the first place...
Having attended a school from which a surprisingly large (statistically?) number of grad students dropped out to found the most successful companies in the Bay Area without finishing their degree, I'd have to say I am solidly in the camp that licensing, certification, degrees, etc mean exactly jack and shit compared to motivation and intelligence in the software industry.
So what? Same with Electrical Engineering. It's a profession and a major, and there is no law that you have to complete an Electical Engineering major to get an EE job, as long as you know what you are doing.
For an EE major, you have to take physics, electronics, calculus, etc - and then take a bunch of classes on practical applications. When I went to school, you had to take similar prerequisites for a Computer Science or Computer Engineering degree. It's all naming and semantics at this point.
Again, I don't know where you went to school, but physics, calculus, and diff eq (not chemistry, but I took 2 years anyway because I was also a bio major) were all required for our Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs.
Maybe wherever you went to school they taught "computer troubleshooting" as a degree, but some of us actually got a solid foundation in the various theoretical and practical foundations of computer software engineering.
Though I do agree that "Computer Science" is a stupid name. They already have Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, etc - why not just call it "Software Engineering"? [I'd say "Computer Engineering", but since that was my major and I also had to do transistor physics and VLSI design, it I guess does need to be separate...]
I totally agree that active shutter glasses are a hard sell, and I don't think there is any way they will become mainstream in the living room... but the cost to manufacture a polarized LCD display for a large screen TV is WAY more than the cost to make a couple active shutter glasses (and glasses don't even have to affect the TV margin much, since they could be sold separately after including 1-2 with the TV, just like game console controllers).
This is especially true given that the hardware changes for the display with active shutters is fairly trivial - just take an existing TV/panel that can do 480Hz, add a cheap RF transmitter, and the rest is firmware/software. That's why these TVs are coming out so quickly, potentially in whatever size the manufacturers already have.
there are a total of about 3 actual companies, and the rest is just subsidiaries. Everyone's parts come from the same manufacturer, just someone different puts it together.
There may only be a few companies that make the plasma or LCD panel, but that doesn't make the CE companies that buy those panels subsidiaries... that's like saying Dell, Apple, and HP are all subsidiaries of Intel because they all buy the same CPU.
Sure, these days the hardware differences between TV (and even more with BD players) is shrinking, but that's being offset by hugely increased software complexiy/differentiation. Just like most PCs.
In fact, most of the complexity of a "3D TV" is software/firmware, as well. New TVs are now doing 240 or even 480Hz refresh without 3D - they just need to take the left/right fields of the video frame, alternate them on every refresh, and stick in a cheap transmitter to sync the active shutter glasses (I bet some will use Bluetooth, which is dirt cheap hardware ie mostly software work).
That's absurd, of course they used high speed duplicators. What, do you think they just go buy a bunch of blanks, and put 50,000 tape-to-tape copiers in a giant room to produce the millions of VHS tapes distributed for a new release? The economics of a solution that silly are what clever engineering is made for...
Watch this video if you don't believe me. It's actually a pretty cool video showing a high speed duplication factory in operation. And they specifically state that the duplication happens at 240x real time.
The whole point of the iPhone is to replace all of those 1-use devices. The same is true of the Apple tablet, to replace the need to carry an e-book reader, PDA and netbook with one device.
If it's really 10" and almost $1000 as rumored, it won't replace a PDA (way too big) or an e-book reader (too big, too expensive, and the battery life won't be sufficient). And unless it has a hard keyboard (who knows at this point...) I couldn't see it effectively replacing a netbook, either. And even if it does, big deal. Netbooks haven't done much of a job replacing laptops yet, anyway.
Given the fact that they came up with this insanely stupid stunt in the first place, I don't think there is much to understand about any of the poor decisions they made.
Plus, if they had used harmless plastic and it wasn't caught, the incompetent security would probably just claim that they did a great job not flagging any false positives...
Yeah, a quote from one of the more experienced, successful programmers in history. I'd trust his opinions more than those of the random blogger the article references.
People say the same thing about wines, coffees, cheeses, or anything else for which they haven't acquired a taste.
If you can't tell the not-very-subtle difference between Smirnoff and a good potato vodka like Chopin, then by all means you should stick to the cheap stuff, but that doesn't mean that other people shouldn't enjoy what they like.
He wants the two drives for redundancy, so he wants RAID 1 (mirroring), not RAID 0 (striping). Otherwise, I don't understand why "get a NAS" wasn't the number one response. I guess too many people just wanting to argue about their filesystem of choice;)
I guess he also wanted a second drive "backed up monthly and kept at a different location". In that case, I'd *still* go with a 2 disk RAID 1 (since drive failure is going to be a LOT more likely than a fire or theft). In that case, get another drive of the same size (don't bother with more RAID) and format it with the fastest filesystem that works with the OS you are most likely to use if you have to copy the backup to a new NAS device (for me that would probably be XFS on Linux if most of the files are huge and contigious, or ext4 if hesitant about XFS...)
I see your point, but it just doesn't make any sense from a commercial point of view. Unfortunately it's in Microsoft and Apple's best interest to keep their APIs proprietary so that once an app is developed for their platform, it's not easily ported. This is especially true for Microsoft, of course, as it's probably the primary way they ARE keeping market share. For Apple it's a bit less so on OSX, but even more true on the iPhone.
The replier to your post did get one thing right - Java was the most ambitious attempt to standardize desktop and embedded platforms so far, but has pretty much failed in that area (its success has been mostly on the server, which I'm sure surprised the original developers...) Android is a good example of that - it uses Java, but also uses non-standard APIs and results in really poor performing apps unless significant effort is spent to optimize, etc. It will only succeed if it takes over the market, not by being portable to other platforms.
Seems obvious, but it isn't. The problem is that people tend to write software for free for themselves to use, and they write software for money for others to use. And most FOSS projects are not started by "the community", they are started by one very motivated person (or a few max) and then eventually snowball into a real FOSS "communbity project".
Most of the free (as in beer - there are very few open source, since Apple restricts distribution anyway) apps on the iPhone are either trivial, demos, or supporting services (Facebook, Google, Pandora, etc). Games especially are rarely free, since few people have any interest (or financial resources) in spending months developing a decent game without getting paid for it.
Anyway... I think the original question was a very good one, but maybe just needs to be restated: what needs to happen/change in the development tools, community, or something else for open source projects to flourish on the Android platform the way they have on the PC?
Electronic Arts is just publishing it. Bioware developed it, just like they developed Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, all of which are up there in my list of favorite games. That's enough credibility for me. You might as well blame Best Buy for selling the game.
I guess my point is that the market for games is the same as the market for any other goods... it's amazingly efficient at optimizing for maximum profit. It will end up at the optimal balance between quality and revenue - we can just hope that somehow that balance skews towards quality. Ironically at some level that means it's more in the interest of us hardcore gamers to discourage the casual gamers from taking too much of an interest;)
It's just an FAQ, not the license. If the wording of the accepted license doesn't distinguish, it doesn't matter. Since it's in the FAQ, it's clearly... well... unclear.
It's pretty obvious to me that if you're paying a premium for showing your product at that show, you don't want 2 bit operations setting up in the hotel rooms above you trying to swindle your viewers up to their private quarters. You're there for those people to see your flashy setup. That's why you pay, isn't it? Management and CES could very well have been protecting the interests and quality of the show. Also, I don't think if CES moved it would hurt Vegas all that much.
That's a pretty crazy exaggeration/analogy. You are practically comparing the 100's of small startup tech companies who rent suites at CES to hookers or swindlers. Nice.
Further, your description is not very accurate. The Las Vegas Convention Center is not a hotel, so there is no "swindling viewers up to their private quarters" - in fact, the hotels that rent the largest number of suites to companies (Venetian, Bellagio, Wynn, etc) are no where near the convention center. Many of these companies have no presence at the convention, so how are they "swindling away" anyone? Many of the meetings/demos are private, have no interest/intention of showing their products in public yet, and have been set up between various parties well in advance, so it's not even taking away revenue from the CEA.
In fact, much of the reason the companies schedule these meetings at CES not to "steal" from the CEA, but simply because that's when all of the executives, press, etc who they want to meet with are in one place at the same time. They save a lot of money and time not having to inefficiently fly everyone around the world for weeks holding one painful meeting at a time. I suppose that is now stealing from the airlines, though...
Ironic that in responding to an article bemoaning a misuse of statistics you would infer so much from a sample consisting only of yourself, isn't it? :-)
Not sure if you were referring to me or you in that comment, but to quote the article...
"I really can't blame them since they were probably told in college that logic and reason are superior to evidence and observation.'"
Ie I'm not all that sure the article had anything to do with statistics in the first place...
Having attended a school from which a surprisingly large (statistically?) number of grad students dropped out to found the most successful companies in the Bay Area without finishing their degree, I'd have to say I am solidly in the camp that licensing, certification, degrees, etc mean exactly jack and shit compared to motivation and intelligence in the software industry.
So what? Same with Electrical Engineering. It's a profession and a major, and there is no law that you have to complete an Electical Engineering major to get an EE job, as long as you know what you are doing.
For an EE major, you have to take physics, electronics, calculus, etc - and then take a bunch of classes on practical applications. When I went to school, you had to take similar prerequisites for a Computer Science or Computer Engineering degree. It's all naming and semantics at this point.
Again, I don't know where you went to school, but physics, calculus, and diff eq (not chemistry, but I took 2 years anyway because I was also a bio major) were all required for our Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs.
Maybe wherever you went to school they taught "computer troubleshooting" as a degree, but some of us actually got a solid foundation in the various theoretical and practical foundations of computer software engineering.
Though I do agree that "Computer Science" is a stupid name. They already have Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, etc - why not just call it "Software Engineering"? [I'd say "Computer Engineering", but since that was my major and I also had to do transistor physics and VLSI design, it I guess does need to be separate...]
Does this mean my Snickers bar will now be confiscated by security?
Does this mean all pets must be neutered before flying?
I totally agree that active shutter glasses are a hard sell, and I don't think there is any way they will become mainstream in the living room... but the cost to manufacture a polarized LCD display for a large screen TV is WAY more than the cost to make a couple active shutter glasses (and glasses don't even have to affect the TV margin much, since they could be sold separately after including 1-2 with the TV, just like game console controllers).
This is especially true given that the hardware changes for the display with active shutters is fairly trivial - just take an existing TV/panel that can do 480Hz, add a cheap RF transmitter, and the rest is firmware/software. That's why these TVs are coming out so quickly, potentially in whatever size the manufacturers already have.
there are a total of about 3 actual companies, and the rest is just subsidiaries. Everyone's parts come from the same manufacturer, just someone different puts it together.
There may only be a few companies that make the plasma or LCD panel, but that doesn't make the CE companies that buy those panels subsidiaries... that's like saying Dell, Apple, and HP are all subsidiaries of Intel because they all buy the same CPU.
Sure, these days the hardware differences between TV (and even more with BD players) is shrinking, but that's being offset by hugely increased software complexiy/differentiation. Just like most PCs.
In fact, most of the complexity of a "3D TV" is software/firmware, as well. New TVs are now doing 240 or even 480Hz refresh without 3D - they just need to take the left/right fields of the video frame, alternate them on every refresh, and stick in a cheap transmitter to sync the active shutter glasses (I bet some will use Bluetooth, which is dirt cheap hardware ie mostly software work).
Wish I had mod points - I was about to post something similar, but your analogy was much more insightful :)
That's absurd, of course they used high speed duplicators. What, do you think they just go buy a bunch of blanks, and put 50,000 tape-to-tape copiers in a giant room to produce the millions of VHS tapes distributed for a new release? The economics of a solution that silly are what clever engineering is made for...
Watch this video if you don't believe me. It's actually a pretty cool video showing a high speed duplication factory in operation. And they specifically state that the duplication happens at 240x real time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RM1sNs4mo
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144039/
The whole point of the iPhone is to replace all of those 1-use devices. The same is true of the Apple tablet, to replace the need to carry an e-book reader, PDA and netbook with one device.
If it's really 10" and almost $1000 as rumored, it won't replace a PDA (way too big) or an e-book reader (too big, too expensive, and the battery life won't be sufficient). And unless it has a hard keyboard (who knows at this point...) I couldn't see it effectively replacing a netbook, either. And even if it does, big deal. Netbooks haven't done much of a job replacing laptops yet, anyway.
Given the fact that they came up with this insanely stupid stunt in the first place, I don't think there is much to understand about any of the poor decisions they made.
Plus, if they had used harmless plastic and it wasn't caught, the incompetent security would probably just claim that they did a great job not flagging any false positives...
Exactly! And hence the discovery of our blessed lady of the grilled cheese sandwich...
Yeah, a quote from one of the more experienced, successful programmers in history. I'd trust his opinions more than those of the random blogger the article references.
People say the same thing about wines, coffees, cheeses, or anything else for which they haven't acquired a taste.
If you can't tell the not-very-subtle difference between Smirnoff and a good potato vodka like Chopin, then by all means you should stick to the cheap stuff, but that doesn't mean that other people shouldn't enjoy what they like.
He wants the two drives for redundancy, so he wants RAID 1 (mirroring), not RAID 0 (striping). Otherwise, I don't understand why "get a NAS" wasn't the number one response. I guess too many people just wanting to argue about their filesystem of choice ;)
I guess he also wanted a second drive "backed up monthly and kept at a different location". In that case, I'd *still* go with a 2 disk RAID 1 (since drive failure is going to be a LOT more likely than a fire or theft). In that case, get another drive of the same size (don't bother with more RAID) and format it with the fastest filesystem that works with the OS you are most likely to use if you have to copy the backup to a new NAS device (for me that would probably be XFS on Linux if most of the files are huge and contigious, or ext4 if hesitant about XFS...)
I see your point, but it just doesn't make any sense from a commercial point of view. Unfortunately it's in Microsoft and Apple's best interest to keep their APIs proprietary so that once an app is developed for their platform, it's not easily ported. This is especially true for Microsoft, of course, as it's probably the primary way they ARE keeping market share. For Apple it's a bit less so on OSX, but even more true on the iPhone.
The replier to your post did get one thing right - Java was the most ambitious attempt to standardize desktop and embedded platforms so far, but has pretty much failed in that area (its success has been mostly on the server, which I'm sure surprised the original developers...) Android is a good example of that - it uses Java, but also uses non-standard APIs and results in really poor performing apps unless significant effort is spent to optimize, etc. It will only succeed if it takes over the market, not by being portable to other platforms.
Seems obvious, but it isn't. The problem is that people tend to write software for free for themselves to use, and they write software for money for others to use. And most FOSS projects are not started by "the community", they are started by one very motivated person (or a few max) and then eventually snowball into a real FOSS "communbity project".
Most of the free (as in beer - there are very few open source, since Apple restricts distribution anyway) apps on the iPhone are either trivial, demos, or supporting services (Facebook, Google, Pandora, etc). Games especially are rarely free, since few people have any interest (or financial resources) in spending months developing a decent game without getting paid for it.
Anyway... I think the original question was a very good one, but maybe just needs to be restated: what needs to happen/change in the development tools, community, or something else for open source projects to flourish on the Android platform the way they have on the PC?
I was intrigued for a minute, but then I realized they were just talking about radios...
Get back to me when you find a bacon motorcycle.
That's why you put the sensor in the hole.
Electronic Arts is just publishing it. Bioware developed it, just like they developed Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, all of which are up there in my list of favorite games. That's enough credibility for me. You might as well blame Best Buy for selling the game.
I guess my point is that the market for games is the same as the market for any other goods... it's amazingly efficient at optimizing for maximum profit. It will end up at the optimal balance between quality and revenue - we can just hope that somehow that balance skews towards quality. Ironically at some level that means it's more in the interest of us hardcore gamers to discourage the casual gamers from taking too much of an interest ;)
It's just an FAQ, not the license. If the wording of the accepted license doesn't distinguish, it doesn't matter. Since it's in the FAQ, it's clearly... well... unclear.