ARM-Based Chromebooks Ready To Battle Windows 8 and Android Tablets
Sometimes I just have to sit and scratch my head wondering at some of the things these self-destructive companies do. Chromebook is for simple, inexpensive, low-end devices. Is iPad any of those things? No. Are the new Windows 8 tablets? No. The only other devices in the same category as Chromebook are eReaders like Kindle and Nook (both running a modified version of Android), and "actual" Android Tablets like the Google Nexus. Just fragment your own market there as much as possible, Google.
A pet peeve of mine (and one of my biggest gripes with Google News) is promoting news sources that are nationally or geographically far removed from the event in question. In this case, I noticed the British spelling of "finalise", which directed my attention to the fact that the linked article is from the BBC. So then I assumed this was in some way related to the London Stock Exchange, or it was the UK division of Google that prematurely released the figures. However that is not the case as this was indeed suspended on NASDAQ and involved the parent Google company.
I wonder how many of these were generated early on and are being hoarded by the early adopters. The rate at which bitcoins can be created out of thin air is artificially controlled to keep production at a steady pace. What I'm curious about is how many bitcoins were created initially before they gained widespread publicity, and are those being hoarded?
That's ironic, because iFixit finally gave the iPhone 5 a much better score than all previous generations as far as repair goes. In the factory the boards are populated by machine, leaving the final assembly of the various parts by hand, which is basically the same process you have when manually disassembling / reassembling the device. Just doesn't jive with what iFixit had to say. Sounds like they are trying to shift blame to me.
Very interesting, but since heat is energy, the control will either have to emit heat (to get warm) or at the very least "pump" heat from place to place, neither of which are very cheap energy-wise (relative to the small size and batteries of a wireless controller). So this may not be practical in a wireless, battery-powered controller.
I would think thermoelectrics would be good for this, but the problem is once the whole controller is hot from being held, it would be hard to cool unless the heat could be radiated into the air.
"Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers."
I don't understand the logic in this. Samsung stands out in the mobile market because of their hardware. People aren't saying "Oh, the customization Samsung has done to Android stands out and makes their devices less generic, so Samsung is selling a lot of phones." Nor do people equate Samsung as the definitive Android device. Whenever I heard "Samsung" in reference to phones, a single thing came to mind: their beautiful OLED displays. The rest of the hardware - it just worked. That's all Nokia would have needed with Android, was some hardware capability that set them apart.
If, as so many people have asserted, Nokia makes fantastic hardware, then they only need these things in an OS: 1) An OS that doesn't suck. 2) An OS that is already mature and available. 3) An OS with a healthy 3rd party application development ecosystem. 4) An OS that doesn't cost a fortune to license.
I can count on 1 finger the number of operating systems that meet Nokia's needs.
That is an interesting concept. Perhaps their (those running the simulation) definition of "intelligence" is exactly that - becoming self aware. However, "self awareness" isn't defined within the context of the simulation (thus it doesn't matter if each one of us is "self aware" because that is still only relative to the simulation), but being aware of something (anything) outside the simulation.
Once we have knowledge that we are running inside a simulation the simulation will be spoiled, and thus those running it will terminate the simulation since it will have become aware of its true nature.
The views of these companies change depending on the success of their individual products. A decade ago when Windows CE beat out Palm OS in the PDA arena, and of course Windows was already the dominate desktop OS, you didn't hear any talk of Microsoft unifying the two operating systems in some way. In fact, Microsoft tried pretty much this exact thing (at least from a GUI perspective) where Windows CE 1.0 and 2.0 were basically exact GUI clones of Windows 95. Much of the underlying OS was also a direct port of Windows, which is why it sucked horribly on devices of the era which had 2 MB of ram and a 44 MHz CPU (I still have my HP 300LX).
So Microsoft did the intelligent thing, which was to redesign the OS specifically targeting mobile hardware. Windows CE 2.11 was a step in the right direction, and they pretty much got it right (at least from a core OS and performance perspective) with Windows CE 3.0 (Pocket PC).
This is also what Apple did, which was to take their existing OS knowledge and technology (OSX) and spend as long as needed optimizing it for mobile chipsets, and designing a good multi-touch based GUI to top it off. The result was the first iPhone. One of the reasons it was a immediate success is because it did not try to be all things to all people, but rather iOS had a narrow focus and within that constraint did those functions very well.
At this point in time Microsoft is basically throwing out not only Apple's obvious success in mobile, but their own past success with Windows CE as well. (and as an aside, the reason Windows CE / Pocket PC failed, is the same as IE6 - they failed to innovate once they dominated that market).
How are you considering iPhone and Mac as the same OS? This article is talking about application portability, and of course iOS apps don't run on OSX or vice versa. iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch are all mobile devices, and the only family of hardware on which iOS runs.
Yes, iOS is based on OSX in some way deep down, but in the context of "A Single OS" they are not the same.
I'm curious why people see this as so much worse than the police helicopters that have been in use for decades. Is it because they cost less money, and thus can be operated more frequently? Or because people associate them with the military?
It always blows my mind seeing geese flying in such perfect V formations as they migrate in the spring and fall. I can't help but wonder if this is some sort of instinct that is pre-programmed into their brains, or if they can actually feel the difference and thus simply do whatever is easiest, or if there is some other aspect (maybe visual or even social?) that prompts the behavior and it just so happens that it is also more efficient.
That's not a good example, because there should be physical evidence and witnesses of the person who committed the crime inside the bank. That is additional evidence and information that either reinforces or weakens the case against the car owner.
In this case, I think a better example is if you have a car that several family members and a few neighbors can use. You simply leave the keys in the car all the time so those people can use it at will. Late at night someone takes your car (it might be one of those "authorized" people, friends of those people that know about your car, or even a complete stranger that happened by), hits and kills a pedestrian, returns the car to your garage, and a camera at the crime scene recorded your license plate number. The ONLY evidence investigators have is your license plate number and nothing more.
No jury is going to convict someone of manslaughter based on that situation, because there is significant doubt of who was operating the vehicle. Is there liability in this case for the vehicle's owner? Certainly, but if a prosecutor goes all out, and attempts to get a murder charge, then the defendant would almost certainly be acquitted. The prosecutor would likely go after some other lesser "accessory" type of charge which would also have lesser burden of proof, and lesser penalties.
Where the vehicle owner would have the greatest legal jeopardy is in a civil wrongful death case. A jury would almost certainly find against the owner of the car.
In this case the prosecution is going all-out. The analogy is not just that the prosecution claims the owner of the car was the one operating it when a pedestrian was killed, but that the owner of the car went out and sought that specific person and ran them over.
Hopefully there will be enough jurors that think "you know, I have this Wifi thing at home too, and I don't fully understand it, nor can I KNOW that it is totally secured, so it could be ME right now on this list of defendants, because someone parked on the street near my house and downloaded music using my internet connection."
Devices with USB On-The-Go (Samsung Galaxy S III for example) already support USB keyboards, mice, storage, hubs, etc (which I usually use bluetooth for keyboard and mouse, but you said "dock"). That model has HDMI output as well. So what you suggest is already possible.
The main limitation is that apps aren't 100% keyboard aware (for example, apps still bring up onscreen keyboard from time to time even when I have a physical keyboard connected, and a lot of the intricate keyboard combos that facilitate "power user" type speed editing and application interaction are missing), and mouse use can be a bit clunky because it is basically just simulating a single touch. So it's totally a matter of software support at this time, but even that is headed in the right direction.
Exactly. I never imaged so many people would walk around with a bluetooth earpiece sticking out the side of their head (especially people who, for all obvious appearances, have absolutely no reason to be grocery shopping like that). A bracelet is much less imposing and restrictive, so it would be adopted even more than an earpiece (at least you can actually hear your environment with both ears like a normal human being).
One thing that strikes me is how modern technology has simplified so many things. Mission control is so much simpler and streamlined - just flat screen monitors on tables. Much cleaner. Even the launch system, using a static support tower angled away from the rocket, appears (at least to my untrained eye) much simpler these days than the mechanized support systems that had to release or pull away from the rockets.
Launch looks perfect so far. Second stage just ignited.
Actually, Facebook's problem isn't trivial in any sense of the word. The complexity and joins of various database tables must be insane. With YouTube it's all about raw bandwidth, which actually is a fairly easy problem to solve especially since 99% of that data is static. You just physically distribute it and throw money / resources at the problem. As far as database structure, any CS student should be able to reproduce the bulk of it in a single day. You have videos associated with users, and comments associated with videos, etc. The gist of it is straightforward.
Now let's talk about Facebook. There is no compartmentalization of the data. You've heard the "six degrees of separation", whereby any two people on the planet can be socially connected to one another in at most 6 steps. Well, with Facebook, the average degree of separation between any two people is 3.74. What that means is everyone is very closely networked, all the data is dynamic (or more specifically, the data the users really care about is the dynamic and most recent data), and since many people (myself included) open up their information to "friends of friends", there is a tremendous amount of data that any one person can potentially have access to. Even Google searches don't have this problem, because the bulk of the common search terms can be preprocessed for easy retrieval, and having data that's an hour or two old isn't a huge issue.
So you have this massive database (1 billion users, each with many different types of associated data - posts, images, videos, things they've liked, things they've shared, etc, etc), and each of those 1 billion users has an entirely different set of friends from which recent (basically real-time) data must be polled - over, and over, and over again, all day long. Now, throw in the very complex privacy rules, as to which types of posts can be seen by which types of friends, groups, block lists, etc, and the problem becomes very, very complex. Sure, most of us could bang out something with that core functionality without too much difficulty, but to make it work nearly real-time for 1 billion users at once? That's an incredible undertaking.
Right. Let's just make "nutritious" and "wholesome" have the EXACT same meaning! Why do we need all these pesky words to have different meanings from one another anyway??
As they say, Hindsight is 20/20. Still, there are things that simply must come of age in their own time. Knowing what you know now, what, if anything, could you have done differently with your very first generation computers - the Apple I and Apple II, that could have advanced computing in general further, or put us on the "right track" and perhaps gotten us to the amazing mobile devices and incredible personal computing power several years sooner?
That's based on a rather narrow and specific definition of what it means to be "earth-like". In human terms, there are many other bodies on the solar system on which we (and any other kind of life as we know it) could live on far easier than Titan.
Slashdot Mirror
ARM-Based Chromebooks Ready To Battle Windows 8 and Android Tablets
Sometimes I just have to sit and scratch my head wondering at some of the things these self-destructive companies do. Chromebook is for simple, inexpensive, low-end devices. Is iPad any of those things? No. Are the new Windows 8 tablets? No. The only other devices in the same category as Chromebook are eReaders like Kindle and Nook (both running a modified version of Android), and "actual" Android Tablets like the Google Nexus. Just fragment your own market there as much as possible, Google.
A pet peeve of mine (and one of my biggest gripes with Google News) is promoting news sources that are nationally or geographically far removed from the event in question. In this case, I noticed the British spelling of "finalise", which directed my attention to the fact that the linked article is from the BBC. So then I assumed this was in some way related to the London Stock Exchange, or it was the UK division of Google that prematurely released the figures. However that is not the case as this was indeed suspended on NASDAQ and involved the parent Google company.
I wonder how many of these were generated early on and are being hoarded by the early adopters. The rate at which bitcoins can be created out of thin air is artificially controlled to keep production at a steady pace. What I'm curious about is how many bitcoins were created initially before they gained widespread publicity, and are those being hoarded?
That's ironic, because iFixit finally gave the iPhone 5 a much better score than all previous generations as far as repair goes. In the factory the boards are populated by machine, leaving the final assembly of the various parts by hand, which is basically the same process you have when manually disassembling / reassembling the device. Just doesn't jive with what iFixit had to say. Sounds like they are trying to shift blame to me.
Very interesting, but since heat is energy, the control will either have to emit heat (to get warm) or at the very least "pump" heat from place to place, neither of which are very cheap energy-wise (relative to the small size and batteries of a wireless controller). So this may not be practical in a wireless, battery-powered controller.
I would think thermoelectrics would be good for this, but the problem is once the whole controller is hot from being held, it would be hard to cool unless the heat could be radiated into the air.
"Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers."
I don't understand the logic in this. Samsung stands out in the mobile market because of their hardware. People aren't saying "Oh, the customization Samsung has done to Android stands out and makes their devices less generic, so Samsung is selling a lot of phones." Nor do people equate Samsung as the definitive Android device. Whenever I heard "Samsung" in reference to phones, a single thing came to mind: their beautiful OLED displays. The rest of the hardware - it just worked. That's all Nokia would have needed with Android, was some hardware capability that set them apart.
If, as so many people have asserted, Nokia makes fantastic hardware, then they only need these things in an OS:
1) An OS that doesn't suck.
2) An OS that is already mature and available.
3) An OS with a healthy 3rd party application development ecosystem.
4) An OS that doesn't cost a fortune to license.
I can count on 1 finger the number of operating systems that meet Nokia's needs.
That is an interesting concept. Perhaps their (those running the simulation) definition of "intelligence" is exactly that - becoming self aware. However, "self awareness" isn't defined within the context of the simulation (thus it doesn't matter if each one of us is "self aware" because that is still only relative to the simulation), but being aware of something (anything) outside the simulation.
Once we have knowledge that we are running inside a simulation the simulation will be spoiled, and thus those running it will terminate the simulation since it will have become aware of its true nature.
The views of these companies change depending on the success of their individual products. A decade ago when Windows CE beat out Palm OS in the PDA arena, and of course Windows was already the dominate desktop OS, you didn't hear any talk of Microsoft unifying the two operating systems in some way. In fact, Microsoft tried pretty much this exact thing (at least from a GUI perspective) where Windows CE 1.0 and 2.0 were basically exact GUI clones of Windows 95. Much of the underlying OS was also a direct port of Windows, which is why it sucked horribly on devices of the era which had 2 MB of ram and a 44 MHz CPU (I still have my HP 300LX).
So Microsoft did the intelligent thing, which was to redesign the OS specifically targeting mobile hardware. Windows CE 2.11 was a step in the right direction, and they pretty much got it right (at least from a core OS and performance perspective) with Windows CE 3.0 (Pocket PC).
This is also what Apple did, which was to take their existing OS knowledge and technology (OSX) and spend as long as needed optimizing it for mobile chipsets, and designing a good multi-touch based GUI to top it off. The result was the first iPhone. One of the reasons it was a immediate success is because it did not try to be all things to all people, but rather iOS had a narrow focus and within that constraint did those functions very well.
At this point in time Microsoft is basically throwing out not only Apple's obvious success in mobile, but their own past success with Windows CE as well. (and as an aside, the reason Windows CE / Pocket PC failed, is the same as IE6 - they failed to innovate once they dominated that market).
How are you considering iPhone and Mac as the same OS? This article is talking about application portability, and of course iOS apps don't run on OSX or vice versa. iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch are all mobile devices, and the only family of hardware on which iOS runs.
Yes, iOS is based on OSX in some way deep down, but in the context of "A Single OS" they are not the same.
I'm curious why people see this as so much worse than the police helicopters that have been in use for decades. Is it because they cost less money, and thus can be operated more frequently? Or because people associate them with the military?
It always blows my mind seeing geese flying in such perfect V formations as they migrate in the spring and fall. I can't help but wonder if this is some sort of instinct that is pre-programmed into their brains, or if they can actually feel the difference and thus simply do whatever is easiest, or if there is some other aspect (maybe visual or even social?) that prompts the behavior and it just so happens that it is also more efficient.
If you loan them your car then you're an accessory to the crime.
Only if the prosecution can prove the owner knew what they were going to use the car for.
That's not a good example, because there should be physical evidence and witnesses of the person who committed the crime inside the bank. That is additional evidence and information that either reinforces or weakens the case against the car owner.
In this case, I think a better example is if you have a car that several family members and a few neighbors can use. You simply leave the keys in the car all the time so those people can use it at will. Late at night someone takes your car (it might be one of those "authorized" people, friends of those people that know about your car, or even a complete stranger that happened by), hits and kills a pedestrian, returns the car to your garage, and a camera at the crime scene recorded your license plate number. The ONLY evidence investigators have is your license plate number and nothing more.
No jury is going to convict someone of manslaughter based on that situation, because there is significant doubt of who was operating the vehicle. Is there liability in this case for the vehicle's owner? Certainly, but if a prosecutor goes all out, and attempts to get a murder charge, then the defendant would almost certainly be acquitted. The prosecutor would likely go after some other lesser "accessory" type of charge which would also have lesser burden of proof, and lesser penalties.
Where the vehicle owner would have the greatest legal jeopardy is in a civil wrongful death case. A jury would almost certainly find against the owner of the car.
In this case the prosecution is going all-out. The analogy is not just that the prosecution claims the owner of the car was the one operating it when a pedestrian was killed, but that the owner of the car went out and sought that specific person and ran them over.
Hopefully there will be enough jurors that think "you know, I have this Wifi thing at home too, and I don't fully understand it, nor can I KNOW that it is totally secured, so it could be ME right now on this list of defendants, because someone parked on the street near my house and downloaded music using my internet connection."
Well then what in the world am I doing wasting time writing software?!? Time to pull the old Casio out of the closet and lay down some tunes!
Devices with USB On-The-Go (Samsung Galaxy S III for example) already support USB keyboards, mice, storage, hubs, etc (which I usually use bluetooth for keyboard and mouse, but you said "dock"). That model has HDMI output as well. So what you suggest is already possible.
The main limitation is that apps aren't 100% keyboard aware (for example, apps still bring up onscreen keyboard from time to time even when I have a physical keyboard connected, and a lot of the intricate keyboard combos that facilitate "power user" type speed editing and application interaction are missing), and mouse use can be a bit clunky because it is basically just simulating a single touch. So it's totally a matter of software support at this time, but even that is headed in the right direction.
Exactly. I never imaged so many people would walk around with a bluetooth earpiece sticking out the side of their head (especially people who, for all obvious appearances, have absolutely no reason to be grocery shopping like that). A bracelet is much less imposing and restrictive, so it would be adopted even more than an earpiece (at least you can actually hear your environment with both ears like a normal human being).
I don't see how. Typically, a fan or the PSU goes out first, and given enough time the HDD begins to fail.
One thing that strikes me is how modern technology has simplified so many things. Mission control is so much simpler and streamlined - just flat screen monitors on tables. Much cleaner. Even the launch system, using a static support tower angled away from the rocket, appears (at least to my untrained eye) much simpler these days than the mechanized support systems that had to release or pull away from the rockets.
Launch looks perfect so far. Second stage just ignited.
Looks like Wikipedia's article on the Square Kilometre Array is incorrect.
With a budget of €1.5 billion, construction of the SKA is scheduled to begin in 2016 for initial observations by 2019 and full operation by 2024.
Not that I'm surprised, considering how horribly broken that sentence is in the first place.
Actually, Facebook's problem isn't trivial in any sense of the word. The complexity and joins of various database tables must be insane. With YouTube it's all about raw bandwidth, which actually is a fairly easy problem to solve especially since 99% of that data is static. You just physically distribute it and throw money / resources at the problem. As far as database structure, any CS student should be able to reproduce the bulk of it in a single day. You have videos associated with users, and comments associated with videos, etc. The gist of it is straightforward.
Now let's talk about Facebook. There is no compartmentalization of the data. You've heard the "six degrees of separation", whereby any two people on the planet can be socially connected to one another in at most 6 steps. Well, with Facebook, the average degree of separation between any two people is 3.74. What that means is everyone is very closely networked, all the data is dynamic (or more specifically, the data the users really care about is the dynamic and most recent data), and since many people (myself included) open up their information to "friends of friends", there is a tremendous amount of data that any one person can potentially have access to. Even Google searches don't have this problem, because the bulk of the common search terms can be preprocessed for easy retrieval, and having data that's an hour or two old isn't a huge issue.
So you have this massive database (1 billion users, each with many different types of associated data - posts, images, videos, things they've liked, things they've shared, etc, etc), and each of those 1 billion users has an entirely different set of friends from which recent (basically real-time) data must be polled - over, and over, and over again, all day long. Now, throw in the very complex privacy rules, as to which types of posts can be seen by which types of friends, groups, block lists, etc, and the problem becomes very, very complex. Sure, most of us could bang out something with that core functionality without too much difficulty, but to make it work nearly real-time for 1 billion users at once? That's an incredible undertaking.
Right. Let's just make "nutritious" and "wholesome" have the EXACT same meaning! Why do we need all these pesky words to have different meanings from one another anyway??
In terms of only km, each second the distance 415,299,808,882,907,133 km expands by 1 more km.
As they say, Hindsight is 20/20. Still, there are things that simply must come of age in their own time. Knowing what you know now, what, if anything, could you have done differently with your very first generation computers - the Apple I and Apple II, that could have advanced computing in general further, or put us on the "right track" and perhaps gotten us to the amazing mobile devices and incredible personal computing power several years sooner?
That's based on a rather narrow and specific definition of what it means to be "earth-like". In human terms, there are many other bodies on the solar system on which we (and any other kind of life as we know it) could live on far easier than Titan.