Exactly. However, for me this brings up another question; why is it taking so long to convert it to an "app" now? Does the "embedded" version of Google Maps use a bunch of private APIs or something? This should be a simple repackaging of the binary, and I'm sure Google has known for many months that their maps would no longer be packaged with the devices by default.
The names of the tablets, and companies involved, are lame. It's called "make up a clever word so that we have keyword exclusivity in search engines" but leaving out the "clever" part.
Apple's problem is primarily with the data, not the actual mapping application. Considering how deep Apple's pockets are, I'm really surprised they weren't able to license a better / larger set of GIS data. There are number of competing mapping companies out there, so I have a hard time believing that, given enough money, one of them wouldn't have provided Apple with what they needed.
Now as for the actual application, I believe Apple's map application is superior to Google's in a number of ways. I've always preferred vector / real-time drawn maps over pre-rendered tiled raster maps (which is what Google's are).
So as for Google maps, why hasn't Google released a stand alone app yet? After all, that's all Google Maps are with Android is an app on the marketplace. Is Apple blocking Google, or is Google (perhaps wisely) letting Apple go it alone for a bit so people will miss the functionality Google provided, then they can step in and save the day (before Apple has a chance to improve their product enough)?
You hit the nail on the head. Office reached good-enough stability, and good-enough feature set, several years ago. They have more recently gotten into the "change for the sake of change" phase, and have been redoing GUI, etc, just to have something to promote with the product. Now imagine if customers like you and I (I'm using Office 2003 on my Windows 7 laptop - as my primary work machine has died and been replaced several times over the years, I've just moved my Office license along with me) didn't have the opportunity to have "bought" and owned Office a decade ago. Instead we had to pay a never-ending recurring fee. I think it's exactly users like us that Microsoft no longer makes money off of, and going with a subscription model is the only way they can try and prevent this from happening in the future.
Granted, they aren't going to get many of us in on this new scheme - we already demand a "fair" method of owning software licenses that have value in the long term future, and most of us will simply switch to other alternatives. However there is a new generation of users coming of age, who are more "plugged in" and used to things being connected to the "cloud", or totally web based, or software at least checking online for "updates" and "synchronizing" when it starts up. There are a large number of iOS / Android games which, even though they SHOULD be able to run happily 100% offline, will only function when they have network connectivity and the user is signed in. What this is doing is conditioning a new generation of software consumers to a new level of control, connectivity and oppressive DRM.
So which other animals must eat fish for their brains to develop properly? Do any other primates have to eat fish? Or did all the rest of the primates also mutate about the same time so they don't have to eat fish either? If humans are the only primate that had to eat fish, and we don't now, then how do the researchers know we required fish at some point in the past when other primates do not?
He's confusing Facebook The Application with Facebook the communication / social network. Facebook has never been a success because of its software. The software has essentially always worked just well enough to facilitate what people came there for, which is to communicate in a feed based manner with friends and family. I have never, ever heard anyone (besides this guy) go on about how wonderful the Facebook software is. In fact it is always the opposite.
My grandparents are on Facebook for one reason and one reason only. They get to read messages and view pictures about family members they care about - information they otherwise could not get through any other channel. I'm sure that a very significant number of people are on FB for the exact same reason. That has nothing to do with software, but content.
Again, the Facebook software facilities the social network, not the other way around.
The problem is Microsoft no longer holds the majority OS market in personal computing devices. If they try and screw you over with their software on their platform, then people will use a platform with more affordable application pricing. Microsoft has to win 2 games at one time here - the OS and the applications. Frankly I don't see it happening, as they are screwing up in one or both arenas every time they turn around.
One thing a lot of people don't realize is that not only is the iOS app market HUGE, but the pricing is incredibly low. The bang for the buck, even with just free apps, is incredible. So for me, it's not just the size of Apple's App market that's impressive, but the amount of entertainment and utility that I can get for a very, very reasonable price.
Any platform that is going to attempt to compete against iOS (and tablets and high-powered cell phones are and will be a big part of the future of consumer computers), has to compete not only in the OS and hardware levels, and not just with number of applications available, but also the cost of those applications. Microsoft doesn't seem to get this. I'm somewhat surprised that the Kindle is doing as well as it is for the same reason (or perhaps a significant number of people are unlocking their kindles so they can access the Google Play market as well?). There isn't a lot of value there, as far as apps go. Developers have to jump through even more hoops to get into the Amazon market, and after the trouble, many developers do not bother with a free or freemium version of their app. It's just pay-only. The Nook app store is even worse in this regard (much fewer apps, and they are basically ALL pay only - last I checked, a free version of Angry Birds wasn't even available, only the full version to purchase).
Now maybe MS is already throwing up their hands in defeat, and ceding that in the future, the only people really buying MS office are those that NEED MS office - for backwards compatibility, or because their school / workplace requires it in some way, etc. This subscription model doesn't even work well as a "PC tax" that they can slip in with the OEMs to bundle a really stripped down version of Office. So if this is the case, perhaps MS is wise to milk those customers for all they're worth, and just forfeit the more casual market to free online services like Google Drive (aka Google Docs), etc.
Dad: Merry Christmas kids!!!! Kids: What did you get us? Dad: We now have a 1 year family subscription for a web-based word processor! Kids: YAAAAAAAY!!!!!!
Does Verizon lease or share these frequencies with any other carriers? I know there are quite a few CDMA based carriers, and they do share a significant amount of towers.
This really makes no sense to me. Rendering HTML is not easy nor is it efficient (memory or cpu wise). There are millions upon millions of iPhones and Android devices running with lower specs than 256 MB memory and a 700 MHz CPU, and they are very usable and responsive - EXCEPT for web browsing!!! So in essence, they're taking the one thing that low-end phones do worst, which is rendering HTML, and only allowing them to do that. The alternative is allowing NATIVE applications (and although Android is Java, the NDK allows binaries compiled directly for the CPU, which is what all non-trivial games use), which provides the best performance even on low end hardware.
Really, in my mind, they have this completely backwards.
Regarding energy requirements for a display and touchscreen, those are both greatly reduced with glasses (which, owing to their small size, are also the devices for which low power consumption is most important). Glasses are much closer to the eye, and ideally can direct the light directly to the eye. Modern displays are designed for maximum angle of visibility - they spew light over 180 degrees, on purpose, so they can be viewed from almost any angle. They are inefficient by design. So glasses can use much, much less power for display because they can be optimized in a number of ways.
Obviously glasses cannot make use touchscreens either, but instead use voice input, accelerometers, etc, which are hardware that require very little power.
As a carpenter specializing in horse-drawn carriages, I felt compelled to survey one of the new-fangled "horseless carriages" that are all the rage these days. It was amazingly, shockingly awful. Some nights I got seriously depressed, as I could no longer hear the music of the crickets, frogs, and other nocturnal animals as I rode across the countryside. The smoke generated by this monstrosity obscured vision, and greatly irritated the eyes and nose. It was far too complex and infernal a machine to ever become standard fare for many people.
Only muiltibillion dollar companies like Google and Apple could come up with such original, clever, and non-obvious uses for existing technologies such as this. Facial recognition?? Whoduthunkit? Logging in? Never tried that before, but it sure sounds neat.
Um, considering that more than likely, every person in the car is already being tracked at a personal level via their cell phone (and other devices, such as tablets, etc), I don't see this as being all that much worse than the de facto privacy of the modern digital world.
The problem is that although Anonymous does have a list of Apple IDs (which I doubt has been verified yet), they don't have hard evidence attributing them to an FBI source. We have to just take their word on that one, unless the FBI admits to the breach.
I'm a software developer who works from home, so I only have need to leave my small town maybe a couple times a month. I have a single vehicle, which is a full-sized SUV, because I have a travel trailer, boat, and trailer to haul around, plus I have 4 kids so I need a lot of seating space. Gas mileage is not an issue because of how few miles I drive, and it is far, far more economical to have a single inefficient vehicle than have two vehicles with double the insurance, personal property taxes, registration fees, etc, etc.
I'm sure there are many other people in a similar situation for whom it is more cost efficient having a single vehicle that meets all our needs, where "needs" means more than just hauling a one or two around on pavement.
I thought that comment was a bit off as well. There are usually multiple launch windows to reach whatever orbit / planetary alignment the payload requires, and on rare occasions things do come down to the wire, but usually there is ample cushion to work around the weather. The only other issue is if a launch area had so many launches lined up that they would get backed up, but I really don't think that's a problem. Actually there are lots of facilities vying for launches, especially since NASA is using more commercial providers and disseminating what was pretty much a monopoly at Cape Canaveral.
Regardless, even if the launch system could fly through a hurricane, it is best to have good weather for multiple visual and radar observations of the launch in case anything goes wrong.
Textastic is a nice source editor for iOS devices that adds an additional row of buttons above the onscreen keyboard. You can type all the common symbols with a single touch gesture. I normally use a Bluetooth keyboard when I have to edit source files on the iPad, so I don't know how fast typing in general would be on the touchscreen device.
This may not be an option for you at all if you're using an IDE on a Windows machine. Textastic is basically a fancy text editor like Notepad++.
VNC is probably the most prolific remote access client / server software in existence. It is open source, although some companies have created enhanced functionality on top of VNC which is available as commercial products. OSX supports VNC type remote access natively.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. However, for me this brings up another question; why is it taking so long to convert it to an "app" now? Does the "embedded" version of Google Maps use a bunch of private APIs or something? This should be a simple repackaging of the binary, and I'm sure Google has known for many months that their maps would no longer be packaged with the devices by default.
The names of the tablets, and companies involved, are lame. It's called "make up a clever word so that we have keyword exclusivity in search engines" but leaving out the "clever" part.
I hear there are hackers in Russia. And they have computers and stuff there too.
Apple's problem is primarily with the data, not the actual mapping application. Considering how deep Apple's pockets are, I'm really surprised they weren't able to license a better / larger set of GIS data. There are number of competing mapping companies out there, so I have a hard time believing that, given enough money, one of them wouldn't have provided Apple with what they needed.
Now as for the actual application, I believe Apple's map application is superior to Google's in a number of ways. I've always preferred vector / real-time drawn maps over pre-rendered tiled raster maps (which is what Google's are).
So as for Google maps, why hasn't Google released a stand alone app yet? After all, that's all Google Maps are with Android is an app on the marketplace. Is Apple blocking Google, or is Google (perhaps wisely) letting Apple go it alone for a bit so people will miss the functionality Google provided, then they can step in and save the day (before Apple has a chance to improve their product enough)?
You hit the nail on the head. Office reached good-enough stability, and good-enough feature set, several years ago. They have more recently gotten into the "change for the sake of change" phase, and have been redoing GUI, etc, just to have something to promote with the product. Now imagine if customers like you and I (I'm using Office 2003 on my Windows 7 laptop - as my primary work machine has died and been replaced several times over the years, I've just moved my Office license along with me) didn't have the opportunity to have "bought" and owned Office a decade ago. Instead we had to pay a never-ending recurring fee. I think it's exactly users like us that Microsoft no longer makes money off of, and going with a subscription model is the only way they can try and prevent this from happening in the future.
Granted, they aren't going to get many of us in on this new scheme - we already demand a "fair" method of owning software licenses that have value in the long term future, and most of us will simply switch to other alternatives. However there is a new generation of users coming of age, who are more "plugged in" and used to things being connected to the "cloud", or totally web based, or software at least checking online for "updates" and "synchronizing" when it starts up. There are a large number of iOS / Android games which, even though they SHOULD be able to run happily 100% offline, will only function when they have network connectivity and the user is signed in. What this is doing is conditioning a new generation of software consumers to a new level of control, connectivity and oppressive DRM.
So which other animals must eat fish for their brains to develop properly? Do any other primates have to eat fish? Or did all the rest of the primates also mutate about the same time so they don't have to eat fish either? If humans are the only primate that had to eat fish, and we don't now, then how do the researchers know we required fish at some point in the past when other primates do not?
He's confusing Facebook The Application with Facebook the communication / social network. Facebook has never been a success because of its software. The software has essentially always worked just well enough to facilitate what people came there for, which is to communicate in a feed based manner with friends and family. I have never, ever heard anyone (besides this guy) go on about how wonderful the Facebook software is. In fact it is always the opposite.
My grandparents are on Facebook for one reason and one reason only. They get to read messages and view pictures about family members they care about - information they otherwise could not get through any other channel. I'm sure that a very significant number of people are on FB for the exact same reason. That has nothing to do with software, but content.
Again, the Facebook software facilities the social network, not the other way around.
Who just copy / pasted the discussion for a wikipedia article to slashdot??
The problem is Microsoft no longer holds the majority OS market in personal computing devices. If they try and screw you over with their software on their platform, then people will use a platform with more affordable application pricing. Microsoft has to win 2 games at one time here - the OS and the applications. Frankly I don't see it happening, as they are screwing up in one or both arenas every time they turn around.
One thing a lot of people don't realize is that not only is the iOS app market HUGE, but the pricing is incredibly low. The bang for the buck, even with just free apps, is incredible. So for me, it's not just the size of Apple's App market that's impressive, but the amount of entertainment and utility that I can get for a very, very reasonable price.
Any platform that is going to attempt to compete against iOS (and tablets and high-powered cell phones are and will be a big part of the future of consumer computers), has to compete not only in the OS and hardware levels, and not just with number of applications available, but also the cost of those applications. Microsoft doesn't seem to get this. I'm somewhat surprised that the Kindle is doing as well as it is for the same reason (or perhaps a significant number of people are unlocking their kindles so they can access the Google Play market as well?). There isn't a lot of value there, as far as apps go. Developers have to jump through even more hoops to get into the Amazon market, and after the trouble, many developers do not bother with a free or freemium version of their app. It's just pay-only. The Nook app store is even worse in this regard (much fewer apps, and they are basically ALL pay only - last I checked, a free version of Angry Birds wasn't even available, only the full version to purchase).
Now maybe MS is already throwing up their hands in defeat, and ceding that in the future, the only people really buying MS office are those that NEED MS office - for backwards compatibility, or because their school / workplace requires it in some way, etc. This subscription model doesn't even work well as a "PC tax" that they can slip in with the OEMs to bundle a really stripped down version of Office. So if this is the case, perhaps MS is wise to milk those customers for all they're worth, and just forfeit the more casual market to free online services like Google Drive (aka Google Docs), etc.
Dad: Merry Christmas kids!!!!
Kids: What did you get us?
Dad: We now have a 1 year family subscription for a web-based word processor!
Kids: YAAAAAAAY!!!!!!
Does Verizon lease or share these frequencies with any other carriers? I know there are quite a few CDMA based carriers, and they do share a significant amount of towers.
This really makes no sense to me. Rendering HTML is not easy nor is it efficient (memory or cpu wise). There are millions upon millions of iPhones and Android devices running with lower specs than 256 MB memory and a 700 MHz CPU, and they are very usable and responsive - EXCEPT for web browsing!!! So in essence, they're taking the one thing that low-end phones do worst, which is rendering HTML, and only allowing them to do that. The alternative is allowing NATIVE applications (and although Android is Java, the NDK allows binaries compiled directly for the CPU, which is what all non-trivial games use), which provides the best performance even on low end hardware.
Really, in my mind, they have this completely backwards.
Regarding energy requirements for a display and touchscreen, those are both greatly reduced with glasses (which, owing to their small size, are also the devices for which low power consumption is most important). Glasses are much closer to the eye, and ideally can direct the light directly to the eye. Modern displays are designed for maximum angle of visibility - they spew light over 180 degrees, on purpose, so they can be viewed from almost any angle. They are inefficient by design. So glasses can use much, much less power for display because they can be optimized in a number of ways.
Obviously glasses cannot make use touchscreens either, but instead use voice input, accelerometers, etc, which are hardware that require very little power.
Yeah yeah, it's got all kind of sciencey uses. Asteroids and stuff like that. But what are the military applications???
As a carpenter specializing in horse-drawn carriages, I felt compelled to survey one of the new-fangled "horseless carriages" that are all the rage these days. It was amazingly, shockingly awful. Some nights I got seriously depressed, as I could no longer hear the music of the crickets, frogs, and other nocturnal animals as I rode across the countryside. The smoke generated by this monstrosity obscured vision, and greatly irritated the eyes and nose. It was far too complex and infernal a machine to ever become standard fare for many people.
Thanks a lot for raining on our parade.
Only muiltibillion dollar companies like Google and Apple could come up with such original, clever, and non-obvious uses for existing technologies such as this. Facial recognition?? Whoduthunkit? Logging in? Never tried that before, but it sure sounds neat.
Um, considering that more than likely, every person in the car is already being tracked at a personal level via their cell phone (and other devices, such as tablets, etc), I don't see this as being all that much worse than the de facto privacy of the modern digital world.
From your link:
Update: AllClear ID sent a statement saying they do not collect UDIDs and are not affiliated with the NCFTA, for whatever it’s worth.
The problem is that although Anonymous does have a list of Apple IDs (which I doubt has been verified yet), they don't have hard evidence attributing them to an FBI source. We have to just take their word on that one, unless the FBI admits to the breach.
The same can be said of pretty much any vehicle.
I'm a software developer who works from home, so I only have need to leave my small town maybe a couple times a month. I have a single vehicle, which is a full-sized SUV, because I have a travel trailer, boat, and trailer to haul around, plus I have 4 kids so I need a lot of seating space. Gas mileage is not an issue because of how few miles I drive, and it is far, far more economical to have a single inefficient vehicle than have two vehicles with double the insurance, personal property taxes, registration fees, etc, etc.
I'm sure there are many other people in a similar situation for whom it is more cost efficient having a single vehicle that meets all our needs, where "needs" means more than just hauling a one or two around on pavement.
I thought that comment was a bit off as well. There are usually multiple launch windows to reach whatever orbit / planetary alignment the payload requires, and on rare occasions things do come down to the wire, but usually there is ample cushion to work around the weather. The only other issue is if a launch area had so many launches lined up that they would get backed up, but I really don't think that's a problem. Actually there are lots of facilities vying for launches, especially since NASA is using more commercial providers and disseminating what was pretty much a monopoly at Cape Canaveral.
Regardless, even if the launch system could fly through a hurricane, it is best to have good weather for multiple visual and radar observations of the launch in case anything goes wrong.
Textastic is a nice source editor for iOS devices that adds an additional row of buttons above the onscreen keyboard. You can type all the common symbols with a single touch gesture. I normally use a Bluetooth keyboard when I have to edit source files on the iPad, so I don't know how fast typing in general would be on the touchscreen device.
This may not be an option for you at all if you're using an IDE on a Windows machine. Textastic is basically a fancy text editor like Notepad++.
VNC is probably the most prolific remote access client / server software in existence. It is open source, although some companies have created enhanced functionality on top of VNC which is available as commercial products. OSX supports VNC type remote access natively.