You're on the losing side of that language change. Too many people are being taught math these days, and mathematical terminology pretty much uses "less [than]" for all numeric comparisons, regardless of the English count/mass classification. The math world simply isn't going to listen to this particular peeve, and will continue to teach people to use "less" for any numerical comparison.
Actually, if you dig into the history of the topic, you'll find that "less" has been used this way pretty much since the language has been called "English". The less/fewer distinction is a bogus modern peeve, invented by people wanting to impose a distinction that the language has never made.
... the #1 certainty about alien life - that it will be alien. That means it may not behave in a way that we think is sensible.
Alien? In my experience, that describes most humans.
I'm expecting that if I ever meet a real alien, it'll be a member of a species that has worked out most of its sensibility problems, and once we have a useful amount of common language, I'd find it very easy to have a sensible conversation with them.
(I'd also be pushing them to teach me their language, but that's a different issue. It'd be fun to learn a real language that didn't originate in a human brain. That could be a more serious challenge, since their vocal mechanism might not be similar enough to ours that we can produce all their significant sounds.)
We shouldn't have a federally owned ISP. In fact the government shouldn't be in the ISP business. They should be in the infrastructure business and that should be done at the city/county level and always should have been.
Actually, we have in effect had that for more than a century. "The government" owns and controls all access to the basic, low-level part of the communication infrastructure. Specifically, the right-of-ways for wiring and the frequency bands for wireless are and always have been owned by governments, which leases access to the private comm companies.
Of course, we've seen the problem with that: The government in control of the right-of-way in most jurisdictions makes a deal with a single comm company, and outlaws access by anyone else. Sometimes they make a deal (usually the same deal) with two companies, so they can claim that it's not a monopoly, which satisfies enough people and the duopoly can behave exactly like the monopolies in other areas.
If we really want a communications "market", we need more than a government that controls the infrastructure and leases it out. We need a government that supports a comm market, and leases out the infrastructure to everyone.
The closest we've come to this is with the FCC, which has historically opened up a few small parts of the spectrum (ham, cell-phone, wifi, etc) to the general public. But even they keep most of the spectrum locked up and available only to a very few corporations.
I did a quick google, and as I expected, it might be difficult to discover the right keywords. Thus, just "Bill of Rights" and "petition" turns up zillions of legal documents that use those words, but aren't about petitions in the sense we mean here.
One of the top google hits, however, was to http://afilreis.blogspot.com/2010/06/bill-of-rights-some-kind-of-subversive.html, which describes a 1951 experiment along this line. Funny thing is that I used to live in Madison, which has long been around 90% a university and government town, so you'd think people there would be familiar with the constitution. But asking 112 (unidentified) people to sign it got 111 refusals, mostly out of fear that "it was some kind of subversive document and thought that if they signed it they would be called Communists."
It might be fun to make an explicit collection of such experiments. I wonder if there's an efficient way to find them?
Yup, that's about right. It's fairly standard for corporations to try to convince their marks that they have a contract when legally they don't. And it's not unusual for real contracts to contain clauses that are contrary to law.
and just why exactly should a student in the UK "have to" pay £300 for a laptop PC if the guys in India can build a useful linux tablet for a small fraction of that price?
Well the obvious reason is that your economic and social "betters" have decided that you don't need that cheap tablet, and you'd be better off paying for their laptop PC. So they've arranged for it to be sufficiently difficult to import the cheap linux tablet that the manufacturer won't try to leap through all the bureaucratic hoops to sell it to you.
There's precedent for this. There have been a number of reports that several cheap tablet/laptop machines introduced into the US with only MS Windows were sold first in Asia with linux. But the US importers "knew" that nobody here would want that weird linux OS, so they sold it with the OS that all Americans know and love.;-)
An obvious parallel is the way that bottom-quality 4-function calculators are now given out as trinkets. You could make a similar criticism that they're not usable as powerful scientific calculators. But that's equally beside the point. Dumb little 4-function calculators have a lot of uses, and making them for a total cost of a few pennies is a socially useful thing to do. At least it is until everyone has one of these $35 computers, for which free calculator apps will be available that are much better than a 4-function calculator.
A similar phenomenon has happened with watches. I stopped wearing one 10 years ago, when I realized that it had become nearly impossible to get out of sight of a working clock, at least in urban areas. Sales of watches generally have plummeted - except that sales of high-end watches are hardly affected. The lower end of the market has been replaced by the cheap digital clocks that we see everywhere. And the switch to cell phones means that nearly everyone has a clock display in their pocket or purse now.
A couple of decades back, someone predicted that eventually a "computer" would be just a bump on a wire, and the only bulk would be in the user-interface hardware, due to the limitations of our physical bodies. We're well on the way to that state, and any companies whose sales depend on computing hardware are facing an end to their business. In another decade or so, what we now call "super-computers" will be given out like 4-function calculators are now. This new $35 computer will be too bulky and expensive to manufacture.
I mean just doing a quick scan of the article it makes it sound like it's more for Indians... and other 3rd worlders.... If it helps improve their standard of living more power to them. (Hopefully it gets further than that One Laptop thing.)
It's weird that this got a "troll" mod, when it's directly to the point. It's especially appropriate in comparison with all the posts saying in essence that it'll be a crappy machine for 1st-world countries. People have missed the point that wealthy populations aren't the intended customers. Don't expect to order one of these from Dell or Amazon. The customers are people whose annual income is less than most/. readers make in a day.
The OLPC comparison is also relevant. One thing this price point should help with is that we might not see a repeat of Microsoft sending in reps to "talk to" the managers looking to order these machines. That was partially effective at limiting the OLPC, but it's clear that this machine is aimed at a market in areas where Windows is available, but people can't afford it even if they can get it free.
This thing's main competitors are cheap phones, for which it is an upgrade. Comparing it with first-world laptops and desktops merely shows cluelessness.
(Actually, comparing it with the iPhone/iPad pair might be relevant. But there's no real competition there, because they're aiming at a market in which an iPhone or iPad costs more than the mean annual income.;-)
... in the UK a crowd of morons got confused between paedophile and paediatrician and the doctor had graffiti painted on her windows and had to leave her house.
There's also the related UK question of when the town of Scunthorpe is going to change its name. In that case, it's mostly a problem of morons writing text-filtering software. You'd think that people paid to write text-processing software would have at least minimal language competence, but this seems not to be the case.
OTOH, it's all good fodder for humorists, who can have a lot of fun mocking the ignorance of much of the population.
Your post [about F/OSS software being safer due to the "many eyes" phenomenon] would make sense if the majority of the work done on Webkit and Firefox was not done by professionals.
I don't think any definition I've seen of Free/Open Software includes anything at all about the professional status of the programmers.
In fact, much of the work on the most popular F/OSS packages is done by "professional" programmers. This is widely understood as a way to improve your public image and résumé, since it allows you to get involved with new things that an employer wouldn't permit. Most employers don't like people working on something that they've never done before, so if you want experience with something new, you usually have to work on it in your copious spare time, i.e., as a Free Software project. And, of course, you want it to also be Open Source, so that people can read your good work and be impressed.
It's also common for the more enlightened managers to approve of employees getting involved in F/OSS work, for the same reasons, and to give the company more credibility among software developers.
But it's common for the corporate world to disparage Free/Open software developers as unpaid professionals. It's pure ideological PR, though, with little basis in reality. (Reality is always a lot messier than anyone's ideology.;-)
isn't "crowdsourcing" business decisions kind of like... communism?
More like democracy.
Well, at least here in the US, most people can't tell you the difference.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were a number of "surveys" in which parts of the US Constitution (mostly the Bill of Rights), were printed up and presented to people as petitions, trying to get people to sign them. The main result reported was the large numbers of people who thought the text was subversive and "unAmerican". A lot of people specifically called these petitions "communist". Hardly anyone anywhere actually recognized the text.
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the better-educated part of the population, of course, but that was about the only result. I expect that if you tried the same thing today, you'd get similar results. People in this country use words like "democracy", "rights", etc., but usually can't define them accurately or tell you anything about how they actually work.
Of course, this isn't at all unique to the US. We might note that the official names of a lot of Communist states have included the term "Democratic", while actual democracies rarely use such terms in their names. In all the attempts to define the term "irony", I've yet to see this example used as an illustration, though you'd think it would be one of the first choices by anyone who understands the term. (Maybe the next time the issue of irony comes up here, one of us should present the phrase "Democratic Republic of..." as an example.;-)
If the design isn't picked, the designer still owns all rights to it and can submit it again.
Um, you might want to read the "contract" very carefully. Most such contests have wording hidden out in the fine print to the effect that all submissions become the property of the company running the contest. So if 1000 people submit entries, the company pays for one of them, but legally owns the other 999. Read the tiny language that comes with most such contests, and see if you can spot where it says this. They can be clever at obfuscating the wording, but with careful reading you can usually spot it.
I've seen a couple of writing contests run by publishers that play the same trick. The top-rated 2 or 3 stories get a reward, but the publisher publishes an entire book of the top N stories. If the authors of the other stories complain, the publisher just quotes the above passage from the contest rules, and refuses to pay anything to the other "losing" authors.
(This is all in the USA; other countries may outlaw such misleading trickery. But probably not many countries do. Anyone here have any data about this?)
This could be a useful precedent for the music business. A growing problem is: You're a musician who thinks you've written a new tune, but think you might be pulling a George Harrison and merely putting new words to someone else's tune. How do you find out if the tune in your head is copyrighted?
Some significant work has been done with putting music online in several computer-encoded forms, with several lookup tools that try to identify similar pieces of music. Leaving aside the fact that this is a nontrivial problem musically, the work has been seriously held back by fears of the copyright enforcers. There have been demands from publishers and agents that copyrighted music be removed from the databases, which has usually been done. So the available music is pretty much just material that's out of copyright. It's obvious that you can put Bach's and Beethoven's music online in computerized form, and it's equally obvious that "folk" tunes published centuries ago (by Playford et al) is legal.
But I've actually asked some music publishers' reps how one might legally find out if they hold a copyright for a particular tune. Their answer, apparently told with a straight face, is that I should buy a copy of everything they've ever published, and search through all of it for the tune. There is a certain lack of practicality to the idea that every musician should own a printed copy of every piece of music that's under copyright. I'd need a house orders of magnitude larger than my current house to hold it all. And the search operation would take several years of full-time work.
So what's the prospect for this decision being applicable to music? Would it be legal for musicians to transcribe lots of copyrighted tunes, putting what's essentially a computerized "fake-book" version of everything in our database, and make the lookup tools available online to musicians? Or would we be risking a multi-million-dollar years-long lawsuit over such a tool? Asking publishers for permission isn't feasible; many of them have already said they don't approve.
If it's not legal, how might a musician learn whether that tune in their head is copyrighted? You can play it at a gig, and wait for the indictment papers to arrive at your door, of course, but it'd be nice if there were some better way that's legal. It'd be even nicer if the database could have contact info for each work, so the musicians can quickly ask for permission to play a work in public. But at present, such a tool seems illegal, on the ground that its database is inherently a mass of copyright infringements.
(There's also the separate problem: How to decide whether two tunes or songs are "the same music" is an unsolved problem, whose only answer right now is "Ask the courts", and it's not obvious how to write a CGI program that does that.;-)
There was a good explanation of the difference a couple of years ago, in a Doonesbury cartoon. One character was complaining that the Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt. The other characters replied "Yeah, but when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong."
Small consolation, I know, but with a bit of truth. We just saw another form of it in the adjacent discussion about google's new arrangement with the China government. The discussion has the usual flock of posts claiming that a (public) corporation's only obligation is to its stockholders. This includes the common claim that corporations can be prosecuted for actions based on morality or the public good, since profit is a corporation's only valid duty. These are people who fall right into Doonesbury's characterization of Republicans as people who don't know the difference between right and wrong, only profit and loss.
Ok, for the birth-ers you're gonna have to bear with me a second. I don't buy it, nor do I think it would matter even if it was true. The claim was that he wasn't born in the US, lets say they are right, his mother was still a US citizen so he would still be able to claim us citizenship from birth anyway. They also had some argument about the type of birth documentation that was needed, and the piece they were looking for was never given.
Actually, this was somewhat a recap of the similar claims when Barry Goldwater ran for president. Like Obama, Goldwater was born in an American-controlled territory (Arizona) before it became a state.
That "debate" didn't last long, though. First, the anti-Goldwater crowd were mostly just making a political joke and having a bit of fun trying to confuse people; they laughed at people who took them seriously. Second, lawyers quickly pointed out that under that interpretation, George Washington couldn't have been president, since he was born before there was a United States. And, since the president has to be at least 36 years old, the first 9 presidential terms were of necessity filled by people "not born in the USA".
But that was all based on the "reasonable man" interpretation of the relevant parts of the Constitution. The fun thing with the modern "birthers" is that they mostly seem to take the issue seriously, and can't be bothered to look up the earlier cases, from George Washington on, that make for obvious precedent. Similarly, it has been pointed out that a lot of children of American diplomats have been born on foreign soil, and it's obvious that the Founding Fathers didn't intend them to be excluded from becoming president.
But the issue is still good for a bit of humor, especially when we have a group of dummies who take it seriously.
(Also, NPR recently had one of their political trivia quizzes in which one question was to name the last president not born in an American state or territory. I've forgotten who it was, though. It wasn't important for anything, since his parents were both American citizens. )
... Both law & software provide a set of instructions that you are supposed to follow to get a result. In law, your processor may or may not follow the instructions, or may not even understand the instruction set that is being used, and moreover each processor's interpretation may affect (i.e. screw up) subsequent processors. In software, your processor does exactly what you told it to, whether you want it to or not....
Heh. In reality, software is usually more like you describe law. Computer may do "exactly what you told it to" in some sense, but this claim is highly misleading. Unless you're working at the very lowest hardware level, the processor's behavior is often wildly unpredictable, because the documentation is always sketchy and very often downright wrong. A significant part of debugging is discovering what the code did "wrong", i.e., differently from the way you understood the language was supposed to behave. Furthermore, when you carry code to a new processor, it's quite normal for all sorts of things to be executed differently than on the previous processor. As a programmer, you have no defense against this. You can say that the machine is doing something wrong, but the machine doesn't listen to you or correct its behavior. It can take years for programmers to appreciate this and learn how to do "defensive programming" so that code is actually portable among a class of machines and systems.
And extreme case is anything that works on the Web. Browsers often do wildly different things with the same "code" (i.e., your HTML and/or CSS). This behavior is mostly not documented at all; what documentation you can find is vague, fuzzy and often contradictory. Thehe browsers are full of outright violations of published standards. The top browser, IE, openly declares itself the standard, and thumbs its nose at the official standards, but the other browsers are wildly different from each other while claiming to follow the official standards. Compared to this, the legal system is almost sane and reasonable in comparison.
(Actually, I've done a fair amount of programming in perl and python, and I've rarely found non-portable code in those language. But then, the designers of those languages explicitly faced the insanity that they knew existed at the lower "system" level, and took extreme steps to correct for it in their implementations. Most of my perl and python code actually works on Microsoft systems, although that's not where I wrote it.;-)
Are you saying the US is not predominantly urban/suburban? Or were you contradicting some other part of the statement? The 2000 census breaks down the population as 80% urban, 20% rural. "Predominant" is subjective, but 80% seems so to me.
That's some mighty fuzzy language there. One could as easily claim that the US is 90% rural and 10% urban/suburban. That is, if I were to drop you down at a random place in the US, chances are around 90% that you wouldn't see another human from where you were standing. There's a chance of about 1 in 4 that you wouldn't even see any signs of human habitation or construction.
Of course, you were probably talking about the population, not the area. But even there, you have to be a bit careful with your language. There are a lot of very densely populated central cities in which most of the population has either no Internet access past dialup, or can only get fast access via a local monopoly whose prices are far too high for much of the impoverished part of the population.
Of course, to much of the US's middle- and upper-class, educated population, and to most of the corporate world, the poor urban and rural areas don't exist and aren't worth noticing. There's not enough profit there to bother with.
Let's say you had no phone service one day out of 100. Would that be acceptable to you?
Probably. A quick scan of my cell's log shows that there's roughly a 60% probability that I wouldn't notice, because I didn't make or receive a call that day.;-)
Actually, I'd notice more if the "data" service were out for a full day. I use my cell phone's browser, email and google maps apps nearly every day. But those don't involve "phone" service.
It's funny how easy it is to use statistics and probabilities in a way that's misleading to most readers.
The Steve is quoted as saying "This is life in the smartphone world. Phones aren't perfect. It's a challenge for the whole industry. Every phone has weak spots."
Naturally, I wanted to test this. So I pulled out my G!, and tried holding it in various ways. I'd seen the iPhone videos, where the signal-strength "bars" fell slowly, dropping by 1 every 5 or 10 seconds, so when I tested a grip, I held it for about 30 sec. My signal strength started at 3 (of 4) bars. I found that no matter how I held it, the indicated strength never fell below 3 bars. For a while, it went to 4, so I re-tested the previous couple of grips, but it stayed at 4 bars. After a while, it fell back to 3 bars and stayed there, and when I retested the previous (3-bar) grips, they all showed 4 bars.
Conclusion: I couldn't find the grip that makes a G1 lose the signal. I even tried completely surrounding the phone with both hands, and holding it completely covered against my chest, but nothing I tried had any visible effect.
So what's the "weak spot" grip of the G1, which Steve says exists? Anyone know?
A bit of googling, but didn't find the grip. I did find a few comments about sporadic reboots during calls, which of course will lose the call, but I haven't seen that.
It could be interesting to collect such info about lots of models of phones and put them online. Just reading assertions made by a vendor in a press conference isn't really all that useful for product comparison purposes.
It's hard to find anything harder than the dihydrogen monoxide from around here...
So you must live in the southern hemisphere, right?
Around here, the DHMO only qualifies as the hard stuff in January and February. But I do keep a supply of it in my freezer to help get us through the hot summer days.
Mathematical principles are facts that are discovered, they are not analogous to software.
You're claiming as "fact" something that has long been debated among mathematicians. And the general consensus seems to be that you need to be very careful with your definitions if you want to claim that anything in mathematics is "fact". The reason is simple: Facts are usually defined as statements that are true in the physical universe, and mathematics has little if anything to do with the physical universe. Mathematics is about logic and reasoning, not physical objects. In even the oldest and most basic fields of math, this is fairly clear. Try finding a number in the real world. There is no "two" anywhere to be seen. You might have two objects, but you don't have a "two". You might write a '2' on a surface, but that's a symbol, and it's well understood that a symbol isn't the object. Similarly, in geometry we reason and make proofs about points, lines and circles, but those don't exist in the physical universe. They can only be approximated. And on and on.
One of the ongoing mysteries in mathematics is its usefulness in science and engineering. It's easy to find long discussions of this, but it's difficult to find good explanations explaining it. The difficulty is based on the fact (;-) that nobody seems to be able to find physical objects in the real world that exactly satisfy any mathematical definitions or axioms.
In any case, the majority of mathematicians would argue that they don't deal with facts, and all of mathematics is abstract ideas that exist only inside our minds. These ideas were made up by our minds, and didn't exist in the physical universe until we thought them up.
Not that this means much in any legislature or court room, of course. Or in any corporate boardroom.
Oh, I dunno; my wife likes her iPhone, but one of her complaints is that it's somewhat slippery. She has accidentally dropped it a couple of times. It survived, but she's tempted to get one of the "bumper" shells to increase the coefficient of friction with her hand.
But then, neither of us thinks the iPhone is especially aesthetic looking. It looks like a chunk of shiny plastic. Not all people respond "Oooh! Shiny!" when they see such objects. Some people just think "plastic", with all the connotations of that term.
It may end up just requiring a change behind the scenes to make it work as intended, in which case it is still pretty awesome engineering.
Or you can just apply a bit of duct tape, as Consumer Reports suggested. If that's too inelegant for you, you could follow Apple's earlier suggestion, and get one of those silicone "bumper" wrappers, which would also help protect the iPhone from damage. Both apparently fix the antenna problem by preventing contact with your (electrically conducting) hand.
I'd think you'd want one of the bumpers, as "cheap insurance" to help your iPhone last longer. But what do I know? I have an Android phone...
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One of my pet peeves: "Less" vs. "Fewer".
You're on the losing side of that language change. Too many people are being taught math these days, and mathematical terminology pretty much uses "less [than]" for all numeric comparisons, regardless of the English count/mass classification. The math world simply isn't going to listen to this particular peeve, and will continue to teach people to use "less" for any numerical comparison.
Actually, if you dig into the history of the topic, you'll find that "less" has been used this way pretty much since the language has been called "English". The less/fewer distinction is a bogus modern peeve, invented by people wanting to impose a distinction that the language has never made.
... the #1 certainty about alien life - that it will be alien. That means it may not behave in a way that we think is sensible.
Alien? In my experience, that describes most humans.
I'm expecting that if I ever meet a real alien, it'll be a member of a species that has worked out most of its sensibility problems, and once we have a useful amount of common language, I'd find it very easy to have a sensible conversation with them.
(I'd also be pushing them to teach me their language, but that's a different issue. It'd be fun to learn a real language that didn't originate in a human brain. That could be a more serious challenge, since their vocal mechanism might not be similar enough to ours that we can produce all their significant sounds.)
We shouldn't have a federally owned ISP. In fact the government shouldn't be in the ISP business. They should be in the infrastructure business and that should be done at the city/county level and always should have been.
Actually, we have in effect had that for more than a century. "The government" owns and controls all access to the basic, low-level part of the communication infrastructure. Specifically, the right-of-ways for wiring and the frequency bands for wireless are and always have been owned by governments, which leases access to the private comm companies.
Of course, we've seen the problem with that: The government in control of the right-of-way in most jurisdictions makes a deal with a single comm company, and outlaws access by anyone else. Sometimes they make a deal (usually the same deal) with two companies, so they can claim that it's not a monopoly, which satisfies enough people and the duopoly can behave exactly like the monopolies in other areas.
If we really want a communications "market", we need more than a government that controls the infrastructure and leases it out. We need a government that supports a comm market, and leases out the infrastructure to everyone.
The closest we've come to this is with the FCC, which has historically opened up a few small parts of the spectrum (ham, cell-phone, wifi, etc) to the general public. But even they keep most of the spectrum locked up and available only to a very few corporations.
Reference, please?
I did a quick google, and as I expected, it might be difficult to discover the right keywords. Thus, just "Bill of Rights" and "petition" turns up zillions of legal documents that use those words, but aren't about petitions in the sense we mean here.
One of the top google hits, however, was to http://afilreis.blogspot.com/2010/06/bill-of-rights-some-kind-of-subversive.html, which describes a 1951 experiment along this line. Funny thing is that I used to live in Madison, which has long been around 90% a university and government town, so you'd think people there would be familiar with the constitution. But asking 112 (unidentified) people to sign it got 111 refusals, mostly out of fear that "it was some kind of subversive document and thought that if they signed it they would be called Communists."
It might be fun to make an explicit collection of such experiments. I wonder if there's an efficient way to find them?
Yup, that's about right. It's fairly standard for corporations to try to convince their marks that they have a contract when legally they don't. And it's not unusual for real contracts to contain clauses that are contrary to law.
and just why exactly should a student in the UK "have to" pay £300 for a laptop PC if the guys in India can build a useful linux tablet for a small fraction of that price?
Well the obvious reason is that your economic and social "betters" have decided that you don't need that cheap tablet, and you'd be better off paying for their laptop PC. So they've arranged for it to be sufficiently difficult to import the cheap linux tablet that the manufacturer won't try to leap through all the bureaucratic hoops to sell it to you.
There's precedent for this. There have been a number of reports that several cheap tablet/laptop machines introduced into the US with only MS Windows were sold first in Asia with linux. But the US importers "knew" that nobody here would want that weird linux OS, so they sold it with the OS that all Americans know and love. ;-)
An obvious parallel is the way that bottom-quality 4-function calculators are now given out as trinkets. You could make a similar criticism that they're not usable as powerful scientific calculators. But that's equally beside the point. Dumb little 4-function calculators have a lot of uses, and making them for a total cost of a few pennies is a socially useful thing to do. At least it is until everyone has one of these $35 computers, for which free calculator apps will be available that are much better than a 4-function calculator.
A similar phenomenon has happened with watches. I stopped wearing one 10 years ago, when I realized that it had become nearly impossible to get out of sight of a working clock, at least in urban areas. Sales of watches generally have plummeted - except that sales of high-end watches are hardly affected. The lower end of the market has been replaced by the cheap digital clocks that we see everywhere. And the switch to cell phones means that nearly everyone has a clock display in their pocket or purse now.
A couple of decades back, someone predicted that eventually a "computer" would be just a bump on a wire, and the only bulk would be in the user-interface hardware, due to the limitations of our physical bodies. We're well on the way to that state, and any companies whose sales depend on computing hardware are facing an end to their business. In another decade or so, what we now call "super-computers" will be given out like 4-function calculators are now. This new $35 computer will be too bulky and expensive to manufacture.
I mean just doing a quick scan of the article it makes it sound like it's more for Indians ... and other 3rd worlders. ... If it helps improve their standard of living more power to them. (Hopefully it gets further than that One Laptop thing.)
It's weird that this got a "troll" mod, when it's directly to the point. It's especially appropriate in comparison with all the posts saying in essence that it'll be a crappy machine for 1st-world countries. People have missed the point that wealthy populations aren't the intended customers. Don't expect to order one of these from Dell or Amazon. The customers are people whose annual income is less than most /. readers make in a day.
The OLPC comparison is also relevant. One thing this price point should help with is that we might not see a repeat of Microsoft sending in reps to "talk to" the managers looking to order these machines. That was partially effective at limiting the OLPC, but it's clear that this machine is aimed at a market in areas where Windows is available, but people can't afford it even if they can get it free.
This thing's main competitors are cheap phones, for which it is an upgrade. Comparing it with first-world laptops and desktops merely shows cluelessness.
(Actually, comparing it with the iPhone/iPad pair might be relevant. But there's no real competition there, because they're aiming at a market in which an iPhone or iPad costs more than the mean annual income. ;-)
... in the UK a crowd of morons got confused between paedophile and paediatrician and the doctor had graffiti painted on her windows and had to leave her house.
There's also the related UK question of when the town of Scunthorpe is going to change its name. In that case, it's mostly a problem of morons writing text-filtering software. You'd think that people paid to write text-processing software would have at least minimal language competence, but this seems not to be the case.
OTOH, it's all good fodder for humorists, who can have a lot of fun mocking the ignorance of much of the population.
Your post [about F/OSS software being safer due to the "many eyes" phenomenon] would make sense if the majority of the work done on Webkit and Firefox was not done by professionals.
I don't think any definition I've seen of Free/Open Software includes anything at all about the professional status of the programmers.
In fact, much of the work on the most popular F/OSS packages is done by "professional" programmers. This is widely understood as a way to improve your public image and résumé, since it allows you to get involved with new things that an employer wouldn't permit. Most employers don't like people working on something that they've never done before, so if you want experience with something new, you usually have to work on it in your copious spare time, i.e., as a Free Software project. And, of course, you want it to also be Open Source, so that people can read your good work and be impressed.
It's also common for the more enlightened managers to approve of employees getting involved in F/OSS work, for the same reasons, and to give the company more credibility among software developers.
But it's common for the corporate world to disparage Free/Open software developers as unpaid professionals. It's pure ideological PR, though, with little basis in reality. (Reality is always a lot messier than anyone's ideology. ;-)
Well, at least here in the US, most people can't tell you the difference.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were a number of "surveys" in which parts of the US Constitution (mostly the Bill of Rights), were printed up and presented to people as petitions, trying to get people to sign them. The main result reported was the large numbers of people who thought the text was subversive and "unAmerican". A lot of people specifically called these petitions "communist". Hardly anyone anywhere actually recognized the text.
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the better-educated part of the population, of course, but that was about the only result. I expect that if you tried the same thing today, you'd get similar results. People in this country use words like "democracy", "rights", etc., but usually can't define them accurately or tell you anything about how they actually work.
Of course, this isn't at all unique to the US. We might note that the official names of a lot of Communist states have included the term "Democratic", while actual democracies rarely use such terms in their names. In all the attempts to define the term "irony", I've yet to see this example used as an illustration, though you'd think it would be one of the first choices by anyone who understands the term. (Maybe the next time the issue of irony comes up here, one of us should present the phrase "Democratic Republic of ..." as an example. ;-)
If the design isn't picked, the designer still owns all rights to it and can submit it again.
Um, you might want to read the "contract" very carefully. Most such contests have wording hidden out in the fine print to the effect that all submissions become the property of the company running the contest. So if 1000 people submit entries, the company pays for one of them, but legally owns the other 999. Read the tiny language that comes with most such contests, and see if you can spot where it says this. They can be clever at obfuscating the wording, but with careful reading you can usually spot it.
I've seen a couple of writing contests run by publishers that play the same trick. The top-rated 2 or 3 stories get a reward, but the publisher publishes an entire book of the top N stories. If the authors of the other stories complain, the publisher just quotes the above passage from the contest rules, and refuses to pay anything to the other "losing" authors.
(This is all in the USA; other countries may outlaw such misleading trickery. But probably not many countries do. Anyone here have any data about this?)
This could be a useful precedent for the music business. A growing problem is: You're a musician who thinks you've written a new tune, but think you might be pulling a George Harrison and merely putting new words to someone else's tune. How do you find out if the tune in your head is copyrighted?
Some significant work has been done with putting music online in several computer-encoded forms, with several lookup tools that try to identify similar pieces of music. Leaving aside the fact that this is a nontrivial problem musically, the work has been seriously held back by fears of the copyright enforcers. There have been demands from publishers and agents that copyrighted music be removed from the databases, which has usually been done. So the available music is pretty much just material that's out of copyright. It's obvious that you can put Bach's and Beethoven's music online in computerized form, and it's equally obvious that "folk" tunes published centuries ago (by Playford et al) is legal.
But I've actually asked some music publishers' reps how one might legally find out if they hold a copyright for a particular tune. Their answer, apparently told with a straight face, is that I should buy a copy of everything they've ever published, and search through all of it for the tune. There is a certain lack of practicality to the idea that every musician should own a printed copy of every piece of music that's under copyright. I'd need a house orders of magnitude larger than my current house to hold it all. And the search operation would take several years of full-time work.
So what's the prospect for this decision being applicable to music? Would it be legal for musicians to transcribe lots of copyrighted tunes, putting what's essentially a computerized "fake-book" version of everything in our database, and make the lookup tools available online to musicians? Or would we be risking a multi-million-dollar years-long lawsuit over such a tool? Asking publishers for permission isn't feasible; many of them have already said they don't approve.
If it's not legal, how might a musician learn whether that tune in their head is copyrighted? You can play it at a gig, and wait for the indictment papers to arrive at your door, of course, but it'd be nice if there were some better way that's legal. It'd be even nicer if the database could have contact info for each work, so the musicians can quickly ask for permission to play a work in public. But at present, such a tool seems illegal, on the ground that its database is inherently a mass of copyright infringements.
(There's also the separate problem: How to decide whether two tunes or songs are "the same music" is an unsolved problem, whose only answer right now is "Ask the courts", and it's not obvious how to write a CGI program that does that. ;-)
Kettle:
- meet Pot.
You are BOTH dirty.
D's or R's makes no fucking difference.
There was a good explanation of the difference a couple of years ago, in a Doonesbury cartoon. One character was complaining that the Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt. The other characters replied "Yeah, but when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong."
Small consolation, I know, but with a bit of truth. We just saw another form of it in the adjacent discussion about google's new arrangement with the China government. The discussion has the usual flock of posts claiming that a (public) corporation's only obligation is to its stockholders. This includes the common claim that corporations can be prosecuted for actions based on morality or the public good, since profit is a corporation's only valid duty. These are people who fall right into Doonesbury's characterization of Republicans as people who don't know the difference between right and wrong, only profit and loss.
Ok, for the birth-ers you're gonna have to bear with me a second. I don't buy it, nor do I think it would matter even if it was true. The claim was that he wasn't born in the US, lets say they are right, his mother was still a US citizen so he would still be able to claim us citizenship from birth anyway. They also had some argument about the type of birth documentation that was needed, and the piece they were looking for was never given.
Actually, this was somewhat a recap of the similar claims when Barry Goldwater ran for president. Like Obama, Goldwater was born in an American-controlled territory (Arizona) before it became a state.
That "debate" didn't last long, though. First, the anti-Goldwater crowd were mostly just making a political joke and having a bit of fun trying to confuse people; they laughed at people who took them seriously. Second, lawyers quickly pointed out that under that interpretation, George Washington couldn't have been president, since he was born before there was a United States. And, since the president has to be at least 36 years old, the first 9 presidential terms were of necessity filled by people "not born in the USA".
But that was all based on the "reasonable man" interpretation of the relevant parts of the Constitution. The fun thing with the modern "birthers" is that they mostly seem to take the issue seriously, and can't be bothered to look up the earlier cases, from George Washington on, that make for obvious precedent. Similarly, it has been pointed out that a lot of children of American diplomats have been born on foreign soil, and it's obvious that the Founding Fathers didn't intend them to be excluded from becoming president.
But the issue is still good for a bit of humor, especially when we have a group of dummies who take it seriously.
(Also, NPR recently had one of their political trivia quizzes in which one question was to name the last president not born in an American state or territory. I've forgotten who it was, though. It wasn't important for anything, since his parents were both American citizens. )
... Both law & software provide a set of instructions that you are supposed to follow to get a result. In law, your processor may or may not follow the instructions, or may not even understand the instruction set that is being used, and moreover each processor's interpretation may affect (i.e. screw up) subsequent processors. In software, your processor does exactly what you told it to, whether you want it to or not. ...
Heh. In reality, software is usually more like you describe law. Computer may do "exactly what you told it to" in some sense, but this claim is highly misleading. Unless you're working at the very lowest hardware level, the processor's behavior is often wildly unpredictable, because the documentation is always sketchy and very often downright wrong. A significant part of debugging is discovering what the code did "wrong", i.e., differently from the way you understood the language was supposed to behave. Furthermore, when you carry code to a new processor, it's quite normal for all sorts of things to be executed differently than on the previous processor. As a programmer, you have no defense against this. You can say that the machine is doing something wrong, but the machine doesn't listen to you or correct its behavior. It can take years for programmers to appreciate this and learn how to do "defensive programming" so that code is actually portable among a class of machines and systems.
And extreme case is anything that works on the Web. Browsers often do wildly different things with the same "code" (i.e., your HTML and/or CSS). This behavior is mostly not documented at all; what documentation you can find is vague, fuzzy and often contradictory. Thehe browsers are full of outright violations of published standards. The top browser, IE, openly declares itself the standard, and thumbs its nose at the official standards, but the other browsers are wildly different from each other while claiming to follow the official standards. Compared to this, the legal system is almost sane and reasonable in comparison.
(Actually, I've done a fair amount of programming in perl and python, and I've rarely found non-portable code in those language. But then, the designers of those languages explicitly faced the insanity that they knew existed at the lower "system" level, and took extreme steps to correct for it in their implementations. Most of my perl and python code actually works on Microsoft systems, although that's not where I wrote it. ;-)
Are you saying the US is not predominantly urban/suburban? Or were you contradicting some other part of the statement? The 2000 census breaks down the population as 80% urban, 20% rural. "Predominant" is subjective, but 80% seems so to me.
That's some mighty fuzzy language there. One could as easily claim that the US is 90% rural and 10% urban/suburban. That is, if I were to drop you down at a random place in the US, chances are around 90% that you wouldn't see another human from where you were standing. There's a chance of about 1 in 4 that you wouldn't even see any signs of human habitation or construction.
Of course, you were probably talking about the population, not the area. But even there, you have to be a bit careful with your language. There are a lot of very densely populated central cities in which most of the population has either no Internet access past dialup, or can only get fast access via a local monopoly whose prices are far too high for much of the impoverished part of the population.
Of course, to much of the US's middle- and upper-class, educated population, and to most of the corporate world, the poor urban and rural areas don't exist and aren't worth noticing. There's not enough profit there to bother with.
In some circles, he's known as "The Steve".
Let's say you had no phone service one day out of 100. Would that be acceptable to you?
Probably. A quick scan of my cell's log shows that there's roughly a 60% probability that I wouldn't notice, because I didn't make or receive a call that day. ;-)
Actually, I'd notice more if the "data" service were out for a full day. I use my cell phone's browser, email and google maps apps nearly every day. But those don't involve "phone" service.
It's funny how easy it is to use statistics and probabilities in a way that's misleading to most readers.
The Steve is quoted as saying "This is life in the smartphone world. Phones aren't perfect. It's a challenge for the whole industry. Every phone has weak spots."
Naturally, I wanted to test this. So I pulled out my G!, and tried holding it in various ways. I'd seen the iPhone videos, where the signal-strength "bars" fell slowly, dropping by 1 every 5 or 10 seconds, so when I tested a grip, I held it for about 30 sec. My signal strength started at 3 (of 4) bars. I found that no matter how I held it, the indicated strength never fell below 3 bars. For a while, it went to 4, so I re-tested the previous couple of grips, but it stayed at 4 bars. After a while, it fell back to 3 bars and stayed there, and when I retested the previous (3-bar) grips, they all showed 4 bars.
Conclusion: I couldn't find the grip that makes a G1 lose the signal. I even tried completely surrounding the phone with both hands, and holding it completely covered against my chest, but nothing I tried had any visible effect.
So what's the "weak spot" grip of the G1, which Steve says exists? Anyone know?
A bit of googling, but didn't find the grip. I did find a few comments about sporadic reboots during calls, which of course will lose the call, but I haven't seen that.
It could be interesting to collect such info about lots of models of phones and put them online. Just reading assertions made by a vendor in a press conference isn't really all that useful for product comparison purposes.
The real danger that they're worried about comes from the aural/mental stimulation called "education".
In many people's minds, that's much more damaging to your consciousness than things like music or a blow to the head.
It's hard to find anything harder than the dihydrogen monoxide from around here...
So you must live in the southern hemisphere, right?
Around here, the DHMO only qualifies as the hard stuff in January and February. But I do keep a supply of it in my freezer to help get us through the hot summer days.
Mathematical principles are facts that are discovered, they are not analogous to software.
You're claiming as "fact" something that has long been debated among mathematicians. And the general consensus seems to be that you need to be very careful with your definitions if you want to claim that anything in mathematics is "fact". The reason is simple: Facts are usually defined as statements that are true in the physical universe, and mathematics has little if anything to do with the physical universe. Mathematics is about logic and reasoning, not physical objects. In even the oldest and most basic fields of math, this is fairly clear. Try finding a number in the real world. There is no "two" anywhere to be seen. You might have two objects, but you don't have a "two". You might write a '2' on a surface, but that's a symbol, and it's well understood that a symbol isn't the object. Similarly, in geometry we reason and make proofs about points, lines and circles, but those don't exist in the physical universe. They can only be approximated. And on and on.
One of the ongoing mysteries in mathematics is its usefulness in science and engineering. It's easy to find long discussions of this, but it's difficult to find good explanations explaining it. The difficulty is based on the fact (;-) that nobody seems to be able to find physical objects in the real world that exactly satisfy any mathematical definitions or axioms.
In any case, the majority of mathematicians would argue that they don't deal with facts, and all of mathematics is abstract ideas that exist only inside our minds. These ideas were made up by our minds, and didn't exist in the physical universe until we thought them up.
Not that this means much in any legislature or court room, of course. Or in any corporate boardroom.
Oh, I dunno; my wife likes her iPhone, but one of her complaints is that it's somewhat slippery. She has accidentally dropped it a couple of times. It survived, but she's tempted to get one of the "bumper" shells to increase the coefficient of friction with her hand.
But then, neither of us thinks the iPhone is especially aesthetic looking. It looks like a chunk of shiny plastic. Not all people respond "Oooh! Shiny!" when they see such objects. Some people just think "plastic", with all the connotations of that term.
It may end up just requiring a change behind the scenes to make it work as intended, in which case it is still pretty awesome engineering.
Or you can just apply a bit of duct tape, as Consumer Reports suggested. If that's too inelegant for you, you could follow Apple's earlier suggestion, and get one of those silicone "bumper" wrappers, which would also help protect the iPhone from damage. Both apparently fix the antenna problem by preventing contact with your (electrically conducting) hand.
I'd think you'd want one of the bumpers, as "cheap insurance" to help your iPhone last longer. But what do I know? I have an Android phone ...