There's an interesting article in the last issue of New Scientist, discussing work by physicist Gerard 't Hooft in refining his theory of a determanistic level of reality below quantum physiscs, from which the apparent randomness and Copenhagen state collape of quantum physics appears.
The price certainly means it's not a mainstream product, but it doesn't need to be to be wildly successful... It's a HUGE market... Apple are hoping for 1% cellphone marketshare in their first year, which means selling 10,000,000 of these at $500 a pop - that's a cool $5B in one year, not to mention the boost to their iTunes music/video business. Who knows what kind of market share they can eventually get, but it seems this product is only the start. In the same announcement they also renamed the company from Apple Computer Inc to plain Apple Inc, in recognition of their shift from computers only to consumer electronics... it seems they're not expecting this to be a flash in the pan or just a cute tech demo!
I'm sure the PPC-6700 doesn't have random access "visual voice mail" (listen to the message you want, vs the whole inbox in fixed order) - iPhone only has it since Cingular partnered with them to develop the back end to support it. The PPC-6700 also can't have multitouch interface so you can quickly resize maps/photos etc with a finger "pinch" - no other commercial product does. Single button conference of held call with current one? Accelerometer for auto landscape/portrait switch? Extreme Apple/OS/X slickness built right in?;-)
The iPhone also is somewhat better connected - quad band GSM (works worldwide), 2.5G EDGE, 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, and has a better camera (2MP vs 1.2).
I guess we'll have to wait and see what the reality is, but he did also put quite a bit of emphasis on the power management capabilities it has... As far as the screen goes, it includes an ambient light sensor that automatically dims / brightens the screen as necessary, and a proximity sensor that automatically turns off the screen (display & touch sensitivity) as soon as you hold it near your head to talk - and back on immediately as soon as you take it away from your head.
Well, the mainframe generation have been doin' it longer, but I built my first kit computer (NASCOM-1 Z80) in 1978, and 25yr = professional programmer since 1982... I'm not dead yet, but that's still got to count as veteran in this industry!
I have a feeling that this is not going to be a geek's toy.
Probably not. Which is so self-destructively stupid of Apple.
Well, nothing's been said yet about how open it is, but it does run OS/X...
That said, the potential hacker market isn't really worth them going after. They hope to get a 1% cellphone market share within the first year - i.e. sell 10 million units in one year! Presumably hoping to grow that in the following years. To assess the geek market, note that in the US there are only 1 million professional programmers to begin with, and I'm sure the % of those who are in the market for *any* kind of $500 phone/communicator is relatively small, let alone those who'd only buy it if they could program for it.
I think for Apple's purposes they'd benefit from allowing 3rd parties to develop for it, but would be wise to require all applications to be approved to keep the quality high.
Try watching the video of Jobs introducing it (it's long) on Apple.com - it really is pretty amazing.
For a start it runs OS/X. It's got no buttons - just a hi-res 3.5" color display with a multi-touch touch-screen interface (responds to multiple touch points simulataneously - see the video to see how this is used).
I'm a jaded 25+yr veteran programmer who hates cell phones, but even I may consider buying one of these! It's just way too cool.
I'm often thought that this would be a good way to clear traffic jams and get traffic flowing smoothly again - send a wave of police cars though driving at a steady sustainable pace (vs the starts and stops of the regular drivers that prevent it from clearing).
Have you ever seen what happens when a modern vehicle ( Mack truck) hits a deer head-on?
If you're unlucky it won't only be your car that suffers major damage.. I remember reading an amusing freak accident case where a driver was killed due to the deer flying throught the windshield and impaling him!
Seems reasonable to me to consider overall market share vs hard-drive-based market share. I wonder how may (non-geek) consumers know, let alone care, how their iPod is storing stuff? I'm sure these players sell based on brand vs storage technology, and anyways it's flash that is replacing hard drives in applications like this, not vice versa.
Well, I've been programming professionally for over 25 years, so...
The real skill in programming is knowing how to break down a complex project into suitable pieces - top down modular design. The skill is not just being able to do this at all for arbitrarily complex projects, but being able to do it well - to select a breakdown that will be easy to develop and maintain, easy to debug, easy to modify and extend.
I really don't think there's any substitute for experience in learning this, since that's the only way it's really going to sink in and become second nature. The best thing you can do therefore is to practice, and push yourself with new challenges all the time. At work push to get on the most demanding projects, and out of work do hobbyist projects that push yourself too. When you switch jobs, don't shy away from switching industries and into new areas. You'll become a stronger programmer by being a generalist rather than a specialist, as long as there's also plenty of depth (don't skip around *too* fast).
What you're really learning via experience is a set of design patterns and approaches, so that when you look at new problems they will intuitively fall apart into "obvious" breakdowns. Nowadays it's fashionable to read books on design patterns, and that can maybe help, but I'd tend so suggest a more back to basics approach of just paying attention to the interfaces between your modules... A good modular breakdown is one that results in modules that may have a fair degree of internal complexity (but not too much - break it down further), but have simple/thin external interfaces. An overly complex module interface is often a sign of choosing a sub-optimal modular breakdown (you've drawn the dividing lines in the wrong place). Good modular design will also hide as much internal design as possible to keep things simple and flexible - if you've kept the interface simple and abstract, then you have more flexibility to change the implemenation.
I'm not sure how this got modded to insightful, since it shows a complete ignorance of stock valuation.
Growth stocks trade on P/E (price/earnings per share) ratios, with people willing to pay premium above-market P/E ratios for stocks with premium growth rates. Slow the growth, and the price will drop because people will pay a lower P/E for slower growth. The absolute $ price per share of a stock has got NOTHING to do with it's value. 1M shares ar $500 or 10M shares at $50 would both give the same company valuation of $500M, and would both give the same P/E ratio.
There is some modest benefit in splitting stocks when the $ price per share gets high, but it's basically psychology. People typically (irrationally) like to buy more shares, or a round 100 multiple of shares, so the same person who might be turned off by a $5000 per share price because he can only afford to buy 1 share, might be more attracted to buy after a 100-1 split when he can instead (obtaining the same % slice of the company) buy a 100 lot for $50 per share. Because psychology can increase demand slightly in this way, splitting stocks does tend to boost the company valuation. A famous example of a very successful stock that NEVER splits is Bershire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's investment vehicle).. their class A shares (BRK-A) are currently $108,000 each!
I don't see any real reason to assume it was rare.
Technology this sophisticated (both in terms of mechanical design/theory and fabrication) doesn't just spring up out of the blue - this represents highly evolved technology. There must have been a whole series of simpler geared devices that lead up to this one, and likely more sophisticated ones that came after that unless there was some catastrophic disruption to the civilization that produced it right at that time.
There's certainly been regressions in human capability as civilizations come and go though.
Because it's such a sophisticated and exotic way to kill someone that it "has" to be Putin/KGB that did it... and this is so obvious that it almost certainly wasn NOT Putin. Putin is no dummy - he'd have the guy killed and made to look like an accident if he wanted to kill him (which I sincerly doubt he did). It was presumably done by someone who wanted to people to think it was ("obviously") Putin to discredit him.
There are human limits on things like how many items we can simulataneoulsy hold in short term emmory (~7) or how fast our brain works, but that doesn't equate to a limit on "productivity". The key here is chunking and levels of abstraction - we can overcome the number of items we can manipulate by "chunking" simpler items into groups that we then consider as a whole (e.g. memorize a phone number as 3 chunks vs 10 digits), and can gain power in our thinking by thinkign at a higher level in terms of more powerful concepts composed of simpler ones. For example, it'd be a lot more productive to design a new spaceship if you can operate at the level of "attach a type X propulsion unit to a type Y living unit" rather than doing low level design, but achieveing this sort of productivity gain requires a lot more intelligence in how components are designed for this sort of higher level usage.
I think the GCC folk are pretty careful and knowledgeable about patents. I've seen a number of previous discussions where they've avoided certain optimization methods because of patents. Anyway, given IBM's involvemnt with Linus, and the fact they they doubtless hold a gazillion more compiler patents than Microsoft, I'm sure there's nothing that gcc needs to do that couldn't be switched to an IBM patented technique if the need ever arose.
It's quite possible that there's so much program trading going on, that you may be able to predict the market (not prfectly, but at least profitably) by effectively predicting what the program traders en-masse are doing. Not that this is necessarily any easier than predicting the mass psychology behind the markets in general, but it does as least point to the fact that much of the market moves according to very deterministic forces.
Anyway, it's already being done, ergo it's possible!
how will they (FSF) stop Novell from using open source code ? They can't, as long as they respect the licencing.
The FSF can't *retroactively* change the licencing, so Novell can continue to use current versions of GPL v.2 software, BUT, what the FSF can do, and is apparently planning to do, is to change the licence on all the software they own copyright to (presumably including gcc, glibc) from GPL v.2 to GPL v.3. Novell will then be forced to choose to continue using the old frozen GPL v.2 versions, or to keep up with the everyone else and use the newer GPL v.3 versions which would force them (or rather Microsoft) to back out of the Microsoft deal because of the patent implications forced by GPL v.3.
Owning glibc puts FSF in a pretty powerful position, since even if Linus is keeping the kernel under GPL v.2, the kernel is in of itself useless without glibc, and any kernel enhancements would be useless without userland (glibc) support. Of couse it's nt just glibc - the majority of Linux userland is GNU/FSF.
What about the pre-computer standard secretarial practice of photocopying documents so as to be able to file them in multiple folders in different orders, or multiple database indeces on the same table for that matter, not to mention a zillion programs that use structures with nextBiggest, nextClosest, etc links.
Maintaining multiple pre-sorted orders is blindinly obvious to everyone (and thus, in theory at least unpatentable) and has been since before computers even existed. It hard to know what's more pathetic - that LSI thought this innovative and patentable, or that the patent office did.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if terrorists get hold of this water stuff, and try to poison us by putting it into our water supply! :-|
There's an interesting article in the last issue of New Scientist, discussing work by physicist Gerard 't Hooft in refining his theory of a determanistic level of reality below quantum physiscs, from which the apparent randomness and Copenhagen state collape of quantum physics appears.
m g19025504.000
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/
Maybe Einstein was right that "God doesn't play dice" (a rather misunderstood statement given that Einstein was an ardent aetheist).
Presumably efforts such as string theory to unite general relativity & quantum mechanics may be quite shaken up if this new theory is correct.
I believe the term you're looking for is "siphon the python".
The price certainly means it's not a mainstream product, but it doesn't need to be to be wildly successful... It's a HUGE market... Apple are hoping for 1% cellphone marketshare in their first year, which means selling 10,000,000 of these at $500 a pop - that's a cool $5B in one year, not to mention the boost to their iTunes music/video business. Who knows what kind of market share they can eventually get, but it seems this product is only the start. In the same announcement they also renamed the company from Apple Computer Inc to plain Apple Inc, in recognition of their shift from computers only to consumer electronics... it seems they're not expecting this to be a flash in the pan or just a cute tech demo!
I'm sure the PPC-6700 doesn't have random access "visual voice mail" (listen to the message you want, vs the whole inbox in fixed order) - iPhone only has it since Cingular partnered with them to develop the back end to support it. The PPC-6700 also can't have multitouch interface so you can quickly resize maps/photos etc with a finger "pinch" - no other commercial product does. Single button conference of held call with current one? Accelerometer for auto landscape/portrait switch? Extreme Apple/OS/X slickness built right in? ;-)
The iPhone also is somewhat better connected - quad band GSM (works worldwide), 2.5G EDGE, 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, and has a better camera (2MP vs 1.2).
I guess we'll have to wait and see what the reality is, but he did also put quite a bit of emphasis on the power management capabilities it has... As far as the screen goes, it includes an ambient light sensor that automatically dims / brightens the screen as necessary, and a proximity sensor that automatically turns off the screen (display & touch sensitivity) as soon as you hold it near your head to talk - and back on immediately as soon as you take it away from your head.
Well, the mainframe generation have been doin' it longer, but I built my first kit computer (NASCOM-1 Z80) in 1978, and 25yr = professional programmer since 1982... I'm not dead yet, but that's still got to count as veteran in this industry!
I have a feeling that this is not going to be a geek's toy.
Probably not. Which is so self-destructively stupid of Apple.
Well, nothing's been said yet about how open it is, but it does run OS/X...
That said, the potential hacker market isn't really worth them going after. They hope to get a 1% cellphone market share within the first year - i.e. sell 10 million units in one year! Presumably hoping to grow that in the following years. To assess the geek market, note that in the US there are only 1 million professional programmers to begin with, and I'm sure the % of those who are in the market for *any* kind of $500 phone/communicator is relatively small, let alone those who'd only buy it if they could program for it.
I think for Apple's purposes they'd benefit from allowing 3rd parties to develop for it, but would be wise to require all applications to be approved to keep the quality high.
16hr talk time or 5hr video play time
I don't know what the standby time is, but it must be pretty long
Jobs says this battery life is WAY better than the competition
Try watching the video of Jobs introducing it (it's long) on Apple.com - it really is pretty amazing.
For a start it runs OS/X. It's got no buttons - just a hi-res 3.5" color display with a multi-touch touch-screen interface (responds to multiple touch points simulataneously - see the video to see how this is used).
I'm a jaded 25+yr veteran programmer who hates cell phones, but even I may consider buying one of these! It's just way too cool.
Interesting...
I'm often thought that this would be a good way to clear traffic jams and get traffic flowing smoothly again - send a wave of police cars though driving at a steady sustainable pace (vs the starts and stops of the regular drivers that prevent it from clearing).
Driving what? A tank?
Have you ever seen what happens when a modern vehicle ( Mack truck) hits a deer head-on?
If you're unlucky it won't only be your car that suffers major damage.. I remember reading an amusing freak accident case where a driver was killed due to the deer flying throught the windshield and impaling him!
The AJAX API isn't a replacement for the deprecated SOAP one - it's an entirely different (and less useful) type of service.
The SOAP API let you obtain search results/etc and use them as you saw fit in your program.
The AJAX API let's you embed Google-generated search boxes and results (& advertisements) in your web page.
Seems reasonable to me to consider overall market share vs hard-drive-based market share. I wonder how may (non-geek) consumers know, let alone care, how their iPod is storing stuff? I'm sure these players sell based on brand vs storage technology, and anyways it's flash that is replacing hard drives in applications like this, not vice versa.
Well, I've been programming professionally for over 25 years, so ...
The real skill in programming is knowing how to break down a complex project into suitable pieces - top down modular design. The skill is not just being able to do this at all for arbitrarily complex projects, but being able to do it well - to select a breakdown that will be easy to develop and maintain, easy to debug, easy to modify and extend.
I really don't think there's any substitute for experience in learning this, since that's the only way it's really going to sink in and become second nature. The best thing you can do therefore is to practice, and push yourself with new challenges all the time. At work push to get on the most demanding projects, and out of work do hobbyist projects that push yourself too. When you switch jobs, don't shy away from switching industries and into new areas. You'll become a stronger programmer by being a generalist rather than a specialist, as long as there's also plenty of depth (don't skip around *too* fast).
What you're really learning via experience is a set of design patterns and approaches, so that when you look at new problems they will intuitively fall apart into "obvious" breakdowns. Nowadays it's fashionable to read books on design patterns, and that can maybe help, but I'd tend so suggest a more back to basics approach of just paying attention to the interfaces between your modules... A good modular breakdown is one that results in modules that may have a fair degree of internal complexity (but not too much - break it down further), but have simple/thin external interfaces. An overly complex module interface is often a sign of choosing a sub-optimal modular breakdown (you've drawn the dividing lines in the wrong place). Good modular design will also hide as much internal design as possible to keep things simple and flexible - if you've kept the interface simple and abstract, then you have more flexibility to change the implemenation.
Sounds like good old fashioned down and dirty engineering/development to me.
I know they're also doing research work at Microsoft research, but this sure ain't it.
I'm not sure how this got modded to insightful, since it shows a complete ignorance of stock valuation.
Growth stocks trade on P/E (price/earnings per share) ratios, with people willing to pay premium above-market P/E ratios for stocks with premium growth rates. Slow the growth, and the price will drop because people will pay a lower P/E for slower growth. The absolute $ price per share of a stock has got NOTHING to do with it's value. 1M shares ar $500 or 10M shares at $50 would both give the same company valuation of $500M, and would both give the same P/E ratio.
There is some modest benefit in splitting stocks when the $ price per share gets high, but it's basically psychology. People typically (irrationally) like to buy more shares, or a round 100 multiple of shares, so the same person who might be turned off by a $5000 per share price because he can only afford to buy 1 share, might be more attracted to buy after a 100-1 split when he can instead (obtaining the same % slice of the company) buy a 100 lot for $50 per share. Because psychology can increase demand slightly in this way, splitting stocks does tend to boost the company valuation. A famous example of a very successful stock that NEVER splits is Bershire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's investment vehicle).. their class A shares (BRK-A) are currently $108,000 each!
I don't see any real reason to assume it was rare.
Technology this sophisticated (both in terms of mechanical design/theory and fabrication) doesn't just spring up out of the blue - this represents highly evolved technology. There must have been a whole series of simpler geared devices that lead up to this one, and likely more sophisticated ones that came after that unless there was some catastrophic disruption to the civilization that produced it right at that time.
There's certainly been regressions in human capability as civilizations come and go though.
Because it's such a sophisticated and exotic way to kill someone that it "has" to be Putin/KGB that did it... and this is so obvious that it almost certainly wasn NOT Putin. Putin is no dummy - he'd have the guy killed and made to look like an accident if he wanted to kill him (which I sincerly doubt he did). It was presumably done by someone who wanted to people to think it was ("obviously") Putin to discredit him.
There are human limits on things like how many items we can simulataneoulsy hold in short term emmory (~7) or how fast our brain works, but that doesn't equate to a limit on "productivity". The key here is chunking and levels of abstraction - we can overcome the number of items we can manipulate by "chunking" simpler items into groups that we then consider as a whole (e.g. memorize a phone number as 3 chunks vs 10 digits), and can gain power in our thinking by thinkign at a higher level in terms of more powerful concepts composed of simpler ones. For example, it'd be a lot more productive to design a new spaceship if you can operate at the level of "attach a type X propulsion unit to a type Y living unit" rather than doing low level design, but achieveing this sort of productivity gain requires a lot more intelligence in how components are designed for this sort of higher level usage.
Exactly.
Nothing here to get remotely excited about.
Dumb asses start visualization project without data to visualize. News at 11.
I think the GCC folk are pretty careful and knowledgeable about patents. I've seen a number of previous discussions where they've avoided certain optimization methods because of patents. Anyway, given IBM's involvemnt with Linus, and the fact they they doubtless hold a gazillion more compiler patents than Microsoft, I'm sure there's nothing that gcc needs to do that couldn't be switched to an IBM patented technique if the need ever arose.
It's quite possible that there's so much program trading going on, that you may be able to predict the market (not prfectly, but at least profitably) by effectively predicting what the program traders en-masse are doing. Not that this is necessarily any easier than predicting the mass psychology behind the markets in general, but it does as least point to the fact that much of the market moves according to very deterministic forces.
Anyway, it's already being done, ergo it's possible!
how will they (FSF) stop Novell from using open source code ? They can't, as long as they respect the licencing.
The FSF can't *retroactively* change the licencing, so Novell can continue to use current versions of GPL v.2 software, BUT, what the FSF can do, and is apparently planning to do, is to change the licence on all the software they own copyright to (presumably including gcc, glibc) from GPL v.2 to GPL v.3. Novell will then be forced to choose to continue using the old frozen GPL v.2 versions, or to keep up with the everyone else and use the newer GPL v.3 versions which would force them (or rather Microsoft) to back out of the Microsoft deal because of the patent implications forced by GPL v.3.
Owning glibc puts FSF in a pretty powerful position, since even if Linus is keeping the kernel under GPL v.2, the kernel is in of itself useless without glibc, and any kernel enhancements would be useless without userland (glibc) support. Of couse it's nt just glibc - the majority of Linux userland is GNU/FSF.
What about the pre-computer standard secretarial practice of photocopying documents so as to be able to file them in multiple folders in different orders, or multiple database indeces on the same table for that matter, not to mention a zillion programs that use structures with nextBiggest, nextClosest, etc links.
Maintaining multiple pre-sorted orders is blindinly obvious to everyone (and thus, in theory at least unpatentable) and has been since before computers even existed. It hard to know what's more pathetic - that LSI thought this innovative and patentable, or that the patent office did.