I don't think it asks permission for what you think it does. It's two separate things its asks permission to do:
1. Read and write contacts
2. Gain some sort of recognition in Android's auth system. It may be that it registers itself as an authentication method (kind of like your google or facebook login can be used to identify you elsewhere), or that it makes use of such authentication services, I didn't look too closely. Either way, it's nothing to worry about.
senators were never supposed to represent our interests.
Exactly. And if you say this is the way it should be, you're opposed to the idea of equal representation in government. If you only trust some fraction of the power of government to be equally distributed, you don't believe in equal representation. Presumably, you either don't trust people to represent their own interest, or you think some people's interests should be a priori favored.
(There are further issues arising from the fact that representatives aren't... wait for it... representative. Also the electoral college, despite being based on population, does not give equal power to all citizens either in theory or practice.)
Rough paraphrase of common slashdot comment, seen dozens of times and usually modded to 5:
"The US isn't a democracy, it's a republic! It's for good reason [citizens aren't equally represented in senatorial and presidental elections], that's the way the framers wanted it. Democracy is just mob rule, and they knew it!"
So, you think if the franchise wasn't extended to the poor, the system would have been stable?
If indeed it was true that only people of means would be interested in defending the Constitution and Bill of Right, that only shows the depravity of those documents. It would be damning proof that they were just a tool for the wealthier classes to keep control. If the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did defend the interests of the lower classes, why shouldn't they be interested in protecting it?
But you are undoubtedly right that it was thinking like this that (for the most part) guided the founders. Which shows which an uphill fight you have before you. Even the idea that people are equally entitled to represent their own interests is controversial in the US. The system is deliberately designed against it. So why shouldn't the interests of lobbyist have privilege over yours?
You do know how this works in parliamentarian systems? Generally it works like this: Local party groups - often numbering in the hundreds, choose delegates to be sent to a regional convention. There, they vote over the list ordering for their party in their district. Sometimes representatives from other regions have opinions about who should have the important places on the list, and they are allowed to speak. However, they don't have a vote: the decision remains with the delegates.
Some dubious parties, with what we could diplomatically call a "democratic deficit", have tried interfering with the process, usually by excluding the candidates opposing their favorite for "disloyalty". This inevitably causes a backlash, and local party members leave in droves, leaving the party with little presence on the ground. In brief: it doesn't work.
The "deals in smoky back rooms" that are often invoked in anti-parliamentarian rhetoric in the US, are mostly just a scare.
By the way, I find it somewhat 'ironic' that the UK parliament is used as an example of a 'modern' democratic system when the US system was based upon the UK parliament.
The UK parliament has changed a lot since then. But it is true that the UK constitution is very old-fashioned compared to most others.
In the US, there's even a lot of public sentiment against the idea of equal representation, so I don't see much chance of any significant changes.
I think that a "game" is an extremely effective way of conveying the true horror of history.
If it was, it wouldn't be a game. One of the defining attributes of a game is that it has clearly defined, limited, reachable goals. It is at best a simplification of the real world, more commonly it's just a way to have fun incorporating real-world themes.
There's really no more reason why a kid should be more horrified at playing this game than playing Dungeon Keeper - unless he knows exactly how historically accurate the game is, in which case he wouldn't learn anything from it anyway. I think kids would need an unusually low level of detachment from computer games, and also a certain lack of common sense, for this game to emotionally affect them.
Even if it did, would that be a good thing? Say there was a couple of Stasi officers in exile somewhere, wanting to defend the DDR. Would they make a game trying to manipulate emotions, like this, or would they try to engage people's minds with documentation?
They would go for the emotions, of course. Minds can detect inconsistencies and see through lies. Emotions don't have that kind of resistance.
You're in trouble. That's why they use a virtual machine architecture in the first place. You need to keep porting/recompiling your app for all different hardware platforms that come to run android in future years.
Of course, on iPhone, all programs will have to do this if there are ever architecture shifts.
My guess is that if/when it happens, the android stores are going to get fuzzy about reporting correct compatibility information, especially for programs using the NDK.
Also, IBM has changed a lot since Gosling started to work there. If you say to any employee of a major technology company"You we're really awful 30 years ago", you might well get "Yeah we were, weren't we?" unless the one you're talking to is a highly touchy veteran.
With IBM, it's hard to imagine they could be entirely straight-faced about their past. Have you heard their old company songs?
You may be contracting for Cisco or Dell You may like to gamble, you might like to sell You may be the code golf champion of the world You may write a quine with a long string in Perl.
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed You're gonna have to serve somebody, It may be Google or it may be SAP, But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
It's an old theme. But IT is all over the world, yet not everywhere did income inequality rise. The English-speaking world got hit hard, France did not - don't you wonder why?
People want to make money by getting their iFart application to the top of Apple's list. Writing a good program that doesn't already exist would be productive work, this isn't.
In other words, what's good for Apple, is good for the consumer? I see... a walled garden & company store monopoly is highly beneficial for Apple, therefore consumers ought to give it to them. It's in their own best interest.
It's bizarre logic, but I admit, it's probably what a lot of Apple fans think, and a reason for its success.
Here, in the pre-multitouchscreen days (or as some pretend, in the "pre-smartphone" days), there was a big market for Java ME applications. Appstore-type companies took out whole page ads listing hundreds of games and silly apps (same as you find a lot of in the iphone marketplace) which you would select and pay for via SMS, and download via GPRS. Subscription services, which would give you N downloads per month, were also big business.
The customers were mostly teenagers, true, but kids are quick at adopting new technologies.
What Apple really did about phone apps, was to use their monopoly to force a single, trusted, highly visible shop, rather than the lots of lots of semi-dubious ones Java ME had. Technologically, there was very little new.
Just about the only thing you will need to use the DalvikJava for is integration with the app system. Which you want.
Re:FOR ALL AUTOTOOLS "REPLACEMENTS"
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 1
Cmake just needs to be able to compile itself on the platform. Since it's C++ with few to no dependencies, that's not very demanding.
CMake also makes project files and makefiles more suitable for non-unix development.
shell+make+gcc aren't present natively on Windows, that's the whole point. Installing cygwin/mingw is a lot more demanding than installing a single, small executable (that you can include with the source).
Autoconf runs a boatload of checks to make sure it runs on archaic Unixes like Xenix and Irix (except that it won't actually, if you are so naive as to try). But Windows and other non-Poxis OSes (which, believe it or not, have their uses) it is stubbornly hostile to.
Re:FOR ALL AUTOTOOLS "REPLACEMENTS"
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 1
This is wrong, only working shell+make+gcc should be needed to actually build software.
In other words, programs should not build natively on Windows. It's 2010, isn't it time you see how outdated that requirement is?
Re:Cross-platform, but not cross-compiling
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 1
I know better now: most of the source packages out there DO NOT cross compile worth a damn! They might BUILD NATIVELY on a wide range of architectures, but not cross-compile.
I think this is the problem with autotools. It gives the impression of supporting lots of things, but the majority of scripts out there even break if you try to build in a separate tree from the source code. All those checks for the behavior of strcpy() and so on impresses newbies to think that their program would compile on Xenix and Sys5 and what have you, while in practice it's completely pointless.
Re:Autotools do not need a book
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 1
The efficient markets hypothesis as applied to software. If it was better, we'd already use it!
I suppose it's nice
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I suppose it's nice that someone writes a book like this, since a lot of existing projects use autotools (or more commonly, try to by means of copy/paste and cargo-cult based build scripting).
But autotools should really be phased out. It solves a lot of problems that aren't problems anymore, and makes a helluva lot of new ones in the process. There are a lot of up and coming build systems to challenge it, and then there's CMake which is an OK compromise between those and practicality.
The SD was created by the merger of several small, right-wing anti immigration parties, some of which were pretty openly nazist. The Jewish community in Sweden are among the many who accuse them of still "wearing their brown shirts under their jackets".
For what it's worth, though, there is still at least one openly neo-nazi party that did not join them, and now occupies the niche (such as it is) on their right.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it asks permission for what you think it does. It's two separate things its asks permission to do:
1. Read and write contacts
2. Gain some sort of recognition in Android's auth system. It may be that it registers itself as an authentication method (kind of like your google or facebook login can be used to identify you elsewhere), or that it makes use of such authentication services, I didn't look too closely. Either way, it's nothing to worry about.
Exactly. And if you say this is the way it should be, you're opposed to the idea of equal representation in government. If you only trust some fraction of the power of government to be equally distributed, you don't believe in equal representation. Presumably, you either don't trust people to represent their own interest, or you think some people's interests should be a priori favored.
(There are further issues arising from the fact that representatives aren't ... wait for it ... representative. Also the electoral college, despite being based on population, does not give equal power to all citizens either in theory or practice.)
Rough paraphrase of common slashdot comment, seen dozens of times and usually modded to 5:
"The US isn't a democracy, it's a republic! It's for good reason [citizens aren't equally represented in senatorial and presidental elections], that's the way the framers wanted it. Democracy is just mob rule, and they knew it!"
So, you think if the franchise wasn't extended to the poor, the system would have been stable?
If indeed it was true that only people of means would be interested in defending the Constitution and Bill of Right, that only shows the depravity of those documents. It would be damning proof that they were just a tool for the wealthier classes to keep control. If the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did defend the interests of the lower classes, why shouldn't they be interested in protecting it?
But you are undoubtedly right that it was thinking like this that (for the most part) guided the founders. Which shows which an uphill fight you have before you. Even the idea that people are equally entitled to represent their own interests is controversial in the US. The system is deliberately designed against it. So why shouldn't the interests of lobbyist have privilege over yours?
You do know how this works in parliamentarian systems? Generally it works like this: Local party groups - often numbering in the hundreds, choose delegates to be sent to a regional convention. There, they vote over the list ordering for their party in their district. Sometimes representatives from other regions have opinions about who should have the important places on the list, and they are allowed to speak. However, they don't have a vote: the decision remains with the delegates.
Some dubious parties, with what we could diplomatically call a "democratic deficit", have tried interfering with the process, usually by excluding the candidates opposing their favorite for "disloyalty". This inevitably causes a backlash, and local party members leave in droves, leaving the party with little presence on the ground. In brief: it doesn't work.
The "deals in smoky back rooms" that are often invoked in anti-parliamentarian rhetoric in the US, are mostly just a scare.
The UK parliament has changed a lot since then. But it is true that the UK constitution is very old-fashioned compared to most others.
In the US, there's even a lot of public sentiment against the idea of equal representation, so I don't see much chance of any significant changes.
Define "everyone else".
If it was, it wouldn't be a game. One of the defining attributes of a game is that it has clearly defined, limited, reachable goals. It is at best a simplification of the real world, more commonly it's just a way to have fun incorporating real-world themes.
There's really no more reason why a kid should be more horrified at playing this game than playing Dungeon Keeper - unless he knows exactly how historically accurate the game is, in which case he wouldn't learn anything from it anyway. I think kids would need an unusually low level of detachment from computer games, and also a certain lack of common sense, for this game to emotionally affect them.
Even if it did, would that be a good thing? Say there was a couple of Stasi officers in exile somewhere, wanting to defend the DDR. Would they make a game trying to manipulate emotions, like this, or would they try to engage people's minds with documentation?
They would go for the emotions, of course. Minds can detect inconsistencies and see through lies. Emotions don't have that kind of resistance.
Now why should we fight with the devil's weapons?
You're in trouble. That's why they use a virtual machine architecture in the first place.
You need to keep porting/recompiling your app for all different hardware platforms that come to run android in future years.
Of course, on iPhone, all programs will have to do this if there are ever architecture shifts.
My guess is that if/when it happens, the android stores are going to get fuzzy about reporting correct compatibility information, especially for programs using the NDK.
Here are a couple, by the way:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/music/music_clips.html
I've heard Esperanto hymns that are less embarrassing.
Also, IBM has changed a lot since Gosling started to work there. If you say to any employee of a major technology company"You we're really awful 30 years ago", you might well get "Yeah we were, weren't we?" unless the one you're talking to is a highly touchy veteran.
With IBM, it's hard to imagine they could be entirely straight-faced about their past. Have you heard their old company songs?
You may be contracting for Cisco or Dell
You may like to gamble, you might like to sell
You may be the code golf champion of the world
You may write a quine with a long string in Perl.
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be Google or it may be SAP,
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
And amazingly, no one has thought of calling a programming language Crema yet.
It's an old theme. But IT is all over the world, yet not everywhere did income inequality rise. The English-speaking world got hit hard, France did not - don't you wonder why?
People want to make money by getting their iFart application to the top of Apple's list. Writing a good program that doesn't already exist would be productive work, this isn't.
In other words, what's good for Apple, is good for the consumer? I see... a walled garden & company store monopoly is highly beneficial for Apple, therefore consumers ought to give it to them. It's in their own best interest.
It's bizarre logic, but I admit, it's probably what a lot of Apple fans think, and a reason for its success.
Yes! Think of how much better the world would be!
Get down of your high horse gilesjuk, and give that strawman a great, big hug!
Here, in the pre-multitouchscreen days (or as some pretend, in the "pre-smartphone" days), there was a big market for Java ME applications. Appstore-type companies took out whole page ads listing hundreds of games and silly apps (same as you find a lot of in the iphone marketplace) which you would select and pay for via SMS, and download via GPRS. Subscription services, which would give you N downloads per month, were also big business.
The customers were mostly teenagers, true, but kids are quick at adopting new technologies.
What Apple really did about phone apps, was to use their monopoly to force a single, trusted, highly visible shop, rather than the lots of lots of semi-dubious ones Java ME had. Technologically, there was very little new.
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html#overview
Just about the only thing you will need to use the DalvikJava for is integration with the app system. Which you want.
Cmake just needs to be able to compile itself on the platform. Since it's C++ with few to no dependencies, that's not very demanding.
CMake also makes project files and makefiles more suitable for non-unix development.
shell+make+gcc aren't present natively on Windows, that's the whole point. Installing cygwin/mingw is a lot more demanding than installing a single, small executable (that you can include with the source).
Autoconf runs a boatload of checks to make sure it runs on archaic Unixes like Xenix and Irix (except that it won't actually, if you are so naive as to try). But Windows and other non-Poxis OSes (which, believe it or not, have their uses) it is stubbornly hostile to.
In other words, programs should not build natively on Windows. It's 2010, isn't it time you see how outdated that requirement is?
I think this is the problem with autotools. It gives the impression of supporting lots of things, but the majority of scripts out there even break if you try to build in a separate tree from the source code. All those checks for the behavior of strcpy() and so on impresses newbies to think that their program would compile on Xenix and Sys5 and what have you, while in practice it's completely pointless.
The efficient markets hypothesis as applied to software. If it was better, we'd already use it!
I suppose it's nice that someone writes a book like this, since a lot of existing projects use autotools (or more commonly, try to by means of copy/paste and cargo-cult based build scripting).
But autotools should really be phased out. It solves a lot of problems that aren't problems anymore, and makes a helluva lot of new ones in the process. There are a lot of up and coming build systems to challenge it, and then there's CMake which is an OK compromise between those and practicality.
The SD was created by the merger of several small, right-wing anti immigration parties, some of which were pretty openly nazist. The Jewish community in Sweden are among the many who accuse them of still "wearing their brown shirts under their jackets".
For what it's worth, though, there is still at least one openly neo-nazi party that did not join them, and now occupies the niche (such as it is) on their right.