Samsung is a supplier of really top quality electronic components in the industry, and at the same time offers those components at extremely competitive prices. That made Apple the primary beneficiary of their contractual relationship, because you can be dead certain that Apple didn't let Samsung charge a premium just because their components were going into high margin Apple products. Samsung doesn't have to beg people to buy their components, they sell themselves on price. Samsung PoP memory even went into the extremely cost-sensitive Raspberry Pi, which really underlines Samsung's approach to pricing.
Once Apple replaces Samsung after their myopic patent war, the replacement partner is very unlikely to match Samsung on quality and price together, so if Apple wants high quality they're going to have to pay more and pass that cost on to their customers.
There is only one loser in all of this, Apple users, because it's unlikely that Apple will reduce their margins. And Samsung is almost certainly delighted that once Apple finds a replacement they can stop supplying a partner that chose to become an enemy, and in the interim to force a price hike.
Samsung is a semiconductor manufacturer (among many other things), and with that comes a whole slew of innovation in electronics. You should check out their leading edge work in camera sensors, not just for smartphones but also at the high end for very impressive cameras of all types that rival Nikon and Canon in some areas. They are very much a leading technology company.
And of course their ARM designs are among the best in the field as well, often detailed here. It's a reasonable guess that Intel is going to be under pressure from Samsung in the power-per-watt area in the not too distant future.
Comparing Samsung to Apple is kind of silly. The company is much more comparable to Sony (in their heyday), omnipresent in all fields of manufacturing. Like all huge engineering conglomerates, they innovate incrementally and continuously, and mostly silently without needing a media circus.
I think perhaps the point that he was making about designing with pointers wasn't fully appreciated by everyone, because he didn't really spell it out. It's not just a matter of preferred coding style nor clarity, far from it.
The unconditional pointer update approach is atomic by virtue of the update being performed in a single memory write cycle, whereas the longer conditional form is clearly not atomic, and to make it atomic would require using locks. (There's a bit more to it than that because you still have to worry about what is being assigned, but it does reduce the scope of the problem significantly.)
This distinction is extremely important in a highly concurrent application like an operating system kernel, because you can merrily use his preferred code everywhere without worrying whether it's going to be used concurrently or only called within a protected critical region. In contrast, if the conditional form were used concurrently then you would have a wonderful recipe for intermittent concurrency bugs, the kernel designer's very worst nightmare.
On report panels and interviews, the scientists and engineers on the Curiosity team refer to the rover as "she" and "her".
Using the female gender seems to be traditional for ships, so perhaps that extends to spaceships, and by association, to space probes.
Early days, so quality is far below par
on
The Rage For MOOCs
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· Score: 1
It takes time to hone courses and online teaching methodologies into effective systems of education, so it's no huge surprise if the quality is below standard at the moment.
That first AI course of Thrun and Norvig's was nothing short of a didactic disaster, full of unexplained inconsistencies in the material, very limited coverage of the area, and no effective authoritative means of answering queries and misunderstandings. The many online fora were just the blind leading the blind. In summary, it was not a Stanford quality course. Many people still benefited from it, but that's a testament to their own individual perseverance and not to the quality of the material nor the teaching.
It will take time to get it right, and I'm sure that that particular course has improved already. But even more importantly, it will require a lot of experience to flow under the bridge before MOOCs earn significant respect, much of that experience based on trial and error. This should be no surprise. Physically attended courses didn't become perfect overnight either.
Encryption of all your Internet comms has been recommended forever and a day, but the bulk of the population hasn't bothered so far because the "postman opening letters" hasn't been very overt and in the public eye.
Now that the politicians are all in the game of demanding their "right" to monitor everything, perhaps it's time that people will respond by finally encrypting everything and telling the police state advocates to sod off and stop terrorizing the population.
I wonder how Apple is going to spin the fact that every man and their dog was releasing a 7" tablet at the time that Jobs was vitriolic in his total contempt for that size. How times change.
Welcome to the party, Apple. You'll discover that it's an excellent form factor for tablets, very mobile for use on the go instead of merely transportable like larger ones, and it doesn't force you to squint like a smartphone display. Best all-rounder size, I reckon.
I love mine, it's proven repeatedly to have been the right choice and an excellent workhorse.
This man deserves a medal for ingenuity under extreme hardship.
One thing that added unnecessarily to his misery though was that the hospital recommended a prosthetic that he couldn't afford. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination for hospitals to run cheap RepRap-type 3D printers for such needs and print out basic parts on demand. Both the building and running costs are very low indeed.
Of course such parts would be very poor compared to professional prosthetics or even professional 3D printing, but when the choice is between that and nothing, it's hard to argue against it. And the flexibility of such printing means that it is easily adapted to evolve with individual requirements, and replacement of printed parts is almost cost-free when they break or wear out.
It seems a good fit for this kind of unfortunate situation, and it might have made this man's days more bearable as he worked on his own solution, or indeed contributed to it where plastic is more appropriate than steel.
I recognize that this is a way out there question to the point of making me laugh, but nevertheless, it's a real physics question in the same general domain as GRACE's measurements. A general idea of the magnitudes involved would certainly be interesting.
By how many orders of magnitude do orbital measurements of local gravity fall short of being able to detect human or human-generated movement on the planet's surface, for example the travel of a train across the country? Related, would the main difficulty likely be to achieve sufficient sensitivity, or to extract the desired signal from the noise floor of atmospheric gravity and other sources? And finally, what is the gravitational contribution of the atmosphere to your measurements?
It's somewhat long, but a one-line summary of what they concluded could be roughly:
At least in the UK and EU, there is no strong legal basis for constraints on non-commercial personal 3D printing.
It's worth reading the whole thing though, as it covers many different forms of legal restrictions on object replication. It certainly foresees problems ahead for commercial companies in this area, but provides legal opinion why personal printing is largely immune to it all.
Of course this means very little in the US legal system where anyone can sue anyone else for anything or for nothing.
Humans have an innate ability to comprehend the spatial organization of an object and to replicate it in another medium, even to scale it automatically. Most of us are not expert sculptors and so we would do a rather poor job of it, but nevertheless, the ability is inherent in us all.
The so-called "reverse rendering" in the article is, again, just part of our innate object recognition ability. Without that ability, images would unrecognizable to us as 2D projections of 3D objects. The ability appears to be quite widespread throughout the animal kingdom too, it's certainly not limited just to us.
Improving this process by computerizing the object capture from 2D images and replicating the object through 3D printing is obviously very useful on a practical level, but hopefully the process is not being claimed to be something new. The process is quite obvious to us because we do it in our heads and with our hands as a natural ability, and it has thousands of years of prior art.
Doing it on a computer with a lot of maths doesn't change that. And maths isn't itself patentable, or at it least shouldn't be.
He's right in many more ways than one. Hedging his bets against a future in which Microsoft is his biggest rival is only one reason for doing this. The other big reason is simply to expand the gaming market, and to lead it.
It's no secret that the Linux world is full of endearing geeks and nerds who love to play video games --- there could hardly be a bigger truism! And yet they are totally under-served on their favorite platform, and frequently have to run a Windows box for the sole reason of being able to play their games. That presents an obvious business opportunity.
By supplying Linux gamers with good games on their favorite platform, not only is he expanding his customer base to a whole new audience of Linux-only gamers, but is also making it possible for Linux gamers to avoid running a Windows box at all. And that can remove one of his rivals from the competition entirely. It would be a move of genius.
What's more, if Linux gaming takes off bigtime (his company certainly has every opportunity to make that happen), then he will be the leader in a new gaming frontier, and everyone else will be playing catchup. That is worth a gamble all by itself, and it's not even a high-risk venture.
I think Gabe's business nose can sense a big opportunity here, a huge and almost unexploited market that he can make his own, while at the same time safeguarding his future against Microsoft.
The pot is black and has conflict of interest
on
The HP Memristor Debate
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Mouttet, a former U.S. patent officer who specialized in nanotechnology, has long argued that HP's technology is not really a memristor. "All HP is doing, in my opinion, is skewing the history to make it look like they were the originators of this technology and it is really not true", Mouttet tells Wired. "To me, this is unethical."
Former U.S. patent officer calls someone unethical. The mind boggles.
And as if that weren't enough, he has patents in the area himself and therefore cannot be a fair witness.
Skepticism about radical new devices is always healthy, but Mouttet's opinion on this topic inspires the opposite of confidence.
A probe in orbit around every planet or dwarf planet in the solar system would seems like a fairly basic NASA objective to me.
I know that New Horizons will be using its velocity to also attempt flybys of one or more other Kuiper belt objects after it shoots through the Pluto system, and that is very worthwhile indeed, but we also seriously need a probe in orbit around Pluto itself.
I hope that they're working on such a mission already, so that when New Horizons returns Pluto data in 2015 they just need to tweak a few parameters and be ready to launch an orbital mission. Such new data could even be sent to an orbital mission that's already en route to Pluto.
If something requires CLI to work, it means every single user must type in at least one command on the CLI for the device to function.
Yes, but words are something that we are very good at.
If a GUI were made complex enough to be as flexible as the commandline, then people would have to remember just as many GUI options as commandline options.
But there's a difference. Humans are pre-wired to remember tens to hundreds of thousands of words trivially, without thinking. In contrast, we're not wired at all to remember many spatial locations, which is why complex GUIs are an utter nightmare to us.
CLIs match our brain and memory capabilities perfectly, at least when readable words are used as option names. Those who want to do away with the commandline don't realize that they're asking for it to be replaced by something that would be far, far worse.
Directly relevant to this topic, if you use Firefox, try installing the Mozilla add-on Ghostery and monitor the little ghost icon which display a number greater than zero whenever the current web page contains one or more trackers.
If you've never seen it before, it's quite eye-opening how virtually every site contains trackers these days, some sites using large numbers of them. Ghostery blocks every tracker unless told not to, but even if you don't want them blocked, it can be interesting to monitor them and watch how they interact with NoScript.
Good add-on. I wonder whether Chrome and Chromium provide anything equivalent.
ARM works because 1) it's good enough while being 2) cheap enough.
I think that you are totally right about this. Maintaining x86 compatibility may hurt Intel a little, but it's not the key issue.
ARM-based SoCs cost under $10 in volume, and Intel simply cannot compete in that space. It doesn't want to. It likes large prices and huge profit margins.
Meanwhile, ARM keeps improving the performance of their cores, while the SoC manufacturers keep improving the capabilities of their SoCs, including (critically) power savings. It's a marriage made in heaven, and the only way that ARM can lose this market to Intel is by upping their license royalties massively so that ARM-based SoC prices move into Intel's territory. There is no sign of that happening.
Short version of the above: Intel fails in the mobile space because of price inertia. There is no sign of that changing either, at least judging by the article. They refuse to compete on SoC pricing. And they're in denial that price matters.
Not only is there massive interest in openness and transparency in the voting process, but there also a need for extremely thorough vetting of the software, its design, and its update lineage. All of these things make it an ideal application for public development under the open source model.
Because of the huge number of expert eyeballs that would be paying very close attention to this code, you can be beyond certain that it would rapidly become some of the most robust software on the planet, and employing the most secure cryptographic systems for security and privacy and anti-corruption devices known to us.
The only people guaranteed to hate this (apart from e-voting machine manufacturers) would be those who currently have backdoors into the proprietary software. They'll fight the idea tooth and nail.
You're right for more than just the reason you give. TFA also fails to understand that the patent system is structured to encourage litigation and to benefit the legal profession on both sides of a patent conflict. TFA's suggestion would do nothing to change this.
Ideally software and business method patents should disappear altogether, but if one is seeking alternatives then the first goal should be to limit the audience exposed to patent litigation.
That can be done in a number of ways, one being to exclude private citizens and corporations below a certain turnover from patent liability altogether.
This would encourage the creation of many small competing businesses and would be hard for megacorps to argue against, because all politicians pay lip service to supporting small businesses. Also, the turnover cap automatically ensures that competing corps cannot grow to the size of the patent holder, so arguments against it are really quite weak.
As you point out, the incumbents would still fight tooth and nail against it, but they would be on much weaker ground than today, and most importantly, lawyers would be presented with a much reduced population of potential victims.
Note also that the many calls to limit patent duration drastically, eg. to 5 years, would have exactly the same effect of reducing the number of people exposed to patent litigation. That idea is good too, but it doesn't level the playing field as well as a turnover cap would do. Perhaps both approaches should be used together.
Although you're making a "glass half full" kind of prediction, it's not hard to imagine that the opposite of your guess might occur in the US: All the other ARM licensees might see this as a fantastic coup for Broadcom, and follow suit with their own competing $25 - $35 boards.
After all, Texas Instruments already has their own $5 SoC available and used in their BeagleBone, so they could quite easily remove features from that board and release something into the Raspberry Pi price niche for education. (The BeagleBone's $89 places it far outside the Raspberry Pi's price niche.)
The Chinese will of course follow suit with boards based on their wildly successful Allwinner A10 ARM device, which is far better than Broadcom's SoC (on specs) and only costs $7 in production volumes. Expect a pile of competitors from that quarter!
Slashdot used to have a perfectly working front page for "today", plus specific URLs for the day before, the day before that, and so on. It used to employ some of the good principles of Roy Fielding's thesis on REST, where each page is a resource with a distinct address that makes sense. You could give someone a link and know exactly what they're seeing. Well no more.
Instead of that sane technical design, now we have some kind of utterly broken page expansion system linked through "Many More", and you never know what the hell you're looking at, and when you return from a nested page you're seeing something totally different. It's a technical disaster, and given that this pretends to be a technical site, its technical design is quite beyond the pale.
Bring back a bit of sane web technology please. Lose the totally unhelpful "Many More" which is a wholly broken design, and bring back dated pages.
Indeed, it seems there was some serious wishful thinking going on. The Foundation's people are so heavily invested in the project that they probably can't see it very objectively. Not too surprising I guess.
The BIS has just given them the bad news of how things really stand though. Here is a new update from Element 14's FAQ (one of the two Raspberry Pi distributors), quoting news from the Foundation's Eben Upton:
HOT OFF THE PRESS UPDATE FROM EBEN UPTON OF RASPBERRY PI EARLIER TODAY:
"We have spoken with BIS this morning, and have been told that, given the volumes involved and the demographic mix of likely users, the development board exemption is not applicable to us; as a result, even the first uncased developer units of Raspberry Pi will require a CE mark prior to distribution in the EU..........we are working with RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell to bring Raspberry Pi into a compliant state as soon as is humanly possible."
.
The above is no surprise to anyone who uses Arduinos. Like the Raspberry Pi, they're bare boards, also from a European company (in Italy), and are manufactured in the same kind of volumes as the Raspberry Pi. They're fully certified with RoHS, CE, and FCC (Class B) certifications (as well as something called Life Zero Impact).
The Pi is even more consumer-oriented than the Arduino, since it's a fully working Linux computer and the Foundation has repeatedly extolled its great multimedia capabilities, even writing articles about its use as a media centre. This guaranteed immense interest from virtually everybody, not just from electronics enthusiasts, so huge numbers of these will be going into regular domestic situations.
Thinking that 10 thousand of the boards could avoid industrial certification when a large proportion of them will be purchased by ordinary consumers was really rather naive.
What sort of instrumentation did they use to take temperature measurements for the center?
They can't measure it directly, obviously. The numbers quoted are those given by our best scientific models of the Sun's structure and its nuclear processes. Those models predict fairly accurately the properties and behavior that we *can* observe and measure from Earth and from our space probes, so they give us some reasonable degree of confidence that we're in the right ballpark when estimating a temperature for the core.
Of course those estimates will change as our understanding improves, but that's the same for all science.
The actual "news" itself is not the point, but how a news gathering and distribution company gets some revenue from reporting done by their reporters.
Except that the actual news really is the point, whereas how a company expects to get its revenue is merely a choice, and that choice may be unrealistic. The world is not obligated to keep a company in profit, just because it chooses to work in a particular area which is now obsolete.
I may choose to earn a profit making and selling buggy whips, but I'm not going to make much money because cars have replaced horse buggies and the world is not obligated to keep paying me for my unrealistic expectations. And so it is for news. It has been democratized by the Internet, and the news producers are now working in a field of diminishing returns and next to zero expectations of profit.
It's pretty funny when the corporations that have traditionally thought of news as their "product" come face to face with the Internet, where "plain ol' people" seem to discover and distribute news just as well as they, or in most cases a lot better and faster. Shocking!:P
Their C&D's and other tactics based on concepts of "intellectual property" really have no solid foundation at all because news isn't actually a product nor of artistic merit. It's a sign of obsolete businesses using every protectionist tactic they can to stave off their demise, nothing more.
It won't work. Things move on, they always do. News has been democratized.
Slashdot Mirror
Samsung is a supplier of really top quality electronic components in the industry, and at the same time offers those components at extremely competitive prices. That made Apple the primary beneficiary of their contractual relationship, because you can be dead certain that Apple didn't let Samsung charge a premium just because their components were going into high margin Apple products. Samsung doesn't have to beg people to buy their components, they sell themselves on price. Samsung PoP memory even went into the extremely cost-sensitive Raspberry Pi, which really underlines Samsung's approach to pricing.
Once Apple replaces Samsung after their myopic patent war, the replacement partner is very unlikely to match Samsung on quality and price together, so if Apple wants high quality they're going to have to pay more and pass that cost on to their customers.
There is only one loser in all of this, Apple users, because it's unlikely that Apple will reduce their margins. And Samsung is almost certainly delighted that once Apple finds a replacement they can stop supplying a partner that chose to become an enemy, and in the interim to force a price hike.
Samsung is a semiconductor manufacturer (among many other things), and with that comes a whole slew of innovation in electronics. You should check out their leading edge work in camera sensors, not just for smartphones but also at the high end for very impressive cameras of all types that rival Nikon and Canon in some areas. They are very much a leading technology company.
And of course their ARM designs are among the best in the field as well, often detailed here. It's a reasonable guess that Intel is going to be under pressure from Samsung in the power-per-watt area in the not too distant future.
Comparing Samsung to Apple is kind of silly. The company is much more comparable to Sony (in their heyday), omnipresent in all fields of manufacturing. Like all huge engineering conglomerates, they innovate incrementally and continuously, and mostly silently without needing a media circus.
I think perhaps the point that he was making about designing with pointers wasn't fully appreciated by everyone, because he didn't really spell it out. It's not just a matter of preferred coding style nor clarity, far from it.
The unconditional pointer update approach is atomic by virtue of the update being performed in a single memory write cycle, whereas the longer conditional form is clearly not atomic, and to make it atomic would require using locks. (There's a bit more to it than that because you still have to worry about what is being assigned, but it does reduce the scope of the problem significantly.)
This distinction is extremely important in a highly concurrent application like an operating system kernel, because you can merrily use his preferred code everywhere without worrying whether it's going to be used concurrently or only called within a protected critical region. In contrast, if the conditional form were used concurrently then you would have a wonderful recipe for intermittent concurrency bugs, the kernel designer's very worst nightmare.
On report panels and interviews, the scientists and engineers on the Curiosity team refer to the rover as "she" and "her" .
Using the female gender seems to be traditional for ships, so perhaps that extends to spaceships, and by association, to space probes.
It takes time to hone courses and online teaching methodologies into effective systems of education, so it's no huge surprise if the quality is below standard at the moment.
That first AI course of Thrun and Norvig's was nothing short of a didactic disaster, full of unexplained inconsistencies in the material, very limited coverage of the area, and no effective authoritative means of answering queries and misunderstandings. The many online fora were just the blind leading the blind. In summary, it was not a Stanford quality course. Many people still benefited from it, but that's a testament to their own individual perseverance and not to the quality of the material nor the teaching.
It will take time to get it right, and I'm sure that that particular course has improved already. But even more importantly, it will require a lot of experience to flow under the bridge before MOOCs earn significant respect, much of that experience based on trial and error. This should be no surprise. Physically attended courses didn't become perfect overnight either.
Encryption of all your Internet comms has been recommended forever and a day, but the bulk of the population hasn't bothered so far because the "postman opening letters" hasn't been very overt and in the public eye.
Now that the politicians are all in the game of demanding their "right" to monitor everything, perhaps it's time that people will respond by finally encrypting everything and telling the police state advocates to sod off and stop terrorizing the population.
I wonder how Apple is going to spin the fact that every man and their dog was releasing a 7" tablet at the time that Jobs was vitriolic in his total contempt for that size. How times change.
Welcome to the party, Apple. You'll discover that it's an excellent form factor for tablets, very mobile for use on the go instead of merely transportable like larger ones, and it doesn't force you to squint like a smartphone display. Best all-rounder size, I reckon.
I love mine, it's proven repeatedly to have been the right choice and an excellent workhorse.
This man deserves a medal for ingenuity under extreme hardship.
One thing that added unnecessarily to his misery though was that the hospital recommended a prosthetic that he couldn't afford. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination for hospitals to run cheap RepRap-type 3D printers for such needs and print out basic parts on demand. Both the building and running costs are very low indeed.
Of course such parts would be very poor compared to professional prosthetics or even professional 3D printing, but when the choice is between that and nothing, it's hard to argue against it. And the flexibility of such printing means that it is easily adapted to evolve with individual requirements, and replacement of printed parts is almost cost-free when they break or wear out.
It seems a good fit for this kind of unfortunate situation, and it might have made this man's days more bearable as he worked on his own solution, or indeed contributed to it where plastic is more appropriate than steel.
I recognize that this is a way out there question to the point of making me laugh, but nevertheless, it's a real physics question in the same general domain as GRACE's measurements. A general idea of the magnitudes involved would certainly be interesting.
By how many orders of magnitude do orbital measurements of local gravity fall short of being able to detect human or human-generated movement on the planet's surface, for example the travel of a train across the country? Related, would the main difficulty likely be to achieve sufficient sensitivity, or to extract the desired signal from the noise floor of atmospheric gravity and other sources? And finally, what is the gravitational contribution of the atmosphere to your measurements?
Here is a legal analysis of the situation:
The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing
It's somewhat long, but a one-line summary of what they concluded could be roughly:
It's worth reading the whole thing though, as it covers many different forms of legal restrictions on object replication. It certainly foresees problems ahead for commercial companies in this area, but provides legal opinion why personal printing is largely immune to it all.
Of course this means very little in the US legal system where anyone can sue anyone else for anything or for nothing.
Humans have an innate ability to comprehend the spatial organization of an object and to replicate it in another medium, even to scale it automatically. Most of us are not expert sculptors and so we would do a rather poor job of it, but nevertheless, the ability is inherent in us all.
The so-called "reverse rendering" in the article is, again, just part of our innate object recognition ability. Without that ability, images would unrecognizable to us as 2D projections of 3D objects. The ability appears to be quite widespread throughout the animal kingdom too, it's certainly not limited just to us.
Improving this process by computerizing the object capture from 2D images and replicating the object through 3D printing is obviously very useful on a practical level, but hopefully the process is not being claimed to be something new. The process is quite obvious to us because we do it in our heads and with our hands as a natural ability, and it has thousands of years of prior art.
Doing it on a computer with a lot of maths doesn't change that. And maths isn't itself patentable, or at it least shouldn't be.
He's right in many more ways than one. Hedging his bets against a future in which Microsoft is his biggest rival is only one reason for doing this. The other big reason is simply to expand the gaming market, and to lead it.
It's no secret that the Linux world is full of endearing geeks and nerds who love to play video games --- there could hardly be a bigger truism! And yet they are totally under-served on their favorite platform, and frequently have to run a Windows box for the sole reason of being able to play their games. That presents an obvious business opportunity.
By supplying Linux gamers with good games on their favorite platform, not only is he expanding his customer base to a whole new audience of Linux-only gamers, but is also making it possible for Linux gamers to avoid running a Windows box at all. And that can remove one of his rivals from the competition entirely. It would be a move of genius.
What's more, if Linux gaming takes off bigtime (his company certainly has every opportunity to make that happen), then he will be the leader in a new gaming frontier, and everyone else will be playing catchup. That is worth a gamble all by itself, and it's not even a high-risk venture.
I think Gabe's business nose can sense a big opportunity here, a huge and almost unexploited market that he can make his own, while at the same time safeguarding his future against Microsoft.
Former U.S. patent officer calls someone unethical. The mind boggles.
And as if that weren't enough, he has patents in the area himself and therefore cannot be a fair witness.
Skepticism about radical new devices is always healthy, but Mouttet's opinion on this topic inspires the opposite of confidence.
A probe in orbit around every planet or dwarf planet in the solar system would seems like a fairly basic NASA objective to me.
I know that New Horizons will be using its velocity to also attempt flybys of one or more other Kuiper belt objects after it shoots through the Pluto system, and that is very worthwhile indeed, but we also seriously need a probe in orbit around Pluto itself.
I hope that they're working on such a mission already, so that when New Horizons returns Pluto data in 2015 they just need to tweak a few parameters and be ready to launch an orbital mission. Such new data could even be sent to an orbital mission that's already en route to Pluto.
Yes, but words are something that we are very good at.
If a GUI were made complex enough to be as flexible as the commandline, then people would have to remember just as many GUI options as commandline options.
But there's a difference. Humans are pre-wired to remember tens to hundreds of thousands of words trivially, without thinking. In contrast, we're not wired at all to remember many spatial locations, which is why complex GUIs are an utter nightmare to us.
CLIs match our brain and memory capabilities perfectly, at least when readable words are used as option names. Those who want to do away with the commandline don't realize that they're asking for it to be replaced by something that would be far, far worse.
Directly relevant to this topic, if you use Firefox, try installing the Mozilla add-on Ghostery and monitor the little ghost icon which display a number greater than zero whenever the current web page contains one or more trackers.
If you've never seen it before, it's quite eye-opening how virtually every site contains trackers these days, some sites using large numbers of them. Ghostery blocks every tracker unless told not to, but even if you don't want them blocked, it can be interesting to monitor them and watch how they interact with NoScript.
Good add-on. I wonder whether Chrome and Chromium provide anything equivalent.
I think that you are totally right about this. Maintaining x86 compatibility may hurt Intel a little, but it's not the key issue.
ARM-based SoCs cost under $10 in volume, and Intel simply cannot compete in that space. It doesn't want to. It likes large prices and huge profit margins.
Meanwhile, ARM keeps improving the performance of their cores, while the SoC manufacturers keep improving the capabilities of their SoCs, including (critically) power savings. It's a marriage made in heaven, and the only way that ARM can lose this market to Intel is by upping their license royalties massively so that ARM-based SoC prices move into Intel's territory. There is no sign of that happening.
Short version of the above: Intel fails in the mobile space because of price inertia. There is no sign of that changing either, at least judging by the article. They refuse to compete on SoC pricing. And they're in denial that price matters.
Morgaine.
Not only is there massive interest in openness and transparency in the voting process, but there also a need for extremely thorough vetting of the software, its design, and its update lineage. All of these things make it an ideal application for public development under the open source model.
Because of the huge number of expert eyeballs that would be paying very close attention to this code, you can be beyond certain that it would rapidly become some of the most robust software on the planet, and employing the most secure cryptographic systems for security and privacy and anti-corruption devices known to us.
The only people guaranteed to hate this (apart from e-voting machine manufacturers) would be those who currently have backdoors into the proprietary software. They'll fight the idea tooth and nail.
You're right for more than just the reason you give. TFA also fails to understand that the patent system is structured to encourage litigation and to benefit the legal profession on both sides of a patent conflict. TFA's suggestion would do nothing to change this.
Ideally software and business method patents should disappear altogether, but if one is seeking alternatives then the first goal should be to limit the audience exposed to patent litigation.
That can be done in a number of ways, one being to exclude private citizens and corporations below a certain turnover from patent liability altogether.
This would encourage the creation of many small competing businesses and would be hard for megacorps to argue against, because all politicians pay lip service to supporting small businesses. Also, the turnover cap automatically ensures that competing corps cannot grow to the size of the patent holder, so arguments against it are really quite weak.
As you point out, the incumbents would still fight tooth and nail against it, but they would be on much weaker ground than today, and most importantly, lawyers would be presented with a much reduced population of potential victims.
Note also that the many calls to limit patent duration drastically, eg. to 5 years, would have exactly the same effect of reducing the number of people exposed to patent litigation. That idea is good too, but it doesn't level the playing field as well as a turnover cap would do. Perhaps both approaches should be used together.
Although you're making a "glass half full" kind of prediction, it's not hard to imagine that the opposite of your guess might occur in the US: All the other ARM licensees might see this as a fantastic coup for Broadcom, and follow suit with their own competing $25 - $35 boards.
After all, Texas Instruments already has their own $5 SoC available and used in their BeagleBone, so they could quite easily remove features from that board and release something into the Raspberry Pi price niche for education. (The BeagleBone's $89 places it far outside the Raspberry Pi's price niche.)
The Chinese will of course follow suit with boards based on their wildly successful Allwinner A10 ARM device, which is far better than Broadcom's SoC (on specs) and only costs $7 in production volumes. Expect a pile of competitors from that quarter!
Slashdot used to have a perfectly working front page for "today", plus specific URLs for the day before, the day before that, and so on. It used to employ some of the good principles of Roy Fielding's thesis on REST, where each page is a resource with a distinct address that makes sense. You could give someone a link and know exactly what they're seeing. Well no more.
Instead of that sane technical design, now we have some kind of utterly broken page expansion system linked through "Many More", and you never know what the hell you're looking at, and when you return from a nested page you're seeing something totally different. It's a technical disaster, and given that this pretends to be a technical site, its technical design is quite beyond the pale.
Bring back a bit of sane web technology please. Lose the totally unhelpful "Many More" which is a wholly broken design, and bring back dated pages.
Indeed, it seems there was some serious wishful thinking going on. The Foundation's people are so heavily invested in the project that they probably can't see it very objectively. Not too surprising I guess.
The BIS has just given them the bad news of how things really stand though. Here is a new update from Element 14's FAQ (one of the two Raspberry Pi distributors), quoting news from the Foundation's Eben Upton:
HOT OFF THE PRESS UPDATE FROM EBEN UPTON OF RASPBERRY PI EARLIER TODAY:
.
The above is no surprise to anyone who uses Arduinos. Like the Raspberry Pi, they're bare boards, also from a European company (in Italy), and are manufactured in the same kind of volumes as the Raspberry Pi. They're fully certified with RoHS, CE, and FCC (Class B) certifications (as well as something called Life Zero Impact).
The Pi is even more consumer-oriented than the Arduino, since it's a fully working Linux computer and the Foundation has repeatedly extolled its great multimedia capabilities, even writing articles about its use as a media centre. This guaranteed immense interest from virtually everybody, not just from electronics enthusiasts, so huge numbers of these will be going into regular domestic situations.
Thinking that 10 thousand of the boards could avoid industrial certification when a large proportion of them will be purchased by ordinary consumers was really rather naive.
Morgaine.
They can't measure it directly, obviously. The numbers quoted are those given by our best scientific models of the Sun's structure and its nuclear processes. Those models predict fairly accurately the properties and behavior that we *can* observe and measure from Earth and from our space probes, so they give us some reasonable degree of confidence that we're in the right ballpark when estimating a temperature for the core.
Of course those estimates will change as our understanding improves, but that's the same for all science.
Except that the actual news really is the point , whereas how a company expects to get its revenue is merely a choice, and that choice may be unrealistic. The world is not obligated to keep a company in profit, just because it chooses to work in a particular area which is now obsolete.
I may choose to earn a profit making and selling buggy whips, but I'm not going to make much money because cars have replaced horse buggies and the world is not obligated to keep paying me for my unrealistic expectations. And so it is for news. It has been democratized by the Internet, and the news producers are now working in a field of diminishing returns and next to zero expectations of profit.
It's pretty funny when the corporations that have traditionally thought of news as their "product" come face to face with the Internet, where "plain ol' people" seem to discover and distribute news just as well as they, or in most cases a lot better and faster. Shocking! :P
Their C&D's and other tactics based on concepts of "intellectual property" really have no solid foundation at all because news isn't actually a product nor of artistic merit. It's a sign of obsolete businesses using every protectionist tactic they can to stave off their demise, nothing more.
It won't work. Things move on, they always do. News has been democratized.