I guess all this means that they are aiming Firefox OS at the low end of the market, where performance matters less than being able to afford a smartphone. However, I've always found it strange that companies do that - if you are going to make a low-end device, wouldn't you want to make the most efficient use of the hardware resources you have by running native code even more than if you had plenty of CPU cycles and RAM to burn?
Well, the OS itself is obviously native code, at least partially. But as far as add-on software goes, distributing mobile apps as binary executables is a surefire path to early obsolescence for phone hardware. Once all the developers drop support for older models in favor of newer ones running different chips, it's game over.
Such a system also makes it harder to introduce significant hardware changes. Say someone put out a smartphone with a new chip that used a different instruction set, for example. It's the old Itanium problem: out of the gate, none of the existing native binaries might work on it. So in terms of its value to consumers, the "latest and greatest" phone would actually be less useful than all of the older ones -- how does ZTE market that?
That's why Android apps aren't native code; they're Java/Dalvik. iOS apps might be native code, but that only works because Apple has total, iron-clad control over its entire hardware ecosystem. ZTE literally cannot make an $80 iOS device, even if it were financially feasible.
Where did this list come from? It seems highly unlikely that any phone would work on Sprint in the US but not on Verizon, and as far as I know the ZTE Open does not have a CDMA radio, which means it would work on AT&T and T-Mobile, but not Sprint.
Orcas are delphinidae, which *are* a part of the cetacean order. So they are very much technically whales, and it is quite correct to call them that.
Except not all members of the order Cetacea are whales. All cetaceans are marine mammals, but just like some cetaceans are whales, others are dolphins and porpoises. Similarly, humans are of the order Primates, but that doesn't make a human the same thing as a monkey, because while monkeys are primates they are not apes.
To sum up, scientists have invented a system by which to classify animals. Order is one level of it, but it gets much more specific than that, and that wasn't done for "marketing" or "branding" reasons. Furthermore, it seems silly to justify one's own ignorance by pointing the finger at the people who know what they're doing like they're purposefully trying to confuse everybody, when they're really trying to do the opposite.
The way the species has been rebranded as a "dolphin" is one of the triumphs of marketing over reality.
"Rebranded"? Orcas belong to the family Delphinidae, the oceanic dolphins. They're commonly referred to as "whales" but that's not technically accurate. But hey, don't let science get in the way of your little speech about "marketing."
For starters, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke called "The Sentinel." Clarke wrote the novel at the same time the movie was being made, and it was actually released after the movie, so it's essentially an adaptation of the film and by no means essential to appreciating or understanding the film.
What's more, Kubrick has a track record for taking the material he is bringing to the screen and adding to it or taking it in new directions not expressed in the written work -- see The Shining, for example, which diverges from Stephen King's book wildly.
Kubrick's film should be enjoyed as a film. All these comments saying you need to read the book to understand it just sound like people who couldn't understand the movie and feel guilty about it, so they went and got the book from the library. Don't feel guilty. The film is designed to be a bit inscrutable and to inspire thought and debate.
(honestly I haven't met anybody who doesn't fast forward through the draggiest parts to get to HAL)
Well, you haven't met me, but if you're talking about everything between the ape men and Discovery then those happen to be my favorite parts of the film. My absolute favorite scene, in fact, is when Heywood Floyd runs into the Russian scientists at the Pan Am lounge on the space station. And if you want to see why these scenes are absolutely essential to 2001, look no further than the film 2010, which completely fails to understand anything about the earlier movie and portrays the Heywood Floyd character -- and everybody else, for that matter -- as a bumbling incompetent who couldn't survive an airline flight to Greece, let alone an interstellar voyage.
Other devices, like an AppleTV, do not require any other device at all. It's kind of ironic, considering all the fuss Google made about Chromecast not requiring Android.
Well, what's ironic about it, really? Chromecast doesn't require Android -- and statistically, you're much more likely to own some flavor of iPad than an Android tablet. Google never promised you that you wouldn't need either one.
It sure is nice to NOT have to fscking "earn" your vacation hours, or sick leave (when contracting, you figure those into your bill rate, and take off when YOU want to)
Unfortunately, freelance writers do not typically get to set their own rates in any significant way. You're generally paid by the word, or by the assignment, at a rate predetermined between you and your editor (and your editor holds all the cards). I have never heard of a freelance writer being paid hourly. And when the editorial budget gets squeezed and the rates go down, you always have the option of taking your talents elsewhere -- if you can find somewhere -- or you take what you're offered. In this market, there is seldom any room to negotiate.
However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
By what standard did it sell well? Maybe Microsoft was moving some units at first, but months after launch we kept hearing the same figure for the number of units sold. A month would go by and someone would quote the same figure, again. That's not indicative of strong sales. By some channel figures, in Q1 of 2013 Microsoft and its partners moved less than 2 million Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets. That's not just Surface RT, not just Microsoft, that's every vendor of Windows tablets combined. Meanwhile, Apple sold nearly 20 million tablets in the same period; one vendor. So I ask again, by what standard has Surface sold "quite well"?
Don't worry; Steve Ballmer's reorg will fix all of this. All of the product groups that analysts used to compare quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year have disappeared. Products have been shuffled around into new groups organized around "engineering." The upshot is that money-losing products like Bing are now going to be lumped in with big breadwinners like Office. You won't be able to look at the Xbox and Online Services divisions anymore and say "they lose money." All those failures will be hidden in the new structure. Without an instance like Microsoft writing down almost a billion dollars on the Surface RT disaster, it will be harder for anyone to gauge how it's doing, at least for the next few quarters. Problem solved!
If a student is used to getting As in high school and gets Bs or Cs in their early math or engineering course, they shouldn't consider that a reason to change majors.
There's one problem with that, which I faced. I was getting the B or C in classes like college chemistry and organic chemistry. I told the instructors I was thinking of dropping the class and trying again later, but they told me that A.) my grade was typical, and that it meant I was actually doing decently well in the class; and B.) if I do drop the class, I shouldn't bother trying to take it again, because based on their experience I would end up with the same grade. It was impossible for students to absorb all the material taught, they told me, and if I got a C this time, the next time I took the class I would just forget the other half of the material and get a C again.
This not only seemed to me to be a totally ridiculous way to teach a class -- you actually admit that students can't learn what you're teaching?? -- but this was also a junior college, where anyone who wanted to get a four-year degree would need to transfer to a four-year university. The department prided itself on teaching classes that "prepared you for Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, or any university in the country." The catch, however, was that they handed out grades that made it impossible for their students to transfer to any of those schools. They'd pat you on the back for passing their class, then reward you with the kiss of death that basically ended your education ambitions right there.
The only ones who backed out of the conference (as far as I can tell) were going to talk about hacking Sharepoint. While I'm sure that's useful in some situations, it sounds like an extremely boring talk.
And kinda entry-level. I'm just generalizing here, but based on my own interactions with SharePoint, I strongly suspect that nobody ever sat around, racking their brains about how to hack a SharePoint site.
I am not big on my networking protocols, but didn't the HTTP 2.0 group decide to base its work on Google's SPDY protocol? The two don't look the same to me, but some of the descriptions in this spec do look like reshuffled versions of the SPDY spec. What's the relationship between the two these days?
People were OK with adopting Apple's UI on small mobile limited-use-case devices (mainly because the existing offerings at the time totally sucked, especially MS's horrible offerings that tried to shove a Win95-style UI onto a tiny touchscreen), but they never did so for their desktop and laptop PCs.
Based on what I see at the (rather many) computer conferences I attend, I beg to differ. It seems to me that a great many IT professionals have switched to MacBooks and aren't looking back. But you can't run Microsoft Dynamics on OS X, so not many in the accounting department are going to switch.
Personally, I think Microsoft is absolutely right to invest as heavily in Visual Studio as it does, because if that product wasn't just so top-notch, you'd have developers fleeing Windows for OS X in droves.
I wouldn't be too surprised if that has something to do with the fact that 'filming'(whether to actual...chemical film... like some kind of barbarian, or to digital) requires nontrivially different(and not inexpensive) hardware, and you have to decide that you are shooting 3d before you start shooting, while re-rendering an existing set of CG models is mostly a computational problem.
That's not really it. Many of the movies released in 3D have been converted from 2D to 3D, after the fact. Early conversions looked bad ("Clash of the Titans") but newer ones are looking better and better ("Star Trek Into Darkness").
Unlikely. The theatres already blew their load and installed multi-million dollar 3D projectors.
Maybe, but many of them installed them because they were forced to buy new projectors for digital content (because film will be obsolete by the end of this year). I'm not sure the cost of getting a 3D capable projector is really significantly more than buying a new, multimillion-dollar digital projector for each screen.
I've been really wanting to see Hugo based on all the comments I hear about the quality of the 3D, but the 3D edition of the Blu-Ray is apparently a limited edition three-disc sets (including two discs you don't need if you have the 3D Blu-Ray and a 3D-compatible player). It's hard to find, and when I do find it somewhere it costs an arm and a leg (typically $40).
I went to see The Hobbit in 48fps and I really enjoyed how it looked. Contrary to all the people complaining about the "soap opera effect" on high-refresh-rate LCD TVs, 48fps was how that movie was really meant to be seen, and I enjoyed experiencing the filmmaker's vision.
The film itself, though? Utter, execrable schlock, and a total wasted opportunity considering the quality of the source material.
However, 3D Box Office revenue is off significantly in 2012. From a high of 2.2 billion down to 1.8. The bloom is off the rose.
I still like to go to the movies in 3D when I think there's going to be lots of flashy sequences that could benefit from it (something like a "Star Trek Into Darkness" or "Man of Steel"). The problem is, I live in a major urban market where the cost of seeing a 3-D movie typically runs around $16.50 or more. A ticket to see "Man of Steel" in IMAX 3D tonight will cost $21.50, including service charges, and I think it was a couple of dollars higher on opening weekend. When I see prices like that, my interest quickly fades, and I assume the same is true for a lot of people -- particularly when we're constantly hearing reviews that say "the 3D added nothing, don't bother."
And a common standard... otherwise it is VHS vs. Beta again.
Enlighten me on this one, because my 3D TV seems to be able to play any 3D content you can throw at it.
Sure, there are various manufacturers of 3D TVs and many of them use different technologies for their glasses, but that's just a consumer choice. They all play the same content. As for technology, my TV is a "passive" set that lets me watch 3D programming using the same glasses you get in movie theaters. You can actually bring your glasses home from the movies and use them with the TV if you want.
With the capability to add a MicroSD card (what I also liked), you'd think they'd have an audio jack for audio books. Nope. Load your own screen savers? Nope.
You can load your own screen savers on a Nook (on the e-ink ones, at least; I can't speak for the tablets). You just make a new directory in the folder that includes all the built-in screen savers, name the directory what you want your screen saver to be called, and load it with as many images as you like. The Nook will rotate through them.
TFA says "Management is clearly focused on salvaging Nook operations rather than trying to make a go of it with the stores" and "B&N's disastrous focus on making Nook e-Readers is weighing heavily on the chain's operations."
Did they not get the memo today that B&N is discontinuing its whole color tablet line and that future color devices will only be sold as co-branded products manufactured by other companies? You read that right, B&N is no longer going to manufacture any tablets. It's going to continue to produce e-ink devices, but that's it. That whole "cannibalizing itself with branded tablets" angle they're whinging about is a dead end, as of today.
Second, how is the fact that the Nook apps are cross-platform making B&N's stores irrelevant? If the Nook apps didn't exist, wouldn't it just be the Kindle apps that are making B&N stores irrelevant, and B&N would have no slice of the ebook pie whatsoever?
Also, let's maintain a little perspective here. B&N's total revenue from the Nook division in fiscal 2013 was $776 million. Its revenue from its retail division was $4.6 billion. Are we really expected to believe that B&N execs are actually ignoring the retail business in favor of Nook? That just sounds like some absurd, "activist investor" fantasy.
B&N is struggling, sure. But it faces fairly serious market challenges. It had no chance at competing with Amazon in the ebook market without making a serious investment in both hardware and software. Has it made some missteps? It seems so, but to say they'll be impossible to retreat from seems a little premature.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's not false reporting. It's just Slashdot pasting a misleading headline onto what was otherwise an accurately reported story.
I guess all this means that they are aiming Firefox OS at the low end of the market, where performance matters less than being able to afford a smartphone. However, I've always found it strange that companies do that - if you are going to make a low-end device, wouldn't you want to make the most efficient use of the hardware resources you have by running native code even more than if you had plenty of CPU cycles and RAM to burn?
Well, the OS itself is obviously native code, at least partially. But as far as add-on software goes, distributing mobile apps as binary executables is a surefire path to early obsolescence for phone hardware. Once all the developers drop support for older models in favor of newer ones running different chips, it's game over.
Such a system also makes it harder to introduce significant hardware changes. Say someone put out a smartphone with a new chip that used a different instruction set, for example. It's the old Itanium problem: out of the gate, none of the existing native binaries might work on it. So in terms of its value to consumers, the "latest and greatest" phone would actually be less useful than all of the older ones -- how does ZTE market that?
That's why Android apps aren't native code; they're Java/Dalvik. iOS apps might be native code, but that only works because Apple has total, iron-clad control over its entire hardware ecosystem. ZTE literally cannot make an $80 iOS device, even if it were financially feasible.
Where did this list come from? It seems highly unlikely that any phone would work on Sprint in the US but not on Verizon, and as far as I know the ZTE Open does not have a CDMA radio, which means it would work on AT&T and T-Mobile, but not Sprint.
Orcas are delphinidae, which *are* a part of the cetacean order. So they are very much technically whales, and it is quite correct to call them that.
Except not all members of the order Cetacea are whales. All cetaceans are marine mammals, but just like some cetaceans are whales, others are dolphins and porpoises. Similarly, humans are of the order Primates, but that doesn't make a human the same thing as a monkey, because while monkeys are primates they are not apes.
To sum up, scientists have invented a system by which to classify animals. Order is one level of it, but it gets much more specific than that, and that wasn't done for "marketing" or "branding" reasons. Furthermore, it seems silly to justify one's own ignorance by pointing the finger at the people who know what they're doing like they're purposefully trying to confuse everybody, when they're really trying to do the opposite.
The way the species has been rebranded as a "dolphin" is one of the triumphs of marketing over reality.
"Rebranded"? Orcas belong to the family Delphinidae, the oceanic dolphins. They're commonly referred to as "whales" but that's not technically accurate. But hey, don't let science get in the way of your little speech about "marketing."
Any symbolic or allegorical content that requires decades to decode is of no interest or relevance to anyone.
That's it, everybody! Last one out, get the lights.
I'm not sure I agree with this.
For starters, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke called "The Sentinel." Clarke wrote the novel at the same time the movie was being made, and it was actually released after the movie, so it's essentially an adaptation of the film and by no means essential to appreciating or understanding the film.
What's more, Kubrick has a track record for taking the material he is bringing to the screen and adding to it or taking it in new directions not expressed in the written work -- see The Shining, for example, which diverges from Stephen King's book wildly.
Kubrick's film should be enjoyed as a film. All these comments saying you need to read the book to understand it just sound like people who couldn't understand the movie and feel guilty about it, so they went and got the book from the library. Don't feel guilty. The film is designed to be a bit inscrutable and to inspire thought and debate.
(honestly I haven't met anybody who doesn't fast forward through the draggiest parts to get to HAL)
Well, you haven't met me, but if you're talking about everything between the ape men and Discovery then those happen to be my favorite parts of the film. My absolute favorite scene, in fact, is when Heywood Floyd runs into the Russian scientists at the Pan Am lounge on the space station. And if you want to see why these scenes are absolutely essential to 2001, look no further than the film 2010, which completely fails to understand anything about the earlier movie and portrays the Heywood Floyd character -- and everybody else, for that matter -- as a bumbling incompetent who couldn't survive an airline flight to Greece, let alone an interstellar voyage.
Other devices, like an AppleTV, do not require any other device at all. It's kind of ironic, considering all the fuss Google made about Chromecast not requiring Android.
Well, what's ironic about it, really? Chromecast doesn't require Android -- and statistically, you're much more likely to own some flavor of iPad than an Android tablet. Google never promised you that you wouldn't need either one.
It sure is nice to NOT have to fscking "earn" your vacation hours, or sick leave (when contracting, you figure those into your bill rate, and take off when YOU want to)
Unfortunately, freelance writers do not typically get to set their own rates in any significant way. You're generally paid by the word, or by the assignment, at a rate predetermined between you and your editor (and your editor holds all the cards). I have never heard of a freelance writer being paid hourly. And when the editorial budget gets squeezed and the rates go down, you always have the option of taking your talents elsewhere -- if you can find somewhere -- or you take what you're offered. In this market, there is seldom any room to negotiate.
However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
By what standard did it sell well? Maybe Microsoft was moving some units at first, but months after launch we kept hearing the same figure for the number of units sold. A month would go by and someone would quote the same figure, again. That's not indicative of strong sales. By some channel figures, in Q1 of 2013 Microsoft and its partners moved less than 2 million Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets. That's not just Surface RT, not just Microsoft, that's every vendor of Windows tablets combined. Meanwhile, Apple sold nearly 20 million tablets in the same period; one vendor. So I ask again, by what standard has Surface sold "quite well"?
Sure they do. All they need to do is port Office to all viable mobile platforms and then they are set.
Not as easy as it sounds. Not by a long shot. Have you tried using Office on an 8" Windows tablet? I don't really recommend it.
Don't worry; Steve Ballmer's reorg will fix all of this. All of the product groups that analysts used to compare quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year have disappeared. Products have been shuffled around into new groups organized around "engineering." The upshot is that money-losing products like Bing are now going to be lumped in with big breadwinners like Office. You won't be able to look at the Xbox and Online Services divisions anymore and say "they lose money." All those failures will be hidden in the new structure. Without an instance like Microsoft writing down almost a billion dollars on the Surface RT disaster, it will be harder for anyone to gauge how it's doing, at least for the next few quarters. Problem solved!
If a student is used to getting As in high school and gets Bs or Cs in their early math or engineering course, they shouldn't consider that a reason to change majors.
There's one problem with that, which I faced. I was getting the B or C in classes like college chemistry and organic chemistry. I told the instructors I was thinking of dropping the class and trying again later, but they told me that A.) my grade was typical, and that it meant I was actually doing decently well in the class; and B.) if I do drop the class, I shouldn't bother trying to take it again, because based on their experience I would end up with the same grade. It was impossible for students to absorb all the material taught, they told me, and if I got a C this time, the next time I took the class I would just forget the other half of the material and get a C again.
This not only seemed to me to be a totally ridiculous way to teach a class -- you actually admit that students can't learn what you're teaching?? -- but this was also a junior college, where anyone who wanted to get a four-year degree would need to transfer to a four-year university. The department prided itself on teaching classes that "prepared you for Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, or any university in the country." The catch, however, was that they handed out grades that made it impossible for their students to transfer to any of those schools. They'd pat you on the back for passing their class, then reward you with the kiss of death that basically ended your education ambitions right there.
The only ones who backed out of the conference (as far as I can tell) were going to talk about hacking Sharepoint. While I'm sure that's useful in some situations, it sounds like an extremely boring talk.
And kinda entry-level. I'm just generalizing here, but based on my own interactions with SharePoint, I strongly suspect that nobody ever sat around, racking their brains about how to hack a SharePoint site.
I am not big on my networking protocols, but didn't the HTTP 2.0 group decide to base its work on Google's SPDY protocol? The two don't look the same to me, but some of the descriptions in this spec do look like reshuffled versions of the SPDY spec. What's the relationship between the two these days?
People were OK with adopting Apple's UI on small mobile limited-use-case devices (mainly because the existing offerings at the time totally sucked, especially MS's horrible offerings that tried to shove a Win95-style UI onto a tiny touchscreen), but they never did so for their desktop and laptop PCs.
Based on what I see at the (rather many) computer conferences I attend, I beg to differ. It seems to me that a great many IT professionals have switched to MacBooks and aren't looking back. But you can't run Microsoft Dynamics on OS X, so not many in the accounting department are going to switch.
Personally, I think Microsoft is absolutely right to invest as heavily in Visual Studio as it does, because if that product wasn't just so top-notch, you'd have developers fleeing Windows for OS X in droves.
I wouldn't be too surprised if that has something to do with the fact that 'filming'(whether to actual...chemical film... like some kind of barbarian, or to digital) requires nontrivially different(and not inexpensive) hardware, and you have to decide that you are shooting 3d before you start shooting, while re-rendering an existing set of CG models is mostly a computational problem.
That's not really it. Many of the movies released in 3D have been converted from 2D to 3D, after the fact. Early conversions looked bad ("Clash of the Titans") but newer ones are looking better and better ("Star Trek Into Darkness").
Unlikely. The theatres already blew their load and installed multi-million dollar 3D projectors.
Maybe, but many of them installed them because they were forced to buy new projectors for digital content (because film will be obsolete by the end of this year). I'm not sure the cost of getting a 3D capable projector is really significantly more than buying a new, multimillion-dollar digital projector for each screen.
I've been really wanting to see Hugo based on all the comments I hear about the quality of the 3D, but the 3D edition of the Blu-Ray is apparently a limited edition three-disc sets (including two discs you don't need if you have the 3D Blu-Ray and a 3D-compatible player). It's hard to find, and when I do find it somewhere it costs an arm and a leg (typically $40).
I went to see The Hobbit in 48fps and I really enjoyed how it looked. Contrary to all the people complaining about the "soap opera effect" on high-refresh-rate LCD TVs, 48fps was how that movie was really meant to be seen, and I enjoyed experiencing the filmmaker's vision.
The film itself, though? Utter, execrable schlock, and a total wasted opportunity considering the quality of the source material.
However, 3D Box Office revenue is off significantly in 2012. From a high of 2.2 billion down to 1.8. The bloom is off the rose.
I still like to go to the movies in 3D when I think there's going to be lots of flashy sequences that could benefit from it (something like a "Star Trek Into Darkness" or "Man of Steel"). The problem is, I live in a major urban market where the cost of seeing a 3-D movie typically runs around $16.50 or more. A ticket to see "Man of Steel" in IMAX 3D tonight will cost $21.50, including service charges, and I think it was a couple of dollars higher on opening weekend. When I see prices like that, my interest quickly fades, and I assume the same is true for a lot of people -- particularly when we're constantly hearing reviews that say "the 3D added nothing, don't bother."
And a common standard... otherwise it is VHS vs. Beta again.
Enlighten me on this one, because my 3D TV seems to be able to play any 3D content you can throw at it.
Sure, there are various manufacturers of 3D TVs and many of them use different technologies for their glasses, but that's just a consumer choice. They all play the same content. As for technology, my TV is a "passive" set that lets me watch 3D programming using the same glasses you get in movie theaters. You can actually bring your glasses home from the movies and use them with the TV if you want.
With the capability to add a MicroSD card (what I also liked), you'd think they'd have an audio jack for audio books. Nope. Load your own screen savers? Nope.
You can load your own screen savers on a Nook (on the e-ink ones, at least; I can't speak for the tablets). You just make a new directory in the folder that includes all the built-in screen savers, name the directory what you want your screen saver to be called, and load it with as many images as you like. The Nook will rotate through them.
TFA says "Management is clearly focused on salvaging Nook operations rather than trying to make a go of it with the stores" and "B&N's disastrous focus on making Nook e-Readers is weighing heavily on the chain's operations."
Did they not get the memo today that B&N is discontinuing its whole color tablet line and that future color devices will only be sold as co-branded products manufactured by other companies? You read that right, B&N is no longer going to manufacture any tablets. It's going to continue to produce e-ink devices, but that's it. That whole "cannibalizing itself with branded tablets" angle they're whinging about is a dead end, as of today.
Second, how is the fact that the Nook apps are cross-platform making B&N's stores irrelevant? If the Nook apps didn't exist, wouldn't it just be the Kindle apps that are making B&N stores irrelevant, and B&N would have no slice of the ebook pie whatsoever?
Also, let's maintain a little perspective here. B&N's total revenue from the Nook division in fiscal 2013 was $776 million. Its revenue from its retail division was $4.6 billion. Are we really expected to believe that B&N execs are actually ignoring the retail business in favor of Nook? That just sounds like some absurd, "activist investor" fantasy.
B&N is struggling, sure. But it faces fairly serious market challenges. It had no chance at competing with Amazon in the ebook market without making a serious investment in both hardware and software. Has it made some missteps? It seems so, but to say they'll be impossible to retreat from seems a little premature.