I'm likely one of the few people here without a smartphone - is it worth it yet?
Depends what you want. I find it convenient to read and respond to new email on my phone, browse the Web from anywhere, pay my bills while sitting at the park, check Google Maps when I'm lost, calculate things (I have a full HP 48 emulator on mine), take the occasional photo of something wacky I see while out and about (and post it directly to Facebook), listen to music, and play the occasional game.
Then again, as much as people rave about how important "apps" are, I have apps on my phone that sounded cool at the time but I'm certain I'll never actually use. Maybe you'd use your phone even less. What you get for the $20 extra per month is that anytime you're possessed of the desire to do any of these things, you can just take out your phone and do it, then put it away again. If the added cost of one dinner per month isn't worth it to you, then don't buy a smartphone. Nobody's forcing you.
Yep this is the only way to increase Bing's market share: make it the default search provider for a browser and hope that most people won't bother to switch. And with a bunch of WP7 devices coming out, they have another opportunity to improve Bing's "popularity."
If you're really that paranoid, just don't use Facebook, Twitter, Google or whatever. It's really not compulsory.
I don't think he's being paranoid. He has a point. I get Internet service from one company, VoIP phone service from another, domain registration from another, Web hosting from still another... I just don't think it behooves me to have a single company managing all of those services. What happens if I decide I don't like the company?
first, there's already a open source based browser on the system
Have you ever actually USED the open source browser on Android? I'm using it right now from a Honeycomb tablet, and it's pretty painful. Pages render strangely, the auto-fit function seems to kick in even when it's disabled, it's slow, the bookmark UI is awful... I don't understand how Google can have one perfectly good browser and make another that's so pathetically lousy. Not saying Boot to Gecko is the way to fix that, but some competition in this regard would be desirable.
Why did you get rid of your perfectly good computer and generate lots of e-waste?
The old one broke, actually. Main logic board fried, smoke out the back and it wouldn't power up. It was a real hassle to have to replace it, transfer my data from the old drives, and still get my work done. But thanks for asking, and while we're on the subject, how's that sanctimoniousness working out for you?
In fact, not only does Breivik have pretty much the attitude toward the Jews that you describe, he extends the same sentiments to "Hindus," a term he uses to mean pretty much every non-Muslim population in Asia, including Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. That would be a pretty unusual position for your run-of-the-mill American racist.
Interesting, yet Breivik's use of the term doesn't really jibe with any of that description. He does make mention of the Frankfurt school, but he seems to feel the most overriding effect of "cultural marxism" is the spread of multiculturalism and the loss of "traditional European values," none of which is really mentioned in that article. The phrase is mostly just Breivik's code word for the vast global conspiracy that he perceives to be eroding everything he holds dear (no matter what it is).
People will compare him to Timothy McVeigh, and to an extent, it does seem that kind of terrorist act, but in some ways Breivik reminds me more of one Colonel Hitler, and I suspect before this is done, every far right culture conservative out there from American white supremacists too Western and Central European neo-Nazis to Serbian racist thugs will be declaring this guy some sort of champion. Polite society certainly will reject him, but the wingnuts, well, he's the perfect poster boy, handsome, dashing and articulately mad.
That's probably inevitable, but I doubt it will be as widespread as you suspect. As much as he tried to describe his ideology at length, it doesn't stand much scrutiny, and it doesn't necessarily intersect with the beliefs of a lot of right-wing groups here in the U.S.
He specifically went out of his way to criticize National Socialism as a dead end and categorically stated that his "Neo Templars" were not a Nazi group, so that could alienate him from some neo-Nazis right there. (At the same time, he does seem to sort of identify with National Socialist groups. I suspect he doesn't actually disagree as much as he claims, it's just more of a "my way or the highway" kind of thing -- he doesn't see himself as a foot soldier but as a "commander.") The people who criticize his extreme nationalists beliefs he describes as "Hitlers" because they oppress right-minded people.
As for his enemies, he categorizes them all as "marxists," in ways that often do not make much sense. Someone who does not accept an extreme nationalist/racialist view of culture is a "cultural marxist" -- do those two words really go together? People with ideas he doesn't agree with tend to be "intellectual marxists," and so on. By comparison, he categorizes himself as a "cultural conservative," and his politics as "national conservatism." (Maybe his aversion to "marxism" explains his distancing himself from "national socialism"?)
There are a few things in his writings that some will snicker over, too. I'll just quote:
Although I have had a change of mentality a majority of my friends have not. My stepfather Tore, one of my best friends Marius and my more distant friends Kristoffer, Sturla and Ronny are all living manifestations of the complete breakdown of sexual moral. All five have had more than 300 sexual partners (two of them more than 700) and I know for a fact that three of them have one or more STDs (probably all of them). I have several other promiscuous (slut) friends and I could list at least 30 male and females in my social environment if I wanted to. I don’t blame them personally and it has absolutely nothing to do with envy. I could easily have chosen the same path if I wanted to, due to my looks, status, resourcefulness and charm. It’s just terribly sad that my country have been the victim of severe Marxist infiltration leading to the political doctrines which have been allowed to destroy all moral and norms, resulting in the complete breakdown of our once great ethical standards.
Got that? Sexually-transmitted diseases are a result of "Marxist infiltration" of society leading to the infection of its "sluts." He devotes several pages to what can be done about STDs, including the unfathomable cost to society of millions of infections, the effects of the shame felt by some people after diagnosis, etc. He goes on:
Artists such as Madonna, Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera and series such as Sex and the City must be considered political activists/political movements and the lifestyles they propagate considered political propaganda. Alternatively, artists/series/movies propagating/glorifying promiscuousity must be restricted to liberal zones. . .. The following are a few arguments against excessive sexuality:
Sexuality can complicate relationships (as when people are hostile towards each other because they are sexually attracted to the same person).
I do agree however that the media called it "terrorism" when the bomb hit Oslo and the perp was unknown and shifted more to "massacre" when it became known that the attack was domestic rather than foreign.
I don't think that's even true. I think they were calling it a "terrorist attack" when it was a bomb blowing up a government building, and they switched to "massacre" when it was a guy with a rifle walking through a summer camp, picking off kids like Jason Voorhees.
But it doesn't use Java. That's the point. If it used java, then it could use any of various freely available java engines. It uses, however, Dalvik which isn't covered by the same license.
But it does require you to compile Android software to Java bytecode as an intermediary step. Do Oracle's patents cover the design of the VM or just the execution of the code? If they cover the design of the VM, then the design of the VM includes bytecode, and using Java bytecode as a basis of a derivative product could be infringing. I say "could be" because I don't know for sure, and nobody really will until the judge rules on it.
Personally, at this point I think they should build a Python engine, and switch over to Python. It should be possible to create a tool that would do 90+% of the code conversion automatically...at least if you don't care how ugly it looks. After all, they did write a compiler.
I wouldn't mind that all. A smartphone SDK that lets you build apps using Python sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to how you do it now.
They did a clean room implementation of Java that worked exactly the same way.
No, that's not quite right. Dalvik is a new virtual machine which, as I understand it, loads and executes bytecode in a way that's more efficient on low-power devices with limited resources. You start with a Java program, which you compile using the Oracle Java compiler. You then run it through an extra step that transforms the stock Java bytecode into Dalvik bytecode. Dalvik will not run regular Java code until you do this last part.
That said, it doesn't really matter. Dalvik could be a virtual machine that runs bytecode from a language called Vluuurm, which only runs backwards, and it could still violate Oracle's patents on virtual machine technology.
Does Android compete with Oracle? (No, Oracle doesn't market phones or tablets and never will.)
Oracle markets Java ME, which must be licensed by phone manufacturers, for money.
Does Android compete with Microsoft. (Not really.)
Microsoft makes Windows Phone 7. It also has a couple of different flavors of Windows designed for embedded systems, and I see an awful lot of device manufacturers considering Android for those these days (the Barnes & Noble Nook line, for example).
Does Android compete with Apple. (No, if you want an iPhone you're not going to buy an Android phone and vice versa.)
Buh? You might as well ask "does Ford compete with Chevy" and conclude that it does not, because once you own a Chevy you're not likely to buy a Ford and vice versa. Competition is something that happens before a company makes a sale. The TV spots, the product placement, the retail channel, the app market -- in short, all the things that make you want an iPhone -- that's the competition part.
Did anybody other than Google put in the effort to create Android and deserve the rewards for doing so? (No, they just want to collect money for doing nothing more than filing a patents that they don't even use in this market.)
Of course they did! By no means was Android created in a vacuum. The simple fact that the Android OS uses Java demonstrates that.
No, but I'd guess it's at least three years old. It's a Core 2 Quad running at 2.4GHz... those chips came out in 2007 and I got mine a little later... anyway, seems fine for my needs.
Words Cross-Platform hint at this not being an option, nevermind IE's blatant disregard of standards.
How about the words, "Oh, and my customers are local police & highway patrol type organizations, most likely running an aged Windows box (probably IE6, too)"? Claiming you want something cross-platform is all well and good when you're trying to sound like a good Slashdotter, but when the facts are that your customers are all on Windows, it seems pointless to worry too much about it.
You know what else creates less e-waste? Hanging on to your perfectly good older TV instead of buying a newer, bigger TV every time the electronics companies bring them to market. Oh, but let me guess: I bet a 3-D LED TV saves the planet even more than the regular, 2-D kind, right?
I'm not sure I understand. Prism still exists, and it sounds like what you want, so I don't understand why you say it "turned into Chromeless."
It's also very easy to embed Internet Explorer in things. A friend of mine once "wrote a Web browser" in Macromedia Director using about six lines of code.
$99 sounds cheap, but that thing has less juice than my Motorola Defy, which cost the same (with a contract). My phone's processor speed is faster, it came with more RAM, and it came with a bigger SD card. In addition, my phone is portable, it's ruggedized, it has a camera, has GPS, does 3G data, and has access to the genuine Android Market. My phone even has higher screen resolution (though the physical screen is obviously smaller).
No sale to this guy, but somebody might want one, I guess.
Though by the same token, if Red Hat then forked the last GPL version, Oracle would no longer be able to merge enhancements from Red Hat's fork into their proprietary version.
That's true, but if my assumptions are correct, then nobody outside the core K-Splice group ever contributed any code to the project, which means everybody who really understands it now works for Oracle. Red Hat's contributions would be far less valuable.
That assumes that they own all of the code, and that none of it was either contributed by a third party or is a derivative work of someone else's GPL code.
The K-Splice source code I've seen has "Copyright K-Splice Inc." at the top of the README and at the top of every single source file. No other author is given. I'm assuming either the project used some form of copyright assignment agreement or nobody outside the core group contributed any code.
That must have been a tough fix, since I didn't even present a dilemma.
You most certainly did. Several, in fact.
You argued that selling to one party is no different than selling to another and that you can only sell or not sell. That's a false dilemma. Most rational people would agree that selling diesel fuel to the Nazis is a lot different than selling it at a truck stop in Kansas. Even a real bastard would recognize the difference between selling chemicals to a factory up the river from your own house and selling them to a factory in another state.
You then extended this fallacy by comparing selling to evil, which suggests the additional false dilemma that you can only be evil or not be evil. Most rational people accept the existence of grey areas and degrees of good and bad, and some people do not acknowledge the concept of "evil" at all, particularly when it comes to business transactions.
You also made the explicit statement that you can either participate in capitalism or have morals. That's clearly another false dilemma, because there are a great many capitalists who didn't sell diesel fuel to the Nazis, even though that would surely have been a way to make some money.
In summary: Your black-and-white thinking does you no credit.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and my phone is a Motorola Defy, which is reasonably rugged. Motorola is rolling out the Titanium now, which supposedly meets military specs.
I'm likely one of the few people here without a smartphone - is it worth it yet?
Depends what you want. I find it convenient to read and respond to new email on my phone, browse the Web from anywhere, pay my bills while sitting at the park, check Google Maps when I'm lost, calculate things (I have a full HP 48 emulator on mine), take the occasional photo of something wacky I see while out and about (and post it directly to Facebook), listen to music, and play the occasional game.
Then again, as much as people rave about how important "apps" are, I have apps on my phone that sounded cool at the time but I'm certain I'll never actually use. Maybe you'd use your phone even less. What you get for the $20 extra per month is that anytime you're possessed of the desire to do any of these things, you can just take out your phone and do it, then put it away again. If the added cost of one dinner per month isn't worth it to you, then don't buy a smartphone. Nobody's forcing you.
It isn't exactly obscure information that Google is limiting the market app to devices linked to a cellular plan.
Not obscure, perhaps, but false nonetheless. My Galaxy Tab 10.1 uses the Android Market, and it's Wi-Fi only.
I get this distinct hillbilly feeling after reading some of the names the open source community has come up with for their projects of late.
Well, then you're a weird and obsessive person.
Photoshop? Windows? AutoCAD? WordPerfect? Dreamweaver? Flash? What kind of open source hillbilly would come up with names like that?
Yep this is the only way to increase Bing's market share: make it the default search provider for a browser and hope that most people won't bother to switch. And with a bunch of WP7 devices coming out, they have another opportunity to improve Bing's "popularity."
And this is wrong because...?
If you're really that paranoid, just don't use Facebook, Twitter, Google or whatever. It's really not compulsory.
I don't think he's being paranoid. He has a point. I get Internet service from one company, VoIP phone service from another, domain registration from another, Web hosting from still another... I just don't think it behooves me to have a single company managing all of those services. What happens if I decide I don't like the company?
first, there's already a open source based browser on the system
Have you ever actually USED the open source browser on Android? I'm using it right now from a Honeycomb tablet, and it's pretty painful. Pages render strangely, the auto-fit function seems to kick in even when it's disabled, it's slow, the bookmark UI is awful... I don't understand how Google can have one perfectly good browser and make another that's so pathetically lousy. Not saying Boot to Gecko is the way to fix that, but some competition in this regard would be desirable.
Why did you get rid of your perfectly good computer and generate lots of e-waste?
The old one broke, actually. Main logic board fried, smoke out the back and it wouldn't power up. It was a real hassle to have to replace it, transfer my data from the old drives, and still get my work done. But thanks for asking, and while we're on the subject, how's that sanctimoniousness working out for you?
That's an interesting point.
In fact, not only does Breivik have pretty much the attitude toward the Jews that you describe, he extends the same sentiments to "Hindus," a term he uses to mean pretty much every non-Muslim population in Asia, including Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. That would be a pretty unusual position for your run-of-the-mill American racist.
Interesting, yet Breivik's use of the term doesn't really jibe with any of that description. He does make mention of the Frankfurt school, but he seems to feel the most overriding effect of "cultural marxism" is the spread of multiculturalism and the loss of "traditional European values," none of which is really mentioned in that article. The phrase is mostly just Breivik's code word for the vast global conspiracy that he perceives to be eroding everything he holds dear (no matter what it is).
People will compare him to Timothy McVeigh, and to an extent, it does seem that kind of terrorist act, but in some ways Breivik reminds me more of one Colonel Hitler, and I suspect before this is done, every far right culture conservative out there from American white supremacists too Western and Central European neo-Nazis to Serbian racist thugs will be declaring this guy some sort of champion. Polite society certainly will reject him, but the wingnuts, well, he's the perfect poster boy, handsome, dashing and articulately mad.
That's probably inevitable, but I doubt it will be as widespread as you suspect. As much as he tried to describe his ideology at length, it doesn't stand much scrutiny, and it doesn't necessarily intersect with the beliefs of a lot of right-wing groups here in the U.S.
He specifically went out of his way to criticize National Socialism as a dead end and categorically stated that his "Neo Templars" were not a Nazi group, so that could alienate him from some neo-Nazis right there. (At the same time, he does seem to sort of identify with National Socialist groups. I suspect he doesn't actually disagree as much as he claims, it's just more of a "my way or the highway" kind of thing -- he doesn't see himself as a foot soldier but as a "commander.") The people who criticize his extreme nationalists beliefs he describes as "Hitlers" because they oppress right-minded people.
As for his enemies, he categorizes them all as "marxists," in ways that often do not make much sense. Someone who does not accept an extreme nationalist/racialist view of culture is a "cultural marxist" -- do those two words really go together? People with ideas he doesn't agree with tend to be "intellectual marxists," and so on. By comparison, he categorizes himself as a "cultural conservative," and his politics as "national conservatism." (Maybe his aversion to "marxism" explains his distancing himself from "national socialism"?)
There are a few things in his writings that some will snicker over, too. I'll just quote:
Although I have had a change of mentality a majority of my friends have not. My stepfather Tore, one of my best friends Marius and my more distant friends Kristoffer, Sturla and Ronny are all living manifestations of the complete breakdown of sexual moral. All five have had more than 300 sexual partners (two of them more than 700) and I know for a fact that three of them have one or more STDs (probably all of them). I have several other promiscuous (slut) friends and I could list at least 30 male and females in my social environment if I wanted to. I don’t blame them personally and it has absolutely nothing to do with envy. I could easily have chosen the same path if I wanted to, due to my looks, status, resourcefulness and charm. It’s just terribly sad that my country have been the victim of severe Marxist infiltration leading to the political doctrines which have been allowed to destroy all moral and norms, resulting in the complete breakdown of our once great ethical standards.
Got that? Sexually-transmitted diseases are a result of "Marxist infiltration" of society leading to the infection of its "sluts." He devotes several pages to what can be done about STDs, including the unfathomable cost to society of millions of infections, the effects of the shame felt by some people after diagnosis, etc. He goes on:
Artists such as Madonna, Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera and series such as Sex and the City must be considered political activists/political movements and the lifestyles they propagate considered political propaganda. Alternatively, artists/series/movies propagating/glorifying promiscuousity must be restricted to liberal zones. .
. .
The following are a few arguments against excessive sexuality:
I do agree however that the media called it "terrorism" when the bomb hit Oslo and the perp was unknown and shifted more to "massacre" when it became known that the attack was domestic rather than foreign.
I don't think that's even true. I think they were calling it a "terrorist attack" when it was a bomb blowing up a government building, and they switched to "massacre" when it was a guy with a rifle walking through a summer camp, picking off kids like Jason Voorhees.
But it doesn't use Java. That's the point. If it used java, then it could use any of various freely available java engines. It uses, however, Dalvik which isn't covered by the same license.
But it does require you to compile Android software to Java bytecode as an intermediary step. Do Oracle's patents cover the design of the VM or just the execution of the code? If they cover the design of the VM, then the design of the VM includes bytecode, and using Java bytecode as a basis of a derivative product could be infringing. I say "could be" because I don't know for sure, and nobody really will until the judge rules on it.
Personally, at this point I think they should build a Python engine, and switch over to Python. It should be possible to create a tool that would do 90+% of the code conversion automatically...at least if you don't care how ugly it looks. After all, they did write a compiler.
I wouldn't mind that all. A smartphone SDK that lets you build apps using Python sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to how you do it now.
You do realize most of the products Oracle sells rely on Java, right? That's the entire reason they didn't want it going to IBM.
Oracle didn't block the sale to IBM. Sun's talks with IBM broke down, IBM walked away from the table, and Oracle swooped in.
They did a clean room implementation of Java that worked exactly the same way.
No, that's not quite right. Dalvik is a new virtual machine which, as I understand it, loads and executes bytecode in a way that's more efficient on low-power devices with limited resources. You start with a Java program, which you compile using the Oracle Java compiler. You then run it through an extra step that transforms the stock Java bytecode into Dalvik bytecode. Dalvik will not run regular Java code until you do this last part.
That said, it doesn't really matter. Dalvik could be a virtual machine that runs bytecode from a language called Vluuurm, which only runs backwards, and it could still violate Oracle's patents on virtual machine technology.
Does Android compete with Oracle? (No, Oracle doesn't market phones or tablets and never will.)
Oracle markets Java ME, which must be licensed by phone manufacturers, for money.
Does Android compete with Microsoft. (Not really.)
Microsoft makes Windows Phone 7. It also has a couple of different flavors of Windows designed for embedded systems, and I see an awful lot of device manufacturers considering Android for those these days (the Barnes & Noble Nook line, for example).
Does Android compete with Apple. (No, if you want an iPhone you're not going to buy an Android phone and vice versa.)
Buh? You might as well ask "does Ford compete with Chevy" and conclude that it does not, because once you own a Chevy you're not likely to buy a Ford and vice versa. Competition is something that happens before a company makes a sale. The TV spots, the product placement, the retail channel, the app market -- in short, all the things that make you want an iPhone -- that's the competition part.
Did anybody other than Google put in the effort to create Android and deserve the rewards for doing so? (No, they just want to collect money for doing nothing more than filing a patents that they don't even use in this market.)
Of course they did! By no means was Android created in a vacuum. The simple fact that the Android OS uses Java demonstrates that.
Did you type this on your five year old computer?
No, but I'd guess it's at least three years old. It's a Core 2 Quad running at 2.4GHz ... those chips came out in 2007 and I got mine a little later... anyway, seems fine for my needs.
Words Cross-Platform hint at this not being an option, nevermind IE's blatant disregard of standards.
How about the words, "Oh, and my customers are local police & highway patrol type organizations, most likely running an aged Windows box (probably IE6, too)"? Claiming you want something cross-platform is all well and good when you're trying to sound like a good Slashdotter, but when the facts are that your customers are all on Windows, it seems pointless to worry too much about it.
You know what else creates less e-waste? Hanging on to your perfectly good older TV instead of buying a newer, bigger TV every time the electronics companies bring them to market. Oh, but let me guess: I bet a 3-D LED TV saves the planet even more than the regular, 2-D kind, right?
I'm not sure I understand. Prism still exists, and it sounds like what you want, so I don't understand why you say it "turned into Chromeless."
It's also very easy to embed Internet Explorer in things. A friend of mine once "wrote a Web browser" in Macromedia Director using about six lines of code.
$99 sounds cheap, but that thing has less juice than my Motorola Defy, which cost the same (with a contract). My phone's processor speed is faster, it came with more RAM, and it came with a bigger SD card. In addition, my phone is portable, it's ruggedized, it has a camera, has GPS, does 3G data, and has access to the genuine Android Market. My phone even has higher screen resolution (though the physical screen is obviously smaller).
No sale to this guy, but somebody might want one, I guess.
Though by the same token, if Red Hat then forked the last GPL version, Oracle would no longer be able to merge enhancements from Red Hat's fork into their proprietary version.
That's true, but if my assumptions are correct, then nobody outside the core K-Splice group ever contributed any code to the project, which means everybody who really understands it now works for Oracle. Red Hat's contributions would be far less valuable.
That assumes that they own all of the code, and that none of it was either contributed by a third party or is a derivative work of someone else's GPL code.
The K-Splice source code I've seen has "Copyright K-Splice Inc." at the top of the README and at the top of every single source file. No other author is given. I'm assuming either the project used some form of copyright assignment agreement or nobody outside the core group contributed any code.
Just for the record, these are called false dichotomies, not false dilemmas.
The two phrases mean the same thing. Just for the record, in modern usage "false dilemma" is probably used more often than "false dichotomy."
That must have been a tough fix, since I didn't even present a dilemma.
You most certainly did. Several, in fact.
You argued that selling to one party is no different than selling to another and that you can only sell or not sell. That's a false dilemma. Most rational people would agree that selling diesel fuel to the Nazis is a lot different than selling it at a truck stop in Kansas. Even a real bastard would recognize the difference between selling chemicals to a factory up the river from your own house and selling them to a factory in another state.
You then extended this fallacy by comparing selling to evil, which suggests the additional false dilemma that you can only be evil or not be evil. Most rational people accept the existence of grey areas and degrees of good and bad, and some people do not acknowledge the concept of "evil" at all, particularly when it comes to business transactions.
You also made the explicit statement that you can either participate in capitalism or have morals. That's clearly another false dilemma, because there are a great many capitalists who didn't sell diesel fuel to the Nazis, even though that would surely have been a way to make some money.
In summary: Your black-and-white thinking does you no credit.