What part of "don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android" and "don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute" did you not understand?
Android is a platform that give much more, and more meaningful, freedoms to app developers.
I'll add another big one - on the Android platform, replacing core apps with your own version is *encouraged*, and in fact *designed into the platform*. Unlike Apple's recent filing about "altering the core experience" re: Google Voice. Apple could create an iPhone-themed app suite for the G1 tomorrow, host it on their own servers, and no one could say otherwise. That's a pretty fundamental difference.
Say what you will about the iPhone as a sexy beast, etc, but as a developer platform and ecosystem, the only thing Android is missing is higher handset sales.
Overall, was tremendously impressed with the look, feel, cinematography, etc. Documentary style absolutely made the movie. And I generally loath shaky-cam. Thing is, shaky-cam has generally been used to imply that you *are* someone, so you never see what the hell is happening, whereas in District 9, it makes you feel like you're *watching* something, so you follow the action but feel the peril. Very effective.
There were some *amazing* scenes - I can't go into it due to spoilers, but really, unbelievably cringe-inducing moments of humanist horror. There is a richness to the interaction of the main character with his world that I just haven't seen elsewhere.
My friends and I kept looking over at each other with wild grins on our faces, unable to believe how intense, crazy, and just totally new the whole thing was. I really can't recommend it highly enough.
I see a lot of tags/comments asking what this is useful for. There are a few uber-nerd things like recording your life and whatnot that I'm not going to get into, but the big one is determining location.
There are a TON of sweet things you can do with accurate location information, but the one that I'm most yearning for is to control my bluetooth, wifi, ringer volume, etc based on where I am during the day.
I'm an Android user, and there's a very nice applet called Locale that attempts to do this, but it proves to be pretty useless. The reason is that you're either using GPS (drains battery, doesn't work indoors) or wifi (drains lots of battery, and is the primary thing you want to control) to figure out where you are. If using the microphone and cpu is cheaper in energy, then this will be a big win.
Beyond the energy use argument, one of the main things you want to control is bluetooth - again, it drains batteries when on, and is not generally useful. But it's EXTRAORDINARILY useful in the car if you have a hands-free setup. Again, figuring out when you're in a car is hard via GPS or wifi, but this technique would seem to knock that one out of the park.
So, in summary, having your phone know where you are in your daily routine allows it to be more intelligent about what services and functionality it enables, and thus makes your cell phone that much smarter and more valuable.
Well, that's the thing. Not the subject matter, but the quality of the writing itself. A good writer can keep your interest in a story about mowing the lawn, while a bad writer can make a murder boring.
Ah, but the worst writer in the world? He can make your own murder boring.
That's a fine generalization, and may or may not be generally true, but my folks and I attended a presbyterian church for 4 years. We stopped when we were told not to return until we wanted to tithe appropriately.
It's a tax, enforced by social ostracism and in our case at least, direct pronouncements from the pastor. Calling it anything else is disingenuous.
That being said, the Xenu guys are way more obvious about it.
Let me just start this discussion off with a great big "Attaboy!" to our top-notch Slashdot editors.
For those of you not intimately related with all of Google's many acquisitions, etc. Jaiku is a microblogging and social-networking site. JaikuEngine is the underlying tech that makes it work. Seems to be written in Python. Designed to run on Google Apps.
in this modern day-and-age, most stuff is just data anyways, and that is all database. Moving to a true client architecture, oh wait, all the data is still stored centrally, and most reports are all done via stored procedures.
I'm not sure what kind of work you do, but as someone who is developing a lot of web apps right now, I'll say straight up that the data is the easy part. The internals of any system are well understood and the border cases are easy to handle.
What takes time, and what breaks, and what drives me nuts, is the UI - validation, layout, rendering quirks, etc., etc., etc.
I've recently started playing around with Adobe's Webkit-based AIR framework for this reason. It lets me interact with the local file-system, have a data store that's not reliant on a network, and above all, has a consistent UI environment.
"It's just data" is a data-centric way of looking at things, and is true in a sense. But the argument being made here is about the interface between the client and the data - not the data itself.
I dont want to kill anyone, but I am a big supporter of public humiliation. part of his sentence needs to be 5 days in public stockades where people can throw non sharp objects at his face. and or take a few whacks with a switch to his body.
What is reminding him of high-school supposed to achieve?
I think pressing the quicksave button is itself part of the challenge. Do you want to overwrite your last save with this new one? What if one of the choices you made between it and where you are now was what determined your game ending?
That's the rationalization I used to use, to make the endless save/restore cycle seem tolerable. But I'll venture a guess here - you've never regretted hitting save, but you HAVE regretted getting into the game, really enjoying things, and FORGETTING to save. You get hit hardest for being the most immersed. Saving is an unnatural act in gaming - it breaks the metaphor.
Oh, and that rationalization? About constantly choosing to save/not save? That's a variation on the too many choices fallacy. I don't really need more anxiety in my life. Save/Restore should die. I applaud games such as BioShock that are moving towards its abolishment.
I haven't played PoP yet, but from this discussion, I'm going to be doing so soonest. Here's to letting go of mechanisms that hinder our immersion in the game.
If you're on a machine where you have sudo privs but no root (fairly common in hosted/managed servers) you can 'sudo bash' to get a full root shell. Veeeeery handy in some cases...
It's kind of obvious in hindsight, but I just learned this one last week.;-)
It has surprised me with all the vitriol that Microsoft received for using their desktop dominance to drive IE installs that no one has taken Google to task for using their web dominance to drive Chrome installs.
Google, like Microsoft before it (and so forth to before my time) stifles innovation today simply through its existence. It does not require active malice to do harm. Anyone involved in the startup world will tell you that one of the major questions VC's will push you on is how you are Google-proof. I mean, they give away blogging, mapping, email, news, search, 3d visualization, online doc collaboration, etc, etc.
If you want to start a business today, you have to have some idea why Google won't just Beta you into the ground. Google thus prevents innovation through the *possibility* of actions it might not ever take, or might take with only good intentions.
- Ringworld by Larry Niven (and generally any Niven book where he's the only author) - The Mote In God's Eye/The Gripping Hand by Niven and Pournelle - Mile Vorkosigan novels by Lois McMaster Bujold (NOTHING else by her!) - Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (duh)
Don't be an ass. The best outcome would be Microsoft taking great care of its customers, so that millions of people aren't hassled and inconvenienced.
It's a pathetic second best to have lots of people getting shafted, just so a company can be "punished".
The end goal is great technology and happy people. How we get there is much less important. Don't put politics before the people we're supposedly trying to help.
Except that the lead developer went on the site and explicitly claimed that that was their intention. Site is slashdotted, so I can't get the exact quote, but basically he claimed that if you put a javascript include tag in a page, your whole site needed to be GPL to comply.
Now, either he was misinformed, or he was intentionally misleading people to drive commercial sales.
1) I signed up to use ExtJS on LGPL, moving to GPL mid-release cycle is bad form 2) What does GPL mean for a client-side interpreted library? 3) Why haven't the ExtJS team members addressed 1 & 2 more clearly?
They have a pretty strong community, and this move has been (IMHO) very poorly executed. If their intentions are good, they need to clarify what they intend to ensure the community doesn't fork or move to another library.
This is a perfect example of how blurred the lines are when using extreme copyleft licenses in a distributed computing world.
The argument made by the ExtJS team is that by having a web page that includes the ExtJS library constitutes a close binding, and that thus your entire web back-end must be GPL'd. This is, on the face of it, ridiculous.
Web pages are specialized programs, written in HTML, JS, etc, that are compiled and run on the browser. My back-end is a tool for generating these programs, which I distribute for free to all users. My back-end does NOT use, require, or in any other way depend on the front-end libraries - rather, it works in harmony with them, and with an expectation that they behave in a certain way.
That the ExtJS team is making the first argument, and that they changed the license (from the LGPL) during a bug-fix point release, is a real indication that ExtJS is not a platform on which to build a long-term business. Especially given the lack of forward communication surrounding the change.
I've enjoyed working with Ext, and will probably stick with the LGPL'd 2.0.2 release for a while, but they have garnered a heck of a lot of bad will with this potential client.
I'm a Sirius subscriber, and in almost all cases, I find these kind of mergers to be bad for people like myself. But in this case, I think that the cost of market confusion, particularly with buying new cars, is more a burden than any perceived loss of choice. I find it intensely annoying to have one car Sirius capable, and the other XM capable, and now way of having both without $600 in after-market installation.
That said, if xSiriusM decides to raise prices or add back advertising or what have you, people will desert them in droves. Terrestrial radio is only worse because they have made a very strong effort to make satellite radio better. If they move towards a ClearChannel-esque service model, they'll be out of business in a year. Particularly ads. God help them if they put in ads.
By that logic, Switzerland would be a horribly war-like nation (mandatory military training) with tens of thousands of shooting deaths a year.
I myself practice "explicit simulation of violence" 3+ times a week. I'm a martial arts instructor. I've been doing it since I was 14. I've played violent video games since there were any to be played. I've never in my life so much as pushed another in anger, let alone kicking, punching or shooting them.
You're mistaking capability for incentive, and ignoring conscious and societal control. If someone gets fired up enough to hit someone, they will do so. Whether they're good at it or not seems to me to be a poor predictor of whether they will snap the societal constraints we all are under.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android" and "don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute" did you not understand?
Android is a platform that give much more, and more meaningful, freedoms to app developers.
I'll add another big one - on the Android platform, replacing core apps with your own version is *encouraged*, and in fact *designed into the platform*. Unlike Apple's recent filing about "altering the core experience" re: Google Voice. Apple could create an iPhone-themed app suite for the G1 tomorrow, host it on their own servers, and no one could say otherwise. That's a pretty fundamental difference.
Say what you will about the iPhone as a sexy beast, etc, but as a developer platform and ecosystem, the only thing Android is missing is higher handset sales.
Overall, was tremendously impressed with the look, feel, cinematography, etc. Documentary style absolutely made the movie. And I generally loath shaky-cam. Thing is, shaky-cam has generally been used to imply that you *are* someone, so you never see what the hell is happening, whereas in District 9, it makes you feel like you're *watching* something, so you follow the action but feel the peril. Very effective.
There were some *amazing* scenes - I can't go into it due to spoilers, but really, unbelievably cringe-inducing moments of humanist horror. There is a richness to the interaction of the main character with his world that I just haven't seen elsewhere.
My friends and I kept looking over at each other with wild grins on our faces, unable to believe how intense, crazy, and just totally new the whole thing was. I really can't recommend it highly enough.
I see a lot of tags/comments asking what this is useful for. There are a few uber-nerd things like recording your life and whatnot that I'm not going to get into, but the big one is determining location.
There are a TON of sweet things you can do with accurate location information, but the one that I'm most yearning for is to control my bluetooth, wifi, ringer volume, etc based on where I am during the day.
I'm an Android user, and there's a very nice applet called Locale that attempts to do this, but it proves to be pretty useless. The reason is that you're either using GPS (drains battery, doesn't work indoors) or wifi (drains lots of battery, and is the primary thing you want to control) to figure out where you are. If using the microphone and cpu is cheaper in energy, then this will be a big win.
Beyond the energy use argument, one of the main things you want to control is bluetooth - again, it drains batteries when on, and is not generally useful. But it's EXTRAORDINARILY useful in the car if you have a hands-free setup. Again, figuring out when you're in a car is hard via GPS or wifi, but this technique would seem to knock that one out of the park.
So, in summary, having your phone know where you are in your daily routine allows it to be more intelligent about what services and functionality it enables, and thus makes your cell phone that much smarter and more valuable.
Just wanted to put a plug in for the HTC-built G1 phone, which has had built-in OGG support from day one.
Very nice toy, am loving being able to SSH into my servers anywhere there's cell service.
Ah, but the worst writer in the world? He can make your own murder boring.
That's a fine generalization, and may or may not be generally true, but my folks and I attended a presbyterian church for 4 years. We stopped when we were told not to return until we wanted to tithe appropriately.
It's a tax, enforced by social ostracism and in our case at least, direct pronouncements from the pastor. Calling it anything else is disingenuous.
That being said, the Xenu guys are way more obvious about it.
It's much worse than that. Put up a porn site. Use free content. Have a "Solve captcha to get free pics!" blocker.
Now, grab a captcha you want to break, show to pornaholics, get solution, pass it back to the original site.
Perfectly unbeatable captcha solving, for virtually free, and totally automated.
Feh.
Let me just start this discussion off with a great big "Attaboy!" to our top-notch Slashdot editors.
For those of you not intimately related with all of Google's many acquisitions, etc. Jaiku is a microblogging and social-networking site. JaikuEngine is the underlying tech that makes it work. Seems to be written in Python. Designed to run on Google Apps.
There, was that so hard?
I'm not sure what kind of work you do, but as someone who is developing a lot of web apps right now, I'll say straight up that the data is the easy part. The internals of any system are well understood and the border cases are easy to handle.
What takes time, and what breaks, and what drives me nuts, is the UI - validation, layout, rendering quirks, etc., etc., etc.
I've recently started playing around with Adobe's Webkit-based AIR framework for this reason. It lets me interact with the local file-system, have a data store that's not reliant on a network, and above all, has a consistent UI environment.
"It's just data" is a data-centric way of looking at things, and is true in a sense. But the argument being made here is about the interface between the client and the data - not the data itself.
What is reminding him of high-school supposed to achieve?
That's the rationalization I used to use, to make the endless save/restore cycle seem tolerable. But I'll venture a guess here - you've never regretted hitting save, but you HAVE regretted getting into the game, really enjoying things, and FORGETTING to save. You get hit hardest for being the most immersed. Saving is an unnatural act in gaming - it breaks the metaphor.
Oh, and that rationalization? About constantly choosing to save/not save? That's a variation on the too many choices fallacy. I don't really need more anxiety in my life. Save/Restore should die. I applaud games such as BioShock that are moving towards its abolishment.
I haven't played PoP yet, but from this discussion, I'm going to be doing so soonest. Here's to letting go of mechanisms that hinder our immersion in the game.
We have no TV. Our son had a nanny (no daycare, very very few playdates). We read stories about bunnies.
His third word was "truck".
We gave him dolls.
He ran them over with his trucks.
If you're on a machine where you have sudo privs but no root (fairly common in hosted/managed servers) you can 'sudo bash' to get a full root shell. Veeeeery handy in some cases...
It's kind of obvious in hindsight, but I just learned this one last week. ;-)
It has surprised me with all the vitriol that Microsoft received for using their desktop dominance to drive IE installs that no one has taken Google to task for using their web dominance to drive Chrome installs.
Google, like Microsoft before it (and so forth to before my time) stifles innovation today simply through its existence. It does not require active malice to do harm. Anyone involved in the startup world will tell you that one of the major questions VC's will push you on is how you are Google-proof. I mean, they give away blogging, mapping, email, news, search, 3d visualization, online doc collaboration, etc, etc.
If you want to start a business today, you have to have some idea why Google won't just Beta you into the ground. Google thus prevents innovation through the *possibility* of actions it might not ever take, or might take with only good intentions.
Hey all, I see lots of comments re: OpenDNS as a good solution if your ISP sucks (as mine does) and has not patched.
But I can't trust my DNS to resolve correctly to OpenDNS.com or whatever.
Anyone got dotted quads for me?
Sci-Fi:
- Ringworld by Larry Niven (and generally any Niven book where he's the only author)
- The Mote In God's Eye/The Gripping Hand by Niven and Pournelle
- Mile Vorkosigan novels by Lois McMaster Bujold (NOTHING else by her!)
- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (duh)
Fantasy:
- Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper
Graphic Novel:
- Dark Night/The Year One by Frank Miller
Don't be an ass. The best outcome would be Microsoft taking great care of its customers, so that millions of people aren't hassled and inconvenienced.
It's a pathetic second best to have lots of people getting shafted, just so a company can be "punished".
The end goal is great technology and happy people. How we get there is much less important. Don't put politics before the people we're supposedly trying to help.
Here: CNet Writeup
Discussion of why a memristor is new, and more about how it works.
Except that the lead developer went on the site and explicitly claimed that that was their intention. Site is slashdotted, so I can't get the exact quote, but basically he claimed that if you put a javascript include tag in a page, your whole site needed to be GPL to comply.
Now, either he was misinformed, or he was intentionally misleading people to drive commercial sales.
Not a great move, either way.
Couple of things:
1) I signed up to use ExtJS on LGPL, moving to GPL mid-release cycle is bad form
2) What does GPL mean for a client-side interpreted library?
3) Why haven't the ExtJS team members addressed 1 & 2 more clearly?
They have a pretty strong community, and this move has been (IMHO) very poorly executed. If their intentions are good, they need to clarify what they intend to ensure the community doesn't fork or move to another library.
This is a perfect example of how blurred the lines are when using extreme copyleft licenses in a distributed computing world.
The argument made by the ExtJS team is that by having a web page that includes the ExtJS library constitutes a close binding, and that thus your entire web back-end must be GPL'd. This is, on the face of it, ridiculous.
Web pages are specialized programs, written in HTML, JS, etc, that are compiled and run on the browser. My back-end is a tool for generating these programs, which I distribute for free to all users. My back-end does NOT use, require, or in any other way depend on the front-end libraries - rather, it works in harmony with them, and with an expectation that they behave in a certain way.
That the ExtJS team is making the first argument, and that they changed the license (from the LGPL) during a bug-fix point release, is a real indication that ExtJS is not a platform on which to build a long-term business. Especially given the lack of forward communication surrounding the change.
I've enjoyed working with Ext, and will probably stick with the LGPL'd 2.0.2 release for a while, but they have garnered a heck of a lot of bad will with this potential client.
No one I know listens to Howard Stern, on Sirius or otherwise.
I listen to Coffee House (acoustic stuff), Chill (ambient/techno), Hits 1 and the Pulse.
I listen to these *all* the *time*. Because there's no ads. It's great.
I know the talk stuff has ads. I couldn't care less. But touch my ears with a Toyota sale-abration on the music stations, and I instantly unsubscribe.
I'm a Sirius subscriber, and in almost all cases, I find these kind of mergers to be bad for people like myself. But in this case, I think that the cost of market confusion, particularly with buying new cars, is more a burden than any perceived loss of choice. I find it intensely annoying to have one car Sirius capable, and the other XM capable, and now way of having both without $600 in after-market installation.
That said, if xSiriusM decides to raise prices or add back advertising or what have you, people will desert them in droves. Terrestrial radio is only worse because they have made a very strong effort to make satellite radio better. If they move towards a ClearChannel-esque service model, they'll be out of business in a year. Particularly ads. God help them if they put in ads.
By that logic, Switzerland would be a horribly war-like nation (mandatory military training) with tens of thousands of shooting deaths a year.
I myself practice "explicit simulation of violence" 3+ times a week. I'm a martial arts instructor. I've been doing it since I was 14. I've played violent video games since there were any to be played. I've never in my life so much as pushed another in anger, let alone kicking, punching or shooting them.
You're mistaking capability for incentive, and ignoring conscious and societal control. If someone gets fired up enough to hit someone, they will do so. Whether they're good at it or not seems to me to be a poor predictor of whether they will snap the societal constraints we all are under.