If it were closed source and simply free I think it could be considered dumping, but then software dumping (like web browsers) has a long history, and you'll note that the web browser market is very competitive right now, even as the cost of most browsers is free to the consumer. But if the codec will be open sourced, it means others can take the code and refine it. So by opening up the codec completely they relinquish some control of it in the process, freeing other organizations to fork it and create something better. Sure, Google gets the benefit of being able to get to the source as well, thanks to most open source licenses, but, again, they do lost some of that control over the direction of the codec.
Firewire is still found on a great many laptops and is currently integral to high end audio and video. Yeah, Apple marketed it poorly, requiring higher license fees and such, and yes, the hardware was more expensive, but it was a better standard in every way, so that's to be expected. In fact, that Firewire survives today despite low-cost, high-speed, and omnipresent USB2 is a testament to its quality.
Yes, there were other PDA has-beens, but the Newton crushed them all in terms of capabilities. I think modern PDA development would be stunted without the Newton demonstrating what could be done in a PDA device. Hell, it took years and years for other PDAs to rise to the level of the Newton that preceded them.
Further, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that the current CPU architecture that IBM is pushing could be linked to Apple's demands. While the RISC movement was not dependent upon Apple, the portion of the movement that resulted in the current core designs used in modern consoles might have moved in an altogether different direction had Apple not been placing regular demands on RISC chip makers for desktop chip designs. Otherwise the RISC technology may have remained mainframe and embedded only. The GC and Wii CPUs are directly descended from chips used in Apple desktops. It's entirely possible they would have been developed without a buyer like Apple on the hook to fund production, but let's face it, Apple was supplying lots of the cash driving large portions of RISC development by buying the chips to put in desktops. If you don't have a buyer for a chip technology you don't have demand, meaning you move on until you find something someone is willing to buy. Does this mean Apple architected the modern RISC chip market? Not really. But without them as a buyer and a driver placing demands on, among others, IBM, RISC development might have panned out differently. Perhaps modern consoles would have ARM-derived chips instead.
The point is, large players, be they developers, designers, or buyers, all play major roles, even if those roles are unwitting or happenstance. Apple is not responsible for many things, but without them those things would not have come about. The same could be said of Microsoft and many other corporations. When you are large enough to affect a market with your buying power you influence that market and are thus linked, even coincidentally, to future developments in that market.
Apple certainly wasn't dead financially. They still had massive amounts of cash. They were slowly bleeding out market share and they were in danger of having to use that cash store as life support, but NeXT wasn't their only option going forward. If Gassee hadn't put such a high price tag on BeOS that could have been the future Apple.
Yeah, it's a little Fairy Tale. It leaves out that Jobs is a major jerk (by every account I've heard) and that for all Apple's innovation they'd not found a way to transform great ideas into great products. But that is largely how it panned out. Jobs returned with better business sense and Apple finally had to face the truth, that one cannot run a company on ideas.
Truth is, I respect the technical chops and true innovation of Scully and Spindler Apple more than the current Apple. I'm glad Apple is finally seeing success, but Apple's latest innovations are all about making earlier ideas more useful and not about contributing new ideas to the intellectual pot. Both roles are needed, not just one or the other. The best Apple would be one that can do both.
Under Scully, and later, Spindler, Apple certainly wasn't as monetarily successful, but the company did see a great measure of valuable hardware and software experimentation without which the computing world would be a much less interesting place. Firewire, Apple Newton (would there even be an iPhone or iPad today without the Newton?), IBM's continued development of the Power line and the CPUs that power the GameCube, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 (linked to Apple if not emerging directly from Apple), Open Transport (fantastic technology which SHOULD have been extended through to OS X), HyperCard... There's more but I've been out of the loop long enough it's hard to recall everything.
No, when Jobs was originally removed from the company it was because he was in danger of driving it into the ground. While Apple still eventually saw some decline, they certainly hung in there and released lots of great technologies and ideas, even if some of the implementations were lacking or too ahead of the market. Jobs was brought back to save the company he almost sank. Jobs needed that time away and Apple needed that time to explore the market and technology. When the two were reunited both had grown in important ways. The modern Apple would probably not be the success it is without Jobs, but Jobs could not have created this Apple without his time away from the company in which the company was able to explore avenues Jobs would never have allowed.
The question now is, will this cycle somehow repeat itself in some way?
As long as the iPad has an LCD screen, eInk devices will have a readability edge for text. Thus, people who want an ebook reader will continue to be better served by lower cost ereaders.
Re:If you can't handle calculus, science isnt for
on
Help Me Get My Math Back?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Really... No business getting a degree in ANYTHING? That's a rather closed and inappropriate (IMO) view. If he's worked in a field for years that doesn't require he use any algebra how's he supposed to keep up with his skills other than doing algebra problems in his spare time? He never indicated the degree he's completing was heavily math-biased or math-dependent. Stats and Calc may be akin to gen-eds.
When you paint such ridiculously broad statements you risk your own image before anyone else's.
Still, if you can't even pass calculus then there's something wrong. And that's not even the problem- he's looking for help preparing for the placement test. If he's let his skills deteriorate so far that he forgets algebra, then he has no business getting a degree in anything.
Personal correspondences and public communications are not works considered to have commercial value, so while they are technically copyrighted (there is some minor debate concerning such things), I would imagine a lawsuit would only result in the messages having to be taken down and actual damages (punitive damages require a copyright notice in the US). Further, it's possible the BBS had used agreements and notices that messages posted there are publicly available and either automatically owned by or licensed to the operators of the BBS.
Exactly this. There is no practical computing device right now that can translate for shit. Simonetta is making lots of assumptions about what the computing power of today can actually do for us. The truth is, most software is wholly incapable of properly tapping that power, and I'm not certain we're anywhere close to devising translation software to truly be able to perform comparably to the human mind on language-related tasks. Again, the human mind is very well suited to language processing, and computers are just general purpose calculating machines. Perhaps when translation software is MUCH more robust (don't expect it within another decade at least) and capable of operating on discrete, portable devices (not just your desktop PC at home - think smart phones) this issue will be worth revisiting. But for now and the immediate, foreseeable future, we should not assume foreign languages are going to just translate themselves.
Fluency in what way? Fluency as in one who is an educated foreigner? If you took the average Chinese citizen's reading ability, I wonder how many characters they would actually know. I'm making some assumptions, yes, but only because I really don't know.
According to an article on linguistics I read some years ago when I was in college, while Chinese characters do often carry a meaning, they are just as important for their sound. The Chinese language and its characters are considered morphemic, however, even though the truth is that the situation is very much a hybrid one.
Most Chinese don't really know thousands of characters, though, really. There are probably only a few hundred, perhaps a little more than a thousand, that you likely really need to get by.
This is SO much more common in Japanese. See, the Japanese had a widespread spoken language long before they had a widespread written language. When travels to China resulted in "borrowing" the Chinese written language, many of the Chinese pronunciations were brought with them. But the Japanese pronunciations weren't tossed out. So most kanji characters in Japanese have a Chinese (onyomi) pronunciation and a Japanese (kunyomi) pronunciation.
The other problem is that the Japanese have 2 key character sets for native words. Kanji are Chinese characters borrowed straight up and hiragana are characters borrows and then altered to represent the individual syllables of the Japanese alphabet. Chinese doesn't have the latter character set, only the first. Some Japanese works are just kanji. Some are a mix of kanji and hiragana (phonetic characters).
Typically (but not always) the Chinese pronunciation is used in compound words and the Japanese pronunciation is used in words which feature only one kanji character or where the kanji character abuts hiragana (phonetic characters), such as at the end of verbs (phonetic characters end verbs because verbs get conjugated and the phonetic characters may change, whereas the verb's kanji characters do not).
I feel like your post might be sarcastic, but I don't think it is. If it is you suck at sarcasm, sorry.
Actually, computers are rather bad at language translation. Handwritten and printed characters are presented with such stylistic variation that even the simplest aspect, optical recognition, is very difficult. Hell, even high-grade OCR software for roman character sets is still imperfect. And then there's translation. Some characters have both multiple meanings and multiple pronunciations, most of which is dependent upon context. Computers don't grok context well since it relies a lot on complex relationships concerning meaning.
So yeah, humans are actually really good at language and the memorization that goes with it, especially in the ways that the computer is not good at it. Nothing wrong with using a digital pocket dictionary or phone app that's a dictionary as an aid, but no practical computer can replace the wonder that is the human mind when it comes to language-related tasks.
I concur. However, beyond this, internet advertising often serves a different purpose than TV advertising. Many TV ads are for products they don't expect you to go right out and buy (click through?). They want to plant the product names and images in your head so that when you next go shopping for certain classes of items you will buy their particular brand. If you have a headache you'll reach for Tylenol instead of generic acetaminophen, or Dial instead of Irish Spring. It's assumed that continued sales of a product have something to do with the presence of advertising.
Internet ads tend to take up less time and space than a full TV ad so they can't do the little story and humor vignettes but are, instead, used to flash crazy shit at you so that you'll click through and either a) get malware or b) maybe make an impulse investigation into their product. Internet ads are like leaders to a full ad instead of the full ad themselves. I guess in their current form internet ads function more like billboards on the highway, only without the "keep us in mind" ads, instead focused solely on "MacDonalds - Exit 32, 2 miles"
Maybe if banner ads advertised products like Dove soap or Cascade dish detergent instead of questionable mortgage products it would be more stable and less likely to be blocked. Internet advertising simply hasn't risen to any kind of reputable level.
None of this says HDTVs have to abandon analog inputs. There will continue to be models that feature them. It's more about Blu-Ray players and other devices that decode AACS protection on video not being able to output analog signals. The HDTV is the receiver, not the sender.
I typically try to express some kind of intelligent or informed opinion on/. stories, but all I can come up with here is, "Screw you, AACS." I have not yet moved to Blu-Ray or an HD TV, and this makes me much less likely to want to. Bastards.
I imagine UVEX has rolled over without a fight to make sure the IOC doesn't attempt to involve Ms. Vonn in this issue. I think UVEX would easily win a court challenge, but what would it do to UVEX's ability to sponsor Olympic athletes if they are on the IOC shit list? And it could have implications for the athletes being sponsored as well. The IOC doesn't have to be right to win, unfortunately.
Corona apparently has a similar development model to early Flash, meaning that people who develop stuff in Flash should theoretically have a easy transition to Corona, thus being able to easily move their Flash apps to the iPhone, and thus the iPhone app store.
And THAT is why this whole posting smacks of a simple advertisement. "Here's why Flash isn't on the iPhone, though if you really want Flash on the iPhone, use Corona instead!"
I like what little insight this article provides into the issue of flash on the iPhone, but it's really not substantive enough to warrant posting here on Slashdot. What does stand out, is how much of an advertising pitch this is for Corona. I'm sure it's fantastic, but the first part of the piece seemed, to me, to simply be an advertising lead-in.
According to US copyright law and Project Gutenberg, the original Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain. This means that the original form of the character is available for re-presentation and re-imagining. Now, it may be that there is some later, more potent version of Sherlock Holmes that is still copyright protected. Certainly all of the movies are. But the original stories, and the ability to create derivatives of the original character as written, that's no longer locked up. The Times article is not clear on what's protected and what's not. It's not like for a continuum of works there's simply an on/off switch, protected/not protected.
So rather than ask manufacturers to design products that meet consumer needs, we should ask consumers to meet product designer's needs. Gee whiz! My whole concept of the economy has clearly been up-side-down!
I think the only conclusion we can come to is that Sega had an array of factors aligned against them, among them their own erratic past in hardware, lingering financial troubles, and Sony's FUD. It's truly a shame that what sank them was their cleanest, most forward-looking console ever.
That's certainly preferable to a number of other solutions. What we really need is something very information dense and relatively stable over time. Speed is less an issue. It's great to backup quickly, but speed should take second place to the other two issues.
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If it were closed source and simply free I think it could be considered dumping, but then software dumping (like web browsers) has a long history, and you'll note that the web browser market is very competitive right now, even as the cost of most browsers is free to the consumer. But if the codec will be open sourced, it means others can take the code and refine it. So by opening up the codec completely they relinquish some control of it in the process, freeing other organizations to fork it and create something better. Sure, Google gets the benefit of being able to get to the source as well, thanks to most open source licenses, but, again, they do lost some of that control over the direction of the codec.
Firewire is still found on a great many laptops and is currently integral to high end audio and video. Yeah, Apple marketed it poorly, requiring higher license fees and such, and yes, the hardware was more expensive, but it was a better standard in every way, so that's to be expected. In fact, that Firewire survives today despite low-cost, high-speed, and omnipresent USB2 is a testament to its quality.
Yes, there were other PDA has-beens, but the Newton crushed them all in terms of capabilities. I think modern PDA development would be stunted without the Newton demonstrating what could be done in a PDA device. Hell, it took years and years for other PDAs to rise to the level of the Newton that preceded them.
Further, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that the current CPU architecture that IBM is pushing could be linked to Apple's demands. While the RISC movement was not dependent upon Apple, the portion of the movement that resulted in the current core designs used in modern consoles might have moved in an altogether different direction had Apple not been placing regular demands on RISC chip makers for desktop chip designs. Otherwise the RISC technology may have remained mainframe and embedded only. The GC and Wii CPUs are directly descended from chips used in Apple desktops. It's entirely possible they would have been developed without a buyer like Apple on the hook to fund production, but let's face it, Apple was supplying lots of the cash driving large portions of RISC development by buying the chips to put in desktops. If you don't have a buyer for a chip technology you don't have demand, meaning you move on until you find something someone is willing to buy. Does this mean Apple architected the modern RISC chip market? Not really. But without them as a buyer and a driver placing demands on, among others, IBM, RISC development might have panned out differently. Perhaps modern consoles would have ARM-derived chips instead.
The point is, large players, be they developers, designers, or buyers, all play major roles, even if those roles are unwitting or happenstance. Apple is not responsible for many things, but without them those things would not have come about. The same could be said of Microsoft and many other corporations. When you are large enough to affect a market with your buying power you influence that market and are thus linked, even coincidentally, to future developments in that market.
Apple certainly wasn't dead financially. They still had massive amounts of cash. They were slowly bleeding out market share and they were in danger of having to use that cash store as life support, but NeXT wasn't their only option going forward. If Gassee hadn't put such a high price tag on BeOS that could have been the future Apple.
Yeah, it's a little Fairy Tale. It leaves out that Jobs is a major jerk (by every account I've heard) and that for all Apple's innovation they'd not found a way to transform great ideas into great products. But that is largely how it panned out. Jobs returned with better business sense and Apple finally had to face the truth, that one cannot run a company on ideas.
Truth is, I respect the technical chops and true innovation of Scully and Spindler Apple more than the current Apple. I'm glad Apple is finally seeing success, but Apple's latest innovations are all about making earlier ideas more useful and not about contributing new ideas to the intellectual pot. Both roles are needed, not just one or the other. The best Apple would be one that can do both.
Under Scully, and later, Spindler, Apple certainly wasn't as monetarily successful, but the company did see a great measure of valuable hardware and software experimentation without which the computing world would be a much less interesting place. Firewire, Apple Newton (would there even be an iPhone or iPad today without the Newton?), IBM's continued development of the Power line and the CPUs that power the GameCube, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 (linked to Apple if not emerging directly from Apple), Open Transport (fantastic technology which SHOULD have been extended through to OS X), HyperCard... There's more but I've been out of the loop long enough it's hard to recall everything.
No, when Jobs was originally removed from the company it was because he was in danger of driving it into the ground. While Apple still eventually saw some decline, they certainly hung in there and released lots of great technologies and ideas, even if some of the implementations were lacking or too ahead of the market. Jobs was brought back to save the company he almost sank. Jobs needed that time away and Apple needed that time to explore the market and technology. When the two were reunited both had grown in important ways. The modern Apple would probably not be the success it is without Jobs, but Jobs could not have created this Apple without his time away from the company in which the company was able to explore avenues Jobs would never have allowed.
The question now is, will this cycle somehow repeat itself in some way?
As long as the iPad has an LCD screen, eInk devices will have a readability edge for text. Thus, people who want an ebook reader will continue to be better served by lower cost ereaders.
Really... No business getting a degree in ANYTHING? That's a rather closed and inappropriate (IMO) view. If he's worked in a field for years that doesn't require he use any algebra how's he supposed to keep up with his skills other than doing algebra problems in his spare time? He never indicated the degree he's completing was heavily math-biased or math-dependent. Stats and Calc may be akin to gen-eds.
When you paint such ridiculously broad statements you risk your own image before anyone else's.
Still, if you can't even pass calculus then there's something wrong. And that's not even the problem- he's looking for help preparing for the placement test. If he's let his skills deteriorate so far that he forgets algebra, then he has no business getting a degree in anything.
Personal correspondences and public communications are not works considered to have commercial value, so while they are technically copyrighted (there is some minor debate concerning such things), I would imagine a lawsuit would only result in the messages having to be taken down and actual damages (punitive damages require a copyright notice in the US). Further, it's possible the BBS had used agreements and notices that messages posted there are publicly available and either automatically owned by or licensed to the operators of the BBS.
Exactly this. There is no practical computing device right now that can translate for shit. Simonetta is making lots of assumptions about what the computing power of today can actually do for us. The truth is, most software is wholly incapable of properly tapping that power, and I'm not certain we're anywhere close to devising translation software to truly be able to perform comparably to the human mind on language-related tasks. Again, the human mind is very well suited to language processing, and computers are just general purpose calculating machines. Perhaps when translation software is MUCH more robust (don't expect it within another decade at least) and capable of operating on discrete, portable devices (not just your desktop PC at home - think smart phones) this issue will be worth revisiting. But for now and the immediate, foreseeable future, we should not assume foreign languages are going to just translate themselves.
Fluency in what way? Fluency as in one who is an educated foreigner? If you took the average Chinese citizen's reading ability, I wonder how many characters they would actually know. I'm making some assumptions, yes, but only because I really don't know.
According to an article on linguistics I read some years ago when I was in college, while Chinese characters do often carry a meaning, they are just as important for their sound. The Chinese language and its characters are considered morphemic, however, even though the truth is that the situation is very much a hybrid one.
Most Chinese don't really know thousands of characters, though, really. There are probably only a few hundred, perhaps a little more than a thousand, that you likely really need to get by.
This is SO much more common in Japanese. See, the Japanese had a widespread spoken language long before they had a widespread written language. When travels to China resulted in "borrowing" the Chinese written language, many of the Chinese pronunciations were brought with them. But the Japanese pronunciations weren't tossed out. So most kanji characters in Japanese have a Chinese (onyomi) pronunciation and a Japanese (kunyomi) pronunciation.
The other problem is that the Japanese have 2 key character sets for native words. Kanji are Chinese characters borrowed straight up and hiragana are characters borrows and then altered to represent the individual syllables of the Japanese alphabet. Chinese doesn't have the latter character set, only the first. Some Japanese works are just kanji. Some are a mix of kanji and hiragana (phonetic characters).
Typically (but not always) the Chinese pronunciation is used in compound words and the Japanese pronunciation is used in words which feature only one kanji character or where the kanji character abuts hiragana (phonetic characters), such as at the end of verbs (phonetic characters end verbs because verbs get conjugated and the phonetic characters may change, whereas the verb's kanji characters do not).
I feel like your post might be sarcastic, but I don't think it is. If it is you suck at sarcasm, sorry.
Actually, computers are rather bad at language translation. Handwritten and printed characters are presented with such stylistic variation that even the simplest aspect, optical recognition, is very difficult. Hell, even high-grade OCR software for roman character sets is still imperfect. And then there's translation. Some characters have both multiple meanings and multiple pronunciations, most of which is dependent upon context. Computers don't grok context well since it relies a lot on complex relationships concerning meaning.
So yeah, humans are actually really good at language and the memorization that goes with it, especially in the ways that the computer is not good at it. Nothing wrong with using a digital pocket dictionary or phone app that's a dictionary as an aid, but no practical computer can replace the wonder that is the human mind when it comes to language-related tasks.
I concur. However, beyond this, internet advertising often serves a different purpose than TV advertising. Many TV ads are for products they don't expect you to go right out and buy (click through?). They want to plant the product names and images in your head so that when you next go shopping for certain classes of items you will buy their particular brand. If you have a headache you'll reach for Tylenol instead of generic acetaminophen, or Dial instead of Irish Spring. It's assumed that continued sales of a product have something to do with the presence of advertising.
Internet ads tend to take up less time and space than a full TV ad so they can't do the little story and humor vignettes but are, instead, used to flash crazy shit at you so that you'll click through and either a) get malware or b) maybe make an impulse investigation into their product. Internet ads are like leaders to a full ad instead of the full ad themselves. I guess in their current form internet ads function more like billboards on the highway, only without the "keep us in mind" ads, instead focused solely on "MacDonalds - Exit 32, 2 miles"
Maybe if banner ads advertised products like Dove soap or Cascade dish detergent instead of questionable mortgage products it would be more stable and less likely to be blocked. Internet advertising simply hasn't risen to any kind of reputable level.
You put far more trust in the build quality and longevity of modern electronics than I do ;)
None of this says HDTVs have to abandon analog inputs. There will continue to be models that feature them. It's more about Blu-Ray players and other devices that decode AACS protection on video not being able to output analog signals. The HDTV is the receiver, not the sender.
I typically try to express some kind of intelligent or informed opinion on /. stories, but all I can come up with here is, "Screw you, AACS." I have not yet moved to Blu-Ray or an HD TV, and this makes me much less likely to want to. Bastards.
I imagine UVEX has rolled over without a fight to make sure the IOC doesn't attempt to involve Ms. Vonn in this issue. I think UVEX would easily win a court challenge, but what would it do to UVEX's ability to sponsor Olympic athletes if they are on the IOC shit list? And it could have implications for the athletes being sponsored as well. The IOC doesn't have to be right to win, unfortunately.
Corona apparently has a similar development model to early Flash, meaning that people who develop stuff in Flash should theoretically have a easy transition to Corona, thus being able to easily move their Flash apps to the iPhone, and thus the iPhone app store.
And THAT is why this whole posting smacks of a simple advertisement. "Here's why Flash isn't on the iPhone, though if you really want Flash on the iPhone, use Corona instead!"
I like what little insight this article provides into the issue of flash on the iPhone, but it's really not substantive enough to warrant posting here on Slashdot. What does stand out, is how much of an advertising pitch this is for Corona. I'm sure it's fantastic, but the first part of the piece seemed, to me, to simply be an advertising lead-in.
According to US copyright law and Project Gutenberg, the original Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain. This means that the original form of the character is available for re-presentation and re-imagining. Now, it may be that there is some later, more potent version of Sherlock Holmes that is still copyright protected. Certainly all of the movies are. But the original stories, and the ability to create derivatives of the original character as written, that's no longer locked up. The Times article is not clear on what's protected and what's not. It's not like for a continuum of works there's simply an on/off switch, protected/not protected.
So rather than ask manufacturers to design products that meet consumer needs, we should ask consumers to meet product designer's needs. Gee whiz! My whole concept of the economy has clearly been up-side-down!
I think the only conclusion we can come to is that Sega had an array of factors aligned against them, among them their own erratic past in hardware, lingering financial troubles, and Sony's FUD. It's truly a shame that what sank them was their cleanest, most forward-looking console ever.
I suspect the "forward looking" bit was referring to scheduling behavior, actually. That's what I took away.
That's certainly preferable to a number of other solutions. What we really need is something very information dense and relatively stable over time. Speed is less an issue. It's great to backup quickly, but speed should take second place to the other two issues.