That would require the server to insert those slices into the feeds in realtime. But right now, there's no difference in HTML5 between a client downloading (as in, saving for later) a video and streaming a video. In both cases, the server is a dumb file server, and the client is downloading the video referenced.
My point is that the server does not need to be a dumb file server and it can insert those slices into the feeds in realtime. There are implementations of this out there already and a site the size of Hulu should have the technical ability to implement this kind of scheme.
Thus, you don't need Flash to switch bitrates on the fly, you can already do it with HTML5 and H.264 and the correct server setup.
What you want is for the server to have say, ten different versions of the same video, encoded at different bit-rates, and for the client to be able to switch from one to another smoothly. Just because it's variable bit rate, does not mean the client can choose to not download some bits. They have to download all of them, and the average bit rate might be greater than their bandwidth. So they need to be able to switch streams. Silverlight does this, Flash allows this, HTML5 does not. See the problem?
Actually, H.264 (and therefore HTML5 if it serving up a H.264 stream) can switch to other bitrates on-the-fly. There are a lot of papers on how it's done if you search around but I found the most succinct explanation at Wikipedia:
Switching slices, called SP and SI slices, allowing an encoder to direct a decoder to jump into an ongoing video stream for such purposes as video streaming bit rate switching and "trick mode" operation. When a decoder jumps into the middle of a video stream using the SP/SI feature, it can get an exact match to the decoded pictures at that location in the video stream despite using different pictures, or no pictures at all, as references prior to the switch.
By variable bitrate, they mean changing the bitrate on a per-viewer basis. So, if someone has a particularly bad connection, it gives them a lower quality picture so that they can keep up. And if they're connection improves (they turn off their torrents, for example) then the bitrate they are being provided would improve.
As far as I know, the object in HTML5 does not allow swapping out the referenced video while it's playing with another one encoded at a different bitrate.
That's really a server issue and not a client issue. H.264 supports variable bit rate streaming and the server should be able to detect the connection speed by monitoring the TCP receive window, acknowledgements, and other flow- and congestion-control elements of TCP. It can then adjust the stream's bit rate of accordingly. As long as the client has properly implemented its h.264 decoder it all should just work.
And you think that information is gone? Sure, it's no longer visible to other users, but in practicality, it's just a check box in a database.
That's why what you do is start filling in bad information over the course of a few months, then they have multiple sets of information and the real information is mixed in with the false information. This means that none of the information is useful or reliable since it is conflicting and misleading. If someone tries to use it all they will get is a mess.
Maybe my single voice means nothing but I'm willing to bet there's a lot more people who are fed up with not only Facebook's privacy activities but also their inane games, spam from other users, advertisements from all sorts of snake oil salesmen, and "friends" who you've barely, if ever, had contact with.
I'll stick to other ways to keep in contact with the people I really care about. The rest of them can stick their social media somewhere unpleasant.
I'll just say one thing about enterprise support and that would be that Mac OS X has tons of server and enterprise support both through FOSS and Apple, you just have to dig deeper. It does support Exchange, Active Directory, virtualization, thin clients, and so on. That being said, Apple really isn't in the business of selling servers, they have a few just in case someone wants them and they actually are decent servers but it's not their core business.
On the non-enterprise server front:
iMacs are definitely not made to be seriously upgraded. You can upgrade basic things like RAM, hard drive, and add peripherals. They are targeted towards people who tend to not upgrade anyways. If you want a computer that you can add in cards then what you want is a tower. Even among people who buy towers there are a very small percentage that actually do serious upgrading of their machine. Most people replace a few minor things and then go ahead and buy a brand new machine.
The small percentage of people who continuously replace components in their machines could easily upgrade their Mac tower or maybe build a "hackintosh" if they really want to run Mac OS X but not be tied into Apple's hardware. Or they could run another operating system and not use Mac OS X. In any case, they are a very small subset of computer users and I don't think they seriously affect Apple's bottom line.
The critical issue for me is flexibility and no Mac person can give a good rebuttal against it. When you buy a Mac you're pretty much stuck with what you've got, they don't make good long term upgradable solutions like the other brands out there in the same marketplace.
First of all, Macs tend to have a lot longer lifetime without any need for upgrading. I'm a systems administrator and we tend to upgrade/replace Windows machines at about 1/2 the lifetime of Macintosh machines. Both sets of machines are completely usable to the same level, it's just that Apple's machines and Mac OS X just seem to be less sensitive to the ravages of time. This seems to be due to Macintosh build quality and the fact that Mac OS X is much less demanding on hardware than Windows.
Secondly, most upgrades to machines are video card, processor, memory, or hard drive. Various Macs allow you to upgrade different things but you can pretty much upgrade all of those items on all Macs, with the exception of the video card. For the most part only Mac towers allow video card upgrades. This is usually OK because generally the only people who upgrade video cards are high-end video gamers or graphic design professionals and both of those groups tend to buy towers anyways.
You can also upgrade some other stuff, optical drives are a good example. It's usually pretty trivial to swap out an old one and swap in an upgrade. Pretty much everything inside a Mac is standard across the industry so it's all just plug-and-play. You usually don't even need to install drivers because the default drivers work very well.
Lastly, a lot of upgrades are easily handled through external peripherals. Want more hard drive space? Just buy an external USB or Firewire drive. This has the advantage of being able to easily move the device between computers.
I'd say the real critical flaw of antivirus software is that it costs money, steals system resources, and has no productive use. Wait a second - maybe antivirus software is just a virus that you KNOW about!
And yeah, I don't run any antivirus software either. I haven't run any for well over 20 years and I have yet to have any problems. Good security practices and an operating system that doesn't have much malware in the first place means that I've saved a lot of cash and time over the years.
he $450 Asus model I referenced has a higher resolution, is very light, and claims almost the exact same battery life.
Asus Eee PC T91, around $450 online: 8.9" diagonal LED panel 1,024x600 resolution, works out to about 133 pixels per inch (ppi) 8.86" (W) x 6.46" (D) x 0.99" ~ 1.12" (H) 2.1 lb up to 5 hours battery life
iPad Wi-Fi, $499 online: 9.7" diagonal LED panel 1,024x768 resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi) 9.56" (W) x 7.47" (D) x 0.5" (H) 1.5 pounds up to 10 hours battery life
The iPad is a bit wider and taller but significantly thinner, lighter, and about twice the battery life. When you're talking about a device that has a main selling point of ease to carry I'd say that the award goes to the iPad.
By the way, you can also use a mouse and keyboard with the iPad, as well as the multi-touch.
Like I said, different devices for different targets. If you want a bullet-proof device that really never needs any antivirus or fiddling around with cleanup software and has a simple UI then the iPad is for you. If you want a device that is thicker and heavier but allows a bit more flexibility along with more need for maintenance then maybe a netbook is your device. Neither one is better than the other, overall, just a different focus.
Netbooks are content creation tools? Good lord...I would never try to edit video on a Netbook. Mix music? How many DSP plugins do you think a Netbook can handle when editing audio?
Text can also be content, although text editing on a tiny netbook screen can be a pain too. I'd agree that netbooks are barely content creation devices, they are convenient to carry, read some e-mails, surf the web, maybe do a little writing but they really aren't that great at any of it.
The iPad is much more portable and easy to handle than a netbook, performs better on content consumption and almost as well on content creation. This is the reason the iPad is selling so well.
I think the thing that amazes me the most about that video is that even after bashing it against the blender a few times you can clearly see the on-screen keyboard through the cracks in the display.
The place where he bent the iPad is filled with battery. What's amazing is that he didn't short out the battery and cause it to overheat and go into a meltdown.
Most of the actual electronics are in the bottom of the unit so you'd have to damage it down there to stop it from actually running. It's still pretty cool that the display continued to work decently, up until it was blended!
For $300 or more, I expect more PC-like functioanlity and would prefer a netbook. In fact, Asus makes a nice convertible netbook/tablet that is cheaper than the iPad, has 10 times the storage, a faster processer, a webcam, I can install whatever software I want, it runs Flash, has more RAM, has a full keyboard built-in when I want it, etc. etc. etc.
If I can get that at $450, why would I want to spend so much more for far less functionality?
Netbooks are also more bulky, heavier, less battery life, lower resolution screen, don't have a GPS or compass, and usually have a worse UI for simple tasks like content consumption.
It's not that the iPad has less functionality than a netbook, it's that it has DIFFERENT functionality than a netbook. Perhaps you don't fit the target demographic for an iPad but there are obviously a ton of people who feel differently. The iPad is selling like crazy and netbooks have been falling off. Maybe the two aren't directly related but one thing is for sure: the masses like the iPad.
Why develop an app with XCode for one platform when you could develop it in Flash and have it run on multiple devices.
Because you can develop an app with XCode and have it run on multiple devices. It really isn't that difficult.
Flash is just another layer of middleware which is not necessary and ultimately just gets in the way. It gives quick results but the true headaches are borne by the users and also by developers down the road once you are locked-in to using Flash and want to do something that it doesn't yet support.
Apple's stance helps all of us. It promotes an alternative to Flash which forces Adobe to clean up its act and open and improve Flash even more. Perhaps it will even get them to come up with some nice HTML5 authoring tools and technologies. We all win.
Just as an example, my father is partially deaf. No hearing in one ear, and less than a quarter of human baseline in the other. But with a hearing aid (which still doesn't get him to full functionality), he gets 95% accuracy or better in regular conversation, and it gets better as the conversation progresses.
There have been a lot of papers written about the fact that English has a TON of redundancy built-in so that you can miss a lot of the conversation and yet still obtain the general meaning. In fact, English has been deemed to be one of the more fault-tolerant languages in existence. Here's an article by Claude Shannon (the same Shannon famous for the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem) on the topic.
The trick is to build algorithms which can properly analyze and utilize this redundancy in order to understand what is being said. Right now it's one of those tasks that the human mind easily handles but which we still haven't discovered how to do it via computers.
It's called a mondegreen. Another famous one is "the girl with colitis goes by" instead of "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" from Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by the Beetles.
There are a ton more of them out there, such as "there's a bathroom on the right" instead of "there's a bad moon on the rise" from Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Speech is definitely a tricky thing that even people may not have mastered!
...I don't want my taxes spent on keeping this man imprisoned for up to twenty years. Cost of imprisonment is on average 22,650 per year, at 20 years that's $453,000. In my opinion it's not worth that much to keep a man behind bars for guessing a password.
He won't get anything near 20 years. In a case like this he'll get almost no time in a minimal security facility, then he'll be put on probation for a number of years and he might also have to do community service or similar. Total cost to the taxpayer will be minimal, the trial itself will probably cost more than the actual imprisonment.
That being said, you NEED to have the threat of 20 years so that there's a possible consequence to your actions. If you break into someone's e-mail there should be penalties and just the possibility of 20 years behind bars is enough to keep most people from trying this sort of thing. You also need it for repeat offenders so that you can punish them properly. This doesn't mean you always need to give the maximum, that's why it's a maximum and not a set amount.
I hope the service stays as it is, I've been a Fastmail user for years and they've always been a pretty solid, inexpensive service.
It does seem like a good marriage to me, with both sides bringing something positive to the table that shouldn't interfere with each other's core businesses. We'll see if Opera enables Fastmail to continue its excellent service or if they mess around with a good thing and ruin it.
Like, one guy? Two of the three founders are still there.
Two founders are still with Bungie, yes. However, a lot of the rest of the top staff went to other companies over the years, such as Wideload Games, Certain Affinity, and Giant Bite.
We'll see if they can regain the magic they once had but they are definitely not in the same place they were before they were bought out by Microsoft.
Luckily Bungie is sitting on the Myth property, along with... well, [googles bungie's properties owned] uh, Marathon, and Oni [googles "Oni"]. So unless their plan is to release Myth 4 less than two years after Starcraft II, they'll be building some sort of new property just to generate cash. I'm doubtful if much of the creative staff that built Myth and Halo still work for the company.
Bungie transferred the rights to Myth and Oni to Take-Two Interactive as part of being bought out by Microsoft so those are toast unless they manage to buy them back. Myth 3 was pretty much a disaster so I'm betting they don't bother. Oni was an extremely cool FPS at the time it came out but it also didn't go too far.
I'm on board with Bungie being pretty much dead. Most of their original staff left for more exciting work over the years and they'll have to do a lot of rebuilding. Maybe they'll pull it off but they certainly aren't the same company that innovated with Marathon and Myth years ago.
Right, but the question is really: Can I distribute the source openly (tar.bz2 from a website) *and* distribute a binary version via the app-store ?
To clarify: The developer agreement only applies to applications (binaries) distributed through the App Store or installed on in-house devices. The developer agreement doesn't contain any wording to stop you from distributing source code, as long as you aren't re-distributing the iPhone SDK or Apple's example source code.
There shouldn't be any problem publishing binaries to the App Store as well as distributing the source code in other ways.
All the restrictions appear to be on the application, when distributed via the app-store, not on the source-code for the application. Other restrictions apply to Apple software (ie: the SDK), but that's not what you'd be distributing either.
If anyone can point out where it says the source-code is restricted from distribution, I'd appreciate it.
Your source code is your source code. Feel free to license it and distribute it however you want. The developer agreement only applies to when you want to distribute the binaries through the App Store.
There are plenty of developers out there who both sell their apps through the App Store and also publish the source code under an open license. This is the best of both worlds, ease-of-use for ordinary people who just want to buy the app and be done with it and the source code for those who want to tinker with it and load it onto their device themselves.
This is why it's so one-sided to link to the analysis of the letter without linking to the letter itself. Yes, the letter is available at the bottom of the article, hidden behind a button that you have to click to see it, but that's not quite the same thing as being up-front and giving people a chance to read the letter first, digesting it, and then the analysis.
Anyways, here's the letter for people who may have missed the link: Thoughts On Flash. Steve Jobs fully admits that a lot of Apple's stuff is proprietary and he explains why the proprietary nature of Flash matters in this circumstance.
Here is a relevant section from the letter:
Adobe's Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript - all open standards. Apple's mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
It's an interesting read which makes quite a few thought-provoking points.
Also note that I could have anything stolen that was worth $5000 and the best that I'd get out of the cops is a sympathetic look and some advice to check with my insurance.
Of course if what you had stolen was a $5000 TV then that's the end to the crime, just possibly breaking and entering and theft.
On the other hand stealing a prototype that possibly contains trade secrets worth millions of dollars is a far different matter. Add to that the fact that they took it apart and published the information they found to everyone, including Apple's competitors, and then maybe you can see the difference between the two crimes.
It seems like what they have re-invented is the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). Like the new Google Cloud Print, CUPS encapsulates the drivers for printers, filters and converts jobs based on the type of printing needed, sets classes of printers where the first available will be used, and much more. You can read a summary of some of the top features at its Wikipedia page.
It's also open-source, licensed under the GPL and LGPL, and has been used in Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X, and several Linux variants for years.
Slashdot Mirror
That would require the server to insert those slices into the feeds in realtime. But right now, there's no difference in HTML5 between a client downloading (as in, saving for later) a video and streaming a video. In both cases, the server is a dumb file server, and the client is downloading the video referenced.
My point is that the server does not need to be a dumb file server and it can insert those slices into the feeds in realtime. There are implementations of this out there already and a site the size of Hulu should have the technical ability to implement this kind of scheme.
Thus, you don't need Flash to switch bitrates on the fly, you can already do it with HTML5 and H.264 and the correct server setup.
What you want is for the server to have say, ten different versions of the same video, encoded at different bit-rates, and for the client to be able to switch from one to another smoothly. Just because it's variable bit rate, does not mean the client can choose to not download some bits. They have to download all of them, and the average bit rate might be greater than their bandwidth. So they need to be able to switch streams. Silverlight does this, Flash allows this, HTML5 does not. See the problem?
Actually, H.264 (and therefore HTML5 if it serving up a H.264 stream) can switch to other bitrates on-the-fly. There are a lot of papers on how it's done if you search around but I found the most succinct explanation at Wikipedia:
Switching slices, called SP and SI slices, allowing an encoder to direct a decoder to jump into an ongoing video stream for such purposes as video streaming bit rate switching and "trick mode" operation. When a decoder jumps into the middle of a video stream using the SP/SI feature, it can get an exact match to the decoded pictures at that location in the video stream despite using different pictures, or no pictures at all, as references prior to the switch.
By variable bitrate, they mean changing the bitrate on a per-viewer basis. So, if someone has a particularly bad connection, it gives them a lower quality picture so that they can keep up. And if they're connection improves (they turn off their torrents, for example) then the bitrate they are being provided would improve.
As far as I know, the object in HTML5 does not allow swapping out the referenced video while it's playing with another one encoded at a different bitrate.
That's really a server issue and not a client issue. H.264 supports variable bit rate streaming and the server should be able to detect the connection speed by monitoring the TCP receive window, acknowledgements, and other flow- and congestion-control elements of TCP. It can then adjust the stream's bit rate of accordingly. As long as the client has properly implemented its h.264 decoder it all should just work.
And you think that information is gone? Sure, it's no longer visible to other users, but in practicality, it's just a check box in a database.
That's why what you do is start filling in bad information over the course of a few months, then they have multiple sets of information and the real information is mixed in with the false information. This means that none of the information is useful or reliable since it is conflicting and misleading. If someone tries to use it all they will get is a mess.
Yeah, sorry Facebook, you are too late. I'm out.
Maybe my single voice means nothing but I'm willing to bet there's a lot more people who are fed up with not only Facebook's privacy activities but also their inane games, spam from other users, advertisements from all sorts of snake oil salesmen, and "friends" who you've barely, if ever, had contact with.
I'll stick to other ways to keep in contact with the people I really care about. The rest of them can stick their social media somewhere unpleasant.
I'll just say one thing about enterprise support and that would be that Mac OS X has tons of server and enterprise support both through FOSS and Apple, you just have to dig deeper. It does support Exchange, Active Directory, virtualization, thin clients, and so on. That being said, Apple really isn't in the business of selling servers, they have a few just in case someone wants them and they actually are decent servers but it's not their core business.
On the non-enterprise server front:
iMacs are definitely not made to be seriously upgraded. You can upgrade basic things like RAM, hard drive, and add peripherals. They are targeted towards people who tend to not upgrade anyways. If you want a computer that you can add in cards then what you want is a tower. Even among people who buy towers there are a very small percentage that actually do serious upgrading of their machine. Most people replace a few minor things and then go ahead and buy a brand new machine.
The small percentage of people who continuously replace components in their machines could easily upgrade their Mac tower or maybe build a "hackintosh" if they really want to run Mac OS X but not be tied into Apple's hardware. Or they could run another operating system and not use Mac OS X. In any case, they are a very small subset of computer users and I don't think they seriously affect Apple's bottom line.
The critical issue for me is flexibility and no Mac person can give a good rebuttal against it. When you buy a Mac you're pretty much stuck with what you've got, they don't make good long term upgradable solutions like the other brands out there in the same marketplace.
First of all, Macs tend to have a lot longer lifetime without any need for upgrading. I'm a systems administrator and we tend to upgrade/replace Windows machines at about 1/2 the lifetime of Macintosh machines. Both sets of machines are completely usable to the same level, it's just that Apple's machines and Mac OS X just seem to be less sensitive to the ravages of time. This seems to be due to Macintosh build quality and the fact that Mac OS X is much less demanding on hardware than Windows.
Secondly, most upgrades to machines are video card, processor, memory, or hard drive. Various Macs allow you to upgrade different things but you can pretty much upgrade all of those items on all Macs, with the exception of the video card. For the most part only Mac towers allow video card upgrades. This is usually OK because generally the only people who upgrade video cards are high-end video gamers or graphic design professionals and both of those groups tend to buy towers anyways.
You can also upgrade some other stuff, optical drives are a good example. It's usually pretty trivial to swap out an old one and swap in an upgrade. Pretty much everything inside a Mac is standard across the industry so it's all just plug-and-play. You usually don't even need to install drivers because the default drivers work very well.
Lastly, a lot of upgrades are easily handled through external peripherals. Want more hard drive space? Just buy an external USB or Firewire drive. This has the advantage of being able to easily move the device between computers.
Is that a good enough rebuttal for you?
I'd say the real critical flaw of antivirus software is that it costs money, steals system resources, and has no productive use. Wait a second - maybe antivirus software is just a virus that you KNOW about!
And yeah, I don't run any antivirus software either. I haven't run any for well over 20 years and I have yet to have any problems. Good security practices and an operating system that doesn't have much malware in the first place means that I've saved a lot of cash and time over the years.
he $450 Asus model I referenced has a higher resolution, is very light, and claims almost the exact same battery life.
Asus Eee PC T91, around $450 online:
8.9" diagonal LED panel
1,024x600 resolution, works out to about 133 pixels per inch (ppi)
8.86" (W) x 6.46" (D) x 0.99" ~ 1.12" (H)
2.1 lb
up to 5 hours battery life
iPad Wi-Fi, $499 online:
9.7" diagonal LED panel
1,024x768 resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)
9.56" (W) x 7.47" (D) x 0.5" (H)
1.5 pounds
up to 10 hours battery life
The iPad is a bit wider and taller but significantly thinner, lighter, and about twice the battery life. When you're talking about a device that has a main selling point of ease to carry I'd say that the award goes to the iPad.
By the way, you can also use a mouse and keyboard with the iPad, as well as the multi-touch.
Like I said, different devices for different targets. If you want a bullet-proof device that really never needs any antivirus or fiddling around with cleanup software and has a simple UI then the iPad is for you. If you want a device that is thicker and heavier but allows a bit more flexibility along with more need for maintenance then maybe a netbook is your device. Neither one is better than the other, overall, just a different focus.
Netbooks are content creation tools? Good lord...I would never try to edit video on a Netbook. Mix music? How many DSP plugins do you think a Netbook can handle when editing audio?
Text can also be content, although text editing on a tiny netbook screen can be a pain too. I'd agree that netbooks are barely content creation devices, they are convenient to carry, read some e-mails, surf the web, maybe do a little writing but they really aren't that great at any of it.
The iPad is much more portable and easy to handle than a netbook, performs better on content consumption and almost as well on content creation. This is the reason the iPad is selling so well.
I think the thing that amazes me the most about that video is that even after bashing it against the blender a few times you can clearly see the on-screen keyboard through the cracks in the display.
The place where he bent the iPad is filled with battery. What's amazing is that he didn't short out the battery and cause it to overheat and go into a meltdown.
Most of the actual electronics are in the bottom of the unit so you'd have to damage it down there to stop it from actually running. It's still pretty cool that the display continued to work decently, up until it was blended!
For $300 or more, I expect more PC-like functioanlity and would prefer a netbook. In fact, Asus makes a nice convertible netbook/tablet that is cheaper than the iPad, has 10 times the storage, a faster processer, a webcam, I can install whatever software I want, it runs Flash, has more RAM, has a full keyboard built-in when I want it, etc. etc. etc.
If I can get that at $450, why would I want to spend so much more for far less functionality?
Netbooks are also more bulky, heavier, less battery life, lower resolution screen, don't have a GPS or compass, and usually have a worse UI for simple tasks like content consumption.
It's not that the iPad has less functionality than a netbook, it's that it has DIFFERENT functionality than a netbook. Perhaps you don't fit the target demographic for an iPad but there are obviously a ton of people who feel differently. The iPad is selling like crazy and netbooks have been falling off. Maybe the two aren't directly related but one thing is for sure: the masses like the iPad.
Why develop an app with XCode for one platform when you could develop it in Flash and have it run on multiple devices.
Because you can develop an app with XCode and have it run on multiple devices. It really isn't that difficult.
Flash is just another layer of middleware which is not necessary and ultimately just gets in the way. It gives quick results but the true headaches are borne by the users and also by developers down the road once you are locked-in to using Flash and want to do something that it doesn't yet support.
Apple's stance helps all of us. It promotes an alternative to Flash which forces Adobe to clean up its act and open and improve Flash even more. Perhaps it will even get them to come up with some nice HTML5 authoring tools and technologies. We all win.
Just as an example, my father is partially deaf. No hearing in one ear, and less than a quarter of human baseline in the other. But with a hearing aid (which still doesn't get him to full functionality), he gets 95% accuracy or better in regular conversation, and it gets better as the conversation progresses.
There have been a lot of papers written about the fact that English has a TON of redundancy built-in so that you can miss a lot of the conversation and yet still obtain the general meaning. In fact, English has been deemed to be one of the more fault-tolerant languages in existence. Here's an article by Claude Shannon (the same Shannon famous for the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem) on the topic.
The trick is to build algorithms which can properly analyze and utilize this redundancy in order to understand what is being said. Right now it's one of those tasks that the human mind easily handles but which we still haven't discovered how to do it via computers.
Even humans mishear speech.
"'Scuse me while I kiss this guy"
It's called a mondegreen. Another famous one is "the girl with colitis goes by" instead of "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" from Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by the Beetles.
There are a ton more of them out there, such as "there's a bathroom on the right" instead of "there's a bad moon on the rise" from Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Speech is definitely a tricky thing that even people may not have mastered!
...I don't want my taxes spent on keeping this man imprisoned for up to twenty years. Cost of imprisonment is on average 22,650 per year, at 20 years that's $453,000. In my opinion it's not worth that much to keep a man behind bars for guessing a password.
He won't get anything near 20 years. In a case like this he'll get almost no time in a minimal security facility, then he'll be put on probation for a number of years and he might also have to do community service or similar. Total cost to the taxpayer will be minimal, the trial itself will probably cost more than the actual imprisonment.
That being said, you NEED to have the threat of 20 years so that there's a possible consequence to your actions. If you break into someone's e-mail there should be penalties and just the possibility of 20 years behind bars is enough to keep most people from trying this sort of thing. You also need it for repeat offenders so that you can punish them properly. This doesn't mean you always need to give the maximum, that's why it's a maximum and not a set amount.
I hope the service stays as it is, I've been a Fastmail user for years and they've always been a pretty solid, inexpensive service.
It does seem like a good marriage to me, with both sides bringing something positive to the table that shouldn't interfere with each other's core businesses. We'll see if Opera enables Fastmail to continue its excellent service or if they mess around with a good thing and ruin it.
Like, one guy? Two of the three founders are still there.
Two founders are still with Bungie, yes. However, a lot of the rest of the top staff went to other companies over the years, such as Wideload Games, Certain Affinity, and Giant Bite.
We'll see if they can regain the magic they once had but they are definitely not in the same place they were before they were bought out by Microsoft.
Luckily Bungie is sitting on the Myth property, along with ... well, [googles bungie's properties owned] uh, Marathon, and Oni [googles "Oni"]. So unless their plan is to release Myth 4 less than two years after Starcraft II, they'll be building some sort of new property just to generate cash. I'm doubtful if much of the creative staff that built Myth and Halo still work for the company.
Bungie transferred the rights to Myth and Oni to Take-Two Interactive as part of being bought out by Microsoft so those are toast unless they manage to buy them back. Myth 3 was pretty much a disaster so I'm betting they don't bother. Oni was an extremely cool FPS at the time it came out but it also didn't go too far.
I'm on board with Bungie being pretty much dead. Most of their original staff left for more exciting work over the years and they'll have to do a lot of rebuilding. Maybe they'll pull it off but they certainly aren't the same company that innovated with Marathon and Myth years ago.
Right, but the question is really: Can I distribute the source openly (tar.bz2 from a website) *and* distribute a binary version via the app-store ?
To clarify: The developer agreement only applies to applications (binaries) distributed through the App Store or installed on in-house devices. The developer agreement doesn't contain any wording to stop you from distributing source code, as long as you aren't re-distributing the iPhone SDK or Apple's example source code.
There shouldn't be any problem publishing binaries to the App Store as well as distributing the source code in other ways.
All the restrictions appear to be on the application, when distributed via the app-store, not on the source-code for the application. Other restrictions apply to Apple software (ie: the SDK), but that's not what you'd be distributing either.
If anyone can point out where it says the source-code is restricted from distribution, I'd appreciate it.
Your source code is your source code. Feel free to license it and distribute it however you want. The developer agreement only applies to when you want to distribute the binaries through the App Store.
There are plenty of developers out there who both sell their apps through the App Store and also publish the source code under an open license. This is the best of both worlds, ease-of-use for ordinary people who just want to buy the app and be done with it and the source code for those who want to tinker with it and load it onto their device themselves.
This is why it's so one-sided to link to the analysis of the letter without linking to the letter itself. Yes, the letter is available at the bottom of the article, hidden behind a button that you have to click to see it, but that's not quite the same thing as being up-front and giving people a chance to read the letter first, digesting it, and then the analysis.
Anyways, here's the letter for people who may have missed the link: Thoughts On Flash. Steve Jobs fully admits that a lot of Apple's stuff is proprietary and he explains why the proprietary nature of Flash matters in this circumstance.
Here is a relevant section from the letter:
Adobe's Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript - all open standards. Apple's mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
It's an interesting read which makes quite a few thought-provoking points.
Also note that I could have anything stolen that was worth $5000 and the best that I'd get out of the cops is a sympathetic look and some advice to check with my insurance.
Of course if what you had stolen was a $5000 TV then that's the end to the crime, just possibly breaking and entering and theft.
On the other hand stealing a prototype that possibly contains trade secrets worth millions of dollars is a far different matter. Add to that the fact that they took it apart and published the information they found to everyone, including Apple's competitors, and then maybe you can see the difference between the two crimes.
It seems like what they have re-invented is the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). Like the new Google Cloud Print, CUPS encapsulates the drivers for printers, filters and converts jobs based on the type of printing needed, sets classes of printers where the first available will be used, and much more. You can read a summary of some of the top features at its Wikipedia page.
It's also open-source, licensed under the GPL and LGPL, and has been used in Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X, and several Linux variants for years.
No no, that would be:
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