Android takes the title of open for a number of reasons, including the fact that it's open source (not the crap manufacturers put on top, but Google's Android,) the market is more open, and the market isn't the only show in town. If Jobs wants to attack specific bad implementations that layer closed crap on top, I'll applaud him -- but you can't generalize that to every phone.
By your 1% definition, even gNewSense wouldn't be open if you put it in front of my grandmother.
What exactly are they dreaming about? I've only dealt with a few, but the open-source hardware companies I've purchased from are catering to individuals who don't need a PC motherboard or a 3GHz processor for their project. Think Arduino or GPS breakout board.
In reality, cost barriers to open source hardware are progressing quite nicely. Access to fab resources in China and pick and place machines are dropping in price; doing it on your own is much more accessible. For examples, check out the aforementioned Arduino or the stuff Makerbot creates. 3d printers at a price-point of $1,000 were a pie in the sky dream 10 years ago.
And lastly, open source isn't always about free as in bear. People still pay for Linux. I still pay for open source hobbyist hardware. I purchase it instead of other roughly equivalent devices because it's more easily modifiable, is easily hacked upon, is often quite well documented, and it's easy to find support.
Adafruit has recently mentioned that "[t]here are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies". It seems to be working for some of us.
Sure! I can't see using a cat shaped scanner in a business setting, but it'd be good for development and personal use.
Of course, there's no way I'd actually _pay_ for one of those hideous failed dot-com relics.
First off, I should've clarified: this isn't actually a POS concept - it's really a inventory tracking addon. The current register (which is, really, just a calculator with department codes and basic gross sales tracking) isn't going anywhere. My idea was a standing barcode scanner attached to the computer, and the computer attached to the serial port on the register, acting as the register's barcode scanner. No worries about credit card fiddliness. The stand alone unit isn't going anywhere. The hardest POS interface issues would be entering quantity and discount percentage.
Secondly, thank you for the constructive criticisms.. In response to the "just buy something," that, unfortunately, isn't an option. The budget simply wouldn't allow it, or else the shop would already have it. As for employee training, there are only two: myself and the owner. It's really one of the reasons I want a man-in-the-middle solution (scanner to inventory tracking Linux system, Linux system to register): if the system has issues and no one can support it (you'd be amazed at the number of older computer nerds at a college town comic/games store. Or.. Not.), just pull it out and revert to the current glorified calculator. The invested work, though, is a recognizable problem. As for excess complexity, I'm really not looking to manage the entire POS experience. Most of that is in the owner's head. This is simply an inventory tracking solution, which may make it less useful, but keep it from becoming intractable. But the idea that the owner might reject it is thoroughly acceptable, for the reasons mentioned.
And as for the Jeff Albertson remarks, I'd be a fool to not get paid to do something I enjoy. I play games in the back room, make sure people don't steal, and defer all comic questions to the owner - who's in the five days I'm not. Which, naturally, is exactly what was in the verbal job description.;)
ipods are damn cool, but there is no way I'm dropping that kind of cash on what is essentially a fluff item.
Whether or not a HDD based mp3 player is a fluff item is certainly up to debate, and I'm certainly willing to tell you why I don't think my iRiver H120 isn't. =)
Besides the 16 GB of oggs, mp3s, and wmas (*retch*), it can also record things. For Every class I've been to this semester, I have an 80 Kbit mp3. Did I miss something in my notes? I'll just look it up in my lectures folder!
It also has a FM tuner, which was quite handy when I discovered that I had no radio when Ivan passed over Athens, Georgia.
Beyond that, it's also a portable hard drive. It's far easier to carry a few character sheets or PDFs in the public domain on a USB mass-storage device than it is to e-mail them to myself (and yes, I do have GMail. My H120 is still easier and quicker.)
I'd consider this little bugger to be far from a fluff item, and lots of people agree. But, hey, to each their own.
P.S.: It's also nice to listen to books on tape, language lessons, or *gasp* music. =)
Re:Of course the candidates are in favor!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
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· Score: 1
Come on people, owning a machine gun doesn't mean crap when the other guy has smart bombs.
The whole idea that we should own guns to keep our own government from opprssing us is just wishful thinking, quit dreaming of Rambo and crack a law book.
You're assuming that arms are the only way to fight a rebellion. All of those examples except for the Civil War were small minded, and the Civil War was too segregated to be effective.
If people really wanted to rebel, they'd have to have very large numbers, be willing to take huge losses, and be spread out about the country. The end result wouldn't be trying to take out the tanks, it'd be to try and demoralize our brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers, sons, and daughters who would fight against the rebellion inside of those tanks. Your trigger finger itches less when you're about to put a shell in a family member's home.
The _only_ way to succeed with violence would be to make the entire country too hot to handle politically and emotionally for our current government. We're nowhere near that in terms of an oppressive/unpopular government or a distressed/pissed off populace.
So, all in all, assault weapons wouldn't help in a rebellion. Riots and Tianimen Square style protest are what it'd take against our US of A.
P.S.: Even though the series is sword and sorcery, Terry Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen from the Sword of Truth series covers this pretty well.
I'm currently taking a course at my school, for essentially doing computations, but only up to a certain accuracy (estimation with precision).... Just continue that process for about 5 times, and the results are amazing.
At my summer job, a math academic camp, one of the instructors was teaching a three week crash course on OR. He found, in a journal, an algorithm for estimating general square roots that could yield _over_ a hundred digits in less than five iterations, if you're even remotely close to a first guess (as in, guessing three for the square root of two; for guesses off by about a hundred, add one to the number of iterations.) This algorithm was created in the early nineteen hundreds in response to a sort of contest in the journal.
It's worth noting that this was done completely by hand, due to the time. The algorithm was two iterated polynomials, but to get the estimate you had to divide huge numbers. Hundred plus digit numbers. Without a calculator.
Educated guessing (numerical analysis, operations research) is pretty damned cool, if you ask me. Too bad most people never learn it, as ten digits on a small calculator is enough for most people.
I wouldn't say that the iRiver firmware is great, but it's not as bad as the original Jukebox. The iRiver, after all, already plays Vorbis.
I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player.
I personally love my H120 with the 1.40US firmware, but a lot of people are becoming quite pissed off about the whole thing. iRiver has repeatedly made promises on release dates, only to turn around and break those promises. Not only that, but when iRiver actually did release a new firmware, they didn't release the features they said they would. Everyone was quite hyped up when they saw 1.60 on the Korean iRiver website, only to find out that iRiver misinterpreted "gapless playback" (which, it turns out, would require a complete rewrite of their decoding software for the player,) and ignored other big items on the wishlist, such as OTF playlists, a kludgeless random shuffle, and a fix to a hard drive bug that can drain a sixteen hour battery in two hours.
iRiver has did a great job with the creation of the H1?0 series, but they're starting to alienate users with their empty promises.
An aside on this: the military recruits color blind individuals very heavily.
They do..? After deciding to join the service, I looked through the Army MOS specifications: less than 20 out of 200 jobs the Army offers allow for red-green deficiency. Specifically, the Army doesn't allow color-blind programmers (much less infantry.) Go figure.
The Air Force, which is who I intend on going with, seems to think that black text on white backgrounds isn't a bane to us with minor red-green deficiency. w0074r.
By the way, the official MOS descriptions for the Army are located here. You can also find all of the other official descriptions for the other services at the wonderful website as well.
It was really only a matter of time before automated image selection moved to further applications. From what I understand, Fermilab has been doing a very similar thing - with millions of "images" from each collision, the _only_ way to look at the remotely interesting ones is to have an automatic selection process.
It does, however, make you wonder about the really interesting things that could be missed in the process.
On the topic of origami, I'm currently interacting with one of the top twenty something origami designers in the US, and I must say that the art origami is much more beautiful and elegant than I expected.
On the note of the origami folder, I said interacting with because he isn't a coworker.. He's a student at an academic camp I'm working at. I'd seriously suggest looking at his work, or at least some specific amazing folds that he's designed. The designs clearly have mathematical elements, and he currently plans on developing a Java program to aid in creating the circle/river packing diagrams (the red lines.)
It's kind of scary to know that a sixteen/seventeen year old is doing such complex work, as is evident from his origami folding and his mathematical ability in class.
However, we should never block cell phone reception anywhere.
Why can't we let businesses decide on their own atmosphere? All they have to do is put a sign up that says "Cell phones will NOT work in this building." Problem solved. If people don't want to watch a movie in a cell-phoneless theatre, they can just go to a theatre that allows them.
Letting people decide via business choices as opposed to through legislation can provide a balance of freedom for both the customer and the business.
Maybe, but the artists have a choice in who distributes their music.
Why is this modded funny? Just sitting here, I've imagined ways of them getting out of their contracts. Of course, I'm imagining that the Beastie Boys are rich, which can't be too far of a stretch. How? Simple.
1) Release crap albums until their contract runs out.
2) Make sure everyone knows _why_ you're releasing crap albums. Make public press releases about why you're doing it. If your contract prohibits that, then make private statements.
3) In all likelihood, the contract would be ended early by the RIAA. If not, it isn't hard to live on a million for the next few years or so, until the contract runs out on its own.
4) Release on an independent record label. Aphex Twin has a successful one. Paul Van Dyk is doing fine on his record label. The Beastie Boys have the clout to do it.
5) Profit. Again.
Where there's a will, there's a way. That's a way. The Beastie Boys just don't have the will.
. . . it will be capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second.
Does anyone else not gain anything from that statement? 50 trillion calculations means very little if all it can do is flop a bit back and forth 50 trillion times. Perhaps someone could come up with a better benchmark, like the largest number it can factor in a minute, on average. Even then we may be talking about huge exponents in scientific notation. =p
It could just be the fact that it is ten in the morning, but 5*10^13 seems incomprehensbily large.
No, no, that's far too simple. The better way (IMAO) is to:
1. Find a man named Gas.
2. Take him to New Jersey.
3.... I just realized that this is going downhill fast. It'd probably be better to do it the simple way.
Optimization isn't really a hard topic. Should a programmer spend days nitpicking fifty lines of code that won't be used frequently? No. When initially writing code, should someone use Bogosort instead of Quicksort ? I'll let you figure that one out.
My biggest (reasonable) beef in the optimization area is software bloat. Programs like huge office suites containing excessive, poorly implemented crap that people won't use really ticks me off. KISS. Even the stuff that has to be complicated.
Of course, I'll always be a sucker for tweaking code for the fun of it, when I have the time. =)
should really read that essay! Maybe then we wouldn't need dual-core 4-6 GHz CPUs and 2GB ram to run their new OS.
Good lord, that article was _written_ for the general/. non-RTFA-readership.
I hate to spoil the article for people (hint, hint,) but Longhorn in Erlang would be scary at best. At worst.. Well, let's just say that we'd have to wait for the Earth Simulator to come out before running it.
I eat a vial with all my passwords. In my will I state that the Medical Examiner has to remove it from my gut. Every few days I pass it, wash it and swallow it again.:)
You know.. I just had this really weird vision of a medical examiner removing a glass vial from your windpipe.
I applaude the creative ressurrection of a childhood pastime, but I am skeptical of the game being much more than an elaborate "tag, you're it" with costumes.
I do hope that was intended to be a joke. In addition to the problems you found, here are some more: neither the ghosts of pac-man will move at a constant speed, Pac-man doesn't have a top down view of the city (and hence no complete knowledge of ghost position), and the city doesn't have some space warping ability to send you to the other side if you walk through a certain door.
In short, it's all for fun. Pac-man was an elaborate "tag, you're it" on a computer screen; this is an elaborate "tag, you're it" on a city. And you get exercise, too. Sounds like a good deal.
I don't know that there's been a test case that has shown that encryption is protected as free speech
Possibly not implicitely, but strong encryption has been around since at least 1976, when NIST approved DES. The only problem found with DES is differential analysis, and that still isn't easy on computers around the time of DES's release. So, it comes down to almost thirty years of hard encryption in the public's hands, with no successful challenges in the courts. To me, it sounds as if encryption is pretty protected.
Slashdot Mirror
Android takes the title of open for a number of reasons, including the fact that it's open source (not the crap manufacturers put on top, but Google's Android,) the market is more open, and the market isn't the only show in town. If Jobs wants to attack specific bad implementations that layer closed crap on top, I'll applaud him -- but you can't generalize that to every phone.
By your 1% definition, even gNewSense wouldn't be open if you put it in front of my grandmother.
Quite. But Google won't let Firefox simply beat them; they'll continue to make Chrome faster in an effort to drive performance with competition.
That's why we're paid. QAs: Doing the suck for you.
35% * 35% ~ 12%. And that ignores that one word is a known control, while the other is a word they're trying to OCR.
What exactly are they dreaming about? I've only dealt with a few, but the open-source hardware companies I've purchased from are catering to individuals who don't need a PC motherboard or a 3GHz processor for their project. Think Arduino or GPS breakout board. In reality, cost barriers to open source hardware are progressing quite nicely. Access to fab resources in China and pick and place machines are dropping in price; doing it on your own is much more accessible. For examples, check out the aforementioned Arduino or the stuff Makerbot creates. 3d printers at a price-point of $1,000 were a pie in the sky dream 10 years ago. And lastly, open source isn't always about free as in bear. People still pay for Linux. I still pay for open source hobbyist hardware. I purchase it instead of other roughly equivalent devices because it's more easily modifiable, is easily hacked upon, is often quite well documented, and it's easy to find support. Adafruit has recently mentioned that "[t]here are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies". It seems to be working for some of us.
Sure! I can't see using a cat shaped scanner in a business setting, but it'd be good for development and personal use. Of course, there's no way I'd actually _pay_ for one of those hideous failed dot-com relics.
First off, I should've clarified: this isn't actually a POS concept - it's really a inventory tracking addon. The current register (which is, really, just a calculator with department codes and basic gross sales tracking) isn't going anywhere. My idea was a standing barcode scanner attached to the computer, and the computer attached to the serial port on the register, acting as the register's barcode scanner. No worries about credit card fiddliness. The stand alone unit isn't going anywhere. The hardest POS interface issues would be entering quantity and discount percentage.
;)
Secondly, thank you for the constructive criticisms.. In response to the "just buy something," that, unfortunately, isn't an option. The budget simply wouldn't allow it, or else the shop would already have it. As for employee training, there are only two: myself and the owner. It's really one of the reasons I want a man-in-the-middle solution (scanner to inventory tracking Linux system, Linux system to register): if the system has issues and no one can support it (you'd be amazed at the number of older computer nerds at a college town comic/games store. Or.. Not.), just pull it out and revert to the current glorified calculator. The invested work, though, is a recognizable problem. As for excess complexity, I'm really not looking to manage the entire POS experience. Most of that is in the owner's head. This is simply an inventory tracking solution, which may make it less useful, but keep it from becoming intractable. But the idea that the owner might reject it is thoroughly acceptable, for the reasons mentioned.
And as for the Jeff Albertson remarks, I'd be a fool to not get paid to do something I enjoy. I play games in the back room, make sure people don't steal, and defer all comic questions to the owner - who's in the five days I'm not. Which, naturally, is exactly what was in the verbal job description.
ipods are damn cool, but there is no way I'm dropping that kind of cash on what is essentially a fluff item.
Whether or not a HDD based mp3 player is a fluff item is certainly up to debate, and I'm certainly willing to tell you why I don't think my iRiver H120 isn't. =)
Besides the 16 GB of oggs, mp3s, and wmas (*retch*), it can also record things. For Every class I've been to this semester, I have an 80 Kbit mp3. Did I miss something in my notes? I'll just look it up in my lectures folder!
It also has a FM tuner, which was quite handy when I discovered that I had no radio when Ivan passed over Athens, Georgia.
Beyond that, it's also a portable hard drive. It's far easier to carry a few character sheets or PDFs in the public domain on a USB mass-storage device than it is to e-mail them to myself (and yes, I do have GMail. My H120 is still easier and quicker.)
I'd consider this little bugger to be far from a fluff item, and lots of people agree. But, hey, to each their own.
P.S.: It's also nice to listen to books on tape, language lessons, or *gasp* music. =)
Come on people, owning a machine gun doesn't mean crap when the other guy has smart bombs. The whole idea that we should own guns to keep our own government from opprssing us is just wishful thinking, quit dreaming of Rambo and crack a law book.
You're assuming that arms are the only way to fight a rebellion. All of those examples except for the Civil War were small minded, and the Civil War was too segregated to be effective.
If people really wanted to rebel, they'd have to have very large numbers, be willing to take huge losses, and be spread out about the country. The end result wouldn't be trying to take out the tanks, it'd be to try and demoralize our brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers, sons, and daughters who would fight against the rebellion inside of those tanks. Your trigger finger itches less when you're about to put a shell in a family member's home.
The _only_ way to succeed with violence would be to make the entire country too hot to handle politically and emotionally for our current government. We're nowhere near that in terms of an oppressive/unpopular government or a distressed/pissed off populace.
So, all in all, assault weapons wouldn't help in a rebellion. Riots and Tianimen Square style protest are what it'd take against our US of A.
P.S.: Even though the series is sword and sorcery, Terry Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen from the Sword of Truth series covers this pretty well.
I'm currently taking a course at my school, for essentially doing computations, but only up to a certain accuracy (estimation with precision). ... Just continue that process for about 5 times, and the results are amazing.
At my summer job, a math academic camp, one of the instructors was teaching a three week crash course on OR. He found, in a journal, an algorithm for estimating general square roots that could yield _over_ a hundred digits in less than five iterations, if you're even remotely close to a first guess (as in, guessing three for the square root of two; for guesses off by about a hundred, add one to the number of iterations.) This algorithm was created in the early nineteen hundreds in response to a sort of contest in the journal.
It's worth noting that this was done completely by hand, due to the time. The algorithm was two iterated polynomials, but to get the estimate you had to divide huge numbers. Hundred plus digit numbers. Without a calculator.
Educated guessing (numerical analysis, operations research) is pretty damned cool, if you ask me. Too bad most people never learn it, as ten digits on a small calculator is enough for most people.
I wouldn't say that the iRiver firmware is great, but it's not as bad as the original Jukebox. The iRiver, after all, already plays Vorbis.
I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player.
I personally love my H120 with the 1.40US firmware, but a lot of people are becoming quite pissed off about the whole thing. iRiver has repeatedly made promises on release dates, only to turn around and break those promises. Not only that, but when iRiver actually did release a new firmware, they didn't release the features they said they would. Everyone was quite hyped up when they saw 1.60 on the Korean iRiver website, only to find out that iRiver misinterpreted "gapless playback" (which, it turns out, would require a complete rewrite of their decoding software for the player,) and ignored other big items on the wishlist, such as OTF playlists, a kludgeless random shuffle, and a fix to a hard drive bug that can drain a sixteen hour battery in two hours.
iRiver has did a great job with the creation of the H1?0 series, but they're starting to alienate users with their empty promises.
An aside on this: the military recruits color blind individuals very heavily.
They do..? After deciding to join the service, I looked through the Army MOS specifications: less than 20 out of 200 jobs the Army offers allow for red-green deficiency. Specifically, the Army doesn't allow color-blind programmers (much less infantry.) Go figure.
The Air Force, which is who I intend on going with, seems to think that black text on white backgrounds isn't a bane to us with minor red-green deficiency. w0074r.
By the way, the official MOS descriptions for the Army are located here. You can also find all of the other official descriptions for the other services at the wonderful website as well.
It was really only a matter of time before automated image selection moved to further applications. From what I understand, Fermilab has been doing a very similar thing - with millions of "images" from each collision, the _only_ way to look at the remotely interesting ones is to have an automatic selection process.
It does, however, make you wonder about the really interesting things that could be missed in the process.
On the topic of origami, I'm currently interacting with one of the top twenty something origami designers in the US, and I must say that the art origami is much more beautiful and elegant than I expected.
On the note of the origami folder, I said interacting with because he isn't a coworker.. He's a student at an academic camp I'm working at. I'd seriously suggest looking at his work, or at least some specific amazing folds that he's designed. The designs clearly have mathematical elements, and he currently plans on developing a Java program to aid in creating the circle/river packing diagrams (the red lines.)
It's kind of scary to know that a sixteen/seventeen year old is doing such complex work, as is evident from his origami folding and his mathematical ability in class.
However, we should never block cell phone reception anywhere.
Why can't we let businesses decide on their own atmosphere? All they have to do is put a sign up that says "Cell phones will NOT work in this building." Problem solved. If people don't want to watch a movie in a cell-phoneless theatre, they can just go to a theatre that allows them.
Letting people decide via business choices as opposed to through legislation can provide a balance of freedom for both the customer and the business.
Maybe, but the artists have a choice in who distributes their music.
Why is this modded funny? Just sitting here, I've imagined ways of them getting out of their contracts. Of course, I'm imagining that the Beastie Boys are rich, which can't be too far of a stretch. How? Simple.
1) Release crap albums until their contract runs out.
2) Make sure everyone knows _why_ you're releasing crap albums. Make public press releases about why you're doing it. If your contract prohibits that, then make private statements.
3) In all likelihood, the contract would be ended early by the RIAA. If not, it isn't hard to live on a million for the next few years or so, until the contract runs out on its own.
4) Release on an independent record label. Aphex Twin has a successful one. Paul Van Dyk is doing fine on his record label. The Beastie Boys have the clout to do it.
5) Profit. Again.
Where there's a will, there's a way. That's a way. The Beastie Boys just don't have the will.
This is a classic example of security through obscurity.. And how it fails miserably.
. . . it will be capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second.
Does anyone else not gain anything from that statement? 50 trillion calculations means very little if all it can do is flop a bit back and forth 50 trillion times. Perhaps someone could come up with a better benchmark, like the largest number it can factor in a minute, on average. Even then we may be talking about huge exponents in scientific notation. =p
It could just be the fact that it is ten in the morning, but 5*10^13 seems incomprehensbily large.
The solution is as simple as:
... I just realized that this is going downhill fast. It'd probably be better to do it the simple way.
No, no, that's far too simple. The better way (IMAO) is to:
1. Find a man named Gas.
2. Take him to New Jersey.
3.
Optimization isn't really a hard topic. Should a programmer spend days nitpicking fifty lines of code that won't be used frequently? No. When initially writing code, should someone use Bogosort instead of Quicksort ? I'll let you figure that one out.
My biggest (reasonable) beef in the optimization area is software bloat. Programs like huge office suites containing excessive, poorly implemented crap that people won't use really ticks me off. KISS. Even the stuff that has to be complicated.
Of course, I'll always be a sucker for tweaking code for the fun of it, when I have the time. =)
should really read that essay! Maybe then we wouldn't need dual-core 4-6 GHz CPUs and 2GB ram to run their new OS.
/. non-RTFA-readership.
Good lord, that article was _written_ for the general
I hate to spoil the article for people (hint, hint,) but Longhorn in Erlang would be scary at best. At worst.. Well, let's just say that we'd have to wait for the Earth Simulator to come out before running it.
Or a computer that can handle Doom 3.
If a Wimp is about a thousand times more massive than a proton - what does that make a proton? a Wuss? or a Nerd?
A little bitch.
I eat a vial with all my passwords. In my will I state that the Medical Examiner has to remove it from my gut. Every few days I pass it, wash it and swallow it again. :)
You know.. I just had this really weird vision of a medical examiner removing a glass vial from your windpipe.
"Cause of death? He choked on his passwords.."
I applaude the creative ressurrection of a childhood pastime, but I am skeptical of the game being much more than an elaborate "tag, you're it" with costumes.
I do hope that was intended to be a joke. In addition to the problems you found, here are some more: neither the ghosts of pac-man will move at a constant speed, Pac-man doesn't have a top down view of the city (and hence no complete knowledge of ghost position), and the city doesn't have some space warping ability to send you to the other side if you walk through a certain door.
In short, it's all for fun. Pac-man was an elaborate "tag, you're it" on a computer screen; this is an elaborate "tag, you're it" on a city. And you get exercise, too. Sounds like a good deal.
I don't know that there's been a test case that has shown that encryption is protected as free speech
Possibly not implicitely, but strong encryption has been around since at least 1976, when NIST approved DES. The only problem found with DES is differential analysis, and that still isn't easy on computers around the time of DES's release. So, it comes down to almost thirty years of hard encryption in the public's hands, with no successful challenges in the courts. To me, it sounds as if encryption is pretty protected.