The big problem you have is that more and more apps are building on the Google APIs, so beyond replacing gmail or the calendar, you have a big compatibility problem.
I'll agree with this. I don't like the way Google is handling the whole Play Services thing.
I like the idea of having an auto-updated component of the API that works across OS versions. That is what is causing everybody to use it.
What I don't like is that this is closed-source and bundled with all the Google-specific stuff.
They really should have two pre-installed apps. One is called Google Play Services and it is EXACTLY that - APIs related to the Play store, or maybe some other Google-specific APIs as well (ones that don't fit into a specific app, like authentication and so on). That app can be closed service.
The other app should be some kind of Android Extensions app which is purely FOSS, and this provides stuff like webviews and all the logic you want to be easy to update. It shouldn't be tied to Google at all, other than Google being the main contributor. Being FOSS everybody could of course use it.
So your saying that despite the fact that Google already provides an open source version of their OS
They don't have an open source version of their OS. That is, the open source version is limited, and missing a lot of functionality.
The only functionality it is missing is the stuff that yandex is complaining about Google bundling.
No, you don't get the automatic Google account provisioning in AOSP. Or Google Play. Or GMail. Or Google Calendar. etc.
Just what do you think a Google-less android would look like?
I don't get the complaint. The non-Google parts of Android are FOSS. Other companies even have made competing forks of it as a result. If MS had done the same thing with Windows back in the 90s there would have been no need for an antitrust lawsuit. If you wanted Windows without IE you could just recompile it yourself, and even sell it if you wanted to.
It was news to me that anybody was doing this, but liquid nitrogen costs about 20 cents per liter as far as I can tell online (probably cheaper in bulk). You would need about 1.4 l per cubic meter of air you want to displace.
Sure. I don't really see a future for the traditional battleship. I think that if it does have a role that it makes more sense to have a fairly generic ship with a big stack of guns on it at far lower cost. The ship is going to sink if anything hits it regardless, so it doesn't need 18" of steel armor and all that nonsense.
Just a minor nit with the whole Millennium Challenge. Is there any kind of cite for the whole "cheating" business?
I'm aware that the scenario was restarted and run to a US victory. That doesn't necessarily mean that lessons were not learned.
What is the alternative? Send everybody home on day 1 and not practice any of the other stuff planned out for the rest of the week? My sense was that things were restarted so that everybody could still get the planned objectives out of the event, even if an unplanned lesson was learned on day 1.
But, I'm sure the military industrial complex is still more than happy to promote expensive solutions that won't work all the same.
Considering a US built plane has disappeared without trace, one would expect them to be very interested...but alas no.
Well, the failure mode seems likely to have included the crew, which is a failure mode that is almost impossible for a manufacturer to guard against, and US-operated aircraft tend to run satellite telemetry which would have avoided the disappearance bit of this as well.
Of course it would be better if the thing were found and the questions were answered. It just seems a bit much to blame the US for not doing anything about it. I wouldn't be surprised if the US snooped around with subs or whatever just as an exercise, but of course they're not going to talk about that if they did, and if they had found something then most likely the US would have let people know about it somehow (maybe a US surface ship might just happen to pick up something on sonar in the area or whatever).
While computerized and radar-based fire control is a wonderful thing, they don't address variability in muzzle velocity.
The computer can instantly calculate exactly where to point the gun so that the shell hits given a muzzle velocity of 2500 m/s The problem is that when the gun is fired that the muzzle velocity might turn out to be 2450 m/s, and it is a bit too late at that point to modify the elevation.
If the shell-to-shell variability were low the computer could of course correct for the next shot, but if the next one comes out at 2570 m/s then you're stuck.
Why the hate on battleships? Why are they out of favor?
Effective range of a battleship cannon: 25-45 km
Effective range of a anti-ship missile: 270+ km Effective range of an aircraft carrying an anti-ship missile: ~2000km
You do the math. Battleships are as dead as the cavalry charge.
I think that is a bit like saying that the assault rifle is obsolete because aircraft have a much longer effective range and are more than capable of killing a single soldier.
I think that battleships in the conventional sense are obviously dead. However, the concept of being able to base heavy artillery quickly anyplace there is deep water is probably still useful. I'd just make the things WAY cheaper and purely offensive in design (minimal crew, ideally no crew, no armor beyond what you'd stick on an APC, etc).
but the ground artillery support role they were the most cost-effective methods around.
You are looking at the thousands of dollars saved in ammunition cost, and ignoring the billions of dollars in fixed costs, for building, maintaining, fueling, and crewing ships that go for decades between active employment.
No question the ship designs should be changed. They aren't intended to be the backbone of the fleet, and they won't survive an attack. They're just floating artillery emplacements and they should be designed as such. Put 10 guns on the thing and enough crew to get them where they need to be and fire them. You don't need 1000 people to operate a fire support base (especially one that doesn't need perimeter security). There is also no need to keep the things out at sea 24x7 either - just position a few near likely conflict areas and man them when you need them.
They're not going to trade shells with another ship of the line either, so they don't need 10" of armor plate and an engine room that can move all that weight. They don't need to launch/recover aircraft, be a command base for the fleet, have a nice room for the admiral, or house 500 marines either. A container ship with a bunch of guns on it would work just fine.
I imagine a key factor there is how much ordnance you need delivered to some target near a coast over a period of time. If you need 500 tons of bombs dropped within a 10mi^2 area near the coast over the course of three months, then I can't see you beating the battleship for cost-effectiveness (especially if you tone the thing down from some kind of dreadnaut into just a big platform for guns - ditch all the useless armor, reduce crew, etc).
A plane costs a lot of money to maintain and can only drop a few bombs at a time, but that plane can drop the bomb anywhere within a country-sized area.
The problem for the battleship is that most wars tend to involve a lot of movement, and not just slugging it out over one city or whatever.
I didn't realize that the court and/or the programmer read the minds of the people behind MegaUpload. That's utterly fascinating - please, do tell me more about this aspect of the legal process.
Nomm further admitted that, through his work as a computer programmer, he was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the websites, including copyright protected motion pictures and television programs, some of which contained the âoeFBI Anti-Piracyâ warning. [...] Despite his knowledge in this regard, Nomm continued to participate in the Mega Conspiracy.
Got it, so I'm safe working for Dropbox as long as they don't store any copyright protected motion pictures on their system - ie I'm not safe working for them.
Seems like Dropbox is even taking a proactive stance to prevent the very thing that MegaUpload proactively facilitated.
Proactive facilitation of copyright infringement? Does that mean that when you sign up for an account with them they go ahead and load copyrighted material on it before you even get a chance to do it yourself? Or does it just mean that they comply with the DMCA and take stuff down when they're asked to?
I don't think anybody has established that one of the purposes of DropBox is piracy. It's one of its uses - in that some people use it for that - but not a purpose.
I see. So, I'm OK working for Dropbox if my reading of the company founder's minds is the same as a court's? Or maybe it comes down to whether Dropbox has better lawyers?
Thank you for your skillful high school grade calculation. But, while it's mathematically correct, it tends to mislead the reasoning regarding growth.
I replied to:
the word "exponential" has specific mathematical meaning
I addressed the claim made in the comment I replied to, no more or less. The discussion was about the "specific mathematical meaning" of exponential growth.
Of course there is more to evaluating the economic performance of a company than that. If that had been s.petry's claim then I wouldn't have disputed it. I was simply correcting the incorrect argument made that somehow this wasn't exponential growth.
Sorry, you are wrong. 64 bit windows does not run 16 bit software.
Got it. So, you're stuck only running software written as early as 1995 on the 64-bit version of Windows 8. Otherwise you'll have to stick to the still-in-production 32-bit version of the product.
Clearly MS is abandoning too many customers here who are still using 8+3 filenames.
From my understanding, the government will have to show that:
A) That the purpose (or at least one purpose of the site) was to aid copyright infringement (or other illegal thing)
B) That this guy knew about the purpose, even if he tried to pretend he didn't.
I'm guessing that they won't have any problem convincing a jury of (A), and he emailed someone a screenshot of his computer watching a pirated video on MEGAVIDEO.COM, so I don't think they'll have much trouble with part (B), either.
So, uh, guess I shouldn't get a drop working for Dropbox or Google, right? You do realize they let people share arbitrary files for download by anybody on the internet.
I'm not sure MS is really the right comparison here. They're actually fairly famous for never breaking userspace. I wouldn't be surprised if Calc.exe from Windows 386 ran fine on Windows 8. Device drivers are a different matter.
That would be IBM with mainframes since the 60s with what is now z/OS and can run applications from the 60s (I don't know how it was called before MVS). Microsoft is just the opposite, the most important criterion for releasing a new version of DOS was that it broke Lotus-123.
Ok, I'll grant you the IBM mainframes.:)
I would distinguish between MS's treatment of its competitors with its treatment of everybody else. Also, that sort of stuff stopped being important after the 90s, mainly because they had no competitors left.
I've seen plenty of software break on newer versions of Windows. My point is that overall it is a lot rarer than you'd expect, and MS probably goes further than just about anybody to prevent it from happening.
What other OS will run 20 year old binaries without issue on a recently released version of the OS?
The given was that Google is growing at 20% annually. You claim that isn't exponential growth. I claim that it is.
Now, if you're disputing that Google is really growing at 20% annually, that is a completely different argument from claiming that 20% annual growth isn't exponential growth. I don't audit Google's books, so I can make no claims as to whether they are or aren't really growing at that rate. I just know that if every year your sales is 1.2x the sales the year before, that is exponential growth, by definition.
However this means ALL companies grow exponentially if this measure is used for their growth.
Well, generally the term is used to describe growth over some period of time. If I step on the gas and move from 1 mph to 2 mph you COULD describe that as exponential growth just as you could describe it as linear, but drawing a curve from two points is really a stretch either way.
Sustained 20% growth for a company is hardly commonplace, either. About the only thing in economics that I've ever seen sustained for a very long period of time is inflation, and things tied to it (like bond rates). That is mainly because it is controlled to be that way and merely a function of how much money we create.
Your original post said: While it does match the marketing lingo, the word "exponential" has specific mathematical meaning which does not even come close to your advertising driven use of the word.
That is untrue. Google's growth, at the moment, precisely agrees with the mathematical definition of exponential growth.
Is Google the ONLY company experiencing exponential growth at the moment, of course not. That doesn't make your statement true.
So, it's not that Google stopped growing, it's that it's growth stopped growing. So we're looking at the 2nd derivative now to determine the peak? Or do the MBAs merely like sensationalism just like their fellow journalists?
2nd derivative implies an inflection point, assuming it ever switches from zero to negative. Pure exponential growth has a 2nd derivative of zero, and obviously NO company can sustain pure exponential growth forever simply because the universe is finite.
But, of course there WILL be a peak google some day, even if it does eventually come to own every atom in the universe, again, because the universe is finite.
Slashdot Mirror
The big problem you have is that more and more apps are building on the Google APIs, so beyond replacing gmail or the calendar, you have a big compatibility problem.
I'll agree with this. I don't like the way Google is handling the whole Play Services thing.
I like the idea of having an auto-updated component of the API that works across OS versions. That is what is causing everybody to use it.
What I don't like is that this is closed-source and bundled with all the Google-specific stuff.
They really should have two pre-installed apps. One is called Google Play Services and it is EXACTLY that - APIs related to the Play store, or maybe some other Google-specific APIs as well (ones that don't fit into a specific app, like authentication and so on). That app can be closed service.
The other app should be some kind of Android Extensions app which is purely FOSS, and this provides stuff like webviews and all the logic you want to be easy to update. It shouldn't be tied to Google at all, other than Google being the main contributor. Being FOSS everybody could of course use it.
So your saying that despite the fact that Google already provides an open source version of their OS
They don't have an open source version of their OS. That is, the open source version is limited, and missing a lot of functionality.
The only functionality it is missing is the stuff that yandex is complaining about Google bundling.
No, you don't get the automatic Google account provisioning in AOSP. Or Google Play. Or GMail. Or Google Calendar. etc.
Just what do you think a Google-less android would look like?
I don't get the complaint. The non-Google parts of Android are FOSS. Other companies even have made competing forks of it as a result. If MS had done the same thing with Windows back in the 90s there would have been no need for an antitrust lawsuit. If you wanted Windows without IE you could just recompile it yourself, and even sell it if you wanted to.
It was news to me that anybody was doing this, but liquid nitrogen costs about 20 cents per liter as far as I can tell online (probably cheaper in bulk). You would need about 1.4 l per cubic meter of air you want to displace.
Sure. I don't really see a future for the traditional battleship. I think that if it does have a role that it makes more sense to have a fairly generic ship with a big stack of guns on it at far lower cost. The ship is going to sink if anything hits it regardless, so it doesn't need 18" of steel armor and all that nonsense.
Not being well-versed in either Rust or C++11, any chance that you could elaborate? Does C++11 not address the issues of data/thread ownership?
Just a minor nit with the whole Millennium Challenge. Is there any kind of cite for the whole "cheating" business?
I'm aware that the scenario was restarted and run to a US victory. That doesn't necessarily mean that lessons were not learned.
What is the alternative? Send everybody home on day 1 and not practice any of the other stuff planned out for the rest of the week? My sense was that things were restarted so that everybody could still get the planned objectives out of the event, even if an unplanned lesson was learned on day 1.
But, I'm sure the military industrial complex is still more than happy to promote expensive solutions that won't work all the same.
Considering a US built plane has disappeared without trace, one would expect them to be very interested...but alas no.
Well, the failure mode seems likely to have included the crew, which is a failure mode that is almost impossible for a manufacturer to guard against, and US-operated aircraft tend to run satellite telemetry which would have avoided the disappearance bit of this as well.
Of course it would be better if the thing were found and the questions were answered. It just seems a bit much to blame the US for not doing anything about it. I wouldn't be surprised if the US snooped around with subs or whatever just as an exercise, but of course they're not going to talk about that if they did, and if they had found something then most likely the US would have let people know about it somehow (maybe a US surface ship might just happen to pick up something on sonar in the area or whatever).
While computerized and radar-based fire control is a wonderful thing, they don't address variability in muzzle velocity.
The computer can instantly calculate exactly where to point the gun so that the shell hits given a muzzle velocity of 2500 m/s The problem is that when the gun is fired that the muzzle velocity might turn out to be 2450 m/s, and it is a bit too late at that point to modify the elevation.
If the shell-to-shell variability were low the computer could of course correct for the next shot, but if the next one comes out at 2570 m/s then you're stuck.
Why the hate on battleships? Why are they out of favor?
Effective range of a battleship cannon: 25-45 km
Effective range of a anti-ship missile: 270+ km
Effective range of an aircraft carrying an anti-ship missile: ~2000km
You do the math. Battleships are as dead as the cavalry charge.
I think that is a bit like saying that the assault rifle is obsolete because aircraft have a much longer effective range and are more than capable of killing a single soldier.
I think that battleships in the conventional sense are obviously dead. However, the concept of being able to base heavy artillery quickly anyplace there is deep water is probably still useful. I'd just make the things WAY cheaper and purely offensive in design (minimal crew, ideally no crew, no armor beyond what you'd stick on an APC, etc).
but the ground artillery support role they were the most cost-effective methods around.
You are looking at the thousands of dollars saved in ammunition cost, and ignoring the billions of dollars in fixed costs, for building, maintaining, fueling, and crewing ships that go for decades between active employment.
No question the ship designs should be changed. They aren't intended to be the backbone of the fleet, and they won't survive an attack. They're just floating artillery emplacements and they should be designed as such. Put 10 guns on the thing and enough crew to get them where they need to be and fire them. You don't need 1000 people to operate a fire support base (especially one that doesn't need perimeter security). There is also no need to keep the things out at sea 24x7 either - just position a few near likely conflict areas and man them when you need them.
They're not going to trade shells with another ship of the line either, so they don't need 10" of armor plate and an engine room that can move all that weight. They don't need to launch/recover aircraft, be a command base for the fleet, have a nice room for the admiral, or house 500 marines either. A container ship with a bunch of guns on it would work just fine.
I imagine a key factor there is how much ordnance you need delivered to some target near a coast over a period of time. If you need 500 tons of bombs dropped within a 10mi^2 area near the coast over the course of three months, then I can't see you beating the battleship for cost-effectiveness (especially if you tone the thing down from some kind of dreadnaut into just a big platform for guns - ditch all the useless armor, reduce crew, etc).
A plane costs a lot of money to maintain and can only drop a few bombs at a time, but that plane can drop the bomb anywhere within a country-sized area.
The problem for the battleship is that most wars tend to involve a lot of movement, and not just slugging it out over one city or whatever.
As far as I know, both (MegaUpload and Dropbox) comply with DMCA requests. One was just a little more 'meh' about it than the other.
Thank you officer, may I have another?
I didn't realize that the court and/or the programmer read the minds of the people behind MegaUpload. That's utterly fascinating - please, do tell me more about this aspect of the legal process.
Got it, so I'm safe working for Dropbox as long as they don't store any copyright protected motion pictures on their system - ie I'm not safe working for them.
Seems like Dropbox is even taking a proactive stance to prevent the very thing that MegaUpload proactively facilitated.
Proactive facilitation of copyright infringement? Does that mean that when you sign up for an account with them they go ahead and load copyrighted material on it before you even get a chance to do it yourself? Or does it just mean that they comply with the DMCA and take stuff down when they're asked to?
I don't think anybody has established that one of the purposes of DropBox is piracy. It's one of its uses - in that some people use it for that - but not a purpose.
I see. So, I'm OK working for Dropbox if my reading of the company founder's minds is the same as a court's? Or maybe it comes down to whether Dropbox has better lawyers?
You said:
Thank you for your skillful high school grade calculation. But, while it's mathematically correct, it tends to mislead the reasoning regarding growth.
I replied to:
the word "exponential" has specific mathematical meaning
I addressed the claim made in the comment I replied to, no more or less. The discussion was about the "specific mathematical meaning" of exponential growth.
Of course there is more to evaluating the economic performance of a company than that. If that had been s.petry's claim then I wouldn't have disputed it. I was simply correcting the incorrect argument made that somehow this wasn't exponential growth.
Sorry, you are wrong. 64 bit windows does not run 16 bit software.
Got it. So, you're stuck only running software written as early as 1995 on the 64-bit version of Windows 8. Otherwise you'll have to stick to the still-in-production 32-bit version of the product.
Clearly MS is abandoning too many customers here who are still using 8+3 filenames.
From my understanding, the government will have to show that:
A) That the purpose (or at least one purpose of the site) was to aid copyright infringement (or other illegal thing)
B) That this guy knew about the purpose, even if he tried to pretend he didn't.
I'm guessing that they won't have any problem convincing a jury of (A), and he emailed someone a screenshot of his computer watching a pirated video on MEGAVIDEO.COM, so I don't think they'll have much trouble with part (B), either.
So, uh, guess I shouldn't get a drop working for Dropbox or Google, right? You do realize they let people share arbitrary files for download by anybody on the internet.
This sounds like going after Al Capone for tax evasion. Actually, more like going after one of his henchmen for tax evasion
Well, more like going after the secretary that works for his tax accountant.
I'm not sure MS is really the right comparison here. They're actually fairly famous for never breaking userspace. I wouldn't be surprised if Calc.exe from Windows 386 ran fine on Windows 8. Device drivers are a different matter.
That would be IBM with mainframes since the 60s with what is now z/OS and can run applications from the 60s (I don't know how it was called before MVS).
Microsoft is just the opposite, the most important criterion for releasing a new version of DOS was that it broke Lotus-123.
Ok, I'll grant you the IBM mainframes. :)
I would distinguish between MS's treatment of its competitors with its treatment of everybody else. Also, that sort of stuff stopped being important after the 90s, mainly because they had no competitors left.
I've seen plenty of software break on newer versions of Windows. My point is that overall it is a lot rarer than you'd expect, and MS probably goes further than just about anybody to prevent it from happening.
What other OS will run 20 year old binaries without issue on a recently released version of the OS?
you are accepting a different value of T
The given was that Google is growing at 20% annually. You claim that isn't exponential growth. I claim that it is.
Now, if you're disputing that Google is really growing at 20% annually, that is a completely different argument from claiming that 20% annual growth isn't exponential growth. I don't audit Google's books, so I can make no claims as to whether they are or aren't really growing at that rate. I just know that if every year your sales is 1.2x the sales the year before, that is exponential growth, by definition.
Only if you're running 32-bit Windows 8.
Cite? Last time I checked 64-bit versions of windows ran 32-bit software (or in this case 16-bit) just fine.
However this means ALL companies grow exponentially if this measure is used for their growth.
Well, generally the term is used to describe growth over some period of time. If I step on the gas and move from 1 mph to 2 mph you COULD describe that as exponential growth just as you could describe it as linear, but drawing a curve from two points is really a stretch either way.
Sustained 20% growth for a company is hardly commonplace, either. About the only thing in economics that I've ever seen sustained for a very long period of time is inflation, and things tied to it (like bond rates). That is mainly because it is controlled to be that way and merely a function of how much money we create.
Your original post said: While it does match the marketing lingo, the word "exponential" has specific mathematical meaning which does not even come close to your advertising driven use of the word.
That is untrue. Google's growth, at the moment, precisely agrees with the mathematical definition of exponential growth.
Is Google the ONLY company experiencing exponential growth at the moment, of course not. That doesn't make your statement true.
So, it's not that Google stopped growing, it's that it's growth stopped growing. So we're looking at the 2nd derivative now to determine the peak? Or do the MBAs merely like sensationalism just like their fellow journalists?
2nd derivative implies an inflection point, assuming it ever switches from zero to negative. Pure exponential growth has a 2nd derivative of zero, and obviously NO company can sustain pure exponential growth forever simply because the universe is finite.
But, of course there WILL be a peak google some day, even if it does eventually come to own every atom in the universe, again, because the universe is finite.