RIMM needs to decide it can compete as a hardware maker against samsung and HTC. If they can, then they should switch to android (for the apps and open platform) and implement their own enterprise technoogy over it. They should further do like the Amazon Fire and pre-process web fetches not just for speed but also for security (e.g. maintain ssl, filter out phishing attacks and viruses, restrict access to corporate approved functions, disable features like cameras or recoring in restricted corprorate areas). They will thus become the premier value added corprorate android phone.
If they can't compete against Samsung and HTC on hardware then they need to stay away from android. Windows 8 would be the logical choice and it is aligned with bussinesses. Their best route there would be to be the premier Intel based smart phone. Windows 8 is going to run better on intel and arm. Corporations will be able to port their proprietary windows platform codes to win8 on intel. And windows RT (arm) appears to be a disaster. So they could beat Nokia in the corporate smart phone area. Let nokia have the developing nations market. High margins for their enterprise system and a high barrier to entry for everyine else in that sector.
IN any case why would anyone give an operating system a name that is homophonic with the historically derogatory slang for the gay community: Homos? It's like Squirting your Social. Or the Brown zune. So tone deaf that it is doomed before it starts.
I just bought some microsoft stock a few weeks ago anticipating that Win8 is going to help MS, but now I think I will sell it. These people are institutionally clueless.
My feeling on the copyright issue is that if I have a book, I have one copy, but it is mine and I can give it or sell it or loan it to anyone I please. The key thing is that if I give my copy away then it is gone. I don't have it, and I can't give it to any more than one person at a time.
Sometimes, social conventions become obsolete, and that obsolescence is always a one-way street. Copyright has become obsolete, and all the DRM and increasingly desperate laws being put on the books to try to protect copyright are doomed to failure. When it's so easy to make perfect copies at will, perfect copies will be made. The pro-copyright people cannot possibly win.
This is not really true. Consider Sheet music. It's trivial reprint this. So this issue was around well before the digital age. Copyright still has full meaning because the creators need compensation. THe fact that it became even cheaper to copy only makes the argument better for copyright protection not worse.
No the new thing is not the "cheapness" of the copy process negating the need for copyright, but rather the problem of how to transmit a copyrighted work without creating a new copy inadvertently.
It remains to be seen what actually comes from this, but it may address a central conundrum of ownership and copyright in the digital age. My feeling on the copyright issue is that if I have a book, I have one copy, but it is mine and I can give it or sell it or loan it to anyone I please. The key thing is that if I give my copy away then it is gone. I don't have it, and I can't give it to any more than one person at a time.
This satisfies the idea that the creator has control of the copy number (and hence meaning to the word copyright) and yet I have complete control over my copy including sharing it.
The problem is the digital age is how to transmit a copy to another person in such a way that I lose physical possession. You can think of a lot of complicated ways to do this. What is missing is a simple almost transparent and effortless way to do this. anything else either feels like a DRM trap or allows rampant distribution in violation of the creator's copyright.
If apple can solve this simplicity issue, then it bodes well for the industry and the consumer. Recall the pre 99 cent track days. by introducing that simple distillation it became less of a hassle to buy and share music across all your personal devices, for most people, this was simpler than hassling with trying to find it free somewhere.
I look forward to this to see if they implement it simply and equitably.
Agreed. Layer your services on top of Android and be done with it. Why develop an OS, when a free one is there waiting for you to add to it.
Why would I buy a RIM when and LG or HTC or Samsung behaved the same? That's a recipe for death. It won't be long before google offers the same enterprise e-mail that rim does. What is the distinguishing feature?
Could be staking their dwindling future on windows phones.
Seriously, I wonder what the prospects for the windows phone are. My starting assumption is that Microsoft knows they need to succeed in the smart phone game and that this would be a good thing to blow their cash hoard on unless they want to stay a PC software company. So I assume they are going to make some company succeed but may have not made up their minds which.
The obvious choice is Nokia's headlong commitment to Windows phones. Clearly a willing partner with the manufacturing, distribution and hardware support capability that knows how to work with every phone company. That's good. The down side is perhaps they are and ARM based smart phone. Can they make the leap to Intel? Early reviews say windows RT (arm) is a total half baked disaster. On the other hand reviews of the XOLO (which is intel android) say that the arm emulation is almost flawless. So there is a possibility they could run windows 8 intel but emulate the legacy ARM drivers and programs.
If they are first to market with the widest distribution of a high power windows 8 then developers will target that devices characteristics. Could be a win. If they try to tough it out on ARM I suspect a big fail.
Then there is samsung who dabbles in windows smart phones. Samsung either needs to fork Android like amazon did or keep a foot in windows or they expose themselves to whims of google. If they fork it, they can dictate control of the OS to the carriers just like Apple does. Empirically apple iphones are great precisely because Verizon or AT&T is not trying to customize it to maximize their revenue stream.
But I think neither android or iphone is so great that Microsoft can't succeed given they already have about 100K of developed Apps. Conversely this is exactly why Blackberry has zero chance. No app base means no customers means no developers.
I had two computers running a mail program that synced with gmail. They each had scripts running that sorted the mail into folders slightly differently. I frequently would find 200 copies of the same message in the trash when I left both computers running.
So if you write a manuscript for a movie on chrome OS then you are giving permission to google to make it into a movie if they want. Amazing.
Does this mean you also can't store on your G-drive anything you don't have permission to reproduce. For example, if I am reviewing a manuscript an I place it on my Gdrive then I've given permission to Google to reproduce it. Yet I don't have that permission to grant.
Nokia Lumina series based on windows is the single roll of the dice bet for Nokia it appears. Obviously to be viable it needs to migrate to the upcoming windows OS. The Nokia runs on ARM. But by all accounts Windows on Arm (WindowsRT) is a half-baked disaster. So Nokia is toast... unless there some way to get an intel processor into a nokia phone that could still run ARM software. Then they could use the new OS but still retain all legacy drivers and applications for ARM.
Switiching to Intel would also fit with NOKIA's "were not android" strategy. You might not believe int his strategy but they do. It would be consistently radical to go to intel to differentiate themselves.
reverse engineering from the language itself might be reasonable but as I understand it Dalvic actually implements all the java VM header profiles. You can't specify those without passing along copyrighted information. So how does one explain that? it's not a clean room and it is something that I beleive their lic forbids. maybe I'm wrong.
Schmidt has dirty paws. I would not be surprised if this behavior is why Sergey Brin had to oust him. Name any market Google has created? Search? Mail? Maps? Online Docs? It's all polished implementations of other peoples well proven ideas. Their finest and purest idea was their first one: search ranking by citation.
As I understand tje JAVA lic, and perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems pretty clear that Sun lic the programming language for free but retained the lic and copyright on the implementation of the language itself. That copyright would clearly include the interface and methods needed to implement any java compatible compiler or interpreter. As long as one agrees that SUN had the right to copyright that then I don't understand why google has a case on this. maybe someone can explain?
We already can't use chrome where I work due to the difficulty of wrangling then push updates. Bussinesses can't tolerate the lack of control of external root access to their computers. Even without root access pushed updates are a bussiness intelligence leak vector. while one can cabble work arounds to this, assuring thaey are intact on every computer is a hassle.
There is of course a raging debate if it's better to be up to date by default or to manage the bussiness approved updates. One can see benefits from both.
What would really help here is some third party paid seal of approval that bussinesses could contract to be the gate keeper on vetting third party updates.
Yes, Perl and Ruby combined have twice the share of python. It's really more like 20 times, since you can get ten times as much done in a single line of perl.
The patent says it is restricted to "A digital system that may be used by children two years old and older. " All apple has to do is claim iphones are fro people under 2 years old.
Forget nit picking over optimizing testing strategies. The real news is you can predict where someone is likely to make an error. Imagine recording all this data while someone was writing code. Eventually there is a bug detected but where is it? Well you might want to color code the code to show sections where the person was struggling with logic. That might be a place to look first. Of course it might be in some place where it never occurred to the person they should be struggling or was just a typo. But at least automatically flagging every place where the programmer was unsure of things would help with code reviews or code refactoring.
There's more than one utility function. For example, if wrote an app I would not expect to profit, it would be for fun. Thus I'd give it away for free or a dollar. Someone else might be hoping to make a living at it. too bad.
The idea of attaching something that costs you something is actually a good idea. As slashdot knows, the only viable (but impossible to implement) cure for spam would be to require postage charges on all e-mail. But in this case it is possible to implement. here's two possible suggestions 1) send a dollar. the dollar does not need to go to the congressman, but instead could go to general revenues or perhaps a reserve for general capitol hill IT support.
2) certify your e-mail address with a trusted proxy sender. For example, the democratic and republican parties could vouch that your e-mail is legit. They would want to do this honestly because if they were dishonest the'd lose the privilege. The way you do this is to give people e-mail accounts from which to send. They can establish those e-mail accounts using visa card numbers or by snail mail or any way that would filter out mass spam.
oops my bad. our numbers actually agree. within a factor of 2. I goofed on the units comparing my power to your energy. A more realistic number is about 300 kWh for a thin corvette roadster or 500 for a family car.
This inspired me to look again at these. my 30kw was a number I came up with a long time ago from coefficients of drag on a honda car.
Now that we have all electric cars you can actually measure this. The chevy volt and nissan leaf are the best ones made and they manage just over 37Kwh/100 miles at "highway" speed.
assuming highway speed means 55mph then 100 miles is 1.8 hours. So that means it takes 20kw to propel these at 55 mph.
now the drag power it takes to propel any object through air scales as the velocity cubed. So to go from 55 to 65 would require 1.65 times more power if we assume that nearly all of this scales as drag.
assuming this is the case and assuming the engine does not lose efficiency with speed then this means we need about 33Kw to drive a small car at 65 mhp.
(alternatively if one assumes HWY driving means 65, and people drive at 75 then we get 30kw)
So my ball park number is still about the same.
It is perhaps worth noting that it takes about 2.5x more power to go 75 than it does 55!
anyhow it takes 370 to 600 WH per mile (depending on how fast you drive)
185KWh to 300KwH to go 500 miles.
Which brings us back to 1.1 to 1.8 MWatts to charge in 10 minutes ignoring coupling losses.
where do you get this 200Wh/mile? Wind resistance and storage conversion (in and out) inefficiecincy are the dominant factors for highway travel. wind resistance is pretty much set by the size of the car's crossectional area. So irrespective of how light or efficient you can make the engine you are not going to beat that. I estimate it take 30KW to push a honda accord size car at highway speed.
There is one issue with these 500mi batteries I can think of, how do you charge them quickly? if you assume it takes about 30KW do push a prius sized vehicle at 50mi/hr then a 500 mile battery would mean about 300Kw/hr storage. I'm not sure if that is what is here or not, but let's assume yes. To charge a 300kW/hr battery in ten mites would require a 1.8MegaWatts connection for every car at the "pump". Sounds kinda dicey. do you really trust that every car pulling up is maintained so well that a bad connection would not explode if you put a megawatt into it?
Even swapping out batteries and charging them off line would not actually decrease the demand. If a "busy" interstate gas station typically had 5 people/ ten minutes filling up all day long then whether you change batteries or not, it is still a 9mega watt station. If you could charge them overnight when they were closed, then it is still a 4.5Mwatt station to maintain a ten minute pit-stop time.
So simply building a large battery does not entirely solve the range problem with electric cars.
What about charging them at home? same problem if everyone is your apartment building wants to go 500 miles every day.
But that's just it. most people in your condo are not going to go 500 miles every day. Electric cars still make sense for commuters rather than long range travelers. Commuters drive a tenth of that, so the power demand is a tenth. this makes charging them at home sensible.
so this is a big advance but it is still does not solve the 500 mile recharge problem.
Slashdot Mirror
RIMM needs to decide it can compete as a hardware maker against samsung and HTC. If they can, then they should switch to android (for the apps and open platform) and implement their own enterprise technoogy over it. They should further do like the Amazon Fire and pre-process web fetches not just for speed but also for security (e.g. maintain ssl, filter out phishing attacks and viruses, restrict access to corporate approved functions, disable features like cameras or recoring in restricted corprorate areas). They will thus become the premier value added corprorate android phone.
If they can't compete against Samsung and HTC on hardware then they need to stay away from android. Windows 8 would be the logical choice and it is aligned with bussinesses. Their best route there would be to be the premier Intel based smart phone. Windows 8 is going to run better on intel and arm. Corporations will be able to port their proprietary windows platform codes to win8 on intel. And windows RT (arm) appears to be a disaster. So they could beat Nokia in the corporate smart phone area. Let nokia have the developing nations market. High margins for their enterprise system and a high barrier to entry for everyine else in that sector.
JAVA, aka OAK, was supposed to be the toaster esperanto when it was in development. Now it is bloat city.
http://mathbits.com/mathbits/java/Introduction/BriefHistory.htm
IN any case why would anyone give an operating system a name that is homophonic with the historically derogatory slang for the gay community: Homos? It's like Squirting your Social. Or the Brown zune. So tone deaf that it is doomed before it starts.
I just bought some microsoft stock a few weeks ago anticipating that Win8 is going to help MS, but now I think I will sell it. These people are institutionally clueless.
Sometimes, social conventions become obsolete, and that obsolescence is always a one-way street. Copyright has become obsolete, and all the DRM and increasingly desperate laws being put on the books to try to protect copyright are doomed to failure. When it's so easy to make perfect copies at will, perfect copies will be made. The pro-copyright people cannot possibly win.
This is not really true. Consider Sheet music. It's trivial reprint this. So this issue was around well before the digital age. Copyright still has full meaning because the creators need compensation. THe fact that it became even cheaper to copy only makes the argument better for copyright protection not worse.
No the new thing is not the "cheapness" of the copy process negating the need for copyright, but rather the problem of how to transmit a copyrighted work without creating a new copy inadvertently.
It remains to be seen what actually comes from this, but it may address a central conundrum of ownership and copyright in the digital age. My feeling on the copyright issue is that if I have a book, I have one copy, but it is mine and I can give it or sell it or loan it to anyone I please. The key thing is that if I give my copy away then it is gone. I don't have it, and I can't give it to any more than one person at a time.
This satisfies the idea that the creator has control of the copy number (and hence meaning to the word copyright) and yet I have complete control over my copy including sharing it.
The problem is the digital age is how to transmit a copy to another person in such a way that I lose physical possession. You can think of a lot of complicated ways to do this. What is missing is a simple almost transparent and effortless way to do this. anything else either feels like a DRM trap or allows rampant distribution in violation of the creator's copyright.
If apple can solve this simplicity issue, then it bodes well for the industry and the consumer. Recall the pre 99 cent track days. by introducing that simple distillation it became less of a hassle to buy and share music across all your personal devices, for most people, this was simpler than hassling with trying to find it free somewhere.
I look forward to this to see if they implement it simply and equitably.
Agreed. Layer your services on top of Android and be done with it. Why develop an OS, when a free one is there waiting for you to add to it.
Why would I buy a RIM when and LG or HTC or Samsung behaved the same? That's a recipe for death. It won't be long before google offers the same enterprise e-mail that rim does. What is the distinguishing feature?
Could be staking their dwindling future on windows phones.
Seriously, I wonder what the prospects for the windows phone are. My starting assumption is that Microsoft knows they need to succeed in the smart phone game and that this would be a good thing to blow their cash hoard on unless they want to stay a PC software company. So I assume they are going to make some company succeed but may have not made up their minds which.
The obvious choice is Nokia's headlong commitment to Windows phones. Clearly a willing partner with the manufacturing, distribution and hardware support capability that knows how to work with every phone company. That's good. The down side is perhaps they are and ARM based smart phone. Can they make the leap to Intel? Early reviews say windows RT (arm) is a total half baked disaster. On the other hand reviews of the XOLO (which is intel android) say that the arm emulation is almost flawless. So there is a possibility they could run windows 8 intel but emulate the legacy ARM drivers and programs.
If they are first to market with the widest distribution of a high power windows 8 then developers will target that devices characteristics. Could be a win. If they try to tough it out on ARM I suspect a big fail.
Then there is samsung who dabbles in windows smart phones. Samsung either needs to fork Android like amazon did or keep a foot in windows or they expose themselves to whims of google. If they fork it, they can dictate control of the OS to the carriers just like Apple does. Empirically apple iphones are great precisely because Verizon or AT&T is not trying to customize it to maximize their revenue stream.
But I think neither android or iphone is so great that Microsoft can't succeed given they already have about 100K of developed Apps. Conversely this is exactly why Blackberry has zero chance. No app base means no customers means no developers.
I had two computers running a mail program that synced with gmail. They each had scripts running that sorted the mail into folders slightly differently. I frequently would find 200 copies of the same message in the trash when I left both computers running.
So if you write a manuscript for a movie on chrome OS then you are giving permission to google to make it into a movie if they want. Amazing.
Does this mean you also can't store on your G-drive anything you don't have permission to reproduce. For example, if I am reviewing a manuscript an I place it on my Gdrive then I've given permission to Google to reproduce it. Yet I don't have that permission to grant.
Nokia Lumina series based on windows is the single roll of the dice bet for Nokia it appears. Obviously to be viable it needs to migrate to the upcoming windows OS. The Nokia runs on ARM. But by all accounts Windows on Arm (WindowsRT) is a half-baked disaster. So Nokia is toast... unless there some way to get an intel processor into a nokia phone that could still run ARM software. Then they could use the new OS but still retain all legacy drivers and applications for ARM.
Switiching to Intel would also fit with NOKIA's "were not android" strategy. You might not believe int his strategy but they do. It would be consistently radical to go to intel to differentiate themselves.
reverse engineering from the language itself might be reasonable but as I understand it Dalvic actually implements all the java VM header profiles. You can't specify those without passing along copyrighted information. So how does one explain that? it's not a clean room and it is something that I beleive their lic forbids. maybe I'm wrong.
Google has been prosecuted for anti trust and infringement in over 40 countries. Pattern?
http://googleopoly.net/Googles_Rap_Sheet.pdf
Schmidt has dirty paws.
I would not be surprised if this behavior is why Sergey Brin had to oust him. Name any market Google has created? Search? Mail? Maps? Online Docs? It's all polished implementations of other peoples well proven ideas. Their finest and purest idea was their first one: search ranking by citation.
As I understand tje JAVA lic, and perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems pretty clear that Sun lic the programming language for free but retained the lic and copyright on the implementation of the language itself. That copyright would clearly include the interface and methods needed to implement any java compatible compiler or interpreter. As long as one agrees that SUN had the right to copyright that then I don't understand why google has a case on this. maybe someone can explain?
The speed of light is known with a precision that goes quite beyond that. After that, the timing is a simple question of arithmetic.
that's what the neutrino people thought. But they didn't have the cable screwed in right.
We already can't use chrome where I work due to the difficulty of wrangling then push updates. Bussinesses can't tolerate the lack of control of external root access to their computers. Even without root access pushed updates are a bussiness intelligence leak vector. while one can cabble work arounds to this, assuring thaey are intact on every computer is a hassle.
There is of course a raging debate if it's better to be up to date by default or to manage the bussiness approved updates. One can see benefits from both.
What would really help here is some third party paid seal of approval that bussinesses could contract to be the gate keeper on vetting third party updates.
My two favorite languages aren't dying!
Yes, Perl and Ruby combined have twice the share of python. It's really more like 20 times, since you can get ten times as much done in a single line of perl.
The patent says it is restricted to "A digital system that may be used by children two years old and older. " All apple has to do is claim iphones are fro people under 2 years old.
Forget nit picking over optimizing testing strategies. The real news is you can predict where someone is likely to make an error. Imagine recording all this data while someone was writing code. Eventually there is a bug detected but where is it? Well you might want to color code the code to show sections where the person was struggling with logic. That might be a place to look first. Of course it might be in some place where it never occurred to the person they should be struggling or was just a typo. But at least automatically flagging every place where the programmer was unsure of things would help with code reviews or code refactoring.
There's more than one utility function. For example, if wrote an app I would not expect to profit, it would be for fun. Thus I'd give it away for free or a dollar. Someone else might be hoping to make a living at it. too bad.
The idea of attaching something that costs you something is actually a good idea. As slashdot knows, the only viable (but impossible to implement) cure for spam would be to require postage charges on all e-mail. But in this case it is possible to implement. here's two possible suggestions
1) send a dollar. the dollar does not need to go to the congressman, but instead could go to general revenues or perhaps a reserve for general capitol hill IT support.
2) certify your e-mail address with a trusted proxy sender. For example, the democratic and republican parties could vouch that your e-mail is legit. They would want to do this honestly because if they were dishonest the'd lose the privilege. The way you do this is to give people e-mail accounts from which to send. They can establish those e-mail accounts using visa card numbers or by snail mail or any way that would filter out mass spam.
oops my bad. our numbers actually agree. within a factor of 2. I goofed on the units comparing my power to your energy. A more realistic number is about 300 kWh for a thin corvette roadster or 500 for a family car.
So you really think it will be safe to connect a megawatt cable to the privately owned and maintained vehicle?
This inspired me to look again at these. my 30kw was a number I came up with a long time ago from coefficients of drag on a honda car.
Now that we have all electric cars you can actually measure this. The chevy volt and nissan leaf are the best ones made and they manage just over 37Kwh/100 miles at "highway" speed.
assuming highway speed means 55mph then 100 miles is 1.8 hours. So that means it takes 20kw to propel these at 55 mph.
now the drag power it takes to propel any object through air scales as the velocity cubed. So to go from 55 to 65 would require 1.65 times more power if we assume that nearly all of this scales as drag.
assuming this is the case and assuming the engine does not lose efficiency with speed then this means we need about
33Kw to drive a small car at 65 mhp.
(alternatively if one assumes HWY driving means 65, and people drive at 75 then we get 30kw)
So my ball park number is still about the same.
It is perhaps worth noting that it takes about 2.5x more power to go 75 than it does 55!
anyhow it takes
370 to 600 WH per mile (depending on how fast you drive)
185KWh to 300KwH to go 500 miles.
Which brings us back to
1.1 to 1.8 MWatts to charge in 10 minutes ignoring coupling losses.
where do you get this 200Wh/mile? Wind resistance and storage conversion (in and out) inefficiecincy are the dominant factors for highway travel. wind resistance is pretty much set by the size of the car's crossectional area. So irrespective of how light or efficient you can make the engine you are not going to beat that. I estimate it take 30KW to push a honda accord size car at highway speed.
There is one issue with these 500mi batteries I can think of, how do you charge them quickly? if you assume it takes about 30KW do push a prius sized vehicle at 50mi/hr then a 500 mile battery would mean about 300Kw/hr storage. I'm not sure if that is what is here or not, but let's assume yes. To charge a 300kW/hr battery in ten mites would require a 1.8MegaWatts connection for every car at the "pump". Sounds kinda dicey. do you really trust that every car pulling up is maintained so well that a bad connection would not explode if you put a megawatt into it?
Even swapping out batteries and charging them off line would not actually decrease the demand. If a "busy" interstate gas station typically had 5 people/ ten minutes filling up all day long then whether you change batteries or not, it is still a 9mega watt station. If you could charge them overnight when they were closed, then it is still a 4.5Mwatt station to maintain a ten minute pit-stop time.
So simply building a large battery does not entirely solve the range problem with electric cars.
What about charging them at home? same problem if everyone is your apartment building wants to go 500 miles every day.
But that's just it. most people in your condo are not going to go 500 miles every day. Electric cars still make sense for commuters rather than long range travelers. Commuters drive a tenth of that, so the power demand is a tenth. this makes charging them at home sensible.
so this is a big advance but it is still does not solve the 500 mile recharge problem.