If there ever was a good excuse for crippled software then this might be it. Allow the application to lock out all the other functions of the iphone the insurance companies fear. That way you get the cost savings of a commondity device as the platform, but avoid the temptation of people to try to get phony perscriptions. I sort of doubt this temptation logic but the insurance companies probably know better than I do about how that goes. There are tonnes of shady companies pushing home health devices that can be justified under medicare but don't really work or soon break (e.g. scooters whose batteries quickly die). They can just imagine how an easy to sell iphone would become.
Moreover you can imagine that while this test to speech is a compelling use case, there are tonnes of other marginal justifications. for example, a timer application might be sold as a reminder for diabetics to check their glucose. A web based local pollen count application for asthmatics. all of these justifying that the insurance companies buy someone an iphone.
(by the way getting diagnosed as an asthmatic is apparently easy since all the pro bike riders have prescriptions for inhalers for brochial passage enlargers)
making the app cripple the device would sort of fix the dillema but still allow genuine need cases to get what they need.
intriguing. So i'm guessing that at least in theory this Hash is crackable (since the iphone has to be able to authenticate on it's own right?) But maybe it's strong enough that no can practically crack it?
Well I've unlocked my phone. so application signing is irrelevant. as for signing the firmware well that's not how it works. you get an apple.ipsw file that is not uniquely signed then transfer this to the phone. you can do this transfer either from itunes, which for all i know might be signing it as it transfers it or from quickpwn which presumably is not signing it.
so it's not clear to me what you are talking about.
The iPhone may have a high resale value, but that comes at the cost of paying $600-$1200 more over the course of a two year contract vs a Pre.
dude, did you read any of my post? I don't pay any extra. I bought the iphone used in craigslist and I pay regular rates on Tmobile. I don't have a 2 year contract. How am I paying $1200 more over 2 years versus a pre?
I use my iphone with T-mobile. for 1000 minutes it's $39. that's not unlimited, but I don't use that many minutes so for me it is. My data plan is $6.25 a week. I say week and not month because T-mobile lets you switch the data plan on and off at will without any impact on your plan (no new 2-year agreement). SO I only switch it on when I travel a few times a year. The rest of the time I just use WiFi for the internet. In my home town I really don't need to have google so bad that I can't just walk to a coffee shop or something to use the iphone. But on travel (especially in the car or public transit, or airport, or whatever you do need the web on the go sometimes for maps, car rentals, hotel reservations, dinner plannning, staying connected with the office).
So you might say, well yeah but sprint is unlimited and has an always on data plan. And I reply yes but I have an iphone which, presently at least, is unarguably more supported in terms of usability (apps and connectivity to easy itunes management and perifrials), has a high resale value, and uses a carrier with better coverage (including sim card conveneince for international travel).
FOr my usage pattern, which may not be yours, t-moble is by far the better deal cost wise as well.
I was under the impression, perhaps wrongly, that apple was locking their phones basebands. That is the locking is occuring in the cell-phone part of the phone which has it's very own firmware and DSP not the main "operating system" CPU part of the phone. So this tethering denial may be just a side effect of the well known baseband locking that occurs when they lock the cell phone to a carrier class. The iphone Dev team has never cracked the Cell phone firmware.
I think it might be "pre"-mature to say the pre is completely open source. The CPU part of the phone might be, but does that assure that they won't permenantly lock the carrier class? I could imagine that some service providers might want Palm to do just that in return for subsidizing the phone.
We shall see. Right now there's not enough Pre phones out there for the main market let alone a gray market of re-banded phones to be siginficant. Apple did not start locking the phones this way till the 3G. the 2G phones supposedly, it is said, can't be locked that way. But I honestly don't know enough to argue the matter, I'm just repeating what i've gleaned on the iphone-dev team blogs.
The problem with open source is the dependency chain becomes brutal. So you turn to a package manager like Yum or Fink to handle all the self consistency and installs, not to mention the updates.
Then sometime later you want to update python from 2.4 to 2.5. you do the update and it updates all these dependencies as well. And suddenly you find that Gimp or gnuplot or something else you need is busted because say they all depend on some Latex for symbolic fonts and there's an incompatibility.
These package manager while saving you a lot of time on the initial install also couple all your apps together in unneccessary ways, so that updating one can break another. Or worse maybe it won't let you update at all.
One would prefer in many cases decoupling of applications or even standalone applications. When you update an app the worst that happens then is that just that app breaks. Plus it's trivial to roll back to the old self contained app.
I use pylab and scipy as a replacement for Matlab. But it's really frustrating because sometimes you do an update and everything can bust because this or that lib won't compile with your current compiler or this or that dependency is not available or it wont work with X or aqua term or whatever.
To give an example, none of the scientific programs I wrote to display my graphs work any more because none of the 3D graphics in pylab work anymore. instead you can use Mayavi (much better but more difficult), but to do an install of that cleanly is a nightmare. So you switch to the Enthought distro with all that built in. But then the ENthought distro doesn't have a fortran compiler so all the scientific add ons that depend on that or use F2PY are busted. And so on. Sure you can if you try get it all to work, but your old programs seldom work anymore.
Continuity is a huge headache with open source. If your time is worth anything then even something as overpriced as matlab starts to be attractive.
(the problem with matlab's pricing is that while it's not so absurd for single seats if it makes you more productive, once you have a large group then everyone needs a copy to be interactive even if they seldom use it: then it becomes prohibitively expensive.)
You could do it like adobe does: if you transfer the lic you have to register the transfer with adobe. they have a form you submit. this is not an obstacle.
If your software has DRM in it, it can't be transferred or resold (first sale), so there is no used market, which increases revenue. It can't be backed up, so if you accidentally destroy the media on which the software is recorded, it must be purchased again, which increases revenue. It can be remotely deactivated, so you have to buy something else to play, which increases revenue. Thus, devs should love DRM in their games.
did you pay less for giving up those privledges? How much extra would you pay to regain those privledges?
To me, DRM is about two things. First it's about making sure that people don't actually have control over the things they've ostensibly bought.
Okay then I assume then you would be in favor of a scheme were your copy is entirely unlocked (ignoring the fact that it only works on the version of the Xbox you bought and perhaps no future version). But that it is water marked with your Credit card number and you agree to be liable for every single one of the games that shows up in the wild even if its thousands of them?
Grand central dispatch has many innovations, but the key feature it provides is that thread pooling is now handled by the OS not the program. This means that in a dynamic environment you don't have each application stepping on each other when they ask for too many threads --all total-- than the multi-core system can optimally handle. So if Mail asks for fifty threads and Firefox asks for fifty threads and CPU you are running on can realistically only handle 10 threads then GCD figures out how to manage things so you don't get a spinning beachball.
It turns out a lot of tricks were required to do this including a lot of things like just in time compiling LVM and this C-Blocks stuff, but that's way over my head.
"generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. "
since when is heat generation anything but 100% efficient. Now delivery to where you want it perhaps not. ANd it might go up the stack. but citing a 92% efficiency does not tell me much about the electrical generation efficiency.
If I have to wear any sort of headgear, even paper glasses, it's a no deal. I like to multitask when I watch TV.
You do bring up an interesting point indirectly. Will 3D perception even without headgear cause vertigo or other disorienting effects to people moving in a room? As the 3D gets better and better you will genuinely perceive the TV as a hole in the wall to another room but the attachment of that room to yours will be constantly shifting relative to your floor. Your brain may choose to perceive it as your floor is tilting.
Additionally the may be problems with filming in 3D that are hard for actors to accomodate. Certain kinds of motions in stereo vision systems can cause the image to become momentarily fuzzy. You can see this in many 3D animated movies where combinations of fast charater motions or doors moving while the camera pans result in anomolously fuzzy images in the otherwise infocus foreground. Someone once tried to explain to me why this is: I think it was somthing about the object sheering rates exceeding the framing rate. Supposedly this is why disney equiped theaters use a faster framing rate and show each frame four times to each eye interleaved.
We have binocular vision which means that our sense of 3D for left and right comes from our eyes directly but our sense of 3d for up and down is less direct by the eyes and aided by head motion which stereo 3d systems don't provide (actually get wrong).
hence it does make sense that how a scene is staged, how pans and zooms are done, and how moving objects traverse the screen will matter to filming good 3D products. and bad results can look worse than 2D, even seeimg less dimensional when they suddenly become fuzzy. and then there may be vertigo effects as well if you are moving around.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. â"Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. pp. 83. ISBN 0-13-349945-6.
The original version of this quotation came much earlier; the very first problem in Tanenbaum's 1981 textbook Computer Networks asks the student to calculate the throughput of a St. Bernard carrying floppy disks (which are said to hold 250 kilobytes of data). The first USENET citation is July 16, 1985, and it was widely considered a chestnut already, possibly dating from the 1970s[citation needed]. Other alleged speakers included Tom Reidel, Warren Jackson, or Bob Sutterfield. The station wagon transporting magnetic tapes is the canonical version, but variants using trucks or Boeing 747s and later storage technologies such as CD-ROMs have frequently appeared.
a refund on all purchased music in Canada to compensate:-P
the article says something explicitly different. the fee is for you to be allowed to translocate your fairly putchased CD. if they lowered the cost of the cd it woul nuliffy the fee!
also this is not a piracy compensation fee. it says so explicitly. sharing is prohibited. its just for personal translocation of your own purchased music.
it might however make sense that they should lower the fee on downloaded music since presumably this music is actually intended for translocation and so logically that should be in the price.
i'd be for this if thr fee was to pay for piracy. it makes sense and is roughly fair though perhaps not individually fair. piracy is a problem for producers. there is no simple way to correct this that is fair. there are tonnes of unkowns like the fact that for somw artists piracy is helpful and for some it is not. while the cost of reproduction is negligible you still need some artificial scarcity to fairly compensate the reasonable revenue the artist should have.
so even though its not an ideal solution it is a good solution in yhat it is easy to implement. easier to police (will get tricky if removable SD cards are used) and has a social benefit. it would decriminalize sharing.
but this is not that law.
instead this will drive people to use SD card based music players as those can't be taxed since they are mostly used in cell phones and cameras.
well I'd assume you can replace the batteries for less than the price of the bike. My guess is the expense is in the light weight constuction and motors. Probably see Chinese knockoff's next summer in Pepboys and Autozone.
My first reaction was oh good maybe i'll understand it this time. Then I thought well if I did maybe some of the magic would be gone too. Sort of like how the mysteroulsy tantilizing aspect of the X-files slowly drained out and only sculley kept me watching and eventually that was not enough.
I recall seeing the prisoner on as a kid. Back then it was common for syndicated shows to be shown out of order since it was expected there was no story arc. for example, it did not matter what happened last week in Hawaii 5-0.
So it was a mystery what the hell was going on more than it even was supposed to be.
Later when it came to DVD I watched it end to end. And I still don't really understand it. especially the last three episodes. It was oddly a product of it's era but also way way way ahead of it's time for TV. A surreal secret agent show.
I always liked how #2 changed but no one said anything. The one constant seemed to be the butler.
Sure that would have problems but no one would do it that way. You'd have the light going through a small sector of a few degrees on the color wheel. the polarizor would be segmented too so that it was always nearly perpendicular over the 2 degree light aperature.
Unless I can move my head to look around something, it's not 3D. If they want to call it 'stereo' TV, that's fine, but it's not 3D.
Well even a hologram goes away when you move past the film. What you mean is you want the image to change depending on your position in the room up to a point (where you are behind the hologram).
And indeed some TVs can do this. the ones with linticular lenses in principle can offer different views to different parts of the room. the stero headsets however don't.
Slashdot Mirror
If there ever was a good excuse for crippled software then this might be it. Allow the application to lock out all the other functions of the iphone the insurance companies fear. That way you get the cost savings of a commondity device as the platform, but avoid the temptation of people to try to get phony perscriptions. I sort of doubt this temptation logic but the insurance companies probably know better than I do about how that goes. There are tonnes of shady companies pushing home health devices that can be justified under medicare but don't really work or soon break (e.g. scooters whose batteries quickly die). They can just imagine how an easy to sell iphone would become.
Moreover you can imagine that while this test to speech is a compelling use case, there are tonnes of other marginal justifications. for example, a timer application might be sold as a reminder for diabetics to check their glucose. A web based local pollen count application for asthmatics. all of these justifying that the insurance companies buy someone an iphone.
(by the way getting diagnosed as an asthmatic is apparently easy since all the pro bike riders have prescriptions for inhalers for brochial passage enlargers)
making the app cripple the device would sort of fix the dillema but still allow genuine need cases to get what they need.
No. works on 100% of the T-mobile network as far as I can tell, and I live in a rural area.
intriguing. So i'm guessing that at least in theory this Hash is crackable (since the iphone has to be able to authenticate on it's own right?) But maybe it's strong enough that no can practically crack it?
Well I've unlocked my phone. so application signing is irrelevant. as for signing the firmware well that's not how it works. you get an apple .ipsw file that is not uniquely signed then transfer this to the phone. you can do this transfer either from itunes, which for all i know might be signing it as it transfers it or from quickpwn which presumably is not signing it.
so it's not clear to me what you are talking about.
I'm curious how you enjoy virgin mobile for $2 per month. Even their cheapest minute plans require you to "top up" for at least $20 every 30 days.
Also is Vigin mobile a GSM card phone?
The iPhone may have a high resale value, but that comes at the cost of paying $600-$1200 more over the course of a two year contract vs a Pre.
dude, did you read any of my post? I don't pay any extra. I bought the iphone used in craigslist and I pay regular rates on Tmobile. I don't have a 2 year contract. How am I paying $1200 more over 2 years versus a pre?
I use my iphone with T-mobile. for 1000 minutes it's $39. that's not unlimited, but I don't use that many minutes so for me it is. My data plan is $6.25 a week. I say week and not month because T-mobile lets you switch the data plan on and off at will without any impact on your plan (no new 2-year agreement). SO I only switch it on when I travel a few times a year. The rest of the time I just use WiFi for the internet. In my home town I really don't need to have google so bad that I can't just walk to a coffee shop or something to use the iphone. But on travel (especially in the car or public transit, or airport, or whatever you do need the web on the go sometimes for maps, car rentals, hotel reservations, dinner plannning, staying connected with the office).
So you might say, well yeah but sprint is unlimited and has an always on data plan. And I reply yes but I have an iphone which, presently at least, is unarguably more supported in terms of usability (apps and connectivity to easy itunes management and perifrials), has a high resale value, and uses a carrier with better coverage (including sim card conveneince for international travel).
FOr my usage pattern, which may not be yours, t-moble is by far the better deal cost wise as well.
I was under the impression, perhaps wrongly, that apple was locking their phones basebands. That is the locking is occuring in the cell-phone part of the phone which has it's very own firmware and DSP not the main "operating system" CPU part of the phone. So this tethering denial may be just a side effect of the well known baseband locking that occurs when they lock the cell phone to a carrier class. The iphone Dev team has never cracked the Cell phone firmware.
I think it might be "pre"-mature to say the pre is completely open source. The CPU part of the phone might be, but does that assure that they won't permenantly lock the carrier class? I could imagine that some service providers might want Palm to do just that in return for subsidizing the phone.
We shall see. Right now there's not enough Pre phones out there for the main market let alone a gray market of re-banded phones to be siginficant. Apple did not start locking the phones this way till the 3G. the 2G phones supposedly, it is said, can't be locked that way. But I honestly don't know enough to argue the matter, I'm just repeating what i've gleaned on the iphone-dev team blogs.
The problem with open source is the dependency chain becomes brutal. So you turn to a package manager like Yum or Fink to handle all the self consistency and installs, not to mention the updates.
Then sometime later you want to update python from 2.4 to 2.5. you do the update and it updates all these dependencies as well. And suddenly you find that Gimp or gnuplot or something else you need is busted because say they all depend on some Latex for symbolic fonts and there's an incompatibility.
These package manager while saving you a lot of time on the initial install also couple all your apps together in unneccessary ways, so that updating one can break another. Or worse maybe it won't let you update at all.
One would prefer in many cases decoupling of applications or even standalone applications. When you update an app the worst that happens then is that just that app breaks. Plus it's trivial to roll back to the old self contained app.
I use pylab and scipy as a replacement for Matlab. But it's really frustrating because sometimes you do an update and everything can bust because this or that lib won't compile with your current compiler or this or that dependency is not available or it wont work with X or aqua term or whatever.
To give an example, none of the scientific programs I wrote to display my graphs work any more because none of the 3D graphics in pylab work anymore. instead you can use Mayavi (much better but more difficult), but to do an install of that cleanly is a nightmare. So you switch to the Enthought distro with all that built in. But then the ENthought distro doesn't have a fortran compiler so all the scientific add ons that depend on that or use F2PY are busted. And so on. Sure you can if you try get it all to work, but your old programs seldom work anymore.
Continuity is a huge headache with open source. If your time is worth anything then even something as overpriced as matlab starts to be attractive.
(the problem with matlab's pricing is that while it's not so absurd for single seats if it makes you more productive, once you have a large group then everyone needs a copy to be interactive even if they seldom use it: then it becomes prohibitively expensive.)
You could do it like adobe does: if you transfer the lic you have to register the transfer with adobe. they have a form you submit. this is not an obstacle.
If your software has DRM in it, it can't be transferred or resold (first sale), so there is no used market, which increases revenue. It can't be backed up, so if you accidentally destroy the media on which the software is recorded, it must be purchased again, which increases revenue. It can be remotely deactivated, so you have to buy something else to play, which increases revenue. Thus, devs should love DRM in their games.
did you pay less for giving up those privledges? How much extra would you pay to regain those privledges?
To me, DRM is about two things. First it's about making sure that people don't actually have control over the things they've ostensibly bought.
Okay then I assume then you would be in favor of a scheme were your copy is entirely unlocked (ignoring the fact that it only works on the version of the Xbox you bought and perhaps no future version). But that it is water marked with your Credit card number and you agree to be liable for every single one of the games that shows up in the wild even if its thousands of them?
If your cool with that then say so.
Grand central dispatch has many innovations, but the key feature it provides is that thread pooling is now handled by the OS not the program. This means that in a dynamic environment you don't have each application stepping on each other when they ask for too many threads --all total-- than the multi-core system can optimally handle. So if Mail asks for fifty threads and Firefox asks for fifty threads and CPU you are running on can realistically only handle 10 threads then GCD figures out how to manage things so you don't get a spinning beachball.
It turns out a lot of tricks were required to do this including a lot of things like just in time compiling LVM and this C-Blocks stuff, but that's way over my head.
"generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. "
since when is heat generation anything but 100% efficient. Now delivery to where you want it perhaps not. ANd it might go up the stack. but citing a 92% efficiency does not tell me much about the electrical generation efficiency.
If I have to wear any sort of headgear, even paper glasses, it's a no deal. I like to multitask when I watch TV.
You do bring up an interesting point indirectly. Will 3D perception even without headgear cause vertigo or other disorienting effects to people moving in a room? As the 3D gets better and better you will genuinely perceive the TV as a hole in the wall to another room but the attachment of that room to yours will be constantly shifting relative to your floor. Your brain may choose to perceive it as your floor is tilting.
Additionally the may be problems with filming in 3D that are hard for actors to accomodate. Certain kinds of motions in stereo vision systems can cause the image to become momentarily fuzzy. You can see this in many 3D animated movies where combinations of fast charater motions or doors moving while the camera pans result in anomolously fuzzy images in the otherwise infocus foreground. Someone once tried to explain to me why this is: I think it was somthing about the object sheering rates exceeding the framing rate. Supposedly this is why disney equiped theaters use a faster framing rate and show each frame four times to each eye interleaved.
We have binocular vision which means that our sense of 3D for left and right comes from our eyes directly but our sense of 3d for up and down is less direct by the eyes and aided by head motion which stereo 3d systems don't provide (actually get wrong).
hence it does make sense that how a scene is staged, how pans and zooms are done, and how moving objects traverse the screen will matter to filming good 3D products. and bad results can look worse than 2D, even seeimg less dimensional when they suddenly become fuzzy. and then there may be vertigo effects as well if you are moving around.
from wikipedia:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. â"Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. pp. 83. ISBN 0-13-349945-6.
The original version of this quotation came much earlier; the very first problem in Tanenbaum's 1981 textbook Computer Networks asks the student to calculate the throughput of a St. Bernard carrying floppy disks (which are said to hold 250 kilobytes of data). The first USENET citation is July 16, 1985, and it was widely considered a chestnut already, possibly dating from the 1970s[citation needed]. Other alleged speakers included Tom Reidel, Warren Jackson, or Bob Sutterfield. The station wagon transporting magnetic tapes is the canonical version, but variants using trucks or Boeing 747s and later storage technologies such as CD-ROMs have frequently appeared.
a refund on all purchased music in Canada to compensate :-P
the article says something explicitly different. the fee is for you to be allowed to translocate your fairly putchased CD. if they lowered the cost of the cd it woul nuliffy the fee!
also this is not a piracy compensation fee. it says so explicitly. sharing is prohibited. its just for personal translocation of your own purchased music.
it might however make sense that they should lower the fee on downloaded music since presumably this music is actually intended for translocation and so logically that should be in the price.
i'd be for this if thr fee was to pay for piracy. it makes sense and is roughly fair though perhaps not individually fair. piracy is a problem for producers. there is no simple way to correct this that is fair. there are tonnes of unkowns like the fact that for somw artists piracy is helpful and for some it is not. while the cost of reproduction is negligible you still need some artificial scarcity to fairly compensate the reasonable revenue the artist should have.
so even though its not an ideal solution it is a good solution in yhat it is easy to implement. easier to police (will get tricky if removable SD cards are used) and has a social benefit. it would decriminalize sharing.
but this is not that law.
instead this will drive people to use SD card based music players as those can't be taxed since they are mostly used in cell phones and cameras.
well I'd assume you can replace the batteries for less than the price of the bike. My guess is the expense is in the light weight constuction and motors. Probably see Chinese knockoff's next summer in Pepboys and Autozone.
Something small and quiet just died...
My first reaction was oh good maybe i'll understand it this time. Then I thought well if I did maybe some of the magic would be gone too. Sort of like how the mysteroulsy tantilizing aspect of the X-files slowly drained out and only sculley kept me watching and eventually that was not enough.
I recall seeing the prisoner on as a kid. Back then it was common for syndicated shows to be shown out of order since it was expected there was no story arc. for example, it did not matter what happened last week in Hawaii 5-0.
So it was a mystery what the hell was going on more than it even was supposed to be.
Later when it came to DVD I watched it end to end. And I still don't really understand it. especially the last three episodes. It was oddly a product of it's era but also way way way ahead of it's time for TV. A surreal secret agent show.
I always liked how #2 changed but no one said anything. The one constant seemed to be the butler.
Sure that would have problems but no one would do it that way. You'd have the light going through a small sector of a few degrees on the color wheel. the polarizor would be segmented too so that it was always nearly perpendicular over the 2 degree light aperature.
As long as the wheel is big compared to the light diameter, the change in angle of the moving wheel should be not a concern.
And the same system will work for 2 ans 3d movies so it's not a special purpose machine.
your explanation is not even wrong. It's incoherent.
Even white paint retains 50-90% polarization on reflection depending on the angle.
Unless I can move my head to look around something, it's not 3D. If they want to call it 'stereo' TV, that's fine, but it's not 3D.
Well even a hologram goes away when you move past the film. What you mean is you want the image to change depending on your position in the room up to a point (where you are behind the hologram).
And indeed some TVs can do this. the ones with linticular lenses in principle can offer different views to different parts of the room. the stero headsets however don't.