My partner got crap grades at GCSE maths and wanted to re-take it (originally taken at 16 in the UK, this was ~15 years later).
Now I got an A the first time around for GCSE, and then at 18 I pretty much completely screwed up my 'pure' maths part and was only partially rescued by the statistical part. Trying to explain stuff to her made me suddenly realize that the parts I was good at, were the parts that I could visualize.
More than that, it wasn't that I had some mental block on some topics - it was just that I'd never learnt them (or been taught them) properly in the first place. If I spent a bit of time looking at the type of question, rather than the specific question, stuff 'clicks'. I came away with 2 thoughts:
1) If my knowledge is supposed to grow 'like a tree', a whole load of branches got lopped off a long time ago - just felt a little bit sad that I'd spent so long no even noticing that I'd given up. This led to a pub conversation around differentiation/integration - I knew what to do, I knew what the inputs and outputs meant (i.e. I could do the questions) but I'd never understood WHY. I'd always been very sniffy about those who could say only multiply if they'd learnt their times table by rote, but I was doing exactly the same thing, just on a topic a little bit more advanced.
2) Other thing I realized was that I was already doing some operations mentally in exactly the same way as some new technique in her book, that I'd never been taught. I'm unsure that everybody thinks in the same way and other techniques vary, but surely I'd have saved time if I'd been taught it - but then maybe it's the fact that my brain decided to solve them this way, that's made it stick for me.
Take for example the first test (47 x 75) ÷ 25
You can either know that you do the thing in the brackets first, then the thing outside - as you've learnt your rules. But stepping back and looking at it as a whole, it becomes trivial.
47 is a bit of a odd number, I'll leave that for now
I'm multiplying something by 75 and then dividing it by 25. So I'll throw those away and multiply by 3. Leaving me with 47 * 3
ah, 47 again. Well it's close enough to 50. So I'll do 50*3 giving me 150.
Finally time for the correction to my not knowing my 47 times table. I knocked off 3*3 to give me the easy 150, so just need to take the 9 off to give the 141.
I genuinely wonder if everybody else worked that out the same way, but it's now just the way my head works. Bit that annoyed me is that whenever I was taught anything, we were told "how to do it" - maybe education would be better if every teacher has to be able to explain 3 ways of approaching any problem. Better yet, rather than testing the student with the question and just getting a boolean pass/fail - the teacher should ask the pupil around their thought processes when they look at the problem - "talk me through it".
The chances of every coming across that particular question in the real world are practically nil. So the purpose of the question is to test whether the process is present in the pupil - yet maths papers NEVER seem to ask for this. From memory there was the 'show working' marks, but they just tended to dry up after the first mistake was made - and aren't particularly conducive to how I personally think (mental white-board and processing explained verbally).
I read the first article and agreed with his conclusions - but he couldn't do any of the questions?
Ran through the test, and erm they were very easy. I can only assume it was a different test.
Sorry, wasn't really gunning for Sony, and I give it 50/50 that after I've had my strop I'll pick one up (Yes, you are typing to a Nintendo VIP/schmuck, who spent too long with a credit card and a delayed flight departure).
Didn't help that I found a 4Gig M2 card in a drawer during my weekend clearout, for a phone that broke many years ago. I remember being annoyed when I bought it and just felt slightly haunted by it.
I guess I'm maybe just old, cranky self-hating gamer - PSP Ridge Racer did make me go oooh and once the novelty wore off, Lumines with the sound up kept me very happy (This was the slightly pre-release PSP I picked up under the counter in some Kuwaiti electronics bazaar - I think I've mentally blocked how much that cost me). Just need to make sure I'm not near a airport when Vita comes out.
OH actually, that does remind me of what I REALLY hated - Getting GTA, getting on the plane, popping it in and it telling me it refused to play, until I updated the firmware, which required it to be plugged in..(2 fully charged batteries in my bag - *weeps*)
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More to the point, if Firefox did switch to Bing, I presume a fair number of users would just switch it to back to google. Should Firefox fall, I'd suspect a large proportion of users would just simply switch to Chrome.
You might be Open Source, but when that much money comes from just one source, you're over a barrel as much as any other company. No money, worse product, less people, less money. If Mozilla had any sense, they'd get their arse in gear and make their product 'stickier'.
There's a push by providers of walled-gardens to make you buy walled-garden products.
I'm sure Apple will love the idea of your new bios locking up your new machine and not giving you keys, but Asus won't be plugging that as a feature on the same mobo they sell to me or you.
People don't care and are not as stupid as you seem hell-bent on asserting. There are not lines into the Apple store from people returning ipads when they realize they can't run Apache on it. There are lines back into your local PC market when "their laptop has broken and just keeps showing them porn, but they didn't do anything"
If you want to consider multi-purpose devices, consider game consoles. It's gaming, it's facebook, it's blu-ray playback, it's netflix, it's facebook, blah blah. Sure you can mod them, but most people just simply don't want to.
If you want to look at phones, Android is flying out the door and most handsets are pretty easily rootable. What % of people do you think actually bother?
What people DO do with their phones and have done for a very long time is pop into a shop to remove the carrier lock. Do they know how this is done? No. They just know they want to change provider, or use a different SIM abroad and the stupid phone is telling them they can't.
My point is that people only get pissed when they want to do something and find they can't. If they don't hit that wall of annoyance, they don't bother.
You, I suspect, are more about the principle of the thing.
I always get the impression with Sony that a dept carefully gestates their baby - and then the moment it pops out, every dept gets a crack at abusing it.
I presume this all started as somebody designed the thing to be media free, after the wonderful UMD on the PSP (I presume the minidisc dept has been canned, by now). So, it's going to be flash only, like the PSP-Go.
You remember, it was like a PSP without the god-awful drive inflicted, but then you for forced to pay more for your device as the memory dept couldn't give a toss about loss-leaders. Oh and the retail dept couldn't lower the price of the games, as then that would piss off the retailer relations division. So punters pay more for the device AND more for the games AND can't sell them 2nd hand.
Not going to fall for that one again are we?
Ahah - but this time we'll sell you the games for LESS as digital downloads. But won't that piss of the retailers? Noooo as we'll make you go into the shop to buy the card, to then digitally download onto it. B.b.but, doesn't this mean I have to download AND go to a shop? Well yes, but the more you use the card, the more you'll save! Oh, so the more money I give you, the less I get screwed? Precisely.
OK, so if it's a success, and you notice your revenues dropping after screwing us upfront, what's to stop you just raising the price of the digital games? Nooo, we wouldn't do that. OK, maybe not so directly. What's to stop you just doubling the RRP, allowing the retailers to advertise massive discounts and then you insisting that we're still reducing the cost? Erm, next question!
On the bright side, this is clearly going to bomb, so I assume that within months, the thing will get heavily discounted. Ah, you might think that, but what we'll do is just advertise a $100+++ saving, by chucking the memory card that costs us naff all in the box. Yes, sorry, no, sorry, can I just jot this idea down? And then you'll just rack up the digital prices again, won't you to compensate? *sound of crayon on business-plan*
Sony's previous successes have been when one department made one thing and sold it. They have never managed to make a success out of anything due to their depts, just sometimes managed to sneak something out despite them.
I wasn't turning this into a Apple/MS and anything you didn't compile yourself is evil rant.
If you want to run Linux and OSS, you can, you'll always be able to - and you'll save yourself a pile of money.
With regards to the iPad - yes. It comes locked down, if you ask Apple they'll tell you it's locked down - and should you try to unlock it, they'll try to re-lock it. It's not a secret, it's just what Apple want and what they've always wanted. You are not given the keys AND THIS IS A FEATURE/SELLING POINT. Not for you or me, which is why I'm guessing neither of us own one, but are you genuinely telling you believe every single person would be best suited being flung at a root prompt?
I own many things, TVs, Watches, digital camera - loads of things I consider appliances and just wish them work as stated on the box. I crack open the case and tinker and bad things will probably happen, so I don't. Many people just want their computer to be the same.
Nobody's killing 'Open Computing' - just there are now some very nice walled gardens, if you prefer it this way.
Provides a nice, safe, stable starting point for a lot of people who were previously scared shitless of technology (if the iphone didn't exist, do you think they'd all be using Android?). If they're happy, they stay there, if they eventually find it limiting, they can move on.
As the recent recipient of "Microsoft called me, asked me to load teamviewer, I left them on my laptop for 2 hours, uninstalled AVG for them as it was 'conflicting' and oh paypalled them £75" call from an elderly late-joiner to the world of IT - I think some people should be locked into walled gardens for their own good.
and therefore make a great target for any politician/newspaper wanting to drum up some publicity.
Ever noticed anybody willing to put their head above the parapet and defend them?
Attempting to do so is way beyond my personal abilities, but the f'in inconsistencies in the arguments beggar belief.
Just to take an example - is paedophilia a crime or a disease? If it's a disease, something they have no control over, then it should be treated like any other with care and compassion - but it can't be a disease, because then we wouldn't feel comfortable demanding they're strung up from the nearest lamp-post.
So - we're stuck with 'crime', a voluntary act they chose to make because they're 'evil' (we so so so want them just to be evil (like Nazis), rational analysis throws up so many 'hard-thinks'). So. Criminals they are - except they're not allowed to be rehabilitated. Their crime is so great that it must be branded upon them for life. Their houses must be marked. Neighbours must be warned. People must cross the street - I'm pretty sure these are all wonderfully well targeted techniques at integrating people back into society.
There are loads of parallels you could take as examples - how for example the USA gets pulled into politics in certain parts of the world.
The "USA" is a great big complex thing, that's done some good things and some really bad things. It's not an actual thing you can point, shout or reason with - it's an amorphous concept. Yet - in many parts of the world, if things are going a bit badly locally, you can guarantee you can just rip into the USA, blame it for all your ills, chuck up a statue of your crusading-pig-dog image of choice, start making some nukes for them and get the crowd cheering. Sure it might screw things up a bit in the long term, but it gets you through that tricky patch.
And to summarize...(I believe this is what you're supposed to do at the end).
The concept of a state publicly marking its citizens, for any reason at all, is distasteful and dangerous. No special cases, no exceptions. Quite likely not to end well, if history is anything to go by.
Actually - bit presumptuous of me to tell you what you should think. I also know damn well if the list went online near me I'd be on there like a shot.
Software should be lead by a designer.
You just seem to be convinced that a designer should only be interested in pretty pretty, not functionality.
Before embarking on this new version of FCP, somebody (a designer) should have produced a document saying what the piece of software will do. This should include the essential stuff from the deprecated version that focus groups wanted to keep, plus the fancy new stuff the re-architecture allows.
After this point the designers job is to keep hitting the developers over the head until they produce something that matches the design doc.
Just taking a wild stab in the dark (based upon personal experience) - As development slips, the choice is to ship with design points missing, or delay ship to get them in. I'm guessing somebody high-up said 'ship'
I'm agreeing with you...kindof. What I was trying to say, was that instead of having a hierarchy of page on a phone (or a huge scrolling list, or whatever) you could just shove it all onto one screen on tablet.
The dev environment provides a nice abstraction to do just this - and you can run different versions in the spangly little emulator that pops up in eclipse, without every even buying a single android device (or spending a single cent).
Point I was trying to make was that the alteration of UIs, upscaling of graphics etc that at least all the initial ipad apps got, is even simpler to do with Android. What is going to be more interesting/problematic, is whether Android gets the apps that could only ever be created for a tablet.
If nothing ever fragmented, we'd all be sitting in Android 1.0 (and IOS 1.0 for that matter).
Current Android is pretty much stuck with the same problem PCs are - for every dual-core, gpu assisted monster that's put out, there's a dozen chinese budget models. Means everybody can pick up an Android device to suit their pocket/needs - but the apps then either all suit the lowest common denominator, or piss off the low-end user when they're 'slow', or piss of the multi-core monster when the iphone app looks better (despite him having bought better hardware)
Personally I love Android to bits - but will be sticking with Nexus X models. Whole Nexus concept seemed to be geared to providing some good reference platforms - the geeky tinkerers picked up on this, but seemingly the masses didn't. Google's current messing about with Android 3.0 would seem to be a response to this - instead of having a specific reference model, have reference internal gubbins.
Not saying I'm happy with it - but there it is. Looks like it's going to be more like buying a PC graphics card. You choose buy the GPU, but then can go high and low on the slight overclocks, the diversions from standard layout/cooling etc etc.
at Android development, one of the 'good things' seemed to be that you can write your app - and then provide different layouts based upon the screen resolution of the target device.
Should mean a developer can very quickly tweak their app to benefit from the extra space given, if it's run on a tablet. I'm not for one moment suggesting that adding some better layouts to a phone app will suddenly transform it into an app natively designed for a tablet - but better than just scaling up.
a) buy a bigger HD for your laptop, so you can get them off your camera.
b) buy a NAS for your home. Doesn't even have to be an expensive one. Something with Mirrored 2Tb drives is an awful lot of photos. Quite a few of these you can get online, so if you're away from home you can trickle back backups if you're feeling paranoid.
c) off-site backup - OK, your house is unlikely to burn down, but just to be safe and all that. Not that expensive. No offence, but 90% of the photos you could lose, so if you want to keep to a budget, just backup the ones you really couldn't live without.
Actually, storage fails very rarely and most online backup services trade (and charge) on the ability to immediately restore. How about just burning to a decent disk and mailing to a family member (ask them nicely to put them in a pile somewhere and return them should a meteorite hit your house).
If Facebook actually wanted pictures to have a shelf-life, they could just allow you to add a default date+x when they would be pulled.
Facebook haven't done this, so I'm guessing they're either a bit short of development cash - or don't want this.
So, how might this work?
Well I'm guessing that either it's:
a brand new file format and the browser requests an external key when the photo display plugin kicks in - so so unlikely to take off, I'll just leave it there.
OR
it's encrypts the image and embeds in tags so the 'plugin' can detect it's a 'special image' and goes off to find a key to decrypt it.
Assuming it's the second, it has my interest. Sounds a little bit interesting - but then I start thinking.
If it's encrypted it's going to have 'look random' - so that's ballsed up the compression ratios of the jpg you uploaded.. and then well most sites tend to compress/thumbnail/crop or a combination of the above... well I don't quite see that working - no it couldn't
I guess maybe we're onto option C, I've just thought of. You don't upload the image, you upload a QR style pointer to the image - and the browser just inserts that in-line?
Well, maybe that would work.. but then these researchers just seem to have come up with a way of replacing an <img src= with a graphical pointer..
Oh and as everybody else has undoubtedly posted whilst I typed this, printsrn.
Maybe there's a market somewhere for pushing the whole public key encryption seamlessly into "stuff we upload" - to restrict or monitor view - but the problem that's never going to go away is that if one person can open it and wants to share it, then there's no security.
is a wonderfully subjective word - as it is entirely subjective and short-term-ist (I wish I had the vocabulary for the word that should have been there).
People 'win' in Vegas, when they hit a jackpot. Nobody ever subtracts their previous losses from the total.
If you play a game with pre-defined rules you can win in a clear fashion - We won a football game, I won a chess match etc.
The term should NEVER be applied to any situation where the rules haven't been defined up-front. If we'd clearly stated we were going into Iraq to remove a nuclear threat - well we'd have forfeited that a long time ago.
If we'd invaded Afghanistan with a rule of 50,000 lives limit (1/5, military/civilian split sub-clause) stated up-front, then maybe we could have pundits and stats and tracking and oh oh some swoopy CGI graphics.
I'm not trying to cover my own personal feelings on various conflicts - but just get very pissed off when people just announce they've 'won' and somebody else has 'lost'
when you think about it.
China can either draw attention to the fact that they treat the residents of Hong Kong differently to the Chinese mainland by blocking internet traffic within 'China' or raise the ire of the HK residents (who they are so so wanting to keep happy) by cutting them off.
Personally whilst I'm all for the 'internet being without censorship' - I think the kicking of China is somewhat unfair. Whilst China may be quite upfront about saying "this is wrong, we don't want you to see it" - pretty much every other government on the planet is keeping tabs on visits to 'certain sites' (or hell-bent on pushing legislation/monitoring through).
as the operators were starting up, Orange came along as a new entrant. The monthly charge was a little bit more expensive, but they did have beautifully simple contracts (I paid £30 a month, I got x many minutes and if I didn't go over that, my bill was £30). That £30 also included a quite wonderful warranty. If ANYTHING happened to your phone, it broke, it got lost, you'd gone swimming with it in your pocket etc - you just called them up (and they answered pretty much immediately) and with no quibble, the next day there'd be a courier at the door with a replacement phone to swap out (or give if the phone had gone AWOL).
It all went wrong about 5 years back (roughly) when all manner of weird policies started appearing - in my case my p800 broke, which seemingly required their smart phone dept to authorize the return, except neither I or the rep I was calling could actually find out why it took a month for them to accept the phone in my hand was dead etc - so I left them after 5 or 6 happy years.
I'd love to know why they changed. Might have been their takeover, might have been the policy was costing them too much money, might have been they wanted to just lower their up-front prices to appear competitive. There's just something rather lovely about a contract where you know "Every month I will be paying £x, and as long as I pay £x a month I will never be more than 24 hours without a phone, whatever happens."
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My partner got crap grades at GCSE maths and wanted to re-take it (originally taken at 16 in the UK, this was ~15 years later).
Now I got an A the first time around for GCSE, and then at 18 I pretty much completely screwed up my 'pure' maths part and was only partially rescued by the statistical part. Trying to explain stuff to her made me suddenly realize that the parts I was good at, were the parts that I could visualize.
More than that, it wasn't that I had some mental block on some topics - it was just that I'd never learnt them (or been taught them) properly in the first place. If I spent a bit of time looking at the type of question, rather than the specific question, stuff 'clicks'. I came away with 2 thoughts:
1) If my knowledge is supposed to grow 'like a tree', a whole load of branches got lopped off a long time ago - just felt a little bit sad that I'd spent so long no even noticing that I'd given up. This led to a pub conversation around differentiation/integration - I knew what to do, I knew what the inputs and outputs meant (i.e. I could do the questions) but I'd never understood WHY. I'd always been very sniffy about those who could say only multiply if they'd learnt their times table by rote, but I was doing exactly the same thing, just on a topic a little bit more advanced.
2) Other thing I realized was that I was already doing some operations mentally in exactly the same way as some new technique in her book, that I'd never been taught. I'm unsure that everybody thinks in the same way and other techniques vary, but surely I'd have saved time if I'd been taught it - but then maybe it's the fact that my brain decided to solve them this way, that's made it stick for me.
Take for example the first test (47 x 75) ÷ 25
You can either know that you do the thing in the brackets first, then the thing outside - as you've learnt your rules. But stepping back and looking at it as a whole, it becomes trivial.
47 is a bit of a odd number, I'll leave that for now
I'm multiplying something by 75 and then dividing it by 25. So I'll throw those away and multiply by 3. Leaving me with 47 * 3
ah, 47 again. Well it's close enough to 50. So I'll do 50*3 giving me 150.
Finally time for the correction to my not knowing my 47 times table. I knocked off 3*3 to give me the easy 150, so just need to take the 9 off to give the 141.
I genuinely wonder if everybody else worked that out the same way, but it's now just the way my head works. Bit that annoyed me is that whenever I was taught anything, we were told "how to do it" - maybe education would be better if every teacher has to be able to explain 3 ways of approaching any problem. Better yet, rather than testing the student with the question and just getting a boolean pass/fail - the teacher should ask the pupil around their thought processes when they look at the problem - "talk me through it".
The chances of every coming across that particular question in the real world are practically nil. So the purpose of the question is to test whether the process is present in the pupil - yet maths papers NEVER seem to ask for this. From memory there was the 'show working' marks, but they just tended to dry up after the first mistake was made - and aren't particularly conducive to how I personally think (mental white-board and processing explained verbally).
I read the first article and agreed with his conclusions - but he couldn't do any of the questions?
Ran through the test, and erm they were very easy. I can only assume it was a different test.
Reminded me of the RSA animation on education - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Sorry, wasn't really gunning for Sony, and I give it 50/50 that after I've had my strop I'll pick one up (Yes, you are typing to a Nintendo VIP/schmuck, who spent too long with a credit card and a delayed flight departure).
Didn't help that I found a 4Gig M2 card in a drawer during my weekend clearout, for a phone that broke many years ago. I remember being annoyed when I bought it and just felt slightly haunted by it.
I guess I'm maybe just old, cranky self-hating gamer - PSP Ridge Racer did make me go oooh and once the novelty wore off, Lumines with the sound up kept me very happy (This was the slightly pre-release PSP I picked up under the counter in some Kuwaiti electronics bazaar - I think I've mentally blocked how much that cost me).
Just need to make sure I'm not near a airport when Vita comes out.
OH actually, that does remind me of what I REALLY hated - Getting GTA, getting on the plane, popping it in and it telling me it refused to play, until I updated the firmware, which required it to be plugged in..(2 fully charged batteries in my bag - *weeps*)
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More to the point, if Firefox did switch to Bing, I presume a fair number of users would just switch it to back to google. Should Firefox fall, I'd suspect a large proportion of users would just simply switch to Chrome.
You might be Open Source, but when that much money comes from just one source, you're over a barrel as much as any other company. No money, worse product, less people, less money. If Mozilla had any sense, they'd get their arse in gear and make their product 'stickier'.
There's a push by providers of walled-gardens to make you buy walled-garden products.
I'm sure Apple will love the idea of your new bios locking up your new machine and not giving you keys, but Asus won't be plugging that as a feature on the same mobo they sell to me or you.
People don't care and are not as stupid as you seem hell-bent on asserting. There are not lines into the Apple store from people returning ipads when they realize they can't run Apache on it. There are lines back into your local PC market when "their laptop has broken and just keeps showing them porn, but they didn't do anything"
If you want to consider multi-purpose devices, consider game consoles. It's gaming, it's facebook, it's blu-ray playback, it's netflix, it's facebook, blah blah. Sure you can mod them, but most people just simply don't want to.
If you want to look at phones, Android is flying out the door and most handsets are pretty easily rootable. What % of people do you think actually bother?
What people DO do with their phones and have done for a very long time is pop into a shop to remove the carrier lock. Do they know how this is done? No. They just know they want to change provider, or use a different SIM abroad and the stupid phone is telling them they can't.
My point is that people only get pissed when they want to do something and find they can't. If they don't hit that wall of annoyance, they don't bother.
You, I suspect, are more about the principle of the thing.
I always get the impression with Sony that a dept carefully gestates their baby - and then the moment it pops out, every dept gets a crack at abusing it.
I presume this all started as somebody designed the thing to be media free, after the wonderful UMD on the PSP (I presume the minidisc dept has been canned, by now). So, it's going to be flash only, like the PSP-Go.
You remember, it was like a PSP without the god-awful drive inflicted, but then you for forced to pay more for your device as the memory dept couldn't give a toss about loss-leaders. Oh and the retail dept couldn't lower the price of the games, as then that would piss off the retailer relations division. So punters pay more for the device AND more for the games AND can't sell them 2nd hand.
Not going to fall for that one again are we?
Ahah - but this time we'll sell you the games for LESS as digital downloads. But won't that piss of the retailers? Noooo as we'll make you go into the shop to buy the card, to then digitally download onto it. B.b.but, doesn't this mean I have to download AND go to a shop? Well yes, but the more you use the card, the more you'll save! Oh, so the more money I give you, the less I get screwed? Precisely.
OK, so if it's a success, and you notice your revenues dropping after screwing us upfront, what's to stop you just raising the price of the digital games? Nooo, we wouldn't do that. OK, maybe not so directly. What's to stop you just doubling the RRP, allowing the retailers to advertise massive discounts and then you insisting that we're still reducing the cost? Erm, next question!
On the bright side, this is clearly going to bomb, so I assume that within months, the thing will get heavily discounted. Ah, you might think that, but what we'll do is just advertise a $100+++ saving, by chucking the memory card that costs us naff all in the box. Yes, sorry, no, sorry, can I just jot this idea down? And then you'll just rack up the digital prices again, won't you to compensate? *sound of crayon on business-plan*
Sony's previous successes have been when one department made one thing and sold it. They have never managed to make a success out of anything due to their depts, just sometimes managed to sneak something out despite them.
I wasn't turning this into a Apple/MS and anything you didn't compile yourself is evil rant.
If you want to run Linux and OSS, you can, you'll always be able to - and you'll save yourself a pile of money.
With regards to the iPad - yes. It comes locked down, if you ask Apple they'll tell you it's locked down - and should you try to unlock it, they'll try to re-lock it. It's not a secret, it's just what Apple want and what they've always wanted. You are not given the keys AND THIS IS A FEATURE/SELLING POINT. Not for you or me, which is why I'm guessing neither of us own one, but are you genuinely telling you believe every single person would be best suited being flung at a root prompt?
I own many things, TVs, Watches, digital camera - loads of things I consider appliances and just wish them work as stated on the box. I crack open the case and tinker and bad things will probably happen, so I don't. Many people just want their computer to be the same.
Nobody's killing 'Open Computing' - just there are now some very nice walled gardens, if you prefer it this way.
Provides a nice, safe, stable starting point for a lot of people who were previously scared shitless of technology (if the iphone didn't exist, do you think they'd all be using Android?). If they're happy, they stay there, if they eventually find it limiting, they can move on.
As the recent recipient of "Microsoft called me, asked me to load teamviewer, I left them on my laptop for 2 hours, uninstalled AVG for them as it was 'conflicting' and oh paypalled them £75" call from an elderly late-joiner to the world of IT - I think some people should be locked into walled gardens for their own good.
and therefore make a great target for any politician/newspaper wanting to drum up some publicity.
Ever noticed anybody willing to put their head above the parapet and defend them?
Attempting to do so is way beyond my personal abilities, but the f'in inconsistencies in the arguments beggar belief.
Just to take an example - is paedophilia a crime or a disease? If it's a disease, something they have no control over, then it should be treated like any other with care and compassion - but it can't be a disease, because then we wouldn't feel comfortable demanding they're strung up from the nearest lamp-post.
So - we're stuck with 'crime', a voluntary act they chose to make because they're 'evil' (we so so so want them just to be evil (like Nazis), rational analysis throws up so many 'hard-thinks'). So. Criminals they are - except they're not allowed to be rehabilitated. Their crime is so great that it must be branded upon them for life. Their houses must be marked. Neighbours must be warned. People must cross the street - I'm pretty sure these are all wonderfully well targeted techniques at integrating people back into society.
There are loads of parallels you could take as examples - how for example the USA gets pulled into politics in certain parts of the world.
The "USA" is a great big complex thing, that's done some good things and some really bad things. It's not an actual thing you can point, shout or reason with - it's an amorphous concept. Yet - in many parts of the world, if things are going a bit badly locally, you can guarantee you can just rip into the USA, blame it for all your ills, chuck up a statue of your crusading-pig-dog image of choice, start making some nukes for them and get the crowd cheering. Sure it might screw things up a bit in the long term, but it gets you through that tricky patch.
And to summarize...(I believe this is what you're supposed to do at the end).
The concept of a state publicly marking its citizens, for any reason at all, is distasteful and dangerous. No special cases, no exceptions. Quite likely not to end well, if history is anything to go by.
Actually - bit presumptuous of me to tell you what you should think. I also know damn well if the list went online near me I'd be on there like a shot.
Software should be lead by a designer. You just seem to be convinced that a designer should only be interested in pretty pretty, not functionality. Before embarking on this new version of FCP, somebody (a designer) should have produced a document saying what the piece of software will do. This should include the essential stuff from the deprecated version that focus groups wanted to keep, plus the fancy new stuff the re-architecture allows. After this point the designers job is to keep hitting the developers over the head until they produce something that matches the design doc. Just taking a wild stab in the dark (based upon personal experience) - As development slips, the choice is to ship with design points missing, or delay ship to get them in. I'm guessing somebody high-up said 'ship'
I'm agreeing with you...kindof. What I was trying to say, was that instead of having a hierarchy of page on a phone (or a huge scrolling list, or whatever) you could just shove it all onto one screen on tablet.
The dev environment provides a nice abstraction to do just this - and you can run different versions in the spangly little emulator that pops up in eclipse, without every even buying a single android device (or spending a single cent).
Point I was trying to make was that the alteration of UIs, upscaling of graphics etc that at least all the initial ipad apps got, is even simpler to do with Android. What is going to be more interesting/problematic, is whether Android gets the apps that could only ever be created for a tablet.
If nothing ever fragmented, we'd all be sitting in Android 1.0 (and IOS 1.0 for that matter).
Current Android is pretty much stuck with the same problem PCs are - for every dual-core, gpu assisted monster that's put out, there's a dozen chinese budget models. Means everybody can pick up an Android device to suit their pocket/needs - but the apps then either all suit the lowest common denominator, or piss off the low-end user when they're 'slow', or piss of the multi-core monster when the iphone app looks better (despite him having bought better hardware)
Personally I love Android to bits - but will be sticking with Nexus X models. Whole Nexus concept seemed to be geared to providing some good reference platforms - the geeky tinkerers picked up on this, but seemingly the masses didn't. Google's current messing about with Android 3.0 would seem to be a response to this - instead of having a specific reference model, have reference internal gubbins.
Not saying I'm happy with it - but there it is. Looks like it's going to be more like buying a PC graphics card. You choose buy the GPU, but then can go high and low on the slight overclocks, the diversions from standard layout/cooling etc etc.
at Android development, one of the 'good things' seemed to be that you can write your app - and then provide different layouts based upon the screen resolution of the target device. Should mean a developer can very quickly tweak their app to benefit from the extra space given, if it's run on a tablet. I'm not for one moment suggesting that adding some better layouts to a phone app will suddenly transform it into an app natively designed for a tablet - but better than just scaling up.
for Sony's encryption key?
If only they'd left the closing date open - we could all have donated $1, along with a lovely little message for Sony, to go into the court records :(
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/27/kindle-ebooks-amazon-stephen-leather
*pulls idiot-face at self in mirror*
But was a bit surprised to see this pop up as an official Google extension.: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhnjdplhmcnkiecampfdgfjilccfpfoe
asking why my phone sent her the txt an hour ago saying "Shields at 5% and falling"
a) buy a bigger HD for your laptop, so you can get them off your camera.
b) buy a NAS for your home. Doesn't even have to be an expensive one. Something with Mirrored 2Tb drives is an awful lot of photos. Quite a few of these you can get online, so if you're away from home you can trickle back backups if you're feeling paranoid.
c) off-site backup - OK, your house is unlikely to burn down, but just to be safe and all that. Not that expensive. No offence, but 90% of the photos you could lose, so if you want to keep to a budget, just backup the ones you really couldn't live without.
Actually, storage fails very rarely and most online backup services trade (and charge) on the ability to immediately restore. How about just burning to a decent disk and mailing to a family member (ask them nicely to put them in a pile somewhere and return them should a meteorite hit your house).
If Facebook actually wanted pictures to have a shelf-life, they could just allow you to add a default date+x when they would be pulled.
Facebook haven't done this, so I'm guessing they're either a bit short of development cash - or don't want this.
So, how might this work?
Well I'm guessing that either it's:
a brand new file format and the browser requests an external key when the photo display plugin kicks in - so so unlikely to take off, I'll just leave it there.
OR
it's encrypts the image and embeds in tags so the 'plugin' can detect it's a 'special image' and goes off to find a key to decrypt it.
Assuming it's the second, it has my interest. Sounds a little bit interesting - but then I start thinking.
If it's encrypted it's going to have 'look random' - so that's ballsed up the compression ratios of the jpg you uploaded.. and then well most sites tend to compress/thumbnail/crop or a combination of the above... well I don't quite see that working - no it couldn't
I guess maybe we're onto option C, I've just thought of. You don't upload the image, you upload a QR style pointer to the image - and the browser just inserts that in-line?
Well, maybe that would work.. but then these researchers just seem to have come up with a way of replacing an <img src= with a graphical pointer..
Oh and as everybody else has undoubtedly posted whilst I typed this, printsrn.
Maybe there's a market somewhere for pushing the whole public key encryption seamlessly into "stuff we upload" - to restrict or monitor view - but the problem that's never going to go away is that if one person can open it and wants to share it, then there's no security.
is a wonderfully subjective word - as it is entirely subjective and short-term-ist (I wish I had the vocabulary for the word that should have been there).
People 'win' in Vegas, when they hit a jackpot. Nobody ever subtracts their previous losses from the total.
If you play a game with pre-defined rules you can win in a clear fashion - We won a football game, I won a chess match etc.
The term should NEVER be applied to any situation where the rules haven't been defined up-front. If we'd clearly stated we were going into Iraq to remove a nuclear threat - well we'd have forfeited that a long time ago.
If we'd invaded Afghanistan with a rule of 50,000 lives limit (1/5, military/civilian split sub-clause) stated up-front, then maybe we could have pundits and stats and tracking and oh oh some swoopy CGI graphics.
I'm not trying to cover my own personal feelings on various conflicts - but just get very pissed off when people just announce they've 'won' and somebody else has 'lost'
they're just blinking
But there's a pattern in their blinking..maybe
Morse Code? Just need to stare a little bit longer to make it out.
*stares*
"I..
"ICAN..
"ICANCU"
Oh, maybe you were right.
when you think about it.
China can either draw attention to the fact that they treat the residents of Hong Kong differently to the Chinese mainland by blocking internet traffic within 'China' or raise the ire of the HK residents (who they are so so wanting to keep happy) by cutting them off.
Personally whilst I'm all for the 'internet being without censorship' - I think the kicking of China is somewhat unfair. Whilst China may be quite upfront about saying "this is wrong, we don't want you to see it" - pretty much every other government on the planet is keeping tabs on visits to 'certain sites' (or hell-bent on pushing legislation/monitoring through).
as the operators were starting up, Orange came along as a new entrant. The monthly charge was a little bit more expensive, but they did have beautifully simple contracts (I paid £30 a month, I got x many minutes and if I didn't go over that, my bill was £30). That £30 also included a quite wonderful warranty. If ANYTHING happened to your phone, it broke, it got lost, you'd gone swimming with it in your pocket etc - you just called them up (and they answered pretty much immediately) and with no quibble, the next day there'd be a courier at the door with a replacement phone to swap out (or give if the phone had gone AWOL).
It all went wrong about 5 years back (roughly) when all manner of weird policies started appearing - in my case my p800 broke, which seemingly required their smart phone dept to authorize the return, except neither I or the rep I was calling could actually find out why it took a month for them to accept the phone in my hand was dead etc - so I left them after 5 or 6 happy years.
I'd love to know why they changed. Might have been their takeover, might have been the policy was costing them too much money, might have been they wanted to just lower their up-front prices to appear competitive. There's just something rather lovely about a contract where you know "Every month I will be paying £x, and as long as I pay £x a month I will never be more than 24 hours without a phone, whatever happens."