A little app that lets the few people who are interested make something is probably a great idea. Logo was fun to play with, and a good teaching tool. But if Google is going to let their dumbed down development system make actual apps then they have two choices: let any of those apps into the store or screen them. If they screen them it's going to put a bit of a damper on their "open" store. If they don't, their store is going to turn into something worse than the Cydia store already is - a morass of themes, wallpapers and useless apps.
"Disagree. Microsoft Access, Word, and Excel all offer programmability for the average people. And there sure are people using that programmability, and even depending on the resulting software."
You've identified that the tools exist. Do you seriously think the average person has used any of them? Next time you're at the mall stop a few people and ask them if they've made an Access app that they use.
Sure, it's a noble and possibly useful goal to make a development system that's simple enough for anyone to use with minimal effort. But don't pretend it's going to be some kind of revolution, or that "Apple should be taking [it] very seriously." Toy development systems have always been just that: a few people will actually use them, a few of those will make something incredible, but the vast majority of people simply won't care.
And keep the results out of app catalogs, unless they're of high quality. It sounds like Google might be doing this, but then again, they might not.
Apple tries to ensure a little bit of quality mainly by charging developers to put their app in the app store. The review process screens out some, but mostly for other purposes. $100 a year discourages an immense amount of crap - just like spam would be reduced if there was some significant cost to send an e-mail.
There's also a filtering process imposed by having to know the development system. Apple has been aggressively weeding out Flash "developers," which means that you have to know C, C++ or Objective-C.
The combination of those two factors means that if you want to get something in the app store you need to have at least some minimal commitment to it. Google doesn't have the financial investment filter, and they seem to be doing their best to tear down the know-how-to-program barrier.
This particular move doesn't really seem to have an up side. Average people have never wanted to write their own programs for any other "computer they depend on." Why would a phone be different?
When I was doing my PhD I had a group assignment with a couple of other grad students from my lab. We broke up the project, all did a section and met afterwards to combine them. When we read over one girl's work (she's Chinese), much of it was copied word for word from a few papers. She was more than capable of writing her section without plagiarism, but she really didn't understand how plagiarism works.
Ah, if only. Hollywood pays most of it's employees regularly too. If you think any other kind of corporation is better, try selling a patent or idea for a product to someone and watch the games they play.
You can't recover ANY message from a hash. You can identify a message you already have using the hash, but you can't recover an unknown message from a hash. It is not a compression algorithm.
You can uniquely identify each of the collected works of Harry Potter using the ISBN number (or the copyright year, for that matter), but you can't recover any of them from either of those numbers.
"An image is really just a set of samples, the color at a grid of points in the image, not a grid of the average color over a square area (not usually, at least)"
No sample, whether a pixel or a sound sample, is EVER a point sample. It's NEVER an instantaneous value. That would require that your sampling function be a delta, and delta functions have nice little features like taking infinite values and having infinite bandwidth.
A real sample is always an average over some finite time or space (or other dimension), weighted by the sampling function. In many cases that sampling function is indeed designed to be as close as possible to a rectangle (or boxcar) function.
The ADC doesn't have a choice. The blocky signal illustrated is impossible to produce. Something closely approximating it is very difficult to produce.
Yeah, the article kind of suggests that, but if you pull up the actual paper (someone linked to it), he's not. This thing is kind of an amateur compression algorithm. It's NOT an interpolation algorithm.
It would put a pretty bad dent in human imaging. High temperature superconductors are brittle and very, very difficult to wind in the complex coils at the sizes required to produce a homogenous field big enough to image a person in. Also, people don't sit still long enough for you to image longer to make up for NR drop with a much less powerful magnet. You could still image with resistive magnets, but you couldn't do most of the things we take for granted today.
The demon of the month needs something PR worthy to make it so. Even if the government in question loses an insignificant fraction of it's total budget to lawsuits, that's an excellent hook for a reporter to write a story: "City Wastes Millions Bullying Innocent Civilians." See how that gets more attention from the average voter than just "City Bullies Innocent Civilians?"
The shop might cut their rates, but nobody would expect them to take non-charity jobs for free. We'd also feel it was unfair if a big chain shop moved in and started giving away their services, at a loss, until the little guy went out of business.
Similarly, this guy doesn't have a monopoly on his product (sheet music for broadway musicals). If he prices himself out of the market, nobody will use his stuff.
Your point is well taken - intellectual "property" isn't exactly like anything else we buy or sell, but the naive comparison with physical property that a LOT of people make is misleading. If you make the comparison to a service the analogy is a lot closer. I think your point about IP being something you can continue to sell forever is the key difference - copyrights and patents must offer the possibility for creators to make a profit, but must be limited to some reasonable term so that they can't go on re-selling their creation forever. Just like a service provider, they are compensated for their time, but at a fair rate.
It's not quite the same, but it's a lot closer. Nobody would argue that the kid shouldn't be forced to mow the lawn without being paid. Current copyright and patent laws suggest that authors, composers and performers should be compensated for the services they provide, but places limits on that compensation, usually in the form of a copyright or patent term.
If you prefer, consider a custom manufacturing company that sets up a metal shop. They invest a lot of money and time into buying or making and calibrating high tech automatic metal working machines and decide to offer machining services.
You bring them some metal and ask that it be machined to your specifications. Unless they're actually swamped with work their cost isn't affected by whether or not they do your job - you've provided all the raw materials and only the machine's time is taken up, time during which it would sit idle anyway. Should the machine shop owner charge you?
If you think that's an unrealistic situation, there are lots of examples of service providers that hire and pay employees regardless of whether they have enough work to keep those employees occupied. Their costs are the same whether they have customers or not.
It seems highly unlikely they can enforce any kind of ban. The author notes this. It's possible there are laws that prevent people who have been convicted of certain crimes from using specific public services, but that doesn't apply here either.
We pay people for services all the time. The asymmetry you describe in information exchanges also exists in service exchanges. If I pay a kid to mow my lawn, at the beginning of the exchange I have money and an unmowed law, and the kid has the ability to mow a lawn. At the end I have a mowed lawn and no money and the kid has money AND the ability to mow a lawn.
If it makes you feel better, consider information exchange as an exchange of time for money where the provider has invested the time up front.
Slashdot Mirror
So far, yes. The two year GIC definitely is.
Wouldn't it be better if his audience thought less like politicians: doing their best to maliciously misinterpret anything anybody says?
Someone needed to complain about the very nonstandard unit, but what's a KG? 9.81 Kelvin metres per second squared?
The proper abbreviation is "kg." And there should always be a space before any unit.
A little app that lets the few people who are interested make something is probably a great idea. Logo was fun to play with, and a good teaching tool. But if Google is going to let their dumbed down development system make actual apps then they have two choices: let any of those apps into the store or screen them. If they screen them it's going to put a bit of a damper on their "open" store. If they don't, their store is going to turn into something worse than the Cydia store already is - a morass of themes, wallpapers and useless apps.
"Disagree. Microsoft Access, Word, and Excel all offer programmability for the average people. And there sure are people using that programmability, and even depending on the resulting software."
You've identified that the tools exist. Do you seriously think the average person has used any of them? Next time you're at the mall stop a few people and ask them if they've made an Access app that they use.
Sure, it's a noble and possibly useful goal to make a development system that's simple enough for anyone to use with minimal effort. But don't pretend it's going to be some kind of revolution, or that "Apple should be taking [it] very seriously." Toy development systems have always been just that: a few people will actually use them, a few of those will make something incredible, but the vast majority of people simply won't care.
And keep the results out of app catalogs, unless they're of high quality. It sounds like Google might be doing this, but then again, they might not.
Yeah, except you won't have friends anymore.
The first time I got that message I'd laugh. The second time I'd stop calling you.
Just don't hang up. The magic words are these:
"Hey, that sounds great. I'm really interested. Can you just hang on for a minute? Thanks."
Then set the phone down and do whatever you were doing. I've had telemarketers hang on for a lot longer than three minutes.
I can buy a 1 year GIC that offers interest that's considerably higher than the rate of inflation last year.
So you make "money" by wasting electricity. Perfect.
Apple tries to ensure a little bit of quality mainly by charging developers to put their app in the app store. The review process screens out some, but mostly for other purposes. $100 a year discourages an immense amount of crap - just like spam would be reduced if there was some significant cost to send an e-mail.
There's also a filtering process imposed by having to know the development system. Apple has been aggressively weeding out Flash "developers," which means that you have to know C, C++ or Objective-C.
The combination of those two factors means that if you want to get something in the app store you need to have at least some minimal commitment to it. Google doesn't have the financial investment filter, and they seem to be doing their best to tear down the know-how-to-program barrier.
This particular move doesn't really seem to have an up side. Average people have never wanted to write their own programs for any other "computer they depend on." Why would a phone be different?
When I was doing my PhD I had a group assignment with a couple of other grad students from my lab. We broke up the project, all did a section and met afterwards to combine them. When we read over one girl's work (she's Chinese), much of it was copied word for word from a few papers. She was more than capable of writing her section without plagiarism, but she really didn't understand how plagiarism works.
Ah, if only. Hollywood pays most of it's employees regularly too. If you think any other kind of corporation is better, try selling a patent or idea for a product to someone and watch the games they play.
You can't recover ANY message from a hash. You can identify a message you already have using the hash, but you can't recover an unknown message from a hash. It is not a compression algorithm.
You can uniquely identify each of the collected works of Harry Potter using the ISBN number (or the copyright year, for that matter), but you can't recover any of them from either of those numbers.
"An image is really just a set of samples, the color at a grid of points in the image, not a grid of the average color over a square area (not usually, at least)"
No sample, whether a pixel or a sound sample, is EVER a point sample. It's NEVER an instantaneous value. That would require that your sampling function be a delta, and delta functions have nice little features like taking infinite values and having infinite bandwidth.
A real sample is always an average over some finite time or space (or other dimension), weighted by the sampling function. In many cases that sampling function is indeed designed to be as close as possible to a rectangle (or boxcar) function.
The ADC doesn't have a choice. The blocky signal illustrated is impossible to produce. Something closely approximating it is very difficult to produce.
You mean he just invented something that doesn't work as well as JPEG.
Yeah, the article kind of suggests that, but if you pull up the actual paper (someone linked to it), he's not. This thing is kind of an amateur compression algorithm. It's NOT an interpolation algorithm.
Unless the image is uncompressed we don't store square pixels anyway. We store DCT or wavelet coefficients. Both are decidedly not square.
It would put a pretty bad dent in human imaging. High temperature superconductors are brittle and very, very difficult to wind in the complex coils at the sizes required to produce a homogenous field big enough to image a person in. Also, people don't sit still long enough for you to image longer to make up for NR drop with a much less powerful magnet. You could still image with resistive magnets, but you couldn't do most of the things we take for granted today.
It works just as well with Bluetooth. And doesn't suck the battery dry as fast as wifi. And you don't need a third party app - it's built in.
The demon of the month needs something PR worthy to make it so. Even if the government in question loses an insignificant fraction of it's total budget to lawsuits, that's an excellent hook for a reporter to write a story: "City Wastes Millions Bullying Innocent Civilians." See how that gets more attention from the average voter than just "City Bullies Innocent Civilians?"
The shop might cut their rates, but nobody would expect them to take non-charity jobs for free. We'd also feel it was unfair if a big chain shop moved in and started giving away their services, at a loss, until the little guy went out of business.
Similarly, this guy doesn't have a monopoly on his product (sheet music for broadway musicals). If he prices himself out of the market, nobody will use his stuff.
Your point is well taken - intellectual "property" isn't exactly like anything else we buy or sell, but the naive comparison with physical property that a LOT of people make is misleading. If you make the comparison to a service the analogy is a lot closer. I think your point about IP being something you can continue to sell forever is the key difference - copyrights and patents must offer the possibility for creators to make a profit, but must be limited to some reasonable term so that they can't go on re-selling their creation forever. Just like a service provider, they are compensated for their time, but at a fair rate.
It's not quite the same, but it's a lot closer. Nobody would argue that the kid shouldn't be forced to mow the lawn without being paid. Current copyright and patent laws suggest that authors, composers and performers should be compensated for the services they provide, but places limits on that compensation, usually in the form of a copyright or patent term.
If you prefer, consider a custom manufacturing company that sets up a metal shop. They invest a lot of money and time into buying or making and calibrating high tech automatic metal working machines and decide to offer machining services.
You bring them some metal and ask that it be machined to your specifications. Unless they're actually swamped with work their cost isn't affected by whether or not they do your job - you've provided all the raw materials and only the machine's time is taken up, time during which it would sit idle anyway. Should the machine shop owner charge you?
If you think that's an unrealistic situation, there are lots of examples of service providers that hire and pay employees regardless of whether they have enough work to keep those employees occupied. Their costs are the same whether they have customers or not.
It seems highly unlikely they can enforce any kind of ban. The author notes this. It's possible there are laws that prevent people who have been convicted of certain crimes from using specific public services, but that doesn't apply here either.
We pay people for services all the time. The asymmetry you describe in information exchanges also exists in service exchanges. If I pay a kid to mow my lawn, at the beginning of the exchange I have money and an unmowed law, and the kid has the ability to mow a lawn. At the end I have a mowed lawn and no money and the kid has money AND the ability to mow a lawn.
If it makes you feel better, consider information exchange as an exchange of time for money where the provider has invested the time up front.