All of you who jumped on the bandwagon and created Palm Pilot apps, how's that skill set working out now?
I never went down that particular path, so I can't comment. But the notion that it has no further value seems wrong.
I have no further use for BASIC programming. But it taught me imperative programming. And even structured programming (I used the BBC BASIC dialect.)
I have no further use of 6502 assembler, but knowledge of that level of computing is invaluable when debugging.
I have no further use for GEM, but it taught me C programming.
I have no further use for Delphi, but it taught me object oriented programming.
I have no further use for the Symbian platform, but it taught me C++.
etc.
None of the obsolete platforms I used to specialize in are wasted. The knowledge I gained with them informs my current programming every day, even though it's for a different platform. I would be a far worse programmer had I only ever specialized in a single platform, no matter how successful it still is.
Are you saying you believe it's "hip" to live in a city, or "hip" to walk to the store? Is there anything else lots of senior citizens do that you think is "hip"?
I used supermarket delivery for a while when I was without wheels. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the veg. I wouldn't have got better if I'd picked them from the store myself. I'm not sure if it's that the store pickers actually cared, or if they picked from the warehouse, where other customers had not yet had a chance to rummage through them.
It doesn't make any sense because The Register is full of shit as usual. This isn't a free for all. This is enabling legislation for one or more future (or present) licensing bodies to search for owners of apparent "orphan works" - works that at the moment cannot be used by anyone - and issue licenses.
There's pros and cons to that. With the biggest question, does the licensing body charge for licenses, and if so who gets the money.
What this is not is a law that will make it legal for any person, company or corporation to decide themselves that a work is an orphan, and so do what they want with it.
But Blackberry is very popular amongst gangsters. Blackberry Messaging is perfect for keeping in touch with the gang, without the police being able to eavesdrop, apparently.
All the London looting riots of summer 2011 were organised via BBM.
It may be popular in certain corporations for much the same reason.
Far more likely is that they'll either want to see where one or a few known individuals went, tracking or locating them through multiple cameras, or they'll want to identify a person or person from among many.
That is indeed an easier problem. But then the average person can't complain that they are being tracked by CCTV and facial recognition. Because they're not.
In any case it still has the issue that in the general population of millions, there will be many people who look almost the same as the person(s) you are looking for. Close enough that the differences are far less than can be captured from the random angles, focus, resolution, distance, lighting etc of a security camera.
Then there's the issue of ageing. Passport and driving license photos are used for years. People rarely look much like their photos after a while - that's why they are so often a source of amusement. Even passport control officers can't really be sure that the person presenting is the person in the photo. And they are looking close up, directly from the front, in good lighting, with no pixelation.
It also relies on the people being watched taking no steps whatsoever to mask their identity.
Take the Boston Bombers, they were on the FBI watchlist, with photos, but no facial recognition system found them. Even after the fact. For one thing they used an simple counter-surveillance technique that no facial recognition system can ever overcome. They wore baseball caps. An extra problem since security cameras look down.
Facial hair, head-hair and make-up can also be an insurmountable problem. And they are everyday changes that wouldn't raise any suspicions from observers.
All these insurmountable problems, before even getting to the algorithms.
A chromebook is *still* the bestselling laptop....I couldn't see the surface in the top 100!?
Interesting top 10. Apple is at positions 2, 5 and 9.
Now look at the prices. $1,099.94, $1,398.99, $1,129.98. respectively. And you think Apple has to LOWER prices? Shows how utterly lacking in business sense you are. Apple doesn't need to lower prices. People buy them at the prices they are. They know they're worth it.
Google has to buy their number one spot by selling all the way down at bargain bin prices. They might be making a loss on every one, but they'll make up for it on volume!
The new generation of $200 laptops are fast, high quality displays...and run Android.
So Jobs was right again. "They're slow, they have low quality displays and they run clunky Android software. They're not better than a laptop at anything, they're just cheaper: they're just cheap laptops."
Ironically younger Jobs agrees with me "What ruined Apple was not growth They got very greedy Instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make the thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible they went for profits. They made outlandish profits for about four years. What this cost them was their future. What they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share.â"
Says the basement dweller to the most successful tech company there is.
That is "Just Broken", on a Android you don't need a third party program:). Having to remember such a complicated hierarchy of directories...and still use a third party program is a disgrace. iOS is so complicated.
Remembering directories is for Android users. There's no user file handling involved whatsoever in the Amazon/Apple process. Amazon's store downloads it to that directory. iTunes picks it up from that directory. That's implementation. User doesn't have to know that any more than they have to know HTML to read a web page.
It CAN still be used to update devices. That functionality is still there. Though of course iOS devices have been able to update themselves over the air for a long time now.
Ahem. Before "Cloud solutions" there was "thin-client" before that there were mainframes and terminals. There's nothing particularly novel about putting computing power in a remote room with multiple CPUs and storage devices.
And my DOS emulator on my late 1980s Atari ST was a virtual machine.
There's nothing particularly hard about either of the things you mentioned. They are better now, as you mention because of better computing power and bandwidth. But there's no fundamentally insurmountable problem they had to overcome.
There are problems that cannot be overcome. For example modern cryptography relies upon it.
The fact is that once you get to a significant number of people - the people for which they have driving license photos for example - there are not enough differences amongst those people to make identifications, not when everything is changing, people's facial expression changes everything. Their angle to the camera changes everything. etc.
The human brain is optimised for this particular task of identifying human faces from each other. And it can't do it at that scale either. Identifying one person out of a hundred is easy. Identifying out of millions via a photo. Not possible in the general case. Of course some people are unique enough to always be identified. But huge numbers are not.
Absolutely. I'm certainly not putting down the skills of musicians. But the fact is that the speed, and the relatively low resources that are needed to create a pop song is a big part of what enables them to be sold at 99c.
Take another example: AAA games are equally popular. But they take teams of people working > a year to create. So they can't be sold for 99c. Casual mobile games of the type once done with flash are much quicker to produce, so they can be sold for 99c.
I'm afraid you're just arguing what you wish was the case. And you wish DRM was gone. And you don't like my post because they are pointing out the reality to you.
The media companies may not be nice people, but they are not stupid, and they do want to optimise their profits. The only reason they keep using DRM in the areas that they do is because they sell more copies of the product that way. Likewise if there was a legal risk to doing so that outweighed their advantage by having DRM they'd also stop.
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I've never met a salesman that wasn't full of bullshit.
All of you who jumped on the bandwagon and created Palm Pilot apps, how's that skill set working out now?
I never went down that particular path, so I can't comment. But the notion that it has no further value seems wrong.
I have no further use for BASIC programming. But it taught me imperative programming. And even structured programming (I used the BBC BASIC dialect.)
I have no further use of 6502 assembler, but knowledge of that level of computing is invaluable when debugging.
I have no further use for GEM, but it taught me C programming.
I have no further use for Delphi, but it taught me object oriented programming.
I have no further use for the Symbian platform, but it taught me C++.
etc.
None of the obsolete platforms I used to specialize in are wasted. The knowledge I gained with them informs my current programming every day, even though it's for a different platform. I would be a far worse programmer had I only ever specialized in a single platform, no matter how successful it still is.
you will NOT get past the HR drones because you don't tick the boxes
But do you really want to work for those kind of companies anyway?
Are you saying you believe it's "hip" to live in a city, or "hip" to walk to the store? Is there anything else lots of senior citizens do that you think is "hip"?
Hip replacement surgery perhaps?
Imagine how much fresher they'd be if you walked to the store for every meal!
I have a friend who does that. Then again he does live across the road from the supermarket.
I used supermarket delivery for a while when I was without wheels. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the veg. I wouldn't have got better if I'd picked them from the store myself. I'm not sure if it's that the store pickers actually cared, or if they picked from the warehouse, where other customers had not yet had a chance to rummage through them.
Munich decided to do that in 2003. 10 years later, they're still working on the transition.
It doesn't make any sense because The Register is full of shit as usual. This isn't a free for all. This is enabling legislation for one or more future (or present) licensing bodies to search for owners of apparent "orphan works" - works that at the moment cannot be used by anyone - and issue licenses.
There's pros and cons to that. With the biggest question, does the licensing body charge for licenses, and if so who gets the money.
What this is not is a law that will make it legal for any person, company or corporation to decide themselves that a work is an orphan, and so do what they want with it.
But Blackberry is very popular amongst gangsters. Blackberry Messaging is perfect for keeping in touch with the gang, without the police being able to eavesdrop, apparently.
All the London looting riots of summer 2011 were organised via BBM.
It may be popular in certain corporations for much the same reason.
Far more likely is that they'll either want to see where one or a few known individuals went, tracking or locating them through multiple cameras, or they'll want to identify a person or person from among many.
That is indeed an easier problem. But then the average person can't complain that they are being tracked by CCTV and facial recognition. Because they're not.
In any case it still has the issue that in the general population of millions, there will be many people who look almost the same as the person(s) you are looking for. Close enough that the differences are far less than can be captured from the random angles, focus, resolution, distance, lighting etc of a security camera.
Then there's the issue of ageing. Passport and driving license photos are used for years. People rarely look much like their photos after a while - that's why they are so often a source of amusement. Even passport control officers can't really be sure that the person presenting is the person in the photo. And they are looking close up, directly from the front, in good lighting, with no pixelation.
It also relies on the people being watched taking no steps whatsoever to mask their identity.
Take the Boston Bombers, they were on the FBI watchlist, with photos, but no facial recognition system found them. Even after the fact. For one thing they used an simple counter-surveillance technique that no facial recognition system can ever overcome. They wore baseball caps. An extra problem since security cameras look down.
Facial hair, head-hair and make-up can also be an insurmountable problem. And they are everyday changes that wouldn't raise any suspicions from observers.
All these insurmountable problems, before even getting to the algorithms.
A chromebook is *still* the bestselling laptop....I couldn't see the surface in the top 100!?
Interesting top 10. Apple is at positions 2, 5 and 9.
Now look at the prices. $1,099.94, $1,398.99, $1,129.98. respectively. And you think Apple has to LOWER prices? Shows how utterly lacking in business sense you are. Apple doesn't need to lower prices. People buy them at the prices they are. They know they're worth it.
Google has to buy their number one spot by selling all the way down at bargain bin prices. They might be making a loss on every one, but they'll make up for it on volume!
The new generation of $200 laptops are fast, high quality displays...and run Android.
So Jobs was right again. "They're slow, they have low quality displays and they run clunky Android software. They're not better than a laptop at anything, they're just cheaper: they're just cheap laptops."
Ironically younger Jobs agrees with me "What ruined Apple was not growth They got very greedy Instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make the thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible they went for profits. They made outlandish profits for about four years. What this cost them was their future. What they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share.â"
Says the basement dweller to the most successful tech company there is.
If you count Safari on iOS he's about right for market share.
If you count all the WebKit browsers, he vastly underestimated.
In your wildest dreams sunshine. Google sell a tiny fraction of the music the Apple iTunes Store does.
That is "Just Broken", on a Android you don't need a third party program :). Having to remember such a complicated hierarchy of directories...and still use a third party program is a disgrace. iOS is so complicated.
Remembering directories is for Android users. There's no user file handling involved whatsoever in the Amazon/Apple process. Amazon's store downloads it to that directory. iTunes picks it up from that directory. That's implementation. User doesn't have to know that any more than they have to know HTML to read a web page.
80% of the world use Android phones for their MP3 needs
You're still a poor liar, with little feel for credible numbers.
It's always easier to pirate than buy, so this band is not significant. It's negligible.
This comment displays a complete lack of understanding of the limited computing abilities of most people.
Get out of the basement. Meet some people in real life.
You only get that here on Slashdot. In the real world, when I see people play music from a laptop 9 times out of 10 they are using iTunes to do it.
Its still used to update devices!?
It CAN still be used to update devices. That functionality is still there. Though of course iOS devices have been able to update themselves over the air for a long time now.
As a developer, I'm quite amused at a spam hosting admin trying to be patronising. Maybe if you'd done better at school...
I manage a very-large email hosting environment comprising >15,000 domains and >150,000 mailboxes.
So I guessed right. You are a spammer.
Ahem. Before "Cloud solutions" there was "thin-client" before that there were mainframes and terminals. There's nothing particularly novel about putting computing power in a remote room with multiple CPUs and storage devices.
And my DOS emulator on my late 1980s Atari ST was a virtual machine.
There's nothing particularly hard about either of the things you mentioned. They are better now, as you mention because of better computing power and bandwidth. But there's no fundamentally insurmountable problem they had to overcome.
There are problems that cannot be overcome. For example modern cryptography relies upon it.
The fact is that once you get to a significant number of people - the people for which they have driving license photos for example - there are not enough differences amongst those people to make identifications, not when everything is changing, people's facial expression changes everything. Their angle to the camera changes everything. etc.
The human brain is optimised for this particular task of identifying human faces from each other. And it can't do it at that scale either. Identifying one person out of a hundred is easy. Identifying out of millions via a photo. Not possible in the general case. Of course some people are unique enough to always be identified. But huge numbers are not.
Absolutely. I'm certainly not putting down the skills of musicians. But the fact is that the speed, and the relatively low resources that are needed to create a pop song is a big part of what enables them to be sold at 99c.
Take another example:
AAA games are equally popular. But they take teams of people working > a year to create. So they can't be sold for 99c.
Casual mobile games of the type once done with flash are much quicker to produce, so they can be sold for 99c.
Sounds like you're getting old, but haven't realised it yet.
I'm afraid you're just arguing what you wish was the case. And you wish DRM was gone. And you don't like my post because they are pointing out the reality to you.
The media companies may not be nice people, but they are not stupid, and they do want to optimise their profits. The only reason they keep using DRM in the areas that they do is because they sell more copies of the product that way. Likewise if there was a legal risk to doing so that outweighed their advantage by having DRM they'd also stop.