Porting J2ME phone midlet to J2SE runtime is not hard at all.
Sure you must take device limitations into account. But that's not the case here! First, the app was not really being "ported for", but rewritten for both simultaneously. Then, they were supposedly the same OS. And last but not least, the app in question was dead simple: display a monochrome bitmap on screen, animate it.
The problem was that Apple developers went to some lengths to make the two deeply incompatible - in parts that could be easily compatible because they do the same thing, they take (functionally) the same parameters, and produce the same results... except they are named differently, they use different types of arguments (with the same meaning) and so on.
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The problem is not that the UI is -completely- different.
It's an UI that is massively the same, just ran through a bulk rename, shuffle parameters order around in function calls and explode/implode some methods / typical sequences.
The UI -could- have been VERY similar, with only minimal differences easy to #ifdef through - the underlying philosophy is. Instead, there was some active effort put in making it totally incompatible, where making it compatible would be easier and more obvious.
A typical case of "an extra week of writing code can save you a hour you'd spend on reading documentation instead."
IF the code requires forking, THEN it should have no pretenses about being cross-platform compatible.
Which was the original point.
It's not a complaint that iPhone is devilishly difficult to program. It is not. The complaint is that it's devilishly difficult to write an iPhone/desktop cross-platform compatible app, which should have been easy if the device actually was cross-platform compatible.
People seem to misinterpret my previous post: I didn't write "It's perfectly fine that Sony does it, because...". I meant "The scoundrels try to backpedal from the deal because..."
1. They wanted to gather nerd community following, to gain good PR by leaving a loophole, being open in some way. That's fine, and they succeeded. 2. But also they wanted to gain a major sector of the market by selling below costs. This is a shady practice that tends to backfire often and hurt bad, and requires draconian control over the product distribution and usage to ever work out.
These two clashed in expectable manner. And now, with the grace of elephant, they try to backpedal out of (1) to salvage (2).
No EULA ever overrides a national law (unless the law in question has special provisions that specifically allow to override/waive it). If the EULA has provisions that are contradicting local law, local law takes priority.
That's one of fine points of labor laws in EU. The employer can give the employee a draconian contract to sign, with many nasty points that, say, raise the number of hours, reduce the number of days off, cut into the salary and so on. The employee can then just smirk, sign, and then sue if the employer tries to assert any of the points that are against labor laws.
Most of "protection laws" are written specifically in a way that makes it impossible for the protected to give up the protection, even willingly - they override any contracts that might contradict them.
Sony fucked up bad. They made a mistake to combine the feature and subsidizing the platform. They should have picked either-or, not both. Now they try to fix their mistake and do it with a grace of a rhino. Of course they are wrong now. Thing is they were wrong from moment zero. You have your right to be pissed, or to sue them, and they will have to suck it up and pay up for their mistakes.
No need to be indignant about it. They offered a deal that was bad to them, and now they are trying to back off from it. In this case, you are supposed to do what you do whatever is normally done with a party that tries to back off from a deal: sue the bastards till you get at least the worth of what you lose, and preferably several times that much.
Sony adds some good money to each console, hoping to recuperate in games and movies. Now imagine the Army buys 2000 PS3s for making a supercomputing cluster, because they are priced competetively. Because Sony is subsidizing them. Of course they will use the "Other OS" feature to run their supercomputer stuff and they won't buy a single game for the cluster. Same about nerds who have 5-10 games and spend time running Linux on PS3.
I think the best course of action would be "You can have the feature... for $150 extra" from moment zero - consoles with "Other OS" enabled not subsidized and sold at a good profit margin.
could you list these countries? Because I know quite a few countries with "CD tax" and from them only in Spain it was ruled file sharing is legal, and not without a court battle, very recently.
The CD tax is a way of labels to have a cake and eat it -twice- too. First you pay for "pirated content" in media tax, and then they will litigate and sue you for damages anyway.
One of my eyes is considerably weaker than the other, which causes that I lack depth perception based on stereovision (I still have some based on focus). Still, the only time I can enjoy seeing in 3D is in a 3D cinema... I'm not sure why but only the images on screen are 3D for me...
One of the major roadblocks is "NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH" doctrine.
If your sources are not quotable (say, you know some a traditional technique that was passed from father to son), if the sources are obscure (a photo with a name tag, in a school's yearbook, school already closed, yearbook in town's archives), if the sources are volatile (you write the article on a current event as you hear it reported over the radio), if the sources are inaccessible for wider public (you publish an article on ancient text in a dead language, and you publish a full translation you just made yourself, along with the original text), and so on and so on.
Generally, if you know something worthy of Wikipedia, you can't just publish it. You must either find a source or -create- one. And such "second hand wikis" are a good place for creating these sources.
the app can be -any- license -including- GPL, providing that you can fulfill all GPL prerequisites.
If you can't, because e.g. GPL contradicts iPhone developer license, then you are not legal to release it under GPL. If you still do - tough luck, it's in violation of both and it's up to the court what to do with this legal monstrosity. Of course you can always hope nobody tries to assert either of them.
Anyway, GPL spreads virally through source code, not through transmission protocols. It can "spawn" instead of spreading anywhere though, providing fertile legal ground. If you tried to branch sources of an existing GPL project into iPhone market, it would be plain impossible. If you create an app from scratch though, you just can't GPL it. And of course I can say by reading this post you agree to terms of my license which forces you to pay me $1mln in royalties for insights you have gained reading it. It has no legal bearing really though.
It does. The moment isn't exactly when the page ends loading but somewhere along the way, but it's frequent enough on a slow netbook.
Another cute case is when it shows "Search bookmarks and History" hint in dim grey text in the URL bar, you focus the bar, and it allows you to edit that text, type the URL in the same dim grey text, and blatantly ignore it when you press enter or go. Unfocus and focus the bar again, and your newly typed URL vanishes, and you can type it again, this time in proper dark text, and get the reaction too.
This is especially notorious if you fullscreen (F11), open the tab with Ctrl-T and focus the bar with F6, no mouse involved.
I believe that simply Google offered them more money than Yahoo.
It took some time for the corporate gears to grind the information "Free software picks a Bing-based competitor instead of us... we must be doing something wrong. They made the switch for money. How much were we paying them again?"
My home page is about:blank. If I need a new tab for something else than a search, I don't want to wait for Google to load, fight with the stop button and risk my absolutely hated: paste URL into the URL bar and have it replaced by Firefox upon finishing loading of the current page.
Yes, 5 shuttle launches or one rocket capable of lifting the shuttle without the dead weight... except we don't have such one. The ones capable of lifting the shuttle are not capable to fly without it. (and just see how works go with converting one of solid fuel thrusters into a much simpler rocket...)
Russians have smaller, weaker rockets that are vastly cheaper to operate. Lifting 1 kg more to the orbit requires some 20kg of starting weight more. Also, technology of scale has its requirements - a beam two times longer must be two times thicker for the same tensile strength.
So... russian rockets are smaller and cheaper but they are more cheaper than smaller.
essentially - yes. There are serious problems. Like, the engines are running a sustained explosion of hydrogen-oxygen mix, which produces temperature quite a bit higher than anything we have at our disposal could survive. It's pretty much only the shape that keeps the explosion far enough to be safe. Oxygen oxidizes everything it touches for prolonged time, hydrogen leaks through thinnest gaps deemed secure normally. Add stability - like ballancing a broom vertically on top of your finger, the unstabilized rocket will happily fly DOWN. Control acceleration - you could easily bring astronauts to orbit in half the time and quite a bit less fuel, except they would have to be scooped with a spoon from the rocket. Your "grain silo" has walls that aren't much thicker than alufoil, and can be easily pierced with a pencil, but it holds liquid hydrogen at room temperature. Check what pressure is liquid hydrogen at room temperature.
When you start adding it up, and especially if you add up all the -failed- tests before you get things right, you come up with much more than $60mln.
...still, with about $500mln per shuttle launch, I think dollar for dollar, russians would have a better perspective on achieving this all.
The basic problem with the shuttle is that it's a big, heavy vehicle, many tons of dead weight that need to be launched into the orbit. The russian rockets in final phase of the flight weight very little compared to the payload. They don't haul heavy-duty engines necessary for startup, landing gear, wings, and all that stuff that is not needed in the orbit. That means hauling 10 tons of cargo in 10 runs by russians will be still cheaper than hauling all the 10 tons in one run by a shuttle.
What's even more interesting, as wildlife flourishes, random private individuals introduce new animals on their own. Someone brought and released a pair of Przewalski's Horses and now they form quite a big herd. There are some other species not native to the area and never observed there before. They were brought there by humans - unsanctioned, unregulated activity funded entirely by enthusiasts from their own money.
I mean, run a hundred atomic clocks (and compare their results) vs a hundred pulsars?
I'd think it could only mean all atomic clocks are a subject to the same interference in equal degree, while pulsars are subject to different interferences, being so spatially scattered et al.
I mean, if -all- atomic clocks are off by almost exactly 0.01s in a hour, what is there to tell us they are? They will all still show the same number.
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Porting J2ME phone midlet to J2SE runtime is not hard at all.
Sure you must take device limitations into account. But that's not the case here!
First, the app was not really being "ported for", but rewritten for both simultaneously. Then, they were supposedly the same OS. And last but not least, the app in question was dead simple: display a monochrome bitmap on screen, animate it.
The problem was that Apple developers went to some lengths to make the two deeply incompatible - in parts that could be easily compatible because they do the same thing, they take (functionally) the same parameters, and produce the same results... except they are named differently, they use different types of arguments (with the same meaning) and so on.
The problem is not that the UI is -completely- different.
It's an UI that is massively the same, just ran through a bulk rename, shuffle parameters order around in function calls and explode/implode some methods / typical sequences.
The UI -could- have been VERY similar, with only minimal differences easy to #ifdef through - the underlying philosophy is. Instead, there was some active effort put in making it totally incompatible, where making it compatible would be easier and more obvious.
A typical case of "an extra week of writing code can save you a hour you'd spend on reading documentation instead."
IF the code requires forking, THEN it should have no pretenses about being cross-platform compatible.
Which was the original point.
It's not a complaint that iPhone is devilishly difficult to program. It is not. The complaint is that it's devilishly difficult to write an iPhone/desktop cross-platform compatible app, which should have been easy if the device actually was cross-platform compatible.
Oh, but totally relevant, just not a good excuse.
Causation is not justification.
People seem to misinterpret my previous post: I didn't write "It's perfectly fine that Sony does it, because...". I meant "The scoundrels try to backpedal from the deal because..."
1. They wanted to gather nerd community following, to gain good PR by leaving a loophole, being open in some way. That's fine, and they succeeded.
2. But also they wanted to gain a major sector of the market by selling below costs. This is a shady practice that tends to backfire often and hurt bad, and requires draconian control over the product distribution and usage to ever work out.
These two clashed in expectable manner. And now, with the grace of elephant, they try to backpedal out of (1) to salvage (2).
No EULA ever overrides a national law (unless the law in question has special provisions that specifically allow to override/waive it). If the EULA has provisions that are contradicting local law, local law takes priority.
That's one of fine points of labor laws in EU. The employer can give the employee a draconian contract to sign, with many nasty points that, say, raise the number of hours, reduce the number of days off, cut into the salary and so on. The employee can then just smirk, sign, and then sue if the employer tries to assert any of the points that are against labor laws.
Most of "protection laws" are written specifically in a way that makes it impossible for the protected to give up the protection, even willingly - they override any contracts that might contradict them.
Sony fucked up bad. They made a mistake to combine the feature and subsidizing the platform. They should have picked either-or, not both. Now they try to fix their mistake and do it with a grace of a rhino. Of course they are wrong now. Thing is they were wrong from moment zero. You have your right to be pissed, or to sue them, and they will have to suck it up and pay up for their mistakes.
No need to be indignant about it. They offered a deal that was bad to them, and now they are trying to back off from it. In this case, you are supposed to do what you do whatever is normally done with a party that tries to back off from a deal: sue the bastards till you get at least the worth of what you lose, and preferably several times that much.
totally. I guess it will be even more successful than the total boycott of Modern Warfare 2 for lack of dedicated servers. That certainly showed them!
OTOH these supporters cost them real money.
Sony adds some good money to each console, hoping to recuperate in games and movies.
Now imagine the Army buys 2000 PS3s for making a supercomputing cluster, because they are priced competetively. Because Sony is subsidizing them. Of course they will use the "Other OS" feature to run their supercomputer stuff and they won't buy a single game for the cluster.
Same about nerds who have 5-10 games and spend time running Linux on PS3.
I think the best course of action would be "You can have the feature... for $150 extra" from moment zero - consoles with "Other OS" enabled not subsidized and sold at a good profit margin.
...a class action lawsuit may convince them otherwise.
could you list these countries?
Because I know quite a few countries with "CD tax" and from them only in Spain it was ruled file sharing is legal, and not without a court battle, very recently.
The CD tax is a way of labels to have a cake and eat it -twice- too.
First you pay for "pirated content" in media tax, and then they will litigate and sue you for damages anyway.
One of my eyes is considerably weaker than the other, which causes that I lack depth perception based on stereovision (I still have some based on focus). Still, the only time I can enjoy seeing in 3D is in a 3D cinema... I'm not sure why but only the images on screen are 3D for me...
One of the major roadblocks is "NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH" doctrine.
If your sources are not quotable (say, you know some a traditional technique that was passed from father to son), if the sources are obscure (a photo with a name tag, in a school's yearbook, school already closed, yearbook in town's archives), if the sources are volatile (you write the article on a current event as you hear it reported over the radio), if the sources are inaccessible for wider public (you publish an article on ancient text in a dead language, and you publish a full translation you just made yourself, along with the original text), and so on and so on.
Generally, if you know something worthy of Wikipedia, you can't just publish it. You must either find a source or -create- one. And such "second hand wikis" are a good place for creating these sources.
the app can be -any- license -including- GPL, providing that you can fulfill all GPL prerequisites.
If you can't, because e.g. GPL contradicts iPhone developer license, then you are not legal to release it under GPL. If you still do - tough luck, it's in violation of both and it's up to the court what to do with this legal monstrosity. Of course you can always hope nobody tries to assert either of them.
Anyway, GPL spreads virally through source code, not through transmission protocols. It can "spawn" instead of spreading anywhere though, providing fertile legal ground. If you tried to branch sources of an existing GPL project into iPhone market, it would be plain impossible. If you create an app from scratch though, you just can't GPL it. And of course I can say by reading this post you agree to terms of my license which forces you to pay me $1mln in royalties for insights you have gained reading it. It has no legal bearing really though.
It does. The moment isn't exactly when the page ends loading but somewhere along the way, but it's frequent enough on a slow netbook.
Another cute case is when it shows "Search bookmarks and History" hint in dim grey text in the URL bar, you focus the bar, and it allows you to edit that text, type the URL in the same dim grey text, and blatantly ignore it when you press enter or go. Unfocus and focus the bar again, and your newly typed URL vanishes, and you can type it again, this time in proper dark text, and get the reaction too.
This is especially notorious if you fullscreen (F11), open the tab with Ctrl-T and focus the bar with F6, no mouse involved.
I believe that simply Google offered them more money than Yahoo.
It took some time for the corporate gears to grind the information "Free software picks a Bing-based competitor instead of us... we must be doing something wrong. They made the switch for money. How much were we paying them again?"
1. piratebay.org torrent search ...
2. redtube
3. cracks.am
My home page is about:blank. If I need a new tab for something else than a search, I don't want to wait for Google to load, fight with the stop button and risk my absolutely hated: paste URL into the URL bar and have it replaced by Firefox upon finishing loading of the current page.
Yes, 5 shuttle launches or one rocket capable of lifting the shuttle without the dead weight... except we don't have such one. The ones capable of lifting the shuttle are not capable to fly without it. (and just see how works go with converting one of solid fuel thrusters into a much simpler rocket...)
Russians have smaller, weaker rockets that are vastly cheaper to operate. Lifting 1 kg more to the orbit requires some 20kg of starting weight more. Also, technology of scale has its requirements - a beam two times longer must be two times thicker for the same tensile strength.
So... russian rockets are smaller and cheaper but they are more cheaper than smaller.
essentially - yes.
There are serious problems. Like, the engines are running a sustained explosion of hydrogen-oxygen mix, which produces temperature quite a bit higher than anything we have at our disposal could survive. It's pretty much only the shape that keeps the explosion far enough to be safe. Oxygen oxidizes everything it touches for prolonged time, hydrogen leaks through thinnest gaps deemed secure normally. Add stability - like ballancing a broom vertically on top of your finger, the unstabilized rocket will happily fly DOWN. Control acceleration - you could easily bring astronauts to orbit in half the time and quite a bit less fuel, except they would have to be scooped with a spoon from the rocket. Your "grain silo" has walls that aren't much thicker than alufoil, and can be easily pierced with a pencil, but it holds liquid hydrogen at room temperature. Check what pressure is liquid hydrogen at room temperature.
When you start adding it up, and especially if you add up all the -failed- tests before you get things right, you come up with much more than $60mln.
...still, with about $500mln per shuttle launch, I think dollar for dollar, russians would have a better perspective on achieving this all.
The basic problem with the shuttle is that it's a big, heavy vehicle, many tons of dead weight that need to be launched into the orbit. The russian rockets in final phase of the flight weight very little compared to the payload. They don't haul heavy-duty engines necessary for startup, landing gear, wings, and all that stuff that is not needed in the orbit. That means hauling 10 tons of cargo in 10 runs by russians will be still cheaper than hauling all the 10 tons in one run by a shuttle.
What's even more interesting, as wildlife flourishes, random private individuals introduce new animals on their own.
Someone brought and released a pair of Przewalski's Horses and now they form quite a big herd. There are some other species not native to the area and never observed there before. They were brought there by humans - unsanctioned, unregulated activity funded entirely by enthusiasts from their own money.
My mother is a troll on the Internet, but goddamnit, she would not do that.
1234ThisIsAVeryDifficultPasswordToBreak
I mean, run a hundred atomic clocks (and compare their results) vs a hundred pulsars?
I'd think it could only mean all atomic clocks are a subject to the same interference in equal degree, while pulsars are subject to different interferences, being so spatially scattered et al.
I mean, if -all- atomic clocks are off by almost exactly 0.01s in a hour, what is there to tell us they are? They will all still show the same number.