Earlier prototypes used an Atom CPU, I doubt that's changed. And the connectivity is some sort of wifi, presumably g, maybe n.
It looks like a neat device, and I'm definitely interested in the cheap lightweight tablet form factor and market niche. But when I think about purchasing it I can't help comparing it in my head to the super-sized iPod tablet Apple is rumored to be working on. The crunchpad's 12" screen is nice compared to the 8-10" expected from apple, but the atom and big screen are going to make for really crappy battery life compared to an ARM based 8-10" solution, and the Apple version will be able to do more than just web surf (a version of the iPhone SDK and app store seems inevitable). However, while the crunchpad may have missed it's $200 price target in favor of $300, the rumors of Apple's $600+ price point were never in that league to begin with.
Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet. Thus Safari users are shown better compressed, but definitely patented, h264 streams on those sites.
IIRC some other WebKit browsers use GStreamer as the back end for their video tag support, and thus probably support Theora.
The Google case *does* relate to full texts, *and* to whether an author should be paid the price of their choosing for their work.
Basically, Google was able to settle a class action lawsuit in such a way that it was given rights to works from all members of a class (including the right to sell access to full texts for out of print books). So basically, unless you've taken action to exclude yourself from the class's deal, Google can sell almost anything you've ever written that is not currently in print, without any permission from you or your agents.
Google has used brilliant legal tricks and some paltry millions to more or less turn the copyright system from opt-in to opt-out when it comes to selling on Google Books.
I personally suspect that this will be a net win for everyone involved, Google, readers, and writers. But it would be wrong to downplay the importance of this case, and the potential impact of it's settlement.
Free filtered internet means that all the people paying for a broadband line to read email, and occasionally browse the web, can now do so for free. Without the ~95% of customers who underuse their connections subsiding the cost of the ~5% who actually need broadband, ISPs will have to increase prices dramatically.
The end result is that only the financially well off will have access to anything the government feels like censoring on their network. And that's making the optimistic assumption that the censorship stops with government networks, and isn't extended, voluntarily or not, to the big ISPs.
What will happen to political speech when that happens? Given what we've seen of these kinds of filters thus far, they tend to pick up on key words, block entire sites for single pages, and generate a lot of what a reasonable person viewing a site would consider false positives. Will any site the agitates for the rights of sex workers, or transsexuals, or gays risk being marked as sexual content, and blocked from the vast majority of american voters? Will any site that discusses a hate crime risk being labeled as hate-speech, and excluded as well? How much harder will it be to get a major party to take up such causes in that kind of environment?
I think that free ubiquitous basic internet access is a great idea, that could do a lot of good for a lot of people and the economy overall. But I'd gladly forgo it, if the cost is freedom of speech on the internet. Any government supported network needs to be an unfiltered. Even forcing people to register with the government as adults to receive an unfiltered connection is far too burdensome, in that it destroys users' privacy and any potential anonymity for whistleblowers and the like. Any parents who want to restrict their kids' browsing have plenty of options to do so on their own devices, without unconstitutionally and unduly compromising adults' freedom of speech.
The idea of giving free cellular data service away with a device is basically the exact opposite of what the rest of the industry does.
You can get an iPhone for $200, but then you're obligated to pay ~10x that amount for wireless service over the next couple of years. A Kindle costs $350 and has free wireless for how long? forever?
Can that business model really be profitable in the long term? If so, I'd say it's a great deal for the consumer. But I have to wonder how many people have to do a bit of web browsing on their Kindle before Amazon starts losing money on wireless bills, and decides to remove features or connectivity?
This isn't just a matter of Mac vs Linux desktop market share. Google's numbers say that the following percentages of users are IPv6 capable, broken down by OS: 2.44% for Mac OS 0.93% for Linux 0.32% for Vista
The article I saw on this at Ars Technica attributed this difference(despite the fact that all three OSes are IPv6 capable by default) to the fact that mac users have a tendency to use other Apple hardware, and Apple's Airport routers use 6to4 to tunnel IPv6 by default.
If linux has been pushing ipv6 (what does that even mean? does your kernel complain when it has to handle ipv4 packets?), perhaps it's been pushing in the wrong place, i.e. on the desktop, or as an end to end solution, rather than in routers, and with tunneling.
That was quick (especially considering they only support intel based macs). Maybe in the future OSS products looking for market share will support official native Mac versions sooner, instead of leaving us with either X11 interfaces or third party ports.
As I understand it, in this case tracing basically means converting the specific javascript path that is executed to compiled machine code, as it is run.
So if you're iterating through a loop a thousand times, you run it once as interpreted javascript, generate and cache a machine language version of the javascript you just ran, and run that version 999 times.
The basic concept isn't that new. Intel even had something similar implemented in hardware called a trace cache on the Pentium4 (I don't recall it being on their newer chips, but I might have missed it), where they cached executed micro-ops, rather than only storing information about jump targets in a branch predictor and then re-cracking instructions into micro-ops as they were needed like most other chips.
This should make repetitive loops a lot faster, but with code that is only executed a few times, the overhead may outweigh the benefits. Used with good judgement, this should be very interesting. But, given the abundance of javascript code that is not run many times, I'll still be interested to see how SquirrelFish's non-JIT approach compares in real usage (as opposed to benchmarks, which tend to favor repetitive code).
The phone probably would still be locked for use only on AT&T's network, said Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg. But buyers could choose a pay-as-you-go plan for voice service.
That doesn't sound like pay-as-you-go is allowed to me. Which is a shame, because if it was I might actually be interested. A $500 phone, $30 a month for data, and a hundred bucks for a year worth of minutes and SMSes is a better deal for me than a $200 phone plus $75+taxes+fees every month for more minutes than I use in a year. AT&T needs to let people who don't use their phone as a phone that much buy what they want.
But there are a couple of developments mentioned that I consider likely, or at least plausible.
The first is a fancy NAS, aka. "home server" (But not called that, of course. Whoever thought up that moniker was practically begging to have their gadget ignored by the mainstream). The Time Capsule's hardware is probably already sufficient for a lot of tasks (although they'll probably sell a new souped up model with the new features instead), and more software integration with OSX and iPods/iPhones/AppleTVs seems like a no brainer for future features. According to NPD, Apple actually has the #1 selling product in both the 802.11n base station and NAS markets these days with Airport Extreme and Time Capsule. And, while I'm not sure they intended to enter that market quite so strongly, I think it does suit their strengths (in this case, making both the hardware and software of easy to setup devices that just work), and I hope they'll seize the opportunity they've been presented with.
And the second is adding BluRay and/or DVR modes to the AppleTV. I think it's pretty clear that a lot of consumers don't want yet another box cluttering their TV stands. If Apple can consolidate a couple of other doodads into theirs for relatively little cost, without compromising the user experience, they ought to go for it. And given that they've recently been allowing variable pricing for new shows from HBO in the US, and other channels in the UK, I think Apple might be becoming open to flexibility in other aspects of video distribution as well. There are certainly still good reasons for them not to do this (dealing with the cable-card/DRM mess, supporting the competition, adding cost and complexity, etc), but in the long run I think it might be worth it to smooth the transition to mainstream internet video distribution.
Rudy Rucker used Femtotech in Freeware back in 1997, and I would be surprised if there aren't earlier references. It's a pretty straightforward step up from nanotech for molecules to femtotech for atoms.
You're almost right... which is to say, wrong. There are 3 types of cone receptors, and 3 numbers is sufficient to describe any color the human eye can perceive, but those 3 numbers can not represent actual physical colors.
Your cones do not just detect one monochromatic color, each type has it's own response curve across varying frequencies, and they're not even nice simple bell curves (one even has two peaks). To represent the entire visible color space with 3 numbers, as the CIE 1931 XYZ color space does, you need to allow things like negative luminance, that don't exist in the real world.
As you can see here, using three colors you can represent a subset of what is actually visible, represented as a triangle within the chromacity diagram. If you used a set of 5 monochromatic colors instead, you could represent a larger subset of the full visible range, which could be visualized as a pentagon in that chromacity diagram (and, of course, using even more colors would let you add more points to the shape representing the colors you can display, letting it conform even more closely to the full range of visible colors).
Afaik, the fact that a 24bbp display can't reproduce all visible colors has more to do with the fact that the display's pixels are made up of 3 monochromatic sub-pixels than the fact that there are 8-bits of information for each of those sub-pixels. Just adding 2 extra bits for each of those 3 colors isn't going to do much in terms of spectrum coverage iirc.
I'd actually be interested in seeing research into displays that didn't use distinct pixels at all, and instead went with something like a bayer pattern composed of monochromatic elements of more than 3 colors. The advantages of easy sub-pixel rendering, and simple 1:1 display of computed pixels, become less relevant with the high dpi displays we can make these days imho. It would be a good idea to look at more exotic layouts to make use of increasing pixel densities.
Your choice of terms may be more precise, but it seems to me that expressing an expense (network maintenance and upgrades) as a percentage of gross revenue is far more straightforward and useful a comparison than expressing it as a percentage of net profits (from which such expenses would have already been deducted).
Also, you used only one years profits for your comparison, and there are still about two years until 2010 (more or less depending on when during the year they expect their network to become saturated) for them to spend that $19B.
If they're only investing $19 billion over the next 2 years until 2010, that's 8% of their income they spend on maintaining and upgrading their network. And they make some pretty huge profits, even after all of their expenses ($11 billion in 2007)
If they're only spending 8% of their money on network maintenance and upgrades, and raking in huge profits, while their network fails to keep up with demand (which, contrary to alarmist reports is multiplying more slowly than it used to), then they need to spend more than 8%! Doing otherwise, when you run an essential utility, ought to be considered criminal negligence imho.
FSF Licensing Compliance Officer Brett Smith syas:
The FSF's Smith says the fact that the author of the program (i.e., you) and the distributor of the binary (i.e., Apple) are unrelated entities makes no difference. "If a program is meant to be installed on a particular User Product, GPLv3 imposes the same requirements about providing Installation Information whether the software is directly installed on the device or conveyed separately."
The Actual GPLv3 License says:
If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information.
IANAL, but it looks to me like the only person who would be restricted from distributing GPLv3 code for the iPhone would be Apple, and even they could do so safely as long as they don't bundle it into the same transaction in which you buy the iPhone itself. You or I ought to be able to just provide a link to the source code in our app, or otherwise embed the source code in a readable fashion, and be safe from that clause while still distributing our app through iTunes.
This is "derived out of Sun's Open Media Commons initiative", which was in turn based on Project DReaM, which was Sun's attempt at an open source DRM stack.
So, by that metric, Webkit (aka Safari's engine) is the first to 100%.
Now we just have to wait to see who's the first to really completely pass with pixel-accuracy and smooth animation, and who's the first to release a final official version.
They make the JDK/JVM available only to developers. Then it's essentially just a library that a developer can use. The finished app still needs to go through Apple, and be posted as an individual app. And installing such an app on the iPhone doesn't enable the end-user to install any other apps on the iPhone.
They might try that, but the article says, "The free JVM would be made available via Apple's AppStore marketplace for third-party applications." So if that's all they intend to do, they didn't get that point across to the reporter.
But Sun has Lawyers too, surely they've read the license as well. They wouldn't say they're going to make iPhone-java unless they saw a way to actually do it (albeit, their way to do it may just be to say they're doing it even though they know it's forbidden, and then try to drum up public support if Apple stops them).
It seems likely that larger players are getting access to extra capabilities not allowed by the public SDK.
Sun isn't the only big company doing things with the SDk that imply a special deal. AOL already demonstrated an AIM client for the iPhone, which would be rendered largely useless if it had to follow the restriction against public-SDK based apps running in the background.
It seems to me that, even if the individual detectors are very simplistic, and the geocoding of inputs is very rough, there would probably be some interesting scientific uses for a multi-million node planet-sized distributed cosmic ray detector.
Does anyone in an relevant field see a good use for this?
With a nice big multi-touch screen, 3d accelerometers, proximity sensors, cameras, mics, positioning via wifi/cellular beacons, etc... all in a nice compact form factor, the iPhone and iPod Touch have the hardware to try a lot of really innovative and interesting things in terms of user interface and gaming. I've been looking forward to playing with that stuff since day it was announced last year.
I just hope the SDK Apple is introducing next thursday is reasonably complete and uncrippled.
Nintendo's Wii and DS have proved that unconventional control systems and innovative casual games can provide a lot of fun, and make a lot of money. By taking the next step down that road, Apple has the opportunity to finally make it big in gaming (after neglecting, and being neglected by, that market for years and years). It would be a real shame if they dropped the ball.
If you search for Tor as the publisher on the webscription store, you'll find that Tor has a whopping ONE book available for sale (by David Weber, who usually writes for Baen anyway). They list a dozen others, but don't actually sell them.
There was a burst of hype, and even an/. article about Tor selling their stuff using Baen's DRM-free model a year or so ago, but they seem to have chickened out (or at least dragged their feet for a good long time, if this new mystery website has to do with selling DRM-free ebooks).
This isn't the RIAA setting any sort of internal payment policy for it's members. This isn't even a matter of paying the artists at all.
This is a matter of the NMPA (an industry association of publishing companies representing composing artists), and the RIAA (an industry association of record labels representing performing artists) squabbling over which middle man ought to get a bigger cut of online sales. How much either of them passes on to the artists they supposedly represent is a separate issue.
And, meanwhile, the DiMA (an industry association of online music sellers) is chiming in to suggest that they both keep their prices low to speed growth in online sales while CD sales tank.
It's a sales war between Universal/Warner/Sony and Apple, Amazon is just the labels' chosen weapon.
What would really be good for customers would be if the labels let everyone sell DRM free music, including Apple, and let the consumer decide where they want to buy their music in a real free-market sales war.
Slashdot Mirror
Earlier prototypes used an Atom CPU, I doubt that's changed. And the connectivity is some sort of wifi, presumably g, maybe n.
It looks like a neat device, and I'm definitely interested in the cheap lightweight tablet form factor and market niche. But when I think about purchasing it I can't help comparing it in my head to the super-sized iPod tablet Apple is rumored to be working on.
The crunchpad's 12" screen is nice compared to the 8-10" expected from apple, but the atom and big screen are going to make for really crappy battery life compared to an ARM based 8-10" solution, and the Apple version will be able to do more than just web surf (a version of the iPhone SDK and app store seems inevitable). However, while the crunchpad may have missed it's $200 price target in favor of $300, the rumors of Apple's $600+ price point were never in that league to begin with.
Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet.
Thus Safari users are shown better compressed, but definitely patented, h264 streams on those sites.
IIRC some other WebKit browsers use GStreamer as the back end for their video tag support, and thus probably support Theora.
The Google case *does* relate to full texts, *and* to whether an author should be paid the price of their choosing for their work.
Basically, Google was able to settle a class action lawsuit in such a way that it was given rights to works from all members of a class (including the right to sell access to full texts for out of print books). So basically, unless you've taken action to exclude yourself from the class's deal, Google can sell almost anything you've ever written that is not currently in print, without any permission from you or your agents.
Google has used brilliant legal tricks and some paltry millions to more or less turn the copyright system from opt-in to opt-out when it comes to selling on Google Books.
I personally suspect that this will be a net win for everyone involved, Google, readers, and writers. But it would be wrong to downplay the importance of this case, and the potential impact of it's settlement.
No, it really isn't.
Free filtered internet means that all the people paying for a broadband line to read email, and occasionally browse the web, can now do so for free. Without the ~95% of customers who underuse their connections subsiding the cost of the ~5% who actually need broadband, ISPs will have to increase prices dramatically.
The end result is that only the financially well off will have access to anything the government feels like censoring on their network. And that's making the optimistic assumption that the censorship stops with government networks, and isn't extended, voluntarily or not, to the big ISPs.
What will happen to political speech when that happens? Given what we've seen of these kinds of filters thus far, they tend to pick up on key words, block entire sites for single pages, and generate a lot of what a reasonable person viewing a site would consider false positives. Will any site the agitates for the rights of sex workers, or transsexuals, or gays risk being marked as sexual content, and blocked from the vast majority of american voters? Will any site that discusses a hate crime risk being labeled as hate-speech, and excluded as well? How much harder will it be to get a major party to take up such causes in that kind of environment?
I think that free ubiquitous basic internet access is a great idea, that could do a lot of good for a lot of people and the economy overall.
But I'd gladly forgo it, if the cost is freedom of speech on the internet.
Any government supported network needs to be an unfiltered. Even forcing people to register with the government as adults to receive an unfiltered connection is far too burdensome, in that it destroys users' privacy and any potential anonymity for whistleblowers and the like. Any parents who want to restrict their kids' browsing have plenty of options to do so on their own devices, without unconstitutionally and unduly compromising adults' freedom of speech.
It's consider that a much more interesting topic.
The idea of giving free cellular data service away with a device is basically the exact opposite of what the rest of the industry does.
You can get an iPhone for $200, but then you're obligated to pay ~10x that amount for wireless service over the next couple of years. A Kindle costs $350 and has free wireless for how long? forever?
Can that business model really be profitable in the long term? If so, I'd say it's a great deal for the consumer. But I have to wonder how many people have to do a bit of web browsing on their Kindle before Amazon starts losing money on wireless bills, and decides to remove features or connectivity?
This isn't just a matter of Mac vs Linux desktop market share.
Google's numbers say that the following percentages of users are IPv6 capable, broken down by OS:
2.44% for Mac OS
0.93% for Linux
0.32% for Vista
The article I saw on this at Ars Technica attributed this difference(despite the fact that all three OSes are IPv6 capable by default) to the fact that mac users have a tendency to use other Apple hardware, and Apple's Airport routers use 6to4 to tunnel IPv6 by default.
If linux has been pushing ipv6 (what does that even mean? does your kernel complain when it has to handle ipv4 packets?), perhaps it's been pushing in the wrong place, i.e. on the desktop, or as an end to end solution, rather than in routers, and with tunneling.
That was quick (especially considering they only support intel based macs).
Maybe in the future OSS products looking for market share will support official native Mac versions sooner, instead of leaving us with either X11 interfaces or third party ports.
As I understand it, in this case tracing basically means converting the specific javascript path that is executed to compiled machine code, as it is run.
So if you're iterating through a loop a thousand times, you run it once as interpreted javascript, generate and cache a machine language version of the javascript you just ran, and run that version 999 times.
The basic concept isn't that new. Intel even had something similar implemented in hardware called a trace cache on the Pentium4 (I don't recall it being on their newer chips, but I might have missed it), where they cached executed micro-ops, rather than only storing information about jump targets in a branch predictor and then re-cracking instructions into micro-ops as they were needed like most other chips.
This should make repetitive loops a lot faster, but with code that is only executed a few times, the overhead may outweigh the benefits. Used with good judgement, this should be very interesting. But, given the abundance of javascript code that is not run many times, I'll still be interested to see how SquirrelFish's non-JIT approach compares in real usage (as opposed to benchmarks, which tend to favor repetitive code).
AT&T has explicitly said that even without a contract you still have a locked phone and the same choices for plans (i.e. minimum $70 a month +taxes and fees for voice/data, with no sms).
That doesn't sound like pay-as-you-go is allowed to me. Which is a shame, because if it was I might actually be interested. A $500 phone, $30 a month for data, and a hundred bucks for a year worth of minutes and SMSes is a better deal for me than a $200 phone plus $75+taxes+fees every month for more minutes than I use in a year.
AT&T needs to let people who don't use their phone as a phone that much buy what they want.
But there are a couple of developments mentioned that I consider likely, or at least plausible.
The first is a fancy NAS, aka. "home server" (But not called that, of course. Whoever thought up that moniker was practically begging to have their gadget ignored by the mainstream). The Time Capsule's hardware is probably already sufficient for a lot of tasks (although they'll probably sell a new souped up model with the new features instead), and more software integration with OSX and iPods/iPhones/AppleTVs seems like a no brainer for future features.
According to NPD, Apple actually has the #1 selling product in both the 802.11n base station and NAS markets these days with Airport Extreme and Time Capsule. And, while I'm not sure they intended to enter that market quite so strongly, I think it does suit their strengths (in this case, making both the hardware and software of easy to setup devices that just work), and I hope they'll seize the opportunity they've been presented with.
And the second is adding BluRay and/or DVR modes to the AppleTV. I think it's pretty clear that a lot of consumers don't want yet another box cluttering their TV stands. If Apple can consolidate a couple of other doodads into theirs for relatively little cost, without compromising the user experience, they ought to go for it. And given that they've recently been allowing variable pricing for new shows from HBO in the US, and other channels in the UK, I think Apple might be becoming open to flexibility in other aspects of video distribution as well. There are certainly still good reasons for them not to do this (dealing with the cable-card/DRM mess, supporting the competition, adding cost and complexity, etc), but in the long run I think it might be worth it to smooth the transition to mainstream internet video distribution.
Rudy Rucker used Femtotech in Freeware back in 1997, and I would be surprised if there aren't earlier references. It's a pretty straightforward step up from nanotech for molecules to femtotech for atoms.
You're almost right... which is to say, wrong.
There are 3 types of cone receptors, and 3 numbers is sufficient to describe any color the human eye can perceive, but those 3 numbers can not represent actual physical colors.
Your cones do not just detect one monochromatic color, each type has it's own response curve across varying frequencies, and they're not even nice simple bell curves (one even has two peaks). To represent the entire visible color space with 3 numbers, as the CIE 1931 XYZ color space does, you need to allow things like negative luminance, that don't exist in the real world.
As you can see here, using three colors you can represent a subset of what is actually visible, represented as a triangle within the chromacity diagram. If you used a set of 5 monochromatic colors instead, you could represent a larger subset of the full visible range, which could be visualized as a pentagon in that chromacity diagram (and, of course, using even more colors would let you add more points to the shape representing the colors you can display, letting it conform even more closely to the full range of visible colors).
Afaik, the fact that a 24bbp display can't reproduce all visible colors has more to do with the fact that the display's pixels are made up of 3 monochromatic sub-pixels than the fact that there are 8-bits of information for each of those sub-pixels. Just adding 2 extra bits for each of those 3 colors isn't going to do much in terms of spectrum coverage iirc.
I'd actually be interested in seeing research into displays that didn't use distinct pixels at all, and instead went with something like a bayer pattern composed of monochromatic elements of more than 3 colors. The advantages of easy sub-pixel rendering, and simple 1:1 display of computed pixels, become less relevant with the high dpi displays we can make these days imho. It would be a good idea to look at more exotic layouts to make use of increasing pixel densities.
Your choice of terms may be more precise, but it seems to me that expressing an expense (network maintenance and upgrades) as a percentage of gross revenue is far more straightforward and useful a comparison than expressing it as a percentage of net profits (from which such expenses would have already been deducted).
Also, you used only one years profits for your comparison, and there are still about two years until 2010 (more or less depending on when during the year they expect their network to become saturated) for them to spend that $19B.
AT&T's annual income was $118 billion in 2007.
If they're only investing $19 billion over the next 2 years until 2010, that's 8% of their income they spend on maintaining and upgrading their network.
And they make some pretty huge profits, even after all of their expenses ($11 billion in 2007)
If they're only spending 8% of their money on network maintenance and upgrades, and raking in huge profits, while their network fails to keep up with demand (which, contrary to alarmist reports is multiplying more slowly than it used to), then they need to spend more than 8%! Doing otherwise, when you run an essential utility, ought to be considered criminal negligence imho.
The Actual GPLv3 License says:
IANAL, but it looks to me like the only person who would be restricted from distributing GPLv3 code for the iPhone would be Apple, and even they could do so safely as long as they don't bundle it into the same transaction in which you buy the iPhone itself. You or I ought to be able to just provide a link to the source code in our app, or otherwise embed the source code in a readable fashion, and be safe from that clause while still distributing our app through iTunes.
So where's the problem Mr Smith?
They'll add DRM!
This is "derived out of Sun's Open Media Commons initiative", which was in turn based on Project DReaM, which was Sun's attempt at an open source DRM stack.
Ok, you can now download Webkit to browse and see 100/100 on your screen.
http://webkit.org/blog/173/webkit-achieves-acid3-100100-in-public-build/
So, by that metric, Webkit (aka Safari's engine) is the first to 100%.
Now we just have to wait to see who's the first to really completely pass with pixel-accuracy and smooth animation, and who's the first to release a final official version.
They might try that, but the article says, "The free JVM would be made available via Apple's AppStore marketplace for third-party applications." So if that's all they intend to do, they didn't get that point across to the reporter.
True.
But Sun has Lawyers too, surely they've read the license as well. They wouldn't say they're going to make iPhone-java unless they saw a way to actually do it (albeit, their way to do it may just be to say they're doing it even though they know it's forbidden, and then try to drum up public support if Apple stops them).
It seems likely that larger players are getting access to extra capabilities not allowed by the public SDK.
Sun isn't the only big company doing things with the SDk that imply a special deal. AOL already demonstrated an AIM client for the iPhone, which would be rendered largely useless if it had to follow the restriction against public-SDK based apps running in the background.
It seems to me that, even if the individual detectors are very simplistic, and the geocoding of inputs is very rough, there would probably be some interesting scientific uses for a multi-million node planet-sized distributed cosmic ray detector.
Does anyone in an relevant field see a good use for this?
With a nice big multi-touch screen, 3d accelerometers, proximity sensors, cameras, mics, positioning via wifi/cellular beacons, etc... all in a nice compact form factor, the iPhone and iPod Touch have the hardware to try a lot of really innovative and interesting things in terms of user interface and gaming. I've been looking forward to playing with that stuff since day it was announced last year.
I just hope the SDK Apple is introducing next thursday is reasonably complete and uncrippled.
Nintendo's Wii and DS have proved that unconventional control systems and innovative casual games can provide a lot of fun, and make a lot of money. By taking the next step down that road, Apple has the opportunity to finally make it big in gaming (after neglecting, and being neglected by, that market for years and years). It would be a real shame if they dropped the ball.
Not really.
/. article about Tor selling their stuff using Baen's DRM-free model a year or so ago, but they seem to have chickened out (or at least dragged their feet for a good long time, if this new mystery website has to do with selling DRM-free ebooks).
If you search for Tor as the publisher on the webscription store, you'll find that Tor has a whopping ONE book available for sale (by David Weber, who usually writes for Baen anyway). They list a dozen others, but don't actually sell them.
There was a burst of hype, and even an
This isn't the RIAA setting any sort of internal payment policy for it's members.
This isn't even a matter of paying the artists at all.
This is a matter of the NMPA (an industry association of publishing companies representing composing artists), and the RIAA (an industry association of record labels representing performing artists) squabbling over which middle man ought to get a bigger cut of online sales.
How much either of them passes on to the artists they supposedly represent is a separate issue.
And, meanwhile, the DiMA (an industry association of online music sellers) is chiming in to suggest that they both keep their prices low to speed growth in online sales while CD sales tank.
It's a sales war between Universal/Warner/Sony and Apple, Amazon is just the labels' chosen weapon.
What would really be good for customers would be if the labels let everyone sell DRM free music, including Apple, and let the consumer decide where they want to buy their music in a real free-market sales war.