For every "unlocked" phone that allows you to install unsigned software, yes. That's the price you pay for unlocked hardware. There are exceptions to the rule, (OS X) but they are very few and far between.
How exactly is OS X an exception?
Due to the notably disproportionate lack of spyware on the Mac.
By that logic, if I leave my front door open year round yet don't get burgled, my home must be burglar proof!
Have you tried Swype or one of the other similar "finger sliding" keyboards like SlideIT, ShapeWriter?
Until I got my Nexus One I had the same opinion as you wrt texting and touch-screen keyboards. It was one of the major reasons I had resisted buying a phone with only a software keyboard. I eventually bit the bullet after speaking to plenty of people who said they got used to the on-screen keyboard quickly enough. It still felt like a big step backwards for me though and I never really felt comfortable with any of the 3-4 different touch keyboards I'd tried until I found Swype (note that's a HUGE plus in favour of Android - you can replace virtually any part of the system 3rd party software, keyboard included).
For those of you who aren't aware of these types of keyboards, they work as follows: Rather than pressing each key one at a time like a normal keyboard, you just slide your finger across all the letters in the word you want to write. Once you've slid out the word, you lift your finger then start sliding the next word. The software figures out what word you intended and inserts that plus a space automatically. It's uncannily accurate, it only takes a few minutes to get the hang of, and it doesn't take a lot of practice until you're "typing" words at 40WPM with just one thumb.
Almost everyone I've shown it to has been blown away by it, including plenty of distinctly envious looking iPhone owners.
Of course for a product like Windows or Office, what you say definitely applies. I'm not sure I agree here though, for something like this I can quite easily imagine scenarios where one person would do a substantial portion of the work. The code samples provided look to me like there's not a lot of separation between the code and UI anyway.
Plenty of large companies I've worked for have had single people working on side projects that later get the attention of management and have more resources diverted to it. Look at Google and their 20% time philosophy for a well known example. Alternatively, imagine a situation where a senior developer is given a project and allocated a couple of junior developers to help. It wouldn't be at all difficult for the senior developer to pass off the stolen code as his or her own.
Of course we'll probably never know exactly what really happened, but if you're right then the rot is very deep indeed.
Of course it's not really Microsoft that copied it, it was someone within Microsoft, who clearly didn't think things through and is probably rather unlikely to be employed there much longer. Of course that doesn't mean it's not Microsoft's problem since they now have to do damage control due to the egg on their faces.
As an aside, I wonder how feasible it is to put some automated checks in place to compare a signature of some code against every other known piece of open source (or otherwise?) out there to search for similarities?
There's no difference in terms of physical convinience, but potentially a big difference in terms of quality since the less distance an analogue signal needs to travel the better. Plus, high quality analogue speaker cable costs a *lot* more than cat5.
Shame they didn't go one step further and make them wireless. It would be quite nice to move speakers between rooms on occasion without having to fight with the speaker cable (or coax in this case).
*sigh*. I said RTFA for a reason. If you actually HAD read it, you would have seen this paragraph:
"The hard disk manufacturers have repeatedly assured the public that they have not built into their devices backdoors in the form of secret master keys and are hence themselves unable to unlock a password-secured hard disk. Even swapping the electronics of the protected hard disk for that of an unprotected one will not suffice to outwit the protection, because large sections of the firmware and the password itself are stored on the hard disk itself and not as one might have expected in flash memory on the motherboard."
Seems the BBC negotiated a deal with Real Networks that resulted in a special build of RealPlayer without all the nasty stuff. Pretty handy, especially since the only reason I want RealPlayer installed is to listen to BBC feeds!
Maybe that post was flamebait, but you can't deny the guy has a point. If you really are a professional photographer you would have found the best software for your needs and then bought whatever hardware/OS it needed to run on. Trying to shoehorn in an operating system to a domain where it is likely to only bring you pain isn't a very smart business move to say the least.
Kinda like a plumber who uses a stick of dynamite to unblock your toilet because he prefers blowing things up to using a plunger. Might be fun for him but not too many people will recommend his services...
Agreed this is indeed a problem, JVMs can be quite memory hungry. However there are several ways to address this. First of all, it's possible to have a single application server instance host multiple web applications. In fact, this is half the point of having an application server in the first place! Sure there's extra effort involved in getting the security and other configuration right, but it will save you gobs and gobs of memory.
Additionally, Sun will be providing new functionality in J2SE 1.6 (6.0?), due out in beta this year, to allow JVM resources to be shared across separate instances of the JVM.
Here "superiority" is a relative thing. If both cards produce identical images, then the one that produces those images at the fastest frame rate "wins", regardless of how that is acheived.
It's like the age old PC vs Mac Photoshop comparisons; it's fairly well accepted that Photoshop is not nearly as well optimized for the PC as it is the Mac, however if the main task you're going to be performing on your computer is running Photoshop then you're likely to get things done faster on a Mac, even if the CPU is technically 'slower'. Similarly, if you're likely to be playing plenty of Doom 3 and any of the other games that will be released over the next year or so that use the Doom 3 engine (of which I'm sure there'll be plenty), it certainly looks like you'll be better off with NVidia.
No, I'm not an NVidia fanboy. In fact I hardly even play games these days and don't care much for 3D performance. And please, let's not start a Mac vs PC flame war either, I'm just trying to illustrate a point here.
There's plenty of ways they'll be able to analyse it eventually, the problem is just that the tools they normally use trip up so they'll have to resort to more painful approaches and it'll take them a lot longer to figure out exactly what is going on.
Anti-debugging techniques have been in use for a long time. As an example, I remember attempting to reverse engineer some (ahem) commercial code about 15 years ago on x86 (MS-DOS). The first problem I hit was they'd replaced the keyboard interrupt (INT 9) with their own handler, so my debugger no longer responded to keypresses. After I worked around that I then discovered that they'd used the breakpoint interrupt (INT 3) to implement some critical functionality. Normal users would never even know, but as soon as you're in a debugging environment everything falls apart.
To be fair, them replacing the keyboard handler wasn't an anti-debugging feature but it still had the same effect since it still rendered my debugger impotent. It sounds like this virus has a similar effect.
Of course it wasn't long before the debuggers started to provide ways to overcome these types of problems, but it was always a constant game of leapfrog and I can't imagine much has changed.
The problem with this is that most of the planets that are observable by Hubble are HUGE. Small planets with gravities and orbits similar to Earth AFAIK aren't directly observable by Hubble, so there's a good chance that Drake's equation is rendered redundant due to the heavily skewed nature of the sample.
There's no reason why they can't map existing phone numbers to an IP address. In fact it's almost certain that this is what will happen - consider the expense to (and outcry from!) local businesses if they all had to change their signs, business cards, advertisments,...
Over time there's the possibility of moving towards other IDs such as domain names or what have you. Raw IPs aren't likely to ever be visible to anyone but the nerds.
> Java isn't and never will be as fast as C/C++
Do some research. Theoretically at least, and increasingly often in practice, a dynamically optimized language will outperform a statically optimized language in many circumstances.
Witness the huge performance delta between Java 1.0 and 1.4.2, and also realize that the dynamic optimizations performed by Hotspot are still relatively immature compared to the optimizations that are performed by your average C/C++ compiler, and you'll begin to realize that C/C++ is NOT the be-all and end-all of high performance code.
As a rough analogy, how often have you profiled code only to be surprised at where the bottlenecks are? Chances are if you've done any serious profiling, this has happened to you often, perhaps even to the point where you don't bother optimizing code without profiling it first. A similar process occurs with static optimizations - the code is optimized without the benefit of knowing on what the common code paths will be, whereas dynamic compilation allows for code to be optimized based on the way it is currently being used. Sure, there's overhead in performing the statistical analysis and compilation at runtime, but it does NOT logically follow that this will cause dynamic compilation to be any slower.
One problem with these harddrives is that they're only rated for use at up to 3000m or so. Above that there's not enough atmosphere to keep the heads floating safely above the platters.
Not a problem for most people, but it is if you're in to snowboarding and climbing or other high-altitude sports.
The only concrete complaint he seems to have is that Java is too difficult for his students because they are unable to count question marks in a prepared statement.
Perhaps he should have specified a minimum of 6 months' pre-school education as a prerequisite for his course?
Slashdot Mirror
What, Steve exaggerating (or just flat out lying) at a keynote? Unheard of!
For every "unlocked" phone that allows you to install unsigned software, yes. That's the price you pay for unlocked hardware. There are exceptions to the rule, (OS X) but they are very few and far between.
How exactly is OS X an exception?
Due to the notably disproportionate lack of spyware on the Mac.
By that logic, if I leave my front door open year round yet don't get burgled, my home must be burglar proof!
Have you tried Swype or one of the other similar "finger sliding" keyboards like SlideIT, ShapeWriter?
Until I got my Nexus One I had the same opinion as you wrt texting and touch-screen keyboards. It was one of the major reasons I had resisted buying a phone with only a software keyboard. I eventually bit the bullet after speaking to plenty of people who said they got used to the on-screen keyboard quickly enough. It still felt like a big step backwards for me though and I never really felt comfortable with any of the 3-4 different touch keyboards I'd tried until I found Swype (note that's a HUGE plus in favour of Android - you can replace virtually any part of the system 3rd party software, keyboard included).
For those of you who aren't aware of these types of keyboards, they work as follows: Rather than pressing each key one at a time like a normal keyboard, you just slide your finger across all the letters in the word you want to write. Once you've slid out the word, you lift your finger then start sliding the next word. The software figures out what word you intended and inserts that plus a space automatically. It's uncannily accurate, it only takes a few minutes to get the hang of, and it doesn't take a lot of practice until you're "typing" words at 40WPM with just one thumb.
Almost everyone I've shown it to has been blown away by it, including plenty of distinctly envious looking iPhone owners.
Plenty of large companies I've worked for have had single people working on side projects that later get the attention of management and have more resources diverted to it. Look at Google and their 20% time philosophy for a well known example. Alternatively, imagine a situation where a senior developer is given a project and allocated a couple of junior developers to help. It wouldn't be at all difficult for the senior developer to pass off the stolen code as his or her own.
Of course we'll probably never know exactly what really happened, but if you're right then the rot is very deep indeed.
As an aside, I wonder how feasible it is to put some automated checks in place to compare a signature of some code against every other known piece of open source (or otherwise?) out there to search for similarities?
You either didn't RTFA or you're just trolling, because all these points are covered quite clearly.
I wonder if this technology is similar to what (might) be being used here:
Mystery Robot
Sure, but it would be nice to have everything contained in the one box. Sounds like time for a speaker mod, anyone? :)
There's no difference in terms of physical convinience, but potentially a big difference in terms of quality since the less distance an analogue signal needs to travel the better. Plus, high quality analogue speaker cable costs a *lot* more than cat5.
Shame they didn't go one step further and make them wireless. It would be quite nice to move speakers between rooms on occasion without having to fight with the speaker cable (or coax in this case).
*sigh*. I said RTFA for a reason. If you actually HAD read it, you would have seen this paragraph:
"The hard disk manufacturers have repeatedly assured the public that they have not built into their devices backdoors in the form of secret master keys and are hence themselves unable to unlock a password-secured hard disk. Even swapping the electronics of the protected hard disk for that of an unprotected one will not suffice to outwit the protection, because large sections of the firmware and the password itself are stored on the hard disk itself and not as one might have expected in flash memory on the motherboard."
Nope, RTFA. Part of the firmware and password is stored on the HDD itself, so even replacing the entire drive controller hardware doesn't help.
Seems the BBC negotiated a deal with Real Networks that resulted in a special build of RealPlayer without all the nasty stuff. Pretty handy, especially since the only reason I want RealPlayer installed is to listen to BBC feeds!
Brings whole new meaning to the expression "Did you get out of the wrong side of bed this morning?"
Maybe that post was flamebait, but you can't deny the guy has a point. If you really are a professional photographer you would have found the best software for your needs and then bought whatever hardware/OS it needed to run on. Trying to shoehorn in an operating system to a domain where it is likely to only bring you pain isn't a very smart business move to say the least.
Kinda like a plumber who uses a stick of dynamite to unblock your toilet because he prefers blowing things up to using a plunger. Might be fun for him but not too many people will recommend his services...
Well send in your CV! It sounds like they might have a few job openings shortly...
Agreed this is indeed a problem, JVMs can be quite memory hungry. However there are several ways to address this. First of all, it's possible to have a single application server instance host multiple web applications. In fact, this is half the point of having an application server in the first place! Sure there's extra effort involved in getting the security and other configuration right, but it will save you gobs and gobs of memory.
Additionally, Sun will be providing new functionality in J2SE 1.6 (6.0?), due out in beta this year, to allow JVM resources to be shared across separate instances of the JVM.
Take a look at http://research.sun.com/projects/barcelona/papers/ oopsla00.pdf to see how Sun plan on addressing this.
It's like the age old PC vs Mac Photoshop comparisons; it's fairly well accepted that Photoshop is not nearly as well optimized for the PC as it is the Mac, however if the main task you're going to be performing on your computer is running Photoshop then you're likely to get things done faster on a Mac, even if the CPU is technically 'slower'. Similarly, if you're likely to be playing plenty of Doom 3 and any of the other games that will be released over the next year or so that use the Doom 3 engine (of which I'm sure there'll be plenty), it certainly looks like you'll be better off with NVidia.
No, I'm not an NVidia fanboy. In fact I hardly even play games these days and don't care much for 3D performance. And please, let's not start a Mac vs PC flame war either, I'm just trying to illustrate a point here.
Anti-debugging techniques have been in use for a long time. As an example, I remember attempting to reverse engineer some (ahem) commercial code about 15 years ago on x86 (MS-DOS). The first problem I hit was they'd replaced the keyboard interrupt (INT 9) with their own handler, so my debugger no longer responded to keypresses. After I worked around that I then discovered that they'd used the breakpoint interrupt (INT 3) to implement some critical functionality. Normal users would never even know, but as soon as you're in a debugging environment everything falls apart.
To be fair, them replacing the keyboard handler wasn't an anti-debugging feature but it still had the same effect since it still rendered my debugger impotent. It sounds like this virus has a similar effect.
Of course it wasn't long before the debuggers started to provide ways to overcome these types of problems, but it was always a constant game of leapfrog and I can't imagine much has changed.
The problem with this is that most of the planets that are observable by Hubble are HUGE. Small planets with gravities and orbits similar to Earth AFAIK aren't directly observable by Hubble, so there's a good chance that Drake's equation is rendered redundant due to the heavily skewed nature of the sample.
Over time there's the possibility of moving towards other IDs such as domain names or what have you. Raw IPs aren't likely to ever be visible to anyone but the nerds.
Witness the huge performance delta between Java 1.0 and 1.4.2, and also realize that the dynamic optimizations performed by Hotspot are still relatively immature compared to the optimizations that are performed by your average C/C++ compiler, and you'll begin to realize that C/C++ is NOT the be-all and end-all of high performance code.
As a rough analogy, how often have you profiled code only to be surprised at where the bottlenecks are? Chances are if you've done any serious profiling, this has happened to you often, perhaps even to the point where you don't bother optimizing code without profiling it first. A similar process occurs with static optimizations - the code is optimized without the benefit of knowing on what the common code paths will be, whereas dynamic compilation allows for code to be optimized based on the way it is currently being used. Sure, there's overhead in performing the statistical analysis and compilation at runtime, but it does NOT logically follow that this will cause dynamic compilation to be any slower.
Not a problem for most people, but it is if you're in to snowboarding and climbing or other high-altitude sports.
And how many people are likely to look at all of the 'mere' 2500 results (let alone the 67,900,000 that Google returns!)?
It's the quality of the results that makes Google good, not the quantity.
The only concrete complaint he seems to have is that Java is too difficult for his students because they are unable to count question marks in a prepared statement.
Perhaps he should have specified a minimum of 6 months' pre-school education as a prerequisite for his course?