Yeah. Who knows? I mean, I haven't played with one in person, so it could be incredibly crappy to use, but from a glance I thought it looked nice. I'm not heading out to buy one, though. I quite like my iTouch.
I didn't see the text cut off of the side, either, that is definitely a problem.
I definitely encourage that among companies. They should be taking the good from each other and adding it to their products. When this occurs, consumers win. Copyright and patent law have gotten way out of whack in this country. The original point was to have a narrow field of focus to protect people long enough to make money for innovation, but also to encourage advancement, which, along with Newton's quote that if he has seen a bit farther it is because he's standing on the shoulders of giants, requires that we be able to build on other people's work. If MS is doing something subpar to what Apple is doing it should DEFINITELY copy Apple, and vice versa.
That is true, although my eyes--though young--are far from perfect. Maybe they are just good with the light sensitivity thing and bad in terms of depth. Who knows.
That is definitely a good question. And I saw someone else asking how deep the interface would go. Is it just eye-candy as a first view or will the developer tools make the interface pervasive throughout the system as Apple did with the iPhone? Who knows. I probably won't get one, but I definitely want to play with one (I actually use a non-smart phone and just carry an iPod Touch with me at all times, since I hate AT&T and don't want an expensive data plan and wifi is pretty much all-pervasive in my life).
I hear this argument from everyone, but I use a computer with an LCD screen 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I've never (ever, ever) had a problem with eye strain. That was a problem with CRTs, sure, but are there really that many people who actually have a problem looking at an LCD screen, or is this just a lot of hot air brought about by tech pundits? I sort of think that most people have heard there is a problem and believe it the way most people thought the Atkin's diet was a good nutritious diet. Maybe the e-ink guys are just marketing hard from this angle and no one has bothered to respond?
I'm not an optometrist or anything, so I could definitely be quite wrong, but I just haven't experienced this "problem" and I asked around to fellow long-term computer users and nobody I know has either. By the way, I'm a CS doctoral student and programmer and gamer, so I basically do look at screens ALL DAY. I even read academic papers on my laptop regularly (and read printed novels but I don't mind using a screen at all).
As a complete Apple fanboi, and one who owns 3 macs and swears by his iPod Touch (I don't like AT&T), I've got to say, that thing looks like it has a really nice interface. Kudos to MS, just from glancing at it (and not having played with it) it looks like the interface could be nicer than both the iPhone OS and Android. If this came out for my cell carrier I would have a tough time deciding between it and an Nexus One. I use Windows 7 at work and have enjoyed it (mostly because MS copied so many of things I prefer about the Mac interface onto Win7, it isn't OS X yet, but getting closer) and I'm willing to keep an open mind about this.
I just spent 6 months volunteering in Western Africa to combat social justice. What have YOU done? What anonymous is doing is, again, like graffiti: attempting to use means that won't convince anyone important. The fact that you equate what anonymous does with civil rights protestors is extremely offensive. I am not saying anonymous isn't fighting for something admirable, but using any illegal means that you feel like is not akin to civil disobedience. Why don't they just break into the government offices and throw stuff around and then escape and call that civil disobedience? What you are saying is that anyone can do whatever they want even if it is against the law as long as they claim its for a good cause. This is not the case and you shouldn't so easily accept what other people do just because you agree with the outcome. The ends do not justify the means.
Please. The sit-in is still a minority gaining a voice. The difference is that it is a minority that actually had to do something difficult to make a stand. They have to go and publicly be in a place to make a protest which signals who they are and what they care about. Anonymous DDOSing someone is not going to change a politicians mind. They probably aren't even citizens. Why would any government official in Australia care about some anonymous trouble maker from outside the country costing them a couple of bucks. An Australian government official WOULD care about a vocal minority of his own constituency actually pounding on his door or making other public actions that won't be construed as illegal. Anonymous' actions are not akin to a sit-in at all, they are akin to a graffiti protest of the government building's steps. No-one important will take notice. You can't honestly believe that this stupid prank will change a politicians mind.
"Too big to fail," does not mean that Google is so big that they can't fail. It means that Google is so big/important that we don't want to let them fail. I'm not saying Google is or isn't, but just clarifying that "too big to fail" in the case of the Titanic or Yahoo or Enron != "too big to fail" in the case of Google. Completely different concepts--one is claiming that their size will save them, the other is claiming that they are so important we shouldn't allow them to fail.
Except that a very small number of angry people can make a very large impact, whereas in your sit-in example it takes a lot of people who feel strongly to pull off a decent sit-in which means that the protest is more likely to reflect public opinion. DDOS is too easy for an individual or a very small group of individuals. This cheapens the process and makes the voice of one count more than the voice of many. The bottom line is that Australians need to be working against this in their political process not a bunch of holier-than-thou American youth. Let's see someone actually organize a big protest in Australia about this--that would be worthy and honorable. This is not.
As an entrance exam to our algorithms class we ask the students to write both a while loop and a for loop (this is after having taken programming classes). Some of them can't do it.
If you didn't get the concept in class and the policy is not to get outside help then you email your professor and/or TA and go to their office hours. Not getting it is no excuse for cheating.
You are assuming that downloading pre-existing code is the only type of cheating. It is also cheating for two students to work together to come up with the same code (and one of them obfuscates it after they are done). This type of cheating is not created out of instructor laziness. It is only on the shoulders of the students.
This is definitely a problem. I TAd for a class where example programs were released as Java class files. I showed the professor how decompiling the Java class could recover basically line for line his original code. There were also times where two students had the same bad errors and results but their code was obfuscated enough that you couldn't prove for sure that they were cheating. In my experience, however, the ones we felt might be cheating by working together were the ones who got the same wrong answers not the same right answers, so they ended up getting much lower grades without us having to do anything at all.
I know a Chair of a math department of one of the largest schools in the united states. They switched from mostly wintel/linux machines to macintosh for staff and any professors who don't specifically request otherwise and it cut their IT maintenance down to almost nothing and after a period of retraining most have expressed being much happier with the Macs. The Chair has 4 or 5 Macs (which synchronize using Mobile Me, which seems to be enough for him) and he swears he will never go back to Windows.
Sorry. If you really want to argue semantics: a monopoly is when a company has near-exclusive control over a market. MS has in the past had near-exclusive control over some of its markets, even though it wasn't the only player, it was the only one who could set the rules of the game. Apple does not have this. It has serious competition for all of its products. A monopoly can exist iff. there does not exist credible and serious competition. My argument is still relevant. You can't just shout monopoly because a company is doing things with their own products that you don't like. You can only shout monopoly if their products have no credible alternatives. And even then there is nothing illegal or unethical about being a monopoly. It becomes unethical/illegal when you use your position to ground out any competition. Case in point: if you invent a new personal levitation device that works great and somehow runs on solar energy and you get a patent and start building them, you would have a monopoly because no one else would be in that market at least until your patent runs out (or some other method for doing the same thing is invented). You would not be doing anything illegal or unethical, however.
I feel somewhat the same way as you about cleaning up code. But forget about the public. It is too important that other researchers be able to evaluate and use the code. For instance, let's say I don't really want to verify that your work is correct, but I want to build on it. If your code is not available I have to duplicate effort and work through all the annoying engineering details that you, presumably, have already solved in order to get to the same place as you were when you published, just so I can test an addition to your ideas. If you released the code, however, this would not be the case. I could download your code and work from there. Not releasing the code hinders scientific advancement and the only benefit is that you (or me, I do it too) can hide your sloppy code, or worse, you can protect your sub-area of research by making the cost to enter to high for another research group. I say this because there are some interesting areas of research in my field that I would like to enter but I've been warned to stay away because to catch up would take 1-2 years of straight coding without any publishing. Why? Because in some areas you need extensive frameworks of code just to be able to do research (let's not even talk verification). This means that the one or two groups that started in these areas early are the only ones investigating. If there code were open, then anyone would have the ability to start adding to the body of knowledge on the subject and advancement would accelerate.
Really? Haven't actually read very many good papers, have you? The point is that many results take a body of code that takes YEARS to develop. And most of that code isn't that scientific and therefore doesn't need to be verified, but without it you can't do the verification. It is framework, or a body of code built up as a research program runs over years that enables research. Many of these are closed source. FOSS is not "so much apart [sic] of the scientific community these days." That is just wrong. I'm a doctoral student in computer science and almost NONE of the important movers in my field publish any of their code. You are simply wrong. The bottom line is that all too many research groups are NOT publishing the code and they should be.
And since you went for a personal attack: my credentials are that I am a doctoral student who has been coding for years both professionally and as a student and I am a scientist with published work in several important journals. Judging by the fact that you posted anonymously, used incredibly poor grammar, and displayed a lack of true understanding about what goes on in scientific research, I'm guessing you aren't qualified to comment.
How are they a monopoly? They don't have the majority market share in smartphones or laptops or desktops. There is no such thing as a monopoly over your own products, so you can't say "well they get to control everything that happens on their apple devices." That is not a monopoly, because you can accomplish very nearly the same tasks with devices from other players. A monopoly exists when a company is the only player. This is not the case with apple. You can buy a Nexus. You can buy a windows PC. So what exactly do you think a monopoly is?
I think the problem is that Opera Mobile violates the SDK agreements and Opera Mini does not. Opera Mobile requires a full fledged JavaScript engine and Apple will not allow scripting engines to be included with apps.
Apple does not allow developers to develop in Java. You can use a cross compiler to compile from java to Objective-C, but I doubt this is why Opera went with Mini. As I understand it, Opera Mini executes JavaScript on Opera's servers, renders the page and sends a rendered version to the browser. If this is true, it sheds light on why Opera is doing Mini. It does it because Opera Mobile would require a full-fledged javascript interpreter and Apple will not allow an app to provide a platform for scripting or arbitrary code execution. Opera Mobile will not be on the iPhone until this policy changes, but Opera Mini might just be able to get around this restriction.
The problem with what you are saying is that a code base for a single experiment may take years to write. No one will ever validate that result if they have to start coding from scratch. Somewhat faulty verification based on having an open code base is much better than no verification at all. The code should always be open.
Credentials: A doctoral student and coder in a scientific field.
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Yeah. Who knows? I mean, I haven't played with one in person, so it could be incredibly crappy to use, but from a glance I thought it looked nice. I'm not heading out to buy one, though. I quite like my iTouch.
I didn't see the text cut off of the side, either, that is definitely a problem.
I definitely encourage that among companies. They should be taking the good from each other and adding it to their products. When this occurs, consumers win. Copyright and patent law have gotten way out of whack in this country. The original point was to have a narrow field of focus to protect people long enough to make money for innovation, but also to encourage advancement, which, along with Newton's quote that if he has seen a bit farther it is because he's standing on the shoulders of giants, requires that we be able to build on other people's work. If MS is doing something subpar to what Apple is doing it should DEFINITELY copy Apple, and vice versa.
That is true, although my eyes--though young--are far from perfect. Maybe they are just good with the light sensitivity thing and bad in terms of depth. Who knows.
That is definitely a good question. And I saw someone else asking how deep the interface would go. Is it just eye-candy as a first view or will the developer tools make the interface pervasive throughout the system as Apple did with the iPhone? Who knows. I probably won't get one, but I definitely want to play with one (I actually use a non-smart phone and just carry an iPod Touch with me at all times, since I hate AT&T and don't want an expensive data plan and wifi is pretty much all-pervasive in my life).
I hear this argument from everyone, but I use a computer with an LCD screen 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I've never (ever, ever) had a problem with eye strain. That was a problem with CRTs, sure, but are there really that many people who actually have a problem looking at an LCD screen, or is this just a lot of hot air brought about by tech pundits? I sort of think that most people have heard there is a problem and believe it the way most people thought the Atkin's diet was a good nutritious diet. Maybe the e-ink guys are just marketing hard from this angle and no one has bothered to respond?
I'm not an optometrist or anything, so I could definitely be quite wrong, but I just haven't experienced this "problem" and I asked around to fellow long-term computer users and nobody I know has either. By the way, I'm a CS doctoral student and programmer and gamer, so I basically do look at screens ALL DAY. I even read academic papers on my laptop regularly (and read printed novels but I don't mind using a screen at all).
As a complete Apple fanboi, and one who owns 3 macs and swears by his iPod Touch (I don't like AT&T), I've got to say, that thing looks like it has a really nice interface. Kudos to MS, just from glancing at it (and not having played with it) it looks like the interface could be nicer than both the iPhone OS and Android. If this came out for my cell carrier I would have a tough time deciding between it and an Nexus One. I use Windows 7 at work and have enjoyed it (mostly because MS copied so many of things I prefer about the Mac interface onto Win7, it isn't OS X yet, but getting closer) and I'm willing to keep an open mind about this.
and by combat social justice, I meant combat social injustice.
I just spent 6 months volunteering in Western Africa to combat social justice. What have YOU done? What anonymous is doing is, again, like graffiti: attempting to use means that won't convince anyone important. The fact that you equate what anonymous does with civil rights protestors is extremely offensive. I am not saying anonymous isn't fighting for something admirable, but using any illegal means that you feel like is not akin to civil disobedience. Why don't they just break into the government offices and throw stuff around and then escape and call that civil disobedience? What you are saying is that anyone can do whatever they want even if it is against the law as long as they claim its for a good cause. This is not the case and you shouldn't so easily accept what other people do just because you agree with the outcome. The ends do not justify the means.
Please. The sit-in is still a minority gaining a voice. The difference is that it is a minority that actually had to do something difficult to make a stand. They have to go and publicly be in a place to make a protest which signals who they are and what they care about. Anonymous DDOSing someone is not going to change a politicians mind. They probably aren't even citizens. Why would any government official in Australia care about some anonymous trouble maker from outside the country costing them a couple of bucks. An Australian government official WOULD care about a vocal minority of his own constituency actually pounding on his door or making other public actions that won't be construed as illegal. Anonymous' actions are not akin to a sit-in at all, they are akin to a graffiti protest of the government building's steps. No-one important will take notice. You can't honestly believe that this stupid prank will change a politicians mind.
"Too big to fail," does not mean that Google is so big that they can't fail. It means that Google is so big/important that we don't want to let them fail. I'm not saying Google is or isn't, but just clarifying that "too big to fail" in the case of the Titanic or Yahoo or Enron != "too big to fail" in the case of Google. Completely different concepts--one is claiming that their size will save them, the other is claiming that they are so important we shouldn't allow them to fail.
Except that a very small number of angry people can make a very large impact, whereas in your sit-in example it takes a lot of people who feel strongly to pull off a decent sit-in which means that the protest is more likely to reflect public opinion. DDOS is too easy for an individual or a very small group of individuals. This cheapens the process and makes the voice of one count more than the voice of many. The bottom line is that Australians need to be working against this in their political process not a bunch of holier-than-thou American youth. Let's see someone actually organize a big protest in Australia about this--that would be worthy and honorable. This is not.
As an entrance exam to our algorithms class we ask the students to write both a while loop and a for loop (this is after having taken programming classes). Some of them can't do it.
If you didn't get the concept in class and the policy is not to get outside help then you email your professor and/or TA and go to their office hours. Not getting it is no excuse for cheating.
You are assuming that downloading pre-existing code is the only type of cheating. It is also cheating for two students to work together to come up with the same code (and one of them obfuscates it after they are done). This type of cheating is not created out of instructor laziness. It is only on the shoulders of the students.
This is definitely a problem. I TAd for a class where example programs were released as Java class files. I showed the professor how decompiling the Java class could recover basically line for line his original code. There were also times where two students had the same bad errors and results but their code was obfuscated enough that you couldn't prove for sure that they were cheating. In my experience, however, the ones we felt might be cheating by working together were the ones who got the same wrong answers not the same right answers, so they ended up getting much lower grades without us having to do anything at all.
I know a Chair of a math department of one of the largest schools in the united states. They switched from mostly wintel/linux machines to macintosh for staff and any professors who don't specifically request otherwise and it cut their IT maintenance down to almost nothing and after a period of retraining most have expressed being much happier with the Macs. The Chair has 4 or 5 Macs (which synchronize using Mobile Me, which seems to be enough for him) and he swears he will never go back to Windows.
This sounds remarkably like the same things that the top AI researchers were saying 20 years ago. Funny how that works.
Sorry. If you really want to argue semantics: a monopoly is when a company has near-exclusive control over a market. MS has in the past had near-exclusive control over some of its markets, even though it wasn't the only player, it was the only one who could set the rules of the game. Apple does not have this. It has serious competition for all of its products. A monopoly can exist iff. there does not exist credible and serious competition. My argument is still relevant. You can't just shout monopoly because a company is doing things with their own products that you don't like. You can only shout monopoly if their products have no credible alternatives. And even then there is nothing illegal or unethical about being a monopoly. It becomes unethical/illegal when you use your position to ground out any competition. Case in point: if you invent a new personal levitation device that works great and somehow runs on solar energy and you get a patent and start building them, you would have a monopoly because no one else would be in that market at least until your patent runs out (or some other method for doing the same thing is invented). You would not be doing anything illegal or unethical, however.
I feel somewhat the same way as you about cleaning up code. But forget about the public. It is too important that other researchers be able to evaluate and use the code. For instance, let's say I don't really want to verify that your work is correct, but I want to build on it. If your code is not available I have to duplicate effort and work through all the annoying engineering details that you, presumably, have already solved in order to get to the same place as you were when you published, just so I can test an addition to your ideas. If you released the code, however, this would not be the case. I could download your code and work from there. Not releasing the code hinders scientific advancement and the only benefit is that you (or me, I do it too) can hide your sloppy code, or worse, you can protect your sub-area of research by making the cost to enter to high for another research group. I say this because there are some interesting areas of research in my field that I would like to enter but I've been warned to stay away because to catch up would take 1-2 years of straight coding without any publishing. Why? Because in some areas you need extensive frameworks of code just to be able to do research (let's not even talk verification). This means that the one or two groups that started in these areas early are the only ones investigating. If there code were open, then anyone would have the ability to start adding to the body of knowledge on the subject and advancement would accelerate.
Really? Haven't actually read very many good papers, have you? The point is that many results take a body of code that takes YEARS to develop. And most of that code isn't that scientific and therefore doesn't need to be verified, but without it you can't do the verification. It is framework, or a body of code built up as a research program runs over years that enables research. Many of these are closed source. FOSS is not "so much apart [sic] of the scientific community these days." That is just wrong. I'm a doctoral student in computer science and almost NONE of the important movers in my field publish any of their code. You are simply wrong. The bottom line is that all too many research groups are NOT publishing the code and they should be.
And since you went for a personal attack: my credentials are that I am a doctoral student who has been coding for years both professionally and as a student and I am a scientist with published work in several important journals. Judging by the fact that you posted anonymously, used incredibly poor grammar, and displayed a lack of true understanding about what goes on in scientific research, I'm guessing you aren't qualified to comment.
How are they a monopoly? They don't have the majority market share in smartphones or laptops or desktops. There is no such thing as a monopoly over your own products, so you can't say "well they get to control everything that happens on their apple devices." That is not a monopoly, because you can accomplish very nearly the same tasks with devices from other players. A monopoly exists when a company is the only player. This is not the case with apple. You can buy a Nexus. You can buy a windows PC. So what exactly do you think a monopoly is?
I think the problem is that Opera Mobile violates the SDK agreements and Opera Mini does not. Opera Mobile requires a full fledged JavaScript engine and Apple will not allow scripting engines to be included with apps.
Apple does not allow developers to develop in Java. You can use a cross compiler to compile from java to Objective-C, but I doubt this is why Opera went with Mini. As I understand it, Opera Mini executes JavaScript on Opera's servers, renders the page and sends a rendered version to the browser. If this is true, it sheds light on why Opera is doing Mini. It does it because Opera Mobile would require a full-fledged javascript interpreter and Apple will not allow an app to provide a platform for scripting or arbitrary code execution. Opera Mobile will not be on the iPhone until this policy changes, but Opera Mini might just be able to get around this restriction.
We want you to release your MATLAB code. It is fine that the platform is closed. MATLAB isn't the scientific part of what you are doing. Your code is.
The problem with what you are saying is that a code base for a single experiment may take years to write. No one will ever validate that result if they have to start coding from scratch. Somewhat faulty verification based on having an open code base is much better than no verification at all. The code should always be open.
Credentials: A doctoral student and coder in a scientific field.