Sigh. Few people actually realize this, but Google can't possibly do it even if they wanted.
Each different phone has different custom hardware. That requires a different kernel, different drivers, etc, etc. Google couldn't possible push an update to any hardware except its own - Nexus One and Nexus S. There is no standard for phones like there is for personal computers. Google would have to maintain and test different Android distributions for every one of the (hundreds?) phones out there. Absurd.
When you buy a phone from a manufacturer (Samsung, HTC, Motorola, whatever) it is that manufacturer's responsibility to update your phone. If you don't like their update policies, don't buy from them. The market should work. And if people don't care (which is apparently the case), why should the manufacturers?
Sadly, Google gets blamed for something which is outside of their control. It is like blaming Linus Torvalds for me being too lazy to install the latest security updates on our company website.
Well, I am a Comcast customer (have been for several years) and I really don't have issues, especially in the last couple of years. Before that there were service outages for about an hour every week, which was annoying as hell. The speed is reliable 5up / 20down and I haven't ever hit any throttling or caps, considering that my usage pattern is hardly typical (remote access to different machines, shared document editing, VPNs, transferring large amounts of data over SSH, etc). The only time I remember needing a Comcast technician - when I moved in my current place - he was on time and did his job.
Of course that is just my personal experience, but it is the only one I have:-) It may depend on where you live - I am located in the Bay Area - but it bothers me to see Comcast constantly being vilified, when my personal experience with them has been consistently good, and as far as I can tell they are actually better than some other ISPs.
My only real complaint is that 5up/20down should cost like $10 a month, and it should be the only kind of service I need from Comcast:-) (With Netflix and, say, Vonage).
I don't understand this irrational hate. How is Comcast trying to destroy the Internet? They have clearly defined caps, they are one of the first trying to deploy IPv6 to consumers, they offer one of the best speeds. No, they are not perfect, and they are not cheap, but as an ISP they are better than AT&T, for example.
One of them is a monopoly in a couple of important areas, and using that monopoly to muscle itself via brute force in nearly every single aspect of computing (gaming, mobile, cloud, etc) - guess which one? Microsoft can no longer be judged solely on technical grounds (where fortunately they do suck).
I think your suggestion makes a lot of practical sense. I doubt many people will actually understand and appreciate it though. Judging from the other comments they don't - it is actually quite shocking how negative most of the replies are. That is why it has zero change of being adopted. Oh, well, at least a couple of years from now, when we are fucked and IPv6 is still nowhere, you can tell everybody "I told you so":-)
Thank god, there is Ron Miller to tell us what to think and like.
While I am not particularly excited about The Daily specifically, Miller's assertion that "we" (who is "we"??) don't want a paid daily newspaper from a single source is very arrogant and short sighted. Many of us _do_ want a paid daily newspaper from a single source. No, that is not all that "we" read, but "we" like the reliable and consistent quality and even a little predictable bias. It is not the same as Google News. I am not bashing the latter, but to assume that everybody wants the same thing is amazingly naive.
"20-century model" in a "21-century package" is "doomed to fail from the get go". Oh my. Such buzz-filled nonsense makes me sick. A paper book is a 16-century model, and a Kindle is the same but in a "21-century" package. Are they doomed to fail?
Don't like "The Daily" (I personally don't) - OK - don't f*ink read it. But don't pretend you have deep all-encompassing insights about what everybody wants in the "21st century".
If Oracle starts locking things up in the premium version, OpenJDK will be forked (there are already some shallow forks like IceTea that take OpenJDK and replace the remaining closed-source bits with stuff from GNU Classpath etc) and the community will shift.
Its happened to OpenSolaris with the Illumos project and OpenOffice with the LibreOffice project. No reason it cant happen with OpenJDK.
Not going to happen. HotSpot is way too complex to be maintained by the "community". As far as I know, so far, years later, the "community" hasn't been able to port HotSpot to a single additional architecture. It runs in interpreted mode, but not as JIT on anything other than x86 or SPARC.
For what its worth, I have been a happy Comcast customer for years. My connection has been getting faster and recently (quite surprisingly) even more reliable.
I like how Comcast approached the IPv6 transition testing and I like what they are doing with DNSSEC.
Nothing is perfect in this world, of course, but you guys are doing a good job. So, thank you.
I am pretty sure no security appliance can fool anything unless it can present a security certificate that my browser trusts. That can work in a corporate environment, a school, etc, but definitely not in general.
In any case, you can trust https only to the extent you can trust the CAs. If there are any CAs in China, UAE, etc, then you can be sure the respective governments can issue a certificate for *.com:-)
I am an expat living in Saudi Arabia. For me the Blackberry is key to staying in contact with my family and friends in a way that I cannot do with other messaging services. I hope Saudi Arabia and RIM solve this situation. There are many people that work here who are away from their families that use this service. This ban would be one more reason to not come here, it does not help to the development of this country.
Suresh Haridas, Al khobar, Saudi Arabia
BlackBerry made our life much easier, whether we are using e-mail, internet, or BBM. A lot of people/students such as myself who live thousands of miles away from their family and friends really depend on BBM as a convenient medium to communicate. There is nothing compared to BBM in terms of quickness, convenience, and cost. On the other hand, I understand why governments such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and others feel threatened. However, I am wondering why BlackBerry does not help these countries in terms of monitoring data and using their own servers to get to encrypted information.
Rakan H, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
I am one of the youths who owns a BlackBerry and I completely agree that it is a major step in my country to protect it against any terrorist or anything that might affect our security. Also I believe all countries like the US should consider the same thing, because it is a tool that can be used among those people who can get access to national security and cause terror to communities. It is a perfect tool for them, cutting it off worldwide will definitely reduce the amount of global issues occurring. If it is necessary to protect the country then why not!
Jim, Singapore
I am a Canadian, living in Dubai and dreading losing my Blackberry. Most people I know are aware of the high level of security in the UAE and appreciate the benefits it provides. I would much rather lose some personal freedoms than take a chance with security. RIM has to understand that Dubai is a transit point for trade and potentially terrorism. Its population is continuously changing as over 80% of its residents are foreigners. UAE's high level of security is in the interests of the West. I am hopeful for a positive resolution but am not brave enough to buy up all the handsets that are selling cheap.
Ara, Dubai, UAE
Whilst it's perfectly true that any invasion of personal privacy in the name of national security is usually resented, I don't really understand the sense of outrage on this one. After all, don't the western intelligence agencies have extensive gathering facilities for the same sort of thing? I don't see the Gulf states doing anything more than our own governments, like it or not.
Ha - ha, come on. Last time I checked, Python 3 was released in 2008 and already has a couple of maintenance releases under its belt. Comparing that to Perl 6 is silly:-).
That says nothing about the relative merits of either language or its implementation, but it is obvious to an objective observer that Perl 6 missed the boat in terms of mind share and relevance.
Garbage collection? Code better if you're using C/C++, or use Python. Sandboxing? Can be done without a pseudo-Java VM.
Excuse me, I haven't laughed like that in a long time. Of course the solution is "just code better" - I wonder why nobody has ever thought of that.
The notion that Python is somehow preferable to Java is also funny (single-threaded, un-optimizable and using reference-counted GC - yes, that must be the future).
The real reason Nokia will not use Android is that it makes them into just another hardware handset manufacturer. "Who, Nokia, isn't that a small HTC spin-off in Taiwan?"
You are right! Now that you mention it I remember that too. A clever trick.
Those were good times... Everyday we were discovering computers could do more than we thought possible yesterday. It was exciting. Plus, lower quality graphics and sound left more to the imagination and in a sense were more immersive. Now it is just boring. (Of course that may have something to do with age:-)
I remember there were games which managed to generate very impressive sounds from the good old PC speaker using pulse-width modulation. It was pretty impressive when you suddenly heard _real_ sound from your PC speaker for the first time. I was like "what the hell is going on??"
As a parent, I would be very worried if my child wasn't interested in porn or couldn't get any.
Sometimes I forget how absurdly conservative and backwards the US is, in some respects, compared to Europe.
A "hip" company in one of the progressive centers of the US apparently thinks sex and porn are "evil". This is sad.
Ahem. Do you realize how fundamentally and permanently slow JavaScript really is?
Whether it is a "good" or a "bad" language is beside the point; it is basically unoptimizeable.
JITs and advanced complication techniques may improve its performance compared to a dumb interpreter, but it is important to look on the absolute scale, where it will remain truly awful.
(Not to mention that JITs are in fact quite limited in what they can really do)
This is a horrible basis for future development, although the idea does seem appealing at the intellectual level. It means that the browser will forever remain a "secondary" platform.
That said, I have to agree that it would still be much better than the horrible mess we have today.
I see your problem, but ultimately it doesn't matter. The bottom line is, nobody is required to sell you any product for any price.
It just happens that in this case you can obtain the product for free, which however explicitly goes against the wishes (and depending on the country legal rights) of its owner and creator.
No matter how we rationalize it, torrenting it would be unethical.
Not to mention that providing a DVR service, like the original poster wanted, clearly costs something - resources, etc. The media corporations and cable companies may be greedy bastards, but they are not the only ones. Any reasonable business is practically obligated to sell for maximum profit.
Who gave you the idea that you are entitled to watch back episodes for free? Is that like a basic human right or something? If you don't like their prising, buy the dvd, a tivo, or find another provider (my cable company lets me watch old episodes for free).
Just because you think something should cost less, doesn't give you the right to steal it.
The rest of your post notwithstanding, the beginning is seriously misleading. Surely if you had a printout of the machine code, you also had another way of transfering it to the eprom programmer, like a serial cable.
I have developed a few projects like that back in the day - no debuggers, you had to pipeline eprom erasing and programming to save time, etc, but it wasn't nearly as hard as you make it to be.
Can't say I am surprised. I had never heard of it before, so I diligently clicked all the links in TFA. Yet, within a couple of minutes I still wasn't able to figure out what it was.
There were not very useful comparisons with "Launchy", which I haven't heard of either.
May be I need to see a live demo to "get it", or may be it is too ahead of its time, or may be it is just garbage. I really don't know, but either way it isn't surprising that it hasn't caught on.
Re:How about integers instead of floating point?
on
Quake 3 For Android
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· Score: 1
Not quite true:-)
A 32-bit floating point number can't have more precision than a 32-bit integer number. The opposite in fact - you only have a 24-bit mantissa in the floating point. And worse, the larger the number becomes, the less precision you have.
That is not to say that using integer for 3D math is a good idea. It isn't, but for different reasons.
You shouldn't need a second license for the software since you will be using only one copy at a time, right? Also, it seems you don't need a second camera for this failure mode we are discussing (although having a spare of this very important device is probably a good idea).
Bottom line, I think you should get an extra hdd, make a copy of your entire os, and stash it. If you ever run into sw trouble, somebody should just swap the drives.
US drivers are 'better' in the sense that they are more predicable, and less likely to drive faster or aggressively. Driving in the US is more predictable, so it is generally safer.
The point is not what to do in the unlikely event that your gas pedal is stuck. Statistically the stuck pedal incidents are insignificant (though no less tragic). The point is to drive in a way that is likely to cause incidents of the 'common' kind. Less passing, driving slower, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. Few people actually realize this, but Google can't possibly do it even if they wanted.
Each different phone has different custom hardware. That requires a different kernel, different drivers, etc, etc. Google couldn't possible push an update to any hardware except its own - Nexus One and Nexus S. There is no standard for phones like there is for personal computers. Google would have to maintain and test different Android distributions for every one of the (hundreds?) phones out there. Absurd.
When you buy a phone from a manufacturer (Samsung, HTC, Motorola, whatever) it is that manufacturer's responsibility to update your phone. If you don't like their update policies, don't buy from them. The market should work. And if people don't care (which is apparently the case), why should the manufacturers?
Sadly, Google gets blamed for something which is outside of their control. It is like blaming Linus Torvalds for me being too lazy to install the latest security updates on our company website.
Well, I am a Comcast customer (have been for several years) and I really don't have issues, especially in the last couple of years. Before that there were service outages for about an hour every week, which was annoying as hell. The speed is reliable 5up / 20down and I haven't ever hit any throttling or caps, considering that my usage pattern is hardly typical (remote access to different machines, shared document editing, VPNs, transferring large amounts of data over SSH, etc). The only time I remember needing a Comcast technician - when I moved in my current place - he was on time and did his job.
Of course that is just my personal experience, but it is the only one I have :-) It may depend on where you live - I am located in the Bay Area - but it bothers me to see Comcast constantly being vilified, when my personal experience with them has been consistently good, and as far as I can tell they are actually better than some other ISPs.
My only real complaint is that 5up/20down should cost like $10 a month, and it should be the only kind of service I need from Comcast :-) (With Netflix and, say, Vonage).
I don't understand this irrational hate. How is Comcast trying to destroy the Internet? They have clearly defined caps, they are one of the first trying to deploy IPv6 to consumers, they offer one of the best speeds. No, they are not perfect, and they are not cheap, but as an ISP they are better than AT&T, for example.
One of them is a monopoly in a couple of important areas, and using that monopoly to muscle itself via brute force in nearly every single aspect of computing (gaming, mobile, cloud, etc) - guess which one?
Microsoft can no longer be judged solely on technical grounds (where fortunately they do suck).
I think your suggestion makes a lot of practical sense. I doubt many people will actually understand and appreciate it though. Judging from the other comments they don't - it is actually quite shocking how negative most of the replies are. That is why it has zero change of being adopted. Oh, well, at least a couple of years from now, when we are fucked and IPv6 is still nowhere, you can tell everybody "I told you so" :-)
Thank god, there is Ron Miller to tell us what to think and like.
While I am not particularly excited about The Daily specifically, Miller's assertion that "we" (who is "we"??) don't want a paid daily newspaper from a single source is very arrogant and short sighted. Many of us _do_ want a paid daily newspaper from a single source. No, that is not all that "we" read, but "we" like the reliable and consistent quality and even a little predictable bias. It is not the same as Google News. I am not bashing the latter, but to assume that everybody wants the same thing is amazingly naive.
"20-century model" in a "21-century package" is "doomed to fail from the get go". Oh my. Such buzz-filled nonsense makes me sick. A paper book is a 16-century model, and a Kindle is the same but in a "21-century" package. Are they doomed to fail?
Don't like "The Daily" (I personally don't) - OK - don't f*ink read it. But don't pretend you have deep all-encompassing insights about what everybody wants in the "21st century".
If Oracle starts locking things up in the premium version, OpenJDK will be forked (there are already some shallow forks like IceTea that take OpenJDK and replace the remaining closed-source bits with stuff from GNU Classpath etc) and the community will shift.
Its happened to OpenSolaris with the Illumos project and OpenOffice with the LibreOffice project.
No reason it cant happen with OpenJDK.
Not going to happen. HotSpot is way too complex to be maintained by the "community". As far as I know, so far, years later, the "community" hasn't been able to port HotSpot to a single additional architecture. It runs in interpreted mode, but not as JIT on anything other than x86 or SPARC.
Good luck getting respect on Slashdot :-)
For what its worth, I have been a happy Comcast customer for years. My connection has been getting faster and recently (quite surprisingly) even more reliable.
I like how Comcast approached the IPv6 transition testing and I like what they are doing with DNSSEC.
Nothing is perfect in this world, of course, but you guys are doing a good job. So, thank you.
I am pretty sure no security appliance can fool anything unless it can present a security certificate that my browser trusts. That can work in a corporate environment, a school, etc, but definitely not in general.
In any case, you can trust https only to the extent you can trust the CAs. If there are any CAs in China, UAE, etc, then you can be sure the respective governments can issue a certificate for *.com :-)
One would assume that this is all pointless, since anybody could just use a web service via https.
However one would also assume that these governments control at least one trusted signing authority, so they can freely intercept any https.
People deserve the freedom they get. Have you read the comments on BBC's article.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10899338
Let me quite a few:
Abu Mohd, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
I am an expat living in Saudi Arabia. For me the Blackberry is key to staying in contact with my family and friends in a way that I cannot do with other messaging services. I hope Saudi Arabia and RIM solve this situation. There are many people that work here who are away from their families that use this service. This ban would be one more reason to not come here, it does not help to the development of this country.
Suresh Haridas, Al khobar, Saudi Arabia
BlackBerry made our life much easier, whether we are using e-mail, internet, or BBM. A lot of people/students such as myself who live thousands of miles away from their family and friends really depend on BBM as a convenient medium to communicate. There is nothing compared to BBM in terms of quickness, convenience, and cost. On the other hand, I understand why governments such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and others feel threatened. However, I am wondering why BlackBerry does not help these countries in terms of monitoring data and using their own servers to get to encrypted information.
Rakan H, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
I am one of the youths who owns a BlackBerry and I completely agree that it is a major step in my country to protect it against any terrorist or anything that might affect our security. Also I believe all countries like the US should consider the same thing, because it is a tool that can be used among those people who can get access to national security and cause terror to communities. It is a perfect tool for them, cutting it off worldwide will definitely reduce the amount of global issues occurring. If it is necessary to protect the country then why not!
Jim, Singapore
I am a Canadian, living in Dubai and dreading losing my Blackberry. Most people I know are aware of the high level of security in the UAE and appreciate the benefits it provides. I would much rather lose some personal freedoms than take a chance with security. RIM has to understand that Dubai is a transit point for trade and potentially terrorism. Its population is continuously changing as over 80% of its residents are foreigners. UAE's high level of security is in the interests of the West. I am hopeful for a positive resolution but am not brave enough to buy up all the handsets that are selling cheap.
Ara, Dubai, UAE
Whilst it's perfectly true that any invasion of personal privacy in the name of national security is usually resented, I don't really understand the sense of outrage on this one. After all, don't the western intelligence agencies have extensive gathering facilities for the same sort of thing? I don't see the Gulf states doing anything more than our own governments, like it or not.
Ha - ha, come on. Last time I checked, Python 3 was released in 2008 and already has a couple of maintenance releases under its belt. Comparing that to Perl 6 is silly :-).
That says nothing about the relative merits of either language or its implementation, but it is obvious to an objective observer that Perl 6 missed the boat in terms of mind share and relevance.
Garbage collection? Code better if you're using C/C++, or use Python. Sandboxing? Can be done without a pseudo-Java VM.
Excuse me, I haven't laughed like that in a long time. Of course the solution is "just code better" - I wonder why nobody has ever thought of that.
The notion that Python is somehow preferable to Java is also funny (single-threaded, un-optimizable and using reference-counted GC - yes, that must be the future).
The real reason Nokia will not use Android is that it makes them into just another hardware handset manufacturer. "Who, Nokia, isn't that a small HTC spin-off in Taiwan?"
You are right! Now that you mention it I remember that too. A clever trick. Those were good times... Everyday we were discovering computers could do more than we thought possible yesterday. It was exciting. Plus, lower quality graphics and sound left more to the imagination and in a sense were more immersive. Now it is just boring. (Of course that may have something to do with age :-)
I remember there were games which managed to generate very impressive sounds from the good old PC speaker using pulse-width modulation. It was pretty impressive when you suddenly heard _real_ sound from your PC speaker for the first time. I was like "what the hell is going on??"
As a parent, I would be very worried if my child wasn't interested in porn or couldn't get any. Sometimes I forget how absurdly conservative and backwards the US is, in some respects, compared to Europe. A "hip" company in one of the progressive centers of the US apparently thinks sex and porn are "evil". This is sad.
Ahem. Do you realize how fundamentally and permanently slow JavaScript really is? Whether it is a "good" or a "bad" language is beside the point; it is basically unoptimizeable. JITs and advanced complication techniques may improve its performance compared to a dumb interpreter, but it is important to look on the absolute scale, where it will remain truly awful. (Not to mention that JITs are in fact quite limited in what they can really do) This is a horrible basis for future development, although the idea does seem appealing at the intellectual level. It means that the browser will forever remain a "secondary" platform. That said, I have to agree that it would still be much better than the horrible mess we have today.
No matter how we rationalize it, torrenting it would be unethical.
Not to mention that providing a DVR service, like the original poster wanted, clearly costs something - resources, etc. The media corporations and cable companies may be greedy bastards, but they are not the only ones. Any reasonable business is practically obligated to sell for maximum profit.
Who gave you the idea that you are entitled to watch back episodes for free? Is that like a basic human right or something? If you don't like their prising, buy the dvd, a tivo, or find another provider (my cable company lets me watch old episodes for free). Just because you think something should cost less, doesn't give you the right to steal it.
The rest of your post notwithstanding, the beginning is seriously misleading. Surely if you had a printout of the machine code, you also had another way of transfering it to the eprom programmer, like a serial cable. I have developed a few projects like that back in the day - no debuggers, you had to pipeline eprom erasing and programming to save time, etc, but it wasn't nearly as hard as you make it to be.
How did that go for you?
Can't say I am surprised. I had never heard of it before, so I diligently clicked all the links in TFA. Yet, within a couple of minutes I still wasn't able to figure out what it was. There were not very useful comparisons with "Launchy", which I haven't heard of either. May be I need to see a live demo to "get it", or may be it is too ahead of its time, or may be it is just garbage. I really don't know, but either way it isn't surprising that it hasn't caught on.
Not quite true :-)
A 32-bit floating point number can't have more precision than a 32-bit integer number. The opposite in fact - you only have a 24-bit mantissa in the floating point. And worse, the larger the number becomes, the less precision you have.
That is not to say that using integer for 3D math is a good idea. It isn't, but for different reasons.
You shouldn't need a second license for the software since you will be using only one copy at a time, right? Also, it seems you don't need a second camera for this failure mode we are discussing (although having a spare of this very important device is probably a good idea). Bottom line, I think you should get an extra hdd, make a copy of your entire os, and stash it. If you ever run into sw trouble, somebody should just swap the drives.
US drivers are 'better' in the sense that they are more predicable, and less likely to drive faster or aggressively. Driving in the US is more predictable, so it is generally safer.
The point is not what to do in the unlikely event that your gas pedal is stuck. Statistically the stuck pedal incidents are insignificant (though no less tragic). The point is to drive in a way that is likely to cause incidents of the 'common' kind. Less passing, driving slower, etc.
Yes, it is very boring :-)