To be honest, there is one other approach Google could have used to combat the KIRFs, fragmentation, and "Poison Pills".
There's one component within nearly all Android devices that isn't actually part of Android and was never open-source by any definition - Google Apps (which includes the Market).
Crack down on GApps licensing, and you can exert control over the Android ecosystem without hiding away the source for the rest of the OS stack.
Compared to what mobile OS that actually has any decent market share is Android a move in the wrong direction as far as openness?
PalmOS? Always closed-source, and when someone figured out how to "cook" custom PalmOS ROMs for the Treo 650, Palm was VERY aggressive at shutting them down. Windows Mobile? - Always closed-source, and sadly, prior to Android, WM was the most open of the mainstream mobile OSes. Blackberry? - Highly closed and tightly controlled Apple iOS? - With the exception of dumphone OSes, it's the epitome of closed Symbian? - Never had significant market share, and the issue of Symbian and openness seems to be a yo-yo OpenMoko? - Did they ever even release a fully functional device? If they did, it was an EDGE device in a UMTS era.
Also, I thought that Google said that they would release 3.x source code once ICS was released?
Google was in a pretty bad position... On one hand, the "openness" of Android was great for consumers. However, some of the sacrifices to "openness" that Google had to make in order to get carriers and hardware manufacturers on board resulted in carriers/manufacturers being able to release closed "poison pill" devices (Motorola) or simply fragment Android by not releasing updates in a timely fashion (AT&T).
So with Honeycomb, Google withheld sources for two reasons that I can see: 1) Prevent people from porting 3.x to phones, for which it was not suited 2) Prevent manufacturers from fragmenting Android further, by saying "You want Honeycomb? Commit to timely updates." - The honest truth is that despite the reduction in "openness" with 3.x - the user experience IS better. Update latency is measured in weeks or maybe 1-2 months, not the 6+ month latencies you saw for 2.x on some devices.
However I think that this was not the best way to do things. What Google should have done is be FAR more restrictive in terms of Market/Google Apps licensing. That along would've been enough to keep the manufacturers in line without having to close up the source for a year.
Re:For the uninformed like me....
on
Arduino Goes ARM
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· Score: 2
It does have 32 bit registers.
An example of a benefit of this are softPWM implementations - on AVRs, softPWM with greater than 8 bits of resolution is a real bitch because once you go above 8 bits, the mathematics slow down a LOT. I worked around this once by having a fast 8-bit PWM loop that was dithered every PWM cycle by an outer sigma-delta modulator loop. I would've been able to do straight softPWM a lot easier with 32-bit registers.
It's also clocked at 96 MHz, significantly higher than the 16 MHz of the MegaXX8s that Arduinos normally use.
Also, the ARM Cortex-M3 architecture has some nifty tricks for modifying individual bits of each register or memory location. With AVR, modifying a single bit requires a read-modify-write operation. In the CM3, each register and memory location is aliased to 8 memory locations, each representing one bit of the aliased location. If the Arduino IDE takes advantage of this trick, it means that you won't pay the heavy I/O penalties Arduino is (or at least was) notorious for.
You clearly didn't read the link at all. (Looks like NYT is semi-paywalling - I was able to use that link before but now it's paywalling me...)
In the article, Warren is indicating that his taxes (in terms of percentage) are lower than anyone else in his office and that this should not be the case. He specifically says that if you make money with money (e.g. investments and such), your taxes are ridiculously low. If you make money by doing real work - your tax percentages are FAR higher.
Don't bother with 802.11n in the 2.4 GHz band - unless you are so far out in the middle of nowhere that there isn't a single 2.4 GHz interference source near you, a high-powered G router with a high-gain antenna will blow away a 2.4 GHz N router in most performance scenarios. 802.11N performance drops drastically in the presence of legacy devices.
So get a nice vanilla (but solid) 802.11g unit for 2.4 GHz service that: Supports DD-WRT Supports external antennas
Hang that off of one of the LAN ports of whatever 5 GHz gigabit-LAN capable unit you pick.
I'm doing what is basically the opposite, due to the fact that my outside Internet connection is fairly slow - the main router is an old G-only Buffalo unit, and the 5 GHz unit is currently a Netgear running DD-WRT but it is going to be replaced with a Ubiqiti Rocket M5 once I order antennas for it.
This country doesn't seem to have learned from its mistakes with Prohibition, which created some of the most violent gangs and cartels in this country's history, at least the most violent until the New Prohibition (aka War on Drugs).
Even SMS and IM merging is bad, due to the significantly different cost structures between them.
If I IM someone, I often do NOT want it going via SMS. 1) It costs them money and costs me money 2) If they're logged off of IM they may not wish to be bothered via SMS
e.g. SMS messages are for higher-priority traffic than IMs, hence should be separated.
There is a reason I have different notification tones for SMS, IM, and email - I prioritize them in that order.
In that it is enabling them to make profit and increase market share, as opposed to hemorrhage market share (BlackBerry), lose money (WebOS), or make more money off of patent licensing from Android devices than your own OS (Windows Phone 7).
The market has spoken - if you try to be "another Apple" - you will fail. Apple can do what they do by leveraging iTunes to bolster the appeal of their devices. iPhone would've gone nowhere if not for iTunes/iPod.
"For example, in WebOS you have a conversation with a person, and whether it's via SMS, IM, or email it just seamlessly flows together. With Android, these are all separate streams. "
Oh god I HATE unified messaging approaches such as this. A messaging medium with a limit of 120 characters per message has NO business being merged with email.
Look at how shitty Facebooks' messaging system has become since they removed the distinction between "email" style messages and IMs. No more subject lines, I get emails when someone IMs me... yech.
Trying to have a "me too" OS at this point without major backers beyond themselves would be an epic failure.
Look at how well Samsung Bada is doing... Or to be more specific, NOT doing. Android is consisting of an increasingly large percentage of Samsung's mobile market share.
Unless Google completely screws up the Motorola situations, I don't see Samsung or HTC dropping Android any time soon. It would leave a product vacuum (non-Moto Android phones) that new players would swoop into - consumers want Android or iOS, not a smalltime player in the mobile market with little developer support - HP's failure with WebOS is a clear example of that.
Yeah, for a vehicle, any software tasks related to engine management are easy peasy compared to designing electrical interfaces between the microcontroller and the engine that won't fry after a few miles. For automotive work, EE is far more useful than CS.
If you go for a second major, go for EE. What the OP describes as his desire for what he'd get from CS sounds more like what he'd get from an EE major or minor with a focus on computer architectures or microcontrollers, or possibly even power electronics. (Actually in this era of hybrids and EVs - if you want to do automotive work that goes anywhere beyond the pure mechanical, you need a SOLID understanding of power electronics.)
The honest truth - You need the electrical interfaces (servos, steppers, sensors, solenoids) between the computer and the mechanics of a vehicle. Developing robust electrical interfaces in a vehicle environment (dirty power with lots of dropouts and spikes, lots of EMI, etc.) is NOT easy. Compared to that, the software doing actual critical engine work in most vehicles is dead simple. Ignore the "Cars have x million lines of code nowadays" - the entertainment and navigation system comprises 90% of the lines of code but performs less than 10% of the critical functions of the vehicle.
The homophobic language may be in another email. The first two emails were clearly racist. The one about the marriage affair investigation looks like an actual case of a department doing EXACTLY what they should have. They received a complaint that an officer had run a criminal background check against him for personal reasons - they investigated this complaint. Someone might have misread the email as indicating that the department ran a background check on the guy just because he complained - but they went and looked to see who ELSE may have background checked the guy because he complained about having a background check run against him.
Yup. As far as my high school classmates - the proportion of students that went into military or law enforcement was FAR lower (5-10% at most), however, I grew up in a fairly wealthy county in suburban New Jersey. However, the students that later became cops were the worst troublemakers in school.
Of all the people I knew from childhood who became police officers, I can think of only ONE who could have been described as a "good kid". In fact, he was an Eagle Scout in my Boy Scout troop - however, law enforcement officers like him are sadly the exception and not the norm.
That's the real key to the success of tablets in the past few years.
There was nothing particularly new or revolutionary about the iPad except one thing: It was the first device that attempted to scale a touch-oriented mobile phone OS up to a larger screen, instead of shoehorning a desktop OS into a smaller device. It helped Apple that they already had a good touchscreen-oriented phone OS, but Android transitioned to tablets easily too.
The HP TouchPad would have done well if WebOS weren't already dying a slow and painful death with miniscule market share.
Or 4) They liquidated their assembled units but still had remaining parts not usable for anything else. To liquidate said parts, it's easier to sell assembled units at well below cost than to try and sell the parts piecemeal.
Probably liquidating parts they already have in stock or may not already have in stock but are contractually obligated to buy (e.g. long-lead items they already ordered to support production.)
This isn't exactly super-new - it's expanding the scope of an existing technique to cases where it hasn't been used before.
Using glue instead of sutures has been around for at least a decade - after getting hit in the face with a hockey pick around 1999-2000, instead of stitches the local hospital glued together the gash above my eye where the lens from my glasses pushed in. (Thank God for shatterproof polycarbonate lenses - the lens saved my eye.) The glue worked very well - not even the slightest scar remains there.
However this appears to involve applying glue with far more precision than anything done before.
If it's unique and new and people aren't quite capable of justifying it yet, it'll take off slowly. Just look at the early days of DVR.
If it's a "me too attempt" at competing with something out there using a similar product - it becomes quickly apparent whether you've got what it takes to "stay in the game" (Android) or you don't (WebOS, Blackberry PlayBook). If upon release your product simply sucks and gets killed by reviewers for being incomplete - then it deserves to die. This was the case for the TouchPad and PlayBook.
When you're up against Android and the iPad in the tablet market - if you release a halfassed incomplete product, you die and you deserve it.
Get to a PC. We need our fix of hot grits and petrified Natalie Portman.
CmdrTaco - I've had this site as my browser home page since I discovered it near the beginning in 1997 when I was in high school. It will be interesting to see where things go without your guidance. Thank you very much for creating a great thing.
Yup. Kid gamers aren't people you'd want as bar patrons - they'd get in the way and wouldn't bring in much money.
But I agree with you - adult gamers WILL consume beer, and I think they tend to also gravitate towards higher-end beers that are probably more profitable for the bar.
I can't tolerate football at all on TV, and I can barely tolerate it in person, for the same reason as you - too much time spent watching the clock tick with nothing happening. I somewhat enjoy hockey on TV, but I LOVE it in person, especially in a highly energetic rink like Lynah Rink at Cornell. Sometimes you can burn 8 minutes of a period without a single stoppage of play. (Which actually sucks if the rink doesn't let you take your seats during play and you get to the game 2 minutes late.) I'd find entertainment from a Starcraft match or a good FPS match even though I never enjoyed playing SC myself. Baseball - it's OK in person, but mindnumbingly boring on TV. The only time I've tolerated it on TV was when I was in Japan and it was the only thing I could understand on TV.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, there is one other approach Google could have used to combat the KIRFs, fragmentation, and "Poison Pills".
There's one component within nearly all Android devices that isn't actually part of Android and was never open-source by any definition - Google Apps (which includes the Market).
Crack down on GApps licensing, and you can exert control over the Android ecosystem without hiding away the source for the rest of the OS stack.
Please substantiate this.
Compared to what mobile OS that actually has any decent market share is Android a move in the wrong direction as far as openness?
PalmOS? Always closed-source, and when someone figured out how to "cook" custom PalmOS ROMs for the Treo 650, Palm was VERY aggressive at shutting them down.
Windows Mobile? - Always closed-source, and sadly, prior to Android, WM was the most open of the mainstream mobile OSes.
Blackberry? - Highly closed and tightly controlled
Apple iOS? - With the exception of dumphone OSes, it's the epitome of closed
Symbian? - Never had significant market share, and the issue of Symbian and openness seems to be a yo-yo
OpenMoko? - Did they ever even release a fully functional device? If they did, it was an EDGE device in a UMTS era.
Also, I thought that Google said that they would release 3.x source code once ICS was released?
Google was in a pretty bad position... On one hand, the "openness" of Android was great for consumers. However, some of the sacrifices to "openness" that Google had to make in order to get carriers and hardware manufacturers on board resulted in carriers/manufacturers being able to release closed "poison pill" devices (Motorola) or simply fragment Android by not releasing updates in a timely fashion (AT&T).
So with Honeycomb, Google withheld sources for two reasons that I can see:
1) Prevent people from porting 3.x to phones, for which it was not suited
2) Prevent manufacturers from fragmenting Android further, by saying "You want Honeycomb? Commit to timely updates." - The honest truth is that despite the reduction in "openness" with 3.x - the user experience IS better. Update latency is measured in weeks or maybe 1-2 months, not the 6+ month latencies you saw for 2.x on some devices.
However I think that this was not the best way to do things. What Google should have done is be FAR more restrictive in terms of Market/Google Apps licensing. That along would've been enough to keep the manufacturers in line without having to close up the source for a year.
It does have 32 bit registers.
An example of a benefit of this are softPWM implementations - on AVRs, softPWM with greater than 8 bits of resolution is a real bitch because once you go above 8 bits, the mathematics slow down a LOT. I worked around this once by having a fast 8-bit PWM loop that was dithered every PWM cycle by an outer sigma-delta modulator loop. I would've been able to do straight softPWM a lot easier with 32-bit registers.
It's also clocked at 96 MHz, significantly higher than the 16 MHz of the MegaXX8s that Arduinos normally use.
Also, the ARM Cortex-M3 architecture has some nifty tricks for modifying individual bits of each register or memory location. With AVR, modifying a single bit requires a read-modify-write operation. In the CM3, each register and memory location is aliased to 8 memory locations, each representing one bit of the aliased location. If the Arduino IDE takes advantage of this trick, it means that you won't pay the heavy I/O penalties Arduino is (or at least was) notorious for.
You clearly didn't read the link at all. (Looks like NYT is semi-paywalling - I was able to use that link before but now it's paywalling me...)
In the article, Warren is indicating that his taxes (in terms of percentage) are lower than anyone else in his office and that this should not be the case. He specifically says that if you make money with money (e.g. investments and such), your taxes are ridiculously low. If you make money by doing real work - your tax percentages are FAR higher.
I agree.
Don't bother with 802.11n in the 2.4 GHz band - unless you are so far out in the middle of nowhere that there isn't a single 2.4 GHz interference source near you, a high-powered G router with a high-gain antenna will blow away a 2.4 GHz N router in most performance scenarios. 802.11N performance drops drastically in the presence of legacy devices.
So get a nice vanilla (but solid) 802.11g unit for 2.4 GHz service that:
Supports DD-WRT
Supports external antennas
Hang that off of one of the LAN ports of whatever 5 GHz gigabit-LAN capable unit you pick.
I'm doing what is basically the opposite, due to the fact that my outside Internet connection is fairly slow - the main router is an old G-only Buffalo unit, and the 5 GHz unit is currently a Netgear running DD-WRT but it is going to be replaced with a Ubiqiti Rocket M5 once I order antennas for it.
Yup. The interesting thing is that even some of the rich people in question are effectively saying "please fuck us" - tax-wise at least.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html
I think that's his point...
This country doesn't seem to have learned from its mistakes with Prohibition, which created some of the most violent gangs and cartels in this country's history, at least the most violent until the New Prohibition (aka War on Drugs).
Even SMS and IM merging is bad, due to the significantly different cost structures between them.
If I IM someone, I often do NOT want it going via SMS.
1) It costs them money and costs me money
2) If they're logged off of IM they may not wish to be bothered via SMS
e.g. SMS messages are for higher-priority traffic than IMs, hence should be separated.
There is a reason I have different notification tones for SMS, IM, and email - I prioritize them in that order.
In that it is enabling them to make profit and increase market share, as opposed to hemorrhage market share (BlackBerry), lose money (WebOS), or make more money off of patent licensing from Android devices than your own OS (Windows Phone 7).
The market has spoken - if you try to be "another Apple" - you will fail. Apple can do what they do by leveraging iTunes to bolster the appeal of their devices. iPhone would've gone nowhere if not for iTunes/iPod.
"For example, in WebOS you have a conversation with a person, and whether it's via SMS, IM, or email it just seamlessly flows together. With Android, these are all separate streams. "
Oh god I HATE unified messaging approaches such as this. A messaging medium with a limit of 120 characters per message has NO business being merged with email.
Look at how shitty Facebooks' messaging system has become since they removed the distinction between "email" style messages and IMs. No more subject lines, I get emails when someone IMs me... yech.
Using Android IS benefiting them.
Trying to have a "me too" OS at this point without major backers beyond themselves would be an epic failure.
Look at how well Samsung Bada is doing... Or to be more specific, NOT doing. Android is consisting of an increasingly large percentage of Samsung's mobile market share.
Unless Google completely screws up the Motorola situations, I don't see Samsung or HTC dropping Android any time soon. It would leave a product vacuum (non-Moto Android phones) that new players would swoop into - consumers want Android or iOS, not a smalltime player in the mobile market with little developer support - HP's failure with WebOS is a clear example of that.
Yeah, for a vehicle, any software tasks related to engine management are easy peasy compared to designing electrical interfaces between the microcontroller and the engine that won't fry after a few miles. For automotive work, EE is far more useful than CS.
I would also say - focus on the ME major.
If you go for a second major, go for EE. What the OP describes as his desire for what he'd get from CS sounds more like what he'd get from an EE major or minor with a focus on computer architectures or microcontrollers, or possibly even power electronics. (Actually in this era of hybrids and EVs - if you want to do automotive work that goes anywhere beyond the pure mechanical, you need a SOLID understanding of power electronics.)
The honest truth - You need the electrical interfaces (servos, steppers, sensors, solenoids) between the computer and the mechanics of a vehicle. Developing robust electrical interfaces in a vehicle environment (dirty power with lots of dropouts and spikes, lots of EMI, etc.) is NOT easy. Compared to that, the software doing actual critical engine work in most vehicles is dead simple. Ignore the "Cars have x million lines of code nowadays" - the entertainment and navigation system comprises 90% of the lines of code but performs less than 10% of the critical functions of the vehicle.
The homophobic language may be in another email. The first two emails were clearly racist. The one about the marriage affair investigation looks like an actual case of a department doing EXACTLY what they should have. They received a complaint that an officer had run a criminal background check against him for personal reasons - they investigated this complaint. Someone might have misread the email as indicating that the department ran a background check on the guy just because he complained - but they went and looked to see who ELSE may have background checked the guy because he complained about having a background check run against him.
Yup. As far as my high school classmates - the proportion of students that went into military or law enforcement was FAR lower (5-10% at most), however, I grew up in a fairly wealthy county in suburban New Jersey. However, the students that later became cops were the worst troublemakers in school.
Of all the people I knew from childhood who became police officers, I can think of only ONE who could have been described as a "good kid". In fact, he was an Eagle Scout in my Boy Scout troop - however, law enforcement officers like him are sadly the exception and not the norm.
That's the real key to the success of tablets in the past few years.
There was nothing particularly new or revolutionary about the iPad except one thing: It was the first device that attempted to scale a touch-oriented mobile phone OS up to a larger screen, instead of shoehorning a desktop OS into a smaller device. It helped Apple that they already had a good touchscreen-oriented phone OS, but Android transitioned to tablets easily too.
The HP TouchPad would have done well if WebOS weren't already dying a slow and painful death with miniscule market share.
Also, 4chan is basically the birthplace of Anonymous... Why would they attack it?
Something is VERY fishy here - the three entities attacked are the last three entities on this planet I could imagine Anonymous attacking.
Or 4) They liquidated their assembled units but still had remaining parts not usable for anything else. To liquidate said parts, it's easier to sell assembled units at well below cost than to try and sell the parts piecemeal.
Probably liquidating parts they already have in stock or may not already have in stock but are contractually obligated to buy (e.g. long-lead items they already ordered to support production.)
This isn't exactly super-new - it's expanding the scope of an existing technique to cases where it hasn't been used before.
Using glue instead of sutures has been around for at least a decade - after getting hit in the face with a hockey pick around 1999-2000, instead of stitches the local hospital glued together the gash above my eye where the lens from my glasses pushed in. (Thank God for shatterproof polycarbonate lenses - the lens saved my eye.) The glue worked very well - not even the slightest scar remains there.
However this appears to involve applying glue with far more precision than anything done before.
If it's unique and new and people aren't quite capable of justifying it yet, it'll take off slowly. Just look at the early days of DVR.
If it's a "me too attempt" at competing with something out there using a similar product - it becomes quickly apparent whether you've got what it takes to "stay in the game" (Android) or you don't (WebOS, Blackberry PlayBook). If upon release your product simply sucks and gets killed by reviewers for being incomplete - then it deserves to die. This was the case for the TouchPad and PlayBook.
When you're up against Android and the iPad in the tablet market - if you release a halfassed incomplete product, you die and you deserve it.
Get to a PC. We need our fix of hot grits and petrified Natalie Portman.
CmdrTaco - I've had this site as my browser home page since I discovered it near the beginning in 1997 when I was in high school. It will be interesting to see where things go without your guidance. Thank you very much for creating a great thing.
Yup. Kid gamers aren't people you'd want as bar patrons - they'd get in the way and wouldn't bring in much money.
But I agree with you - adult gamers WILL consume beer, and I think they tend to also gravitate towards higher-end beers that are probably more profitable for the bar.
I can't tolerate football at all on TV, and I can barely tolerate it in person, for the same reason as you - too much time spent watching the clock tick with nothing happening.
I somewhat enjoy hockey on TV, but I LOVE it in person, especially in a highly energetic rink like Lynah Rink at Cornell. Sometimes you can burn 8 minutes of a period without a single stoppage of play. (Which actually sucks if the rink doesn't let you take your seats during play and you get to the game 2 minutes late.)
I'd find entertainment from a Starcraft match or a good FPS match even though I never enjoyed playing SC myself.
Baseball - it's OK in person, but mindnumbingly boring on TV. The only time I've tolerated it on TV was when I was in Japan and it was the only thing I could understand on TV.