Some people suspected that "Ask Slashdot" was just an infomercial designed to sell a product that just so happens satisfies the question. It didn't help that some of the questions were worded to have an obvious answer. Now the use of "sponsors" just adds to the skepticism.
There is a thing called too much TV. Some people may be shocked by this...
As for your points:
1) TV doesn't do its job anymore. News in particular. Entertain and inform were the tasks at hand. Instead I see middle American slobs neither entertaining nor informing me of anything useful. Reality shows and garbage slant news coverage is not something I will pay for.
You need to find better channels, rent a dvd, or *ahem* read a book. There are plenty of interesting shows on broadcast television, not including PBS! Daytime television sucks but that's because they are saving their more expensive shows for times where people are normally home from work. Buy a DVR and let it record the shows while you do something else. Be sure to get a DVR with multiple tuners because all the really good shows come on at the same damn time.
2) The TV that is good is covered up, hidden, made inaccessible, or mired in advertisements - if it survives some political TV executives wide-swung axe. (Examples: Eureka, Firefly, Community, and many others.)
Don't paint all networks with the incompetency that is Fox. USA, CBS, NBC, AMC and ABC to name a few have several good shows and yes they do come on at their regular advertised time. Commercials aren't really that bad live (gives me a chance to get a drink and other stuff), and I fast forward while playing from the DVR. Your examples kinda suck. I was surprised when SyFy cancelled filming future episodes of Eureka but lets be honest the storyline is getting too repetitive. They have new series like Haven. BTW, Eureka, Warehouse 13, etc. always seem to come on during their regular time slot on Mondays. However I will say having the christmas episodes come on a tuesday is confusing.
3) The price is exorbitant. When people say they are paying for 1,000-3,000 channels they are forgetting they DO NOT NEED 1,000-3,000 channels. Nor will they watch that much garbage content. They are forcing a justification to price gouge you.
Exaggerate much? I doubt I have more than 50 unique channels non premium with my cable provider. Price? Broadcast television is free. RedBox is $1 a night. Netflix is $8 a month. You can get basic cable if you are desperate for more recent episodes. Even if ala carte pricing was feasible, the cable company would have to charge a minimum. I doubt the minimum would be less than limited basic cable. Television studios shoulder most of the blame since they insist on requiring the cable companies to carry all of their channels even if only one is popular.
4) TV in its current iteration is a problem that telcos have forced us to have. Its complex, there are huge software issues, huge time slot issues, and even bigger hardware complexity issues that make it so unwieldy most leave the damn thing off. We're paying middle men of middle men for the right to look at content that is shit. I don't need more middle men.
TV is a box with moving pictures. It has a power button, channel up, channel down, volume up, volume down and picture controls. What you are talking about is the cable provider. If you don't like your current cable provider then find another one. Grandmas have no problem using that cable box so I think you are making a tempest in a teacup here.
5) It does not meet demand. It demands of you. 'YOU BE HERE AT THIS TIME AND THIS PLACE AND I'LL SHOW YOU SOME MILDLY ENTERTAINING TRASH.' I don't think anyone should pay for that - not today not ever. I run my life, not some damn box. I don't care if its a sporting event, debate, or "hit show" b/c it will be forgotten inside of a year.
Seriously... You need to buy a DVR.
We need a simplistic a la carte system where we can pick what we want, when want, and how we want it, and how much we're willing to pay for it. Nothing more, nothing less. Because of monopolisti
Sounds like retailers and television manufacturers are grumbling about market saturation. Didn't they get enough money from the last federally mandated and subsidized change in television broadcast formats?
Nothing is wrong with the current television. I can view local news and weather and it accepts video inputs from my games, netflix, dvr, and dvd player. What else do I really need?
I'll see your.sig, and raise you mine.
--
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
Nice obfuscation. Not exactly recursive but it is redundant!
Your code depends on a quirk found in the older gcc compilers. Therefore if you want it to work on the newer versions you'll need to add an include in your.sig:
Y'know, back in the day, we didn't call them "frameworks", we called them libraries, and rather than replacing one bad scripting language with another, which is effectively an interpreted language running inside another interpreted language, well we just had these library functions to tackle common problems.
The reason people call these frameworks is that these environments pretty much dictate how your code will be written. You build your custom code onto the framework provided by these products which is usually auto-generated by some script ran at the CLI.
Libraries usually don't dictate how you should write your code. Like you I prefer libraries over frameworks for most custom applications; However when it comes to writing the standard website with some custom dynamic pages nothing beats a framework. Unless you like reinventing the wheel every time you need to put a site up.
Do you want your bills to be posted 1 day late (and you encounter a late fee) because the mail delivery was delayed a day?
What does that have to do with your parent? You assume everybody waits to the last minute to pay their bills and that the last minute may fall within the 3 days that you proposed. I don't see much value in having it there the next day when you're limited by a pickup schedule. Also if they have to drive into town to go to a PO Box then they could just go to the drive up lanes that most utilities and banks have.
I much rather have 1st class mail quietly take 2 days minimum to reach its destination. This would also add value to the next day service that the USPS also provides at a higher rate. The USPS never guaranteed First Class mail makes it to its destination the next day. It just so happens that First Class mail arrives overnight for most local deliveries.
They could also sell more last mile services to the commercial companies like FedEx; This would allow the commercial companies to spend less money delivering to rural areas or to all areas on Saturday. This would serve as a way for the USPS to keep 6 day a week deliveries.
Besides, those "commercial interests" already send the vast majority of mail via USPS, so they're the one's paying the vast majority of the USPS revenue.
That's an unfair comparison. How can a residential customer compete with Junk mailers or billing companies? These commercial entities already pay a discount for pre-sort and volume.
Give commercial interests preferential treatment from a government agency and penalizing residences who aren't able to drive to the nearest PO Box. What a novel concept!
I get about a pound of junk mail every week. Coupons, Real estate offers, Credit card offers, Store sale circulars, New and Used car ads, Letters begging for money from my alma matter, and offers to save money on Insurance.
Not to mention, Congress picking on the USPS distracts our attention away from the real problems like: Medicare expansion, Corporate welfare, Social programs that have little evidence of actually meeting their mandates, Defense contractors who work on stuff outside of actual defense, Lack of true bank reforms, The possible upcoming incentive package that will mostly benefit banks and large corporations, Three different government programs that provide health benefits to the poor, the elderly, and the military veterans (why not consolidate?), The multiple government agencies that do similar tasks, The creation of new government agencies that supervise an almost as new government agency who was tasked to watch other government agencies (i.e. DHS->FBI,CIA,NSA,TSA,DOD, USCP, ISICE, USS, FEMA, USCG). I tried to give equal blame to both sides of the political spectrum.
Yes our time and effort is best spent dismantling the USPS.
But please don't assume that support of openness is "zealotry".
l didn't mean to make that assumption about you in particular. It was a knee-jerk reaction caused by prolong exposure with eager enthusiasts.
If you read comments from the CM devs they aren't on some Free Software crusade, they just enjoy hacking their phones and having a (more) open platform to do that on makes a big difference. I don't care that the GPS or 4G drivers on my Nexus are proprietary binary blobs as long as they're supported by Google and they work well.
Then we have more in common than I gave you credit for.
But when this is a device that basically holds all the most personal details of my life, and we see stories every day about Carrier IQ and shopping malls tracking cell phone users and everyone else who wants to know more about me than I want them to, you bet I'm gonna support more open devices and support the companies that promote them. Yes there's a lot of zealotry out there but in this particular case it's very relevant.
To Apple's credit they are the most up front company that I have dealt with. They always make their positions known to the customer up front and their customer service is excellent at least it has been my experience so far. Apple faced legal repercussions from the collection of WiFi data last year and I would believe that they take privacy issues a little more seriously than my phone carrier.
As for CarrierIQ, I don't really think the phone OS matters much. The CarrierIQ service within the smart phone only serves to provide usage patterns to your phone provider when you are out of their network coverage area or using WiFi. They still have most of the information available from towers and I am suspicious about their radio firmware which is not open sourced. My phone carrier offers a $10/month subscription service using a third party vendor that allows me to track all my phones regardless of type (They support my Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola handsets that are NOT smart phones).
To clarify my position: I agree that the Android OS being open source does provide some protection from tracking services running at the OS level. However it isn't fail safe because the carrier has other avenues to get most of the same information from your phone, and not all crucial parts of you phone is open sourced (e.g. Radio Firmware). I also believe that iOS isn't necessarily unsafe from not being open sourced. The iPhone customers do place a lot of trust in Apple. Apple knows this and understands the financial repercussions of violating that trust. Apple will not risk hurting its cash cow.
Obviously this bill is aimed squarely at the lower tiered positions and new hires. Basically allowing the corporations to milk more work for less money out of the people desperate to keep or get a job.
Once you are deemed an exempt employee with any kind of management function you are not required to be paid overtime anyway.
There's a HUGE difference between the iPhone "jailbreak community" and the Android custom ROM community. Yes I assumed you knew the Android option existed but if you think jailbreaking an iPhone and loading custom apps is any comparison then I guess we're not speaking the same language.
I'm sure someone has managed to get some open source OS running on the iPhone but it's nowhere near the community or user base of CM and other custom ROMs.
I guess we are talking different languages. I said nothing about installing another OS on the iPhone nor do I believe that all that can be accomplished requires me to insert custom code into the kernel. I know that people are able to run daemons on the iPhone with upgraded privileges (root), since there was a default password exploit on the sshd service that the original jail break script installed years ago. I assume that most of the really "novel" software on the iPhone require a jail broken phone solely for the elevated privileges that are required to access some services/API which the stock iPhone won't allow.
Most of *my* modifications to the linux kernel involved making a driver for a new piece of hardware. I did have an occasion where I needed to patch the linux kernel for pulse per second synchronization and there was a flaw in the LinuxPPS code that triggered on both rising and falling edges of the PPS being fed on a serial port which required my correction. That said if I did need to something at the Kernel level on the iPhone, since iOS is based on the Mach kernel, I assume I could write a kernel extension for a jail broken phone. I assume since I don't have access to a jail broken phone, but I'm sure someone around here has experience. Anyway, I assume the iPhone hardware is well supported by iOS so I really don't know why you place so much value on the OS being open source for *this* particular part of the conversation.
And I know that CM running on my Nexus S (or even stock Nexus S ROM for that matter) isn't running CarrierIQ because all of the relevant user-land apps are open source.
You only assume that CarrierIQ isn't running unless you actually view the source code yourself. You also assume that a CarrierIQ like function doesn't exist in the phone's firmware that isn't explicitly covered by an open source license.
So yes the "android is open mantra" is a pretty big deal to myself and many others, it's not just lip service.
This is where we really differ. I support open source (professionally on occasion) yet my support doesn't rise to the level of zealotry. I do not disqualify any product solely on the basis that it's less open then other options.
Um, please define "special neat trick". If you think there "isn't much of a real difference for people with the initiative" then you obviously haven't participated in the Android custom ROM community. iPhone has nothing like it, and the reason for that is that Android is open-source.
I own an Android phone. I actually been using CyangenMod for years now. I admit I don't use CyangenMod on my newest Android phone since I haven't had a compelling reason to continue to waste my valuable time playing on my phone. I do still have my unlocked and rooted old phone. So short answer is yes I have participated in the Android custom ROM community and for a very long time at that. A clue may have been that I knew the steps involved in my previous comment.
BTW, my iPhone friends say that there is a thriving jail break community on the iPhone and supposedly you can do things on a jail broken phone that can't be done on a locked iPhone. One being installing GPL licensed software as binaries from a third party software provider. I remember seeing him use his jail broken phone as a WiFi hotspot before it was sanctioned on both iOS and Android.
Honestly you could Google the iPhone jail break community and know about as much as I do, since I don't know much myself.
Can you tell me with any certainty that Option 1 absolutely prevents any such data from being sent to the carriers or CarrierIQ?
I'd say yes. Only because the iPhone is the most scrutinized (and vilified) device on the web and it hasn't been discovered so far. Also if you RTFA you'd see that the author reported that it's off by default.
And you forgot Option 3, which is to vote with your wallet and buy a Nexus device, which doesn't have Carrier IQ, which Google releases the source code for (including all binary drivers where source isn't available) as soon as, or (with 4.0) before the device launches, and is the most open, hacker friendly mass-market consumer mobile device in the US today.
Option 3 wasn't really that appealing of an option. I had the opportunity to by a Google phone when I upgraded. Google dropped the ball and couldn't decide if they would really support it. I really don't know if I could depend on Google to support their current Nexus phone for long. My reasoning being that if I had to pay full unsubsidized price for a phone then the manufacturer could at least humor me and pretend that they would support the phone. Maybe Google learned their lesson which may explain why they are purchasing Motorola so someone who knows what they are doing could make and support their phones.
Pardon the pun but we are comparing Apple and Oranges. The Asus Transformer is designed to be a laptop/tablet hybrid so I can see this chip being used to its potential. But to make the assertion that faster is better in a purely tablet form is a stretched because for things that I actually use a tablet for (yes I have an iPad 2) the CPU is being wasted. How fast do I really need my calendar, email, iSSH, Rhapsody, Netflix, HBOgo, and notepad to go? They perform exceptionally well now.
As a embedded systems guy, I'm interested in the Tegra 3. Outside of the Intel family, our shop has two classes of custom boards. The ones based on actual ARM or PowerPC cpus this is where the Tegra3 has a shot, and the other being boards designed around the Virtex series FPGAs that our FPGA guys are smitten with and it would take extinction event to be able to pry that out of their cold dead hands.:P
It is? Shootout [debian.org] makes it marginally faster in 2 tests, marginally slower in 5 tests, and 2-3x slower in two tests.
If you look a little closer in the shootout results that you linked, you will see the overall difference is a wash (basically the same speed) hence the term "statistically the same speed".
if number crunching is so important that a 10% difference is important you'd be using C anyway:-P
Actually we use intel Fortran. It's slower than C (4 times slower in the benchmark), much faster than Python and Ruby (32 times faster), and it's easier to program all those matrix manipulations without depending too much on external libraries; Not to mention the scientists around here used Fortran for decades so there you go. I'm a C/C++ guy so I do my high throughput data pushing in C which is callable in Fortran, Perl, Ruby, and Python.
I use Perl as the glue that brings all these bits of software together, and pretty much use Ruby the same way.
since android is open you can just compile the code yourself and install a copy of the OS on your phone without this
Yea lets bring out the "android is open" mantra. Conveniently leave out the rooting part, the waiting for Google to decide to release the source code, and waiting for groups like CyanogenMod to make a rom image for your phone.
I don't have an iPhone but if I did I could easily say I can do [insert special neat trick] with my iPhone after jail breaking it. There really isn't much of a real difference for people with the initiative. Especially if you depend on other people to do the real work for you.
Let's keep the discussion on phones as delivered to the average consumer.
Now take a deep breath and rationally think this through. Which is easier (for anyone)?
1. Turning off the settings using the menus within the iPhone, or
2. Downloading a rom image from CynamodGen, rooting your Android phone, and reinstalling Google binaries and reseting all your user settings.
Not to mention Ruby 1.9 is statistically the same speed as Python 3 (if not just very slightly faster).
I like both so I really don't care who wins this fanboy war.
My personal preference is Ruby since I have to work with Perl most of the day and Ruby is what OO Perl should be. Also I like RubyGems for library management, not having to worry about indentation, and there are some syntactic sugar in Ruby that gives it an edge (for me at least).
I like Python while using iPython to do some quick and dirty data checks with numpy and matplotlib.
That's better than my HTC phone which allows you to do the following in settings > About Phone > Tell HTC > Network preference > "When data connection is available" or "When Wi-Fi or cable connection is available".
I can turn off "Tell HTC" but apparently that is only for error reports relating to HTC Sense.
No other options for turning off network diagnostics are available.
I'll reserve my bashing until after we see what Google plans to do with this patent. If anything we should be bashing USPTO for granting yet another business practice patent. I'm concerned because it appears to be vaguely familiar to how I delegate "content evaluators". I'm sysadmin and give privileges to managers who delegate privileges to their subordinates.
Google's patent seems familiar. I can see a scenario where a newspaper would have their CIO delegate authority to the editor in chief. The EIC would then delegate authority to regional editors. The regional editors would then delegate authority to city editors. The city editors would delegate authority to section editors (business, social, obits, etc.). The section editors would delegate authority to their assistant editors. A news story based on its merits (rating) would propagate up the food chain by being uprated by the next editor above. A story only worth mentioning locally would be rated only by the local editor while a story worthy of national attention would be uprated by all the editor leading up to the EIC (basically propagating up the organizational tree).
It would take more than a cessna filled with explosives to take out a sturdy oceangoing vessel. Likewise, a small boat filled with explosives will only take out a watertight compartment or two on the large ship, presumably on the less desirable lower decks where you won't find the high valued targets doing deals up on the lido deck.
Slight longer answer: The ocean water is not calm. Any breach in a ship's hull will be detrimental to the vessel's ability to stay afloat. Your scenario using watertight compartments only serves as a method to delay the vessel's decent long enough for rescue crews to arrive. Depending on the weather conditions this may not be enough. Water filling the watertight compartment will cause the vessel to list towards the breach. This means that the deck is now more susceptible to waves breaking over the rail. Even if the opposite side could be ballasted to level the deck the resulting vessel depth would still make the vessel more susceptible to being swamped by the ocean's waves. This doesn't even take into account the stresses being placed on the vessel in rough seas with a breach and the metal fatigue that comes with the more affordable older vessels.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people suspected that "Ask Slashdot" was just an infomercial designed to sell a product that just so happens satisfies the question. It didn't help that some of the questions were worded to have an obvious answer. Now the use of "sponsors" just adds to the skepticism.
There is a thing called too much TV. Some people may be shocked by this...
As for your points:
You need to find better channels, rent a dvd, or *ahem* read a book. There are plenty of interesting shows on broadcast television, not including PBS! Daytime television sucks but that's because they are saving their more expensive shows for times where people are normally home from work. Buy a DVR and let it record the shows while you do something else. Be sure to get a DVR with multiple tuners because all the really good shows come on at the same damn time.
Don't paint all networks with the incompetency that is Fox. USA, CBS, NBC, AMC and ABC to name a few have several good shows and yes they do come on at their regular advertised time. Commercials aren't really that bad live (gives me a chance to get a drink and other stuff), and I fast forward while playing from the DVR. Your examples kinda suck. I was surprised when SyFy cancelled filming future episodes of Eureka but lets be honest the storyline is getting too repetitive. They have new series like Haven. BTW, Eureka, Warehouse 13, etc. always seem to come on during their regular time slot on Mondays. However I will say having the christmas episodes come on a tuesday is confusing.
Exaggerate much? I doubt I have more than 50 unique channels non premium with my cable provider. Price? Broadcast television is free. RedBox is $1 a night. Netflix is $8 a month. You can get basic cable if you are desperate for more recent episodes. Even if ala carte pricing was feasible, the cable company would have to charge a minimum. I doubt the minimum would be less than limited basic cable. Television studios shoulder most of the blame since they insist on requiring the cable companies to carry all of their channels even if only one is popular.
TV is a box with moving pictures. It has a power button, channel up, channel down, volume up, volume down and picture controls. What you are talking about is the cable provider. If you don't like your current cable provider then find another one. Grandmas have no problem using that cable box so I think you are making a tempest in a teacup here.
Seriously... You need to buy a DVR.
Sounds like retailers and television manufacturers are grumbling about market saturation. Didn't they get enough money from the last federally mandated and subsidized change in television broadcast formats?
Nothing is wrong with the current television. I can view local news and weather and it accepts video inputs from my games, netflix, dvr, and dvd player. What else do I really need?
Nice obfuscation. Not exactly recursive but it is redundant! .sig:
Your code depends on a quirk found in the older gcc compilers. Therefore if you want it to work on the newer versions you'll need to add an include in your
#include <stdio.h>
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
This message is sponsored by Mr. Buzzkillingworth as seen on TV.
The reason people call these frameworks is that these environments pretty much dictate how your code will be written. You build your custom code onto the framework provided by these products which is usually auto-generated by some script ran at the CLI.
Libraries usually don't dictate how you should write your code. Like you I prefer libraries over frameworks for most custom applications; However when it comes to writing the standard website with some custom dynamic pages nothing beats a framework. Unless you like reinventing the wheel every time you need to put a site up.
What does that have to do with your parent? You assume everybody waits to the last minute to pay their bills and that the last minute may fall within the 3 days that you proposed. I don't see much value in having it there the next day when you're limited by a pickup schedule. Also if they have to drive into town to go to a PO Box then they could just go to the drive up lanes that most utilities and banks have.
I much rather have 1st class mail quietly take 2 days minimum to reach its destination. This would also add value to the next day service that the USPS also provides at a higher rate. The USPS never guaranteed First Class mail makes it to its destination the next day. It just so happens that First Class mail arrives overnight for most local deliveries.
They could also sell more last mile services to the commercial companies like FedEx; This would allow the commercial companies to spend less money delivering to rural areas or to all areas on Saturday. This would serve as a way for the USPS to keep 6 day a week deliveries.
That's an unfair comparison. How can a residential customer compete with Junk mailers or billing companies? These commercial entities already pay a discount for pre-sort and volume.
Why? My bank accepts my pay checks.
Give commercial interests preferential treatment from a government agency and penalizing residences who aren't able to drive to the nearest PO Box. What a novel concept!
I get about a pound of junk mail every week. Coupons, Real estate offers, Credit card offers, Store sale circulars, New and Used car ads, Letters begging for money from my alma matter, and offers to save money on Insurance.
What's your secret?
Not to mention, Congress picking on the USPS distracts our attention away from the real problems like: Medicare expansion, Corporate welfare, Social programs that have little evidence of actually meeting their mandates, Defense contractors who work on stuff outside of actual defense, Lack of true bank reforms, The possible upcoming incentive package that will mostly benefit banks and large corporations, Three different government programs that provide health benefits to the poor, the elderly, and the military veterans (why not consolidate?), The multiple government agencies that do similar tasks, The creation of new government agencies that supervise an almost as new government agency who was tasked to watch other government agencies (i.e. DHS->FBI,CIA,NSA,TSA,DOD, USCP, ISICE, USS, FEMA, USCG). I tried to give equal blame to both sides of the political spectrum.
Yes our time and effort is best spent dismantling the USPS.
I use the SVN client built into iOS and iSSH for my SSH sessions. Works great for me.
Agree. One of my systems uses Perl as a backend and RoR for the web interface. The Perl glues some C code and Fortran together.
l didn't mean to make that assumption about you in particular. It was a knee-jerk reaction caused by prolong exposure with eager enthusiasts.
Then we have more in common than I gave you credit for.
To Apple's credit they are the most up front company that I have dealt with. They always make their positions known to the customer up front and their customer service is excellent at least it has been my experience so far. Apple faced legal repercussions from the collection of WiFi data last year and I would believe that they take privacy issues a little more seriously than my phone carrier.
As for CarrierIQ, I don't really think the phone OS matters much. The CarrierIQ service within the smart phone only serves to provide usage patterns to your phone provider when you are out of their network coverage area or using WiFi. They still have most of the information available from towers and I am suspicious about their radio firmware which is not open sourced. My phone carrier offers a $10/month subscription service using a third party vendor that allows me to track all my phones regardless of type (They support my Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola handsets that are NOT smart phones).
To clarify my position: I agree that the Android OS being open source does provide some protection from tracking services running at the OS level. However it isn't fail safe because the carrier has other avenues to get most of the same information from your phone, and not all crucial parts of you phone is open sourced (e.g. Radio Firmware). I also believe that iOS isn't necessarily unsafe from not being open sourced. The iPhone customers do place a lot of trust in Apple. Apple knows this and understands the financial repercussions of violating that trust. Apple will not risk hurting its cash cow.
I was thinking the same thing.
Obviously this bill is aimed squarely at the lower tiered positions and new hires. Basically allowing the corporations to milk more work for less money out of the people desperate to keep or get a job.
Once you are deemed an exempt employee with any kind of management function you are not required to be paid overtime anyway.
I guess we are talking different languages. I said nothing about installing another OS on the iPhone nor do I believe that all that can be accomplished requires me to insert custom code into the kernel. I know that people are able to run daemons on the iPhone with upgraded privileges (root), since there was a default password exploit on the sshd service that the original jail break script installed years ago. I assume that most of the really "novel" software on the iPhone require a jail broken phone solely for the elevated privileges that are required to access some services/API which the stock iPhone won't allow.
Most of *my* modifications to the linux kernel involved making a driver for a new piece of hardware. I did have an occasion where I needed to patch the linux kernel for pulse per second synchronization and there was a flaw in the LinuxPPS code that triggered on both rising and falling edges of the PPS being fed on a serial port which required my correction. That said if I did need to something at the Kernel level on the iPhone, since iOS is based on the Mach kernel, I assume I could write a kernel extension for a jail broken phone. I assume since I don't have access to a jail broken phone, but I'm sure someone around here has experience. Anyway, I assume the iPhone hardware is well supported by iOS so I really don't know why you place so much value on the OS being open source for *this* particular part of the conversation.
You only assume that CarrierIQ isn't running unless you actually view the source code yourself. You also assume that a CarrierIQ like function doesn't exist in the phone's firmware that isn't explicitly covered by an open source license.
This is where we really differ. I support open source (professionally on occasion) yet my support doesn't rise to the level of zealotry. I do not disqualify any product solely on the basis that it's less open then other options.
Of course, OpenMoko!
I own an Android phone. I actually been using CyangenMod for years now. I admit I don't use CyangenMod on my newest Android phone since I haven't had a compelling reason to continue to waste my valuable time playing on my phone. I do still have my unlocked and rooted old phone. So short answer is yes I have participated in the Android custom ROM community and for a very long time at that. A clue may have been that I knew the steps involved in my previous comment.
BTW, my iPhone friends say that there is a thriving jail break community on the iPhone and supposedly you can do things on a jail broken phone that can't be done on a locked iPhone. One being installing GPL licensed software as binaries from a third party software provider. I remember seeing him use his jail broken phone as a WiFi hotspot before it was sanctioned on both iOS and Android.
Honestly you could Google the iPhone jail break community and know about as much as I do, since I don't know much myself.
I'd say yes. Only because the iPhone is the most scrutinized (and vilified) device on the web and it hasn't been discovered so far. Also if you RTFA you'd see that the author reported that it's off by default.
Option 3 wasn't really that appealing of an option. I had the opportunity to by a Google phone when I upgraded. Google dropped the ball and couldn't decide if they would really support it. I really don't know if I could depend on Google to support their current Nexus phone for long. My reasoning being that if I had to pay full unsubsidized price for a phone then the manufacturer could at least humor me and pretend that they would support the phone. Maybe Google learned their lesson which may explain why they are purchasing Motorola so someone who knows what they are doing could make and support their phones.
Pardon the pun but we are comparing Apple and Oranges. The Asus Transformer is designed to be a laptop/tablet hybrid so I can see this chip being used to its potential. But to make the assertion that faster is better in a purely tablet form is a stretched because for things that I actually use a tablet for (yes I have an iPad 2) the CPU is being wasted. How fast do I really need my calendar, email, iSSH, Rhapsody, Netflix, HBOgo, and notepad to go? They perform exceptionally well now.
As a embedded systems guy, I'm interested in the Tegra 3. Outside of the Intel family, our shop has two classes of custom boards. The ones based on actual ARM or PowerPC cpus this is where the Tegra3 has a shot, and the other being boards designed around the Virtex series FPGAs that our FPGA guys are smitten with and it would take extinction event to be able to pry that out of their cold dead hands. :P
LOL. You beat me to it by 9 minutes. Damn my long comments.
If you look a little closer in the shootout results that you linked, you will see the overall difference is a wash (basically the same speed) hence the term "statistically the same speed".
Actually we use intel Fortran. It's slower than C (4 times slower in the benchmark), much faster than Python and Ruby (32 times faster), and it's easier to program all those matrix manipulations without depending too much on external libraries; Not to mention the scientists around here used Fortran for decades so there you go. I'm a C/C++ guy so I do my high throughput data pushing in C which is callable in Fortran, Perl, Ruby, and Python.
I use Perl as the glue that brings all these bits of software together, and pretty much use Ruby the same way.
Yea lets bring out the "android is open" mantra. Conveniently leave out the rooting part, the waiting for Google to decide to release the source code, and waiting for groups like CyanogenMod to make a rom image for your phone.
I don't have an iPhone but if I did I could easily say I can do [insert special neat trick] with my iPhone after jail breaking it. There really isn't much of a real difference for people with the initiative. Especially if you depend on other people to do the real work for you.
Let's keep the discussion on phones as delivered to the average consumer.
Now take a deep breath and rationally think this through. Which is easier (for anyone)?
1. Turning off the settings using the menus within the iPhone, or
2. Downloading a rom image from CynamodGen, rooting your Android phone, and reinstalling Google binaries and reseting all your user settings.
Not to mention Ruby 1.9 is statistically the same speed as Python 3 (if not just very slightly faster).
I like both so I really don't care who wins this fanboy war.
My personal preference is Ruby since I have to work with Perl most of the day and Ruby is what OO Perl should be. Also I like RubyGems for library management, not having to worry about indentation, and there are some syntactic sugar in Ruby that gives it an edge (for me at least).
I like Python while using iPython to do some quick and dirty data checks with numpy and matplotlib.
That's better than my HTC phone which allows you to do the following in settings > About Phone > Tell HTC > Network preference > "When data connection is available" or "When Wi-Fi or cable connection is available".
I can turn off "Tell HTC" but apparently that is only for error reports relating to HTC Sense.
No other options for turning off network diagnostics are available.
I'll reserve my bashing until after we see what Google plans to do with this patent. If anything we should be bashing USPTO for granting yet another business practice patent. I'm concerned because it appears to be vaguely familiar to how I delegate "content evaluators". I'm sysadmin and give privileges to managers who delegate privileges to their subordinates.
Google's patent seems familiar. I can see a scenario where a newspaper would have their CIO delegate authority to the editor in chief. The EIC would then delegate authority to regional editors. The regional editors would then delegate authority to city editors. The city editors would delegate authority to section editors (business, social, obits, etc.). The section editors would delegate authority to their assistant editors. A news story based on its merits (rating) would propagate up the food chain by being uprated by the next editor above. A story only worth mentioning locally would be rated only by the local editor while a story worthy of national attention would be uprated by all the editor leading up to the EIC (basically propagating up the organizational tree).
Short answer: You need to read about the USS Cole bombing.
Slight longer answer: The ocean water is not calm. Any breach in a ship's hull will be detrimental to the vessel's ability to stay afloat. Your scenario using watertight compartments only serves as a method to delay the vessel's decent long enough for rescue crews to arrive. Depending on the weather conditions this may not be enough. Water filling the watertight compartment will cause the vessel to list towards the breach. This means that the deck is now more susceptible to waves breaking over the rail. Even if the opposite side could be ballasted to level the deck the resulting vessel depth would still make the vessel more susceptible to being swamped by the ocean's waves. This doesn't even take into account the stresses being placed on the vessel in rough seas with a breach and the metal fatigue that comes with the more affordable older vessels.