There's an ongoing Amazon review war surrounding the re-release of the movie Fantasia due to a ~10-second bit of the movie that was removed because it featured a racist character. That slice of the movie has been removed from every single commercial release of the movie ever, so there's not really even an alternative version that people can buy. But there is still a flood of 1-star ratings complaining of "censorship" weighing down the mostly positive reviews.
High level languages need not be slower than low level languages?
Not that I believe that myself.
Although in theory low level languages can always be faster, the real-world situation is that a high level language with good optimisation is likely to be faster than the low level language because tweaking of the low-level code is limited by cost and timescale constraints.
These companies are paying that cost and spending that time though, and they have a lot of experience at it
Have you RTFA? He talks nothing about fragmentation:
The HD version of Rage is 1.4GB installed, and all the world geometry is using 2-bit PowerVR texture compression. If we went to one of the other platforms that's not PowerVR-based, we'd be stuck with a 4-bit texture compression format, and that pushes the size over 2GB. And the Android Marketplace doesn't even let you download more than 20 or 30MB, and you have to end up setting up your own server and doing your own transfer for all of that. Dealing with the user interface of managing space... there's a lot of things that happen automagically for us on iOS that we'll have to deal with particularly on the Android space. And that's not a lot of work that's going to be huge heaps of fun to do. It's going to be dreary, tedious work that I would certainly push on somebody else personally, but I'm not sure that even as a company it's something that we want to be involved in.
Even in the old days of the feature phone world, we always had EA Mobile or JAMDAT to build the 300 or 400 SKUs that they had for all the worldwide feature phone splits that we had from our four base versions. And we may yet wind up partnering with somebody else to do that level of broad support, but that's a little less satisfying when we're doing something that's pushing the limit graphically, because you don't have a second-tier company port your stuff to other graphics architectures and expect it to remain cutting-edge.
Basically, he needs Steam for Android.
That part sounded to me like he was worried about fragmentation, and what it would mean to have some other company port your software in order to offload the burden of dealing with the fragmentation. But his idea of fragmentation (different base graphics hardware) is different than what some people have complained about (different manufacturer-added UI augmentation) because games use more native code. He definitely mentions that the Android Market not allowing large app downloads is an issue, but it seems like he was more worried about supporting all the different hardware configurations.
"Nexus S can be purchased (unlocked or with a T-Mobile service plan) online and in-store from all Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile stores in the U.S."
I guess that's not clear if that's from the Google online Nexus store (like the last one was) or only from bestbuy.com, but it seems like the first scenario is more likely. I think they're partnering with Best Buy because last time so many people complained that they'd like to try the phone themselves.
There are already touchscreen netbooks, so some people have already been working to get Ubuntu working on them. I think they've tackled a lot of the driver problems, but I imagine that any new hardware like this is going to have its own set of driver issues to tackle (and no manufacturer support). As for Android in a virtual machine, I think you'd just have to run the Android emulator in Eclipse?
Exactly. It's the companies that you haven't heard of yet that will be the ones that have to pay to reach customers, because the ones you have heard of and rely on will be missed and people will switch service to maintain contact. This does nothing but enrich the near-monopolies of cable companies and phone companies and further entrench the industry leaders on the internet who can't be bullied.
This is no different than my home phone company directly charging you an extra fee to call me even though I already pay my phone bill and you already pay yours. If they are doing this in order to "cover the cost of heavy usage" they need to switch to charging metered rates to their own customers (i.e. not Google/Amazon) and compete on the merits of that price and the service that they're providing.
And CDNs charge more to serve HTTPS traffic, including Akamai which is the CDN for Facebook. I assume the extra cost is due to the processing overhead and the need to have certificates on their servers in order to serve as a middle-man
This may not be true on other services, but I see it all the time on Amazon where new printed books are slightly or definitively less than the Kindle version. As an example Mike Birbiglia was commenting just the other day that his book was being priced that way. I see it about a quarter of the time in my experience. And in a lot of the ones where the price isn't less for the paper version, the prices are so close that the resale/loan abilities of the regular book make me just get that instead.
I think you'd still be fine without rooting as long as you installed mobile firefox from the Android store? This is a webkit attack that targets the default browser.
I think you don't even have to go that far, you just have to make sure that the browser request passes along the path/url/etc of the cookie along with the value. Most of these problems with cookies being clobbered has to do with the application not being able to tell that it's not reading the cookie for its domain, but is instead reading the one for the top-level domain (or the non-secure one, or the non-http-only one, etc). If the application had all the applicable cookies and knew which was which, then it seems like a lot of the problems go away.
If the AIG bailout were handled more reasonably (by paying out some percentage of policy value less than 100%) the banks would have been chastened for making the poor decisions that they made, they would be acting like an industry that made mistakes because they are an industry that made mistakes, and new regulation on their leverage and risk-taking would be more obviously necessary to everyone up and down the line. As it is the whole situation became a net win for a lot of these companies, and we're stuck wondering why they're handing out bonuses to the people that made it possible.
Right off the bat he went back on his pledge to not hire lobbyists, and not in a small way. He also talked all through the election run-up about the value of increasing transparency, but now they're still blocking cases with claims that various things are "state secrets" and making threats against wikileaks
It looks like Overdrive is the site that is working with a lot of local libraries in the US. I'd never heard of it before, but here is their ebook compatibility list. It sounds like their audio books are more widely compatible than their ebooks, because the ebooks use DRM'd PDFs that a lot of devices aren't setup to use. Their audio books work in a player that they've written themselves for many platforms called "OverDrive Media Console"
You are also living with a logical fallacy. How can one judge security measures except by the lack of successful attacks?
How about judging them by the number of unsuccessful attacks due to people being caught by these detectors? They cite some numbers in the article but A. none of the numbers is related to terrorism (the "scourge" that everyone uses to justify these extreme measures) and B. there's not much context for how widely they've been using the vans to achieve the seizures they have made.
I'm also concerned by the list of countries that they've exported these detectors to. It seems like at some point we were trying not to aid China in perfecting their police state.
They had a lot of things going for them that put them in a unique position. Having 4 authors with existing fan-bases makes promotion a lot easier, and having all 4 authors available to edit each other makes the editing cost go away. But still spending $6500 for editing/proofing/artwork yourself means you only need to bring in $14,000 revenue to beat paying a publishing house 52.5% of every copy to provide those services.
I think there's still a place for big publishing houses in the market. But as soon as some new guys pop-up that haven't sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into printing equipment (that they now consider a "sunk cost" that is being paid for by both print and non-print books), it seems like the old ones are going to get their lunch eaten
That's crazy talk. If you want your users to use physical buttons they will need to tap out the name of the function they want to run via morse code on the one main button.
Actually, Google uses access to their market as the carrot to keep Hardware vendors from producing incompatible hardware. If it doesn't pass the compatibility checks, you can't include the Google apps including the marketplace. Once having access to their market is not a big deal, then staying compatible is not a big deal. That will probably mean fragmentation.
from the Android FAQ
How does the AOSP relate to the Android Compatibility Program?
The Android Open-Source Project maintains the Android software, and develops new versions. Since it's open-source, this software can be used for any purpose, including to ship devices that are not compatible with other devices based on the same source.
The function of the Android Compatibility Program is to define a baseline implementation of Android that is compatible with third-party apps written by developers. Devices that are "Android compatible" may participate in the Android ecosystem, including Android Market; devices that don't meet the compatibility requirements exist outside that ecosystem.
In other words, the Android Compatibility Program is how we separate "Android compatible devices" from devices that merely run derivatives of the source code. We welcome all uses of the Android source code, but only Android compatible devices -- as defined and tested by the Android Compatibility Program -- may participate in the Android ecosystem.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an ongoing Amazon review war surrounding the re-release of the movie Fantasia due to a ~10-second bit of the movie that was removed because it featured a racist character. That slice of the movie has been removed from every single commercial release of the movie ever, so there's not really even an alternative version that people can buy. But there is still a flood of 1-star ratings complaining of "censorship" weighing down the mostly positive reviews.
High level languages need not be slower than low level languages?
Not that I believe that myself.
Although in theory low level languages can always be faster, the real-world situation is that a high level language with good optimisation is likely to be faster than the low level language because tweaking of the low-level code is limited by cost and timescale constraints.
These companies are paying that cost and spending that time though, and they have a lot of experience at it
Have you RTFA? He talks nothing about fragmentation:
The HD version of Rage is 1.4GB installed, and all the world geometry is using 2-bit PowerVR texture compression. If we went to one of the other platforms that's not PowerVR-based, we'd be stuck with a 4-bit texture compression format, and that pushes the size over 2GB. And the Android Marketplace doesn't even let you download more than 20 or 30MB, and you have to end up setting up your own server and doing your own transfer for all of that. Dealing with the user interface of managing space... there's a lot of things that happen automagically for us on iOS that we'll have to deal with particularly on the Android space. And that's not a lot of work that's going to be huge heaps of fun to do. It's going to be dreary, tedious work that I would certainly push on somebody else personally, but I'm not sure that even as a company it's something that we want to be involved in.
Even in the old days of the feature phone world, we always had EA Mobile or JAMDAT to build the 300 or 400 SKUs that they had for all the worldwide feature phone splits that we had from our four base versions. And we may yet wind up partnering with somebody else to do that level of broad support, but that's a little less satisfying when we're doing something that's pushing the limit graphically, because you don't have a second-tier company port your stuff to other graphics architectures and expect it to remain cutting-edge.
Basically, he needs Steam for Android.
That part sounded to me like he was worried about fragmentation, and what it would mean to have some other company port your software in order to offload the burden of dealing with the fragmentation. But his idea of fragmentation (different base graphics hardware) is different than what some people have complained about (different manufacturer-added UI augmentation) because games use more native code. He definitely mentions that the Android Market not allowing large app downloads is an issue, but it seems like he was more worried about supporting all the different hardware configurations.
I guess that's not clear if that's from the Google online Nexus store (like the last one was) or only from bestbuy.com, but it seems like the first scenario is more likely. I think they're partnering with Best Buy because last time so many people complained that they'd like to try the phone themselves.
If measuring is your hangup, you can measure it just fine when they try to sell their house
or that's when they saw him on TV interviews and remembered his face?
In the case of copyright, it is the rights of the dead's living dependents that meant to be are protected.
How exactly do the rights of the dependents encourage the dead person to go on creating works?
I'll play Devil's Advocate...you could say that it encourages people who are old or sick enough that they are nearing death to go on creating works
True, but imagine the carnage when all those computer chips hit a blue screen of death
There are already touchscreen netbooks, so some people have already been working to get Ubuntu working on them. I think they've tackled a lot of the driver problems, but I imagine that any new hardware like this is going to have its own set of driver issues to tackle (and no manufacturer support). As for Android in a virtual machine, I think you'd just have to run the Android emulator in Eclipse?
Exactly. It's the companies that you haven't heard of yet that will be the ones that have to pay to reach customers, because the ones you have heard of and rely on will be missed and people will switch service to maintain contact. This does nothing but enrich the near-monopolies of cable companies and phone companies and further entrench the industry leaders on the internet who can't be bullied.
This is no different than my home phone company directly charging you an extra fee to call me even though I already pay my phone bill and you already pay yours. If they are doing this in order to "cover the cost of heavy usage" they need to switch to charging metered rates to their own customers (i.e. not Google/Amazon) and compete on the merits of that price and the service that they're providing.
And CDNs charge more to serve HTTPS traffic, including Akamai which is the CDN for Facebook. I assume the extra cost is due to the processing overhead and the need to have certificates on their servers in order to serve as a middle-man
This may not be true on other services, but I see it all the time on Amazon where new printed books are slightly or definitively less than the Kindle version. As an example Mike Birbiglia was commenting just the other day that his book was being priced that way. I see it about a quarter of the time in my experience. And in a lot of the ones where the price isn't less for the paper version, the prices are so close that the resale/loan abilities of the regular book make me just get that instead.
I think you'd still be fine without rooting as long as you installed mobile firefox from the Android store? This is a webkit attack that targets the default browser.
I'm sure if you deleted all of the redundant copies of all the animated gifs that every geocities page used you could slim it down to about 1GB
I think you don't even have to go that far, you just have to make sure that the browser request passes along the path/url/etc of the cookie along with the value. Most of these problems with cookies being clobbered has to do with the application not being able to tell that it's not reading the cookie for its domain, but is instead reading the one for the top-level domain (or the non-secure one, or the non-http-only one, etc). If the application had all the applicable cookies and knew which was which, then it seems like a lot of the problems go away.
A big part of the reason that the banks bounced back unscathed and that bailout made money is because the AIG bailout was done so poorly. We bought out AIG and put ourselves on the hook for all of AIGs poor decisions, paying out full dollar amounts on all of the ridiculous policies that AIG issued and even forfeiting the right to sue the policyholders for fraudulent policy applications. So saying that the bank bailouts made money is essentially ignoring huge losses that were stashed in another bailout.
If the AIG bailout were handled more reasonably (by paying out some percentage of policy value less than 100%) the banks would have been chastened for making the poor decisions that they made, they would be acting like an industry that made mistakes because they are an industry that made mistakes, and new regulation on their leverage and risk-taking would be more obviously necessary to everyone up and down the line. As it is the whole situation became a net win for a lot of these companies, and we're stuck wondering why they're handing out bonuses to the people that made it possible.
Right off the bat he went back on his pledge to not hire lobbyists, and not in a small way. He also talked all through the election run-up about the value of increasing transparency, but now they're still blocking cases with claims that various things are "state secrets" and making threats against wikileaks
It looks like Overdrive is the site that is working with a lot of local libraries in the US. I'd never heard of it before, but here is their ebook compatibility list. It sounds like their audio books are more widely compatible than their ebooks, because the ebooks use DRM'd PDFs that a lot of devices aren't setup to use. Their audio books work in a player that they've written themselves for many platforms called "OverDrive Media Console"
I always assumed it was the ThesePants particle, the one that makes everyone look fat
You are also living with a logical fallacy. How can one judge security measures except by the lack of successful attacks?
How about judging them by the number of unsuccessful attacks due to people being caught by these detectors? They cite some numbers in the article but A. none of the numbers is related to terrorism (the "scourge" that everyone uses to justify these extreme measures) and B. there's not much context for how widely they've been using the vans to achieve the seizures they have made.
I'm also concerned by the list of countries that they've exported these detectors to. It seems like at some point we were trying not to aid China in perfecting their police state.
They had a lot of things going for them that put them in a unique position. Having 4 authors with existing fan-bases makes promotion a lot easier, and having all 4 authors available to edit each other makes the editing cost go away. But still spending $6500 for editing/proofing/artwork yourself means you only need to bring in $14,000 revenue to beat paying a publishing house 52.5% of every copy to provide those services.
I think there's still a place for big publishing houses in the market. But as soon as some new guys pop-up that haven't sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into printing equipment (that they now consider a "sunk cost" that is being paid for by both print and non-print books), it seems like the old ones are going to get their lunch eaten
That's crazy talk. If you want your users to use physical buttons they will need to tap out the name of the function they want to run via morse code on the one main button.
How does the AOSP relate to the Android Compatibility Program?
The Android Open-Source Project maintains the Android software, and develops new versions. Since it's open-source, this software can be used for any purpose, including to ship devices that are not compatible with other devices based on the same source.
The function of the Android Compatibility Program is to define a baseline implementation of Android that is compatible with third-party apps written by developers. Devices that are "Android compatible" may participate in the Android ecosystem, including Android Market; devices that don't meet the compatibility requirements exist outside that ecosystem.
In other words, the Android Compatibility Program is how we separate "Android compatible devices" from devices that merely run derivatives of the source code. We welcome all uses of the Android source code, but only Android compatible devices -- as defined and tested by the Android Compatibility Program -- may participate in the Android ecosystem.
Really, Contra? The game where I'd use the code to give me 30 lives and finish the game with 34 lives anyway?
FDR was an ass that mistreated millions of American citizens.
Not to minimize the issue, but it was apparently more like 110,000.