I really mean it. The Lawrence Welk show is everything that is virtuous and decent about America. Pleasant music for every demographic, peerless musicianship, wholesome entertainment all led by an avuncular, unpretentious, assimilated Ukrainian.
Now America is 9-11 bumper stickers, MARPAT fatigue melodramas, and teevee preachers who assure you God wants you to be rich.... And if you're not for those things you might as well be a Canadian.
Lady Gaga's real name is Stafani Germanotta, and you had no trouble finding Vic's name. Google is happy to permit brands to be people on G+ insofar as it draws more subscribers...
The stage name argument is sorta garbage. Stage names offer no proper anonymity. Take it from iluvcapra, "Jamie Hardt, MPSE," born James Hardt.
Apple and Android are still both growing in share, it's Symbian and RIM that have been losing. I'd say up until a week ago that Android might have had a sustainable model for share dominance, but then Google went and bought Motorola, and now the whole future of the thing is in question, if Google doesn't handle their relationship with their partners very carefully.
the fact of the matter is that licenses don't seem to mean jack shit in China (and that's their right as a sovereign nation).
Note that, when a country adopts a treaty, such as the WIPO Copyright Treaty (ratified by China in 2007), that treaty is incorporated into the basic law of that country -- that's why treaty ratification in the US is such a high bar, adopted treaties carry the same force as constitutional law, and the courts give treaties precedence over acts of congress or local laws or regulations.
The China problem, as with so many problems in that country, is about the government's tolerance of corruption and lawlessness, contrary to their internal and external legal obligations, as long as it gets them what they want today -- which, in the case of IP abuses, would be fat payola/protection money to local communist party officials skimming off the top of grey-label hardware makers and DVD duplicators.
This isn't true, your brain is able to locate the azimuth of a source using spectral differences imparted by the pinna and diffraction artifacts caused by your head and body. This is why HRTF headphones allow you to hear things "over" you and why IMAX and 10.2 speaker systems have speakers above the screen, and not just behind it.
"No, you can't make that particular change be effective in July, because it will take 12 months to get the necessary modifications in the state's software systems finished."
Puke. So developers now write our laws? They're the client. you do what they tell you. (And it it throws their system into chaos you bill for the overtime.)
Well... if we were to somehow expand the definition of "software company" to include non-profit foundations, collectives, and community organizations the point might still hold. The commercial, profit-making enterprise is not the only way human beings organize.
I'm very skeptical of the contention, if only because software always is dependent on hardware, and while PCs are commoditized, the trend of the last decade is to move away from PCs to specialized appliances and mobile devices that do whatever a wireless carrier needs them to do in order to achieve their objectives.
Pin 1 and the shield are often not tied on the cables you buy at the store, so ground just gets connected at the same time as everything else -- typically the connector on equipment is tied to chassis ground and pin 1 is audio ground, so if you tie them together in the cable you'll get weird noise from whatever is creating interference on the chassis's ground rail (and whatever that ground rail finally dumps to, like the power receptacle ground pin, which if your house has a wiring fault will be blasting 60Hz.) Even better some equipment will tie chassis ground to audio ground through some filtering, so if the shield and pin 1 are tied on your cable you have instant ground loop. Many times wiring in a studio will lift the ground on one side of the connection, and the shield will be unconnected, to prevent ground loops in the patchbay. And we're not even getting into the pin 2/pin 3 hot controversy, which seems like it should be solved but you still run into pin 3 equipment. XLRs are funny.
You're not supposed to plug any audio connection when signal is present, yeah everybody does it but not many connection systems are spec'd to handle it properly, including XLR. Even if you tie the shield to the ground, there are bias and other signals (like phantom powering) that will eventually wear down the internal electronics if you plug them in energized.
The OS if free. Opening up the phones will only sell more hardware... something a hardware company should be doing.
If there were cellphone integrators on every block, and buyers actually exercised choice in their phone OS and didn't just accept what the phone shipped with, this would probably be true. But alas, all Google has to do is make sure Samsung and HTC have their copies of the source on time, and that takes care of a commanding majority of the market. They can release the source (maybe a slightly less useful source) to everyone else, but since a vanishingly small proportion of cellphone users make use of it, it doesn't really make a difference.
Samsung would be selling just as many phones if Android were closed. It'd be one thing if you were claiming there were 3rd-party developer benefits to Android, or moral benefits, but I don't think there's any evidence that the openness, in this case, creates sales, at least compared to the classic Microsoft model of closed source with an aggressive and open licensing strategy. From a business perspective Google's relationship with HTC or Huawei and MS's relationship with a Dell is identical -- HTC still needs a license agreement and to partner with Google in order to distribute the "real" Android, they're still under an NDA, etc.
Of course, in this case the software is licensed free of charge for everyone. I'd say that, and the fact that the base is all open source, does quite a bit to calm other manufacturers.
Unless those vendors are shipping the AOSP or something like Cyanogenmod, they have to have a license agreement with Google in order to sell those phones, even if it's "stock" OHA Android. Google's free to license or not license whoever they please.
but it seems pretty unlike them to play nickel-and-dime software lock upgrade drive games to eke out a few extra handset sales at the expense of customer satisfaction and overall success of Android
I don't think there's any evidence that the bootloader issue or the "nickle-and-dime" upgrade issue significantly impacts sales or customer satisfaction...
This would seem to work against your point above, since shitty iPod earbuds are at least a detrimental to the signal as a tube amp. And the fact of the Loudness War is an argument against the idea that a mastered recording is conveying an artist's intent, which is the point I thought you were trying to make...
I really can't think of two companies that approach the problem from such different directions:
Apple has a very top-down developer/third party attitude about its relationship with developers. It loves them and everything, but they take the interpretation of their developer documentation very seriously, they don't give product or platform roadmaps, and they will change, deprecate and remove APIs such as their wont. To Apple, the computer buyer is the customer, and the developers are a sort of collateral operation. Microsoft sees developers as their main customers, and go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that if a program ran under some version of Windows, it will always run without the developer having to update -- if it runs once, Microsoft considers that a contract. This makes the platform much more stable and predictable but allows all sorts of bad behavior to go uncorrected.
Apple leverages lots of open source projects to provide the middleware on their platform; granted they sometimes leverage quite old versions of open source projects. Microsoft is committed to in-house development of the complete system -- you'd never see Microsoft ship OpenSSH, KHTML, or a Ruby interpreter with their operating system, they're much more apt to ship their own tools to accomplish the same things, with all the benefit and risk that entails.
Microsoft is committed to the PC as a platform for computing, and differentiating the "power" of a Real Computer to things like mobile devices or appliances, so they don't countenance things like sandboxes, curated app stores, the principle of least privilege -- they're much more deferential to developers. Apple is happy to impose much tighter restrictions system-level restrictions (in Lion, apps aren't even allowed to traverse the filesystem directly anymore, all of this happens outside the apps address space), and Apple is much less grandiose and much more practical about designing programming environments.
Apple sees the ultimate security of the system as the vendor's responsibility. Microsoft sees the ultimate security of the system as the user's responsibility. Pick your poison.
Yeah, but I know mastering engineers that will test through a Manley Stingray or another suitable tube amp. Recording engineers aren't necessarily focused on making the recording sound good through a perfectly linear reproducing chain. They're realists who know that people have lots of different kinds of gear and generally won't have an ideal listening environment, anyways -- most of the new music people hear is over the Internet or in a car, worrying about a 1% margin in THD+noise is counterproductive in that situation.
Most recording engineers will try to make the recording awesome, and their attitude is, "Here is an awesome sounding CD, it makes the output stage of your CD player do awesome things. If you think your amplifier and speakers are awesome, we welcome the awesomeness your system induces on the recording, and it's my job to make sure I'm giving you the best source material possible for whatever configuration you may have, The customer is always right."
And if Google's C ABI required submitting all function arguments to Google...
Google works very hard to make submitting things to them very easy, to the point where you dont even realize any submission is happening, this just greases the rails a little more.
Most uses of power during different times of day is obligatory -- you can't schedule all your air conditioning at night, and you can't schedule your lighting for the day.
In principle, everyone can charge their Volt at 2AM as long as the power company knows ahead of time its going to happen -- the problem TFA posits is that people would be sufficently unpredictable about when they would use their power, or would allocate their power usage in a perfectly rational way in order to minimize their cost per unit, causing power consumption to become unpredictable, neither of which is likely to happen in aggregate.
The way the power company is liable to solve this problem, which will totally work but people don't like, is they'll give you a schedule and tell you to only run your clothes washer at certain hours, or your car charger at certain hours, and the Smart Grid(tm) will give your power company the liberty to switch off your high-demand appliances at times they don't have the supply.
That's what a Smart Grid does -- people think it will let them pay spot prices for electricity, no no no, it's about the power company collecting Google-style metrics of power consumption on an appliance-by-appliance, outlet-by-outlet basis, and then giving you 10% off your bill if you consent to having a remote power cutoff installed on your washing machine, air conditioner, and car charger.
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I really mean it. The Lawrence Welk show is everything that is virtuous and decent about America. Pleasant music for every demographic, peerless musicianship, wholesome entertainment all led by an avuncular, unpretentious, assimilated Ukrainian.
Now America is 9-11 bumper stickers, MARPAT fatigue melodramas, and teevee preachers who assure you God wants you to be rich.... And if you're not for those things you might as well be a Canadian.
See also The Last Roman.
Lady Gaga's real name is Stafani Germanotta, and you had no trouble finding Vic's name. Google is happy to permit brands to be people on G+ insofar as it draws more subscribers...
The stage name argument is sorta garbage. Stage names offer no proper anonymity. Take it from iluvcapra, "Jamie Hardt, MPSE," born James Hardt.
Newcastlejon's usage accurate, it embiggens me to say...
Apple and Android are still both growing in share, it's Symbian and RIM that have been losing. I'd say up until a week ago that Android might have had a sustainable model for share dominance, but then Google went and bought Motorola, and now the whole future of the thing is in question, if Google doesn't handle their relationship with their partners very carefully.
the fact of the matter is that licenses don't seem to mean jack shit in China (and that's their right as a sovereign nation).
Note that, when a country adopts a treaty, such as the WIPO Copyright Treaty (ratified by China in 2007), that treaty is incorporated into the basic law of that country -- that's why treaty ratification in the US is such a high bar, adopted treaties carry the same force as constitutional law, and the courts give treaties precedence over acts of congress or local laws or regulations.
The China problem, as with so many problems in that country, is about the government's tolerance of corruption and lawlessness, contrary to their internal and external legal obligations, as long as it gets them what they want today -- which, in the case of IP abuses, would be fat payola/protection money to local communist party officials skimming off the top of grey-label hardware makers and DVD duplicators.
This isn't true, your brain is able to locate the azimuth of a source using spectral differences imparted by the pinna and diffraction artifacts caused by your head and body. This is why HRTF headphones allow you to hear things "over" you and why IMAX and 10.2 speaker systems have speakers above the screen, and not just behind it.
"No, you can't make that particular change be effective in July, because it will take 12 months to get the necessary modifications in the state's software systems finished."
Puke. So developers now write our laws? They're the client. you do what they tell you. (And it it throws their system into chaos you bill for the overtime.)
Boy Scouts of America?
Well... if we were to somehow expand the definition of "software company" to include non-profit foundations, collectives, and community organizations the point might still hold. The commercial, profit-making enterprise is not the only way human beings organize.
I'm very skeptical of the contention, if only because software always is dependent on hardware, and while PCs are commoditized, the trend of the last decade is to move away from PCs to specialized appliances and mobile devices that do whatever a wireless carrier needs them to do in order to achieve their objectives.
Accounting ate the world 3000 years ago, and accountants are still treated as second-class citizens in organizations.
My Kyma's control application and compiler use Command-B to find, and it's English. The documentation says that "B" stands for "Befuddled."
"Open Apple-F"
(sic) "Dutch Katholieke Universiteit Leuven."
Leuven/Louvain is in Belgium, not the Netherlands.
Pin 1 and the shield are often not tied on the cables you buy at the store, so ground just gets connected at the same time as everything else -- typically the connector on equipment is tied to chassis ground and pin 1 is audio ground, so if you tie them together in the cable you'll get weird noise from whatever is creating interference on the chassis's ground rail (and whatever that ground rail finally dumps to, like the power receptacle ground pin, which if your house has a wiring fault will be blasting 60Hz.) Even better some equipment will tie chassis ground to audio ground through some filtering, so if the shield and pin 1 are tied on your cable you have instant ground loop. Many times wiring in a studio will lift the ground on one side of the connection, and the shield will be unconnected, to prevent ground loops in the patchbay. And we're not even getting into the pin 2/pin 3 hot controversy, which seems like it should be solved but you still run into pin 3 equipment. XLRs are funny.
You're not supposed to plug any audio connection when signal is present, yeah everybody does it but not many connection systems are spec'd to handle it properly, including XLR. Even if you tie the shield to the ground, there are bias and other signals (like phantom powering) that will eventually wear down the internal electronics if you plug them in energized.
The OS if free. Opening up the phones will only sell more hardware... something a hardware company should be doing.
If there were cellphone integrators on every block, and buyers actually exercised choice in their phone OS and didn't just accept what the phone shipped with, this would probably be true. But alas, all Google has to do is make sure Samsung and HTC have their copies of the source on time, and that takes care of a commanding majority of the market. They can release the source (maybe a slightly less useful source) to everyone else, but since a vanishingly small proportion of cellphone users make use of it, it doesn't really make a difference.
Samsung would be selling just as many phones if Android were closed. It'd be one thing if you were claiming there were 3rd-party developer benefits to Android, or moral benefits, but I don't think there's any evidence that the openness, in this case, creates sales, at least compared to the classic Microsoft model of closed source with an aggressive and open licensing strategy. From a business perspective Google's relationship with HTC or Huawei and MS's relationship with a Dell is identical -- HTC still needs a license agreement and to partner with Google in order to distribute the "real" Android, they're still under an NDA, etc.
Of course, in this case the software is licensed free of charge for everyone. I'd say that, and the fact that the base is all open source, does quite a bit to calm other manufacturers.
Unless those vendors are shipping the AOSP or something like Cyanogenmod, they have to have a license agreement with Google in order to sell those phones, even if it's "stock" OHA Android. Google's free to license or not license whoever they please.
Logic isn't knowledge. "Follow the money" is not, in itself, evidence.
but it seems pretty unlike them to play nickel-and-dime software lock upgrade drive games to eke out a few extra handset sales at the expense of customer satisfaction and overall success of Android
I don't think there's any evidence that the bootloader issue or the "nickle-and-dime" upgrade issue significantly impacts sales or customer satisfaction...
So this is strictly a strategic move to corner the Mark-of-the-Beast market? :)
Unless your company does web street maps.
This would seem to work against your point above, since shitty iPod earbuds are at least a detrimental to the signal as a tube amp. And the fact of the Loudness War is an argument against the idea that a mastered recording is conveying an artist's intent, which is the point I thought you were trying to make...
I really can't think of two companies that approach the problem from such different directions:
Yeah, but I know mastering engineers that will test through a Manley Stingray or another suitable tube amp. Recording engineers aren't necessarily focused on making the recording sound good through a perfectly linear reproducing chain. They're realists who know that people have lots of different kinds of gear and generally won't have an ideal listening environment, anyways -- most of the new music people hear is over the Internet or in a car, worrying about a 1% margin in THD+noise is counterproductive in that situation.
Most recording engineers will try to make the recording awesome, and their attitude is, "Here is an awesome sounding CD, it makes the output stage of your CD player do awesome things. If you think your amplifier and speakers are awesome, we welcome the awesomeness your system induces on the recording, and it's my job to make sure I'm giving you the best source material possible for whatever configuration you may have, The customer is always right."
And if Google's C ABI required submitting all function arguments to Google...
Google works very hard to make submitting things to them very easy, to the point where you dont even realize any submission is happening, this just greases the rails a little more.
Most uses of power during different times of day is obligatory -- you can't schedule all your air conditioning at night, and you can't schedule your lighting for the day.
In principle, everyone can charge their Volt at 2AM as long as the power company knows ahead of time its going to happen -- the problem TFA posits is that people would be sufficently unpredictable about when they would use their power, or would allocate their power usage in a perfectly rational way in order to minimize their cost per unit, causing power consumption to become unpredictable, neither of which is likely to happen in aggregate.
The way the power company is liable to solve this problem, which will totally work but people don't like, is they'll give you a schedule and tell you to only run your clothes washer at certain hours, or your car charger at certain hours, and the Smart Grid(tm) will give your power company the liberty to switch off your high-demand appliances at times they don't have the supply.
That's what a Smart Grid does -- people think it will let them pay spot prices for electricity, no no no, it's about the power company collecting Google-style metrics of power consumption on an appliance-by-appliance, outlet-by-outlet basis, and then giving you 10% off your bill if you consent to having a remote power cutoff installed on your washing machine, air conditioner, and car charger.