Thin of the resources an offline Google Now or Siri would need.
Parts of that wouldn't be feasible (notes coming in about sports scores, news items, what have you), but keeping a local database to correlate locations, time, and all that? Sure, you could do that. Ditto with the voice recognition, especially if it's limited to a certain set of vocabulary that's useful for on-device management of your alarms/calendar/contacts.
but you wouldn't expect to navigate offline, with live traffic data, without a net connection.
I wouldn't? That's what I've got a Garmin with radio traffic updates for. I bought it before I had a smartphone, and it still works as well as it did when I got it.
Or you couldn't cast your IDE from your tablet to your PC without a net connection.
Oh? I can't host an AP from my laptop, run a VNC or RDP server there, and connect from my tablet? Or run VNC on my tablet and access it from the laptop? I'm not sure what you're claiming, because the most direct interpretations of your post have counterexamples.
Well, useless for anything that needs internet, sure. I can't check email or browse a webpage, but I can program, write, play games, listen to music, watch movies, etc. I mean, it's not like you're using Steam for all your games, Spotify for your music, and Netflix for your video, right?
SDL and SFML are both pretty cool and have large development communities. I haven't used Allegro or Clanlib, but Clanlib's features seem especially close to SFML's (based on examining the API). Allegro has been around for over 20 years. SDL for 17, Clanlib for 16, SFML for just about half of that.
It raises a question in my mind: If Clanlib had been out for that long in 2007, providing a C++ game programming library and being well-known enough to be included in at least one book, then why was there a perceived need for SFML? Was it just a marketing/popularizing failure on the part of clanlib's developers, or was there some technical shortcoming in Clanlib at that time? If the latter, has the shortcoming been corrected? In short, why exactly should we be excited about a new release of Clanlib?
They give me more, and get paid much more. My Facebook has about as much information on it as one of my old instant messaging accounts did. It gives you rope to hang yourself with. Doesn't mean you have to use it.
Facebook doesn't know about my trip because I didn't post about it. My credit card knows a fair amount about it because I don't usually conduct all of my business exclusively in cash. Oddly, I hear a lot more people complaining about Facebook than I do about the massive datamining that credit companies do.
Really? Then what's going on if someone pays me money to mow their lawn? In that case, they're the customer. They hired me, and they're going to pay me for my work. Ditto if I'm doing maintenance on their computer, or something. I've done both. So, in what way does that mean that I haven't been hired+paid by a customer?
Facebook is a middleman for a product. The product is user information, offered by users for sale. Facebook pays their users by providing a service that many of them find useful. There's a trade; if it's a one-sided donation on the user's part, then they got screwed (like in a blood drive, where it's a donation, instead of a trade). If Facebook doesn't provide useful services for trade, then the users will take their product elsewhere.
Of course Facebook translates information into money by analyzing it and selling information to advertisers, so advertisers are the first Facebook customers that actually trade money for a product. So, the users and the ad guys are both customers, just in different senses.
When I started working as a salaried employee doing software development, my employment contract included language to the effect that everything I produced using any company resources, or using internal company information, belonged to them. When you're salaried, you don't really have "your own time", and since they're paying you, most companies would say that your time is another "company resource". I'm not sure how well that would hold up in court, but I'd also expect that most companies could grind their employees into the ground if it came to time in a courtroom.
Realistically, they weren't interested in the little hobby game I was writing (my employer produced business software), so it's unlikely that they'll claim copyright on it. Now, if I developed a new plugin for my employer's product, that's a somewhat more danger-fraught proposition.
What you want is probably some time with a lawyer, and to begin negotiations with your employer for an explicit contract stating that you own copyright on the things you're making, but that you're assigning non-exclusive, but unlimited use+distribution+modification rights to your employer (OK, obviously I'm no lawyer, but I'm sure you get the idea).
You may be on good terms with your employer, but they aren't your friend. They're out to make money off of your work. There needs to be a contract outlining who owns what, what they can do with it, etc. Otherwise, you're opening yourself up for bad times.
Remember, the only information you need is the URL.
Only if the URL makes human-parseable sense, or if I recognize the URL and know what's on the page. The tab title, page layout, colors, etc act as mnemonic devices.
Yet you spend 80MB, valuable screen estate and tab switching space, just to be reminded of that one simple string.
80MB is nothing, and tab groups are great for categorizing open tabs. Firefox and Chrome will both restore previously-open tabs after a crash.
The malware uses OpenCL. Nothing using a fixed graphics pipeline should be able to be infected, since they aren't capable of general purpose computation.
#1: Are you going to guarantee that another webkit browser will have the exact behavior of Safari, in all respects?
#2: You sound like you're assuming that there's a "perfectly good Mac" available, when the earlier AC was complaining about having to pay Apple for hardware to test their software on. I'd assume that in their perfect world, they're running a licensed copy of OSX in a virtualized environment on a Windows or Linux machine.
My company's purpose is to virtualize the OS for development; we don't care about Safari itself, but in the case that we did, there isn't any (legal) way to test it without purchasing Apple hardware.
By their licensing terms, OSX can only be run on "Apple-branded hardware", or words to that effect. My employer virtualizes OSX, but they do it on a old Apple Xserve from about 2009. There arentt any other rackmount options available that I know of.
If the kid's skilled enough to make a game, then surely whoever paid for the computer would recognize that and pay for something worthwhile like a game engine subscription, rather than something frivolous like an mmorpg subscription. And if not? Well, life's not always fair, and this would provide an excellent example of that. The company's got to make money, and there are plenty of free alternatives that the kid could start with anyhow.
Android tablets typically don't run smaller than 7 inches without being designed (and priced) for use with a cellular network. Or should people just buy an entry-level Android phone and use it without a SIM?
...Haven't we covered this already? Is there some downside to using a phone? You talk about it like it's a bad idea. As for the iPod Touch, it's been about 5 years since one was released that could be used without iTunes. If I didn't have a smartphone, I'd use my $20 MP3 player. Smaller+lighter than even a small touchscreen device, cheaper to replace, takes microSD for memory expansion (and thus has more space than my 1st gen iPod Touch, anyhow), and it's too small to break if dropped.
Unless you've bought into the Apple app ecosystem, there are better options than an iPod from any angle. Music player, mini-tablet/personal media device, etc.
I think you didn't understand what you linked to when you stated, "is apparently present for some fairly popular devices, but not activated in software"
Ah, I wasn't aware that the stock firmwares for all of them included support. What I understood was that they were all from product lines that I've heard of and know people that own them (using "well-advertised" and anecdotal evidence as a heuristic for "fairly popular") and that the maintainers of the app had to reverse-engineer support for the hardware. On the latter point, I didn't really know *why* they had to do that, and I appreciate the more knowledgeable perspective.
Even if they aren't familiar with exactly how far a mile is, they know that it's a unit of distance used in similar situations to kilometers. It's reasonable to expect that the meaning of the saying wouldn't be lost on them.
Why is there a "workable business case for" a PDA running locked-down iOS but not a PDA running open-userland Android?
Because most people really don't give a flip about whether a system is open or not. A small percentage of a small percentage is worth ignoring for large companies.
By "off-contract", which of the following did you mean?
Any phone that matches the iPod Touch's specs will be in a similar (or lower) price range at this point. Its lower screen resolution and size, non-expandable memory, single camera, and aging CPU point to a budget phone. Something like a 2nd-generation Motorola Moto G kills it in every spec besides on-device storage, and it has a MicroSD slot to help take care of that. It's available new for $180, directly from Moto. Do you have more requirements that you haven't mentioned? Or are you just trying to be difficult?
[probably as part of the Qualcomm/whomever chip for processing cell phone signals]./ Since the signal is [most likely] coming from the cellular chip
It's apparently part of the bluetooth module in a lot of phones, rather than the cellular radio..
You need an antennae/other external hardware that receives those signals properly.
This is generally accomplished by using headphone wires as antennae.
Hardware-level support for FM is apparently present for some fairly popular devices, but not activated in software. I don't think that the difficulties (power requirements, technical difficulty of implementation, etc) are as serious as you're making them out to be.
AC, Americans don't say "representative to" (or at least they don't in any part of the country I've ever lived in). It sounds unnatural. I would assume that the previous AC either made a typo or isn't a native speaker of English.
Are you claiming that people who don't want yet another phone bill deserve to do without hardware too?
What does "deserve" have to do with business decisions? Someone who isn't willing to pay for a product+service that's available doesn't necessarily deserve to have an alternative that fits there need better. If there's no workable business case for it, it won't happen.
And what does paying for a cellular plan have to do with buying a smartphone, anyhow? There's plenty of capable hardware available off-contract. My last two smartphones see some limited use as PDA-like devices, and my current phone. Sometimes you make some good points. This doesn't look like one of those times.
Lol. Do you not get that I spend a lot of time talking with economists and financial experts around the world?
I think that there are a few problems that people have with your statements, and it doesn't have anything to do with whether they're true or not.
First, that bit that I quoted is a logical fallacy usually called Argument from Authority.
Second, you are making a lot of claims without providing evidence. Since you are making the claims, the burden of proof falls on you; you don't get to dismiss the counterarguments that others have posted (often with backing evidence, like links to studies and papers) since you haven't provided anything to counter them aside from unsupported assertions.
Seriously, do you guys not grok the 100 Gbps Internet 2 or something?
I think we do. Part of the point is that it's wonderfully easy to link to information, since you seem to have it available in abundance. Personally, I'm completely ignorant of the Seattle area. I'm sure that I could find some kind of information about the situation up there, since I'm fairly handy with a search engine; I don't know if it would reflect reality though, or if I'd just find the mouthpiece of someone with an agenda besides truth.
Just for the sake of being clear though: I don't think you're trying to persuade anyone of anything. I think you're just trying to make a lot of noise and see how many people you can hook with a troll line. Congrats; you seem to have a good catch.
Worst of all is when they embark on a rewrite and give up half way through.
I saw something similar happen at my employer. A newer employee was sent on a mostly solo project to rewrite some of the core of our product, to make it easier to make some planned enhancements. Things didn't immediately work perfectly, and some of the founding employees fought the changes. Since they were necessary for the next release, and there wasn't another option for the features that we were required to make available, we ended up with two parallel sections of code that did basically the same thing but in very different ways. That was what we put up with for 4 or 5 *years* before the politics of the situation allowed us to integrate the changes back into a single codepath. Before that, if you didn't touch that code constantly, it was usually unclear which path was being actively used and which was bitrotted to uselessness.
Slashdot Mirror
Thin of the resources an offline Google Now or Siri would need.
Parts of that wouldn't be feasible (notes coming in about sports scores, news items, what have you), but keeping a local database to correlate locations, time, and all that? Sure, you could do that. Ditto with the voice recognition, especially if it's limited to a certain set of vocabulary that's useful for on-device management of your alarms/calendar/contacts.
but you wouldn't expect to navigate offline, with live traffic data, without a net connection.
I wouldn't? That's what I've got a Garmin with radio traffic updates for. I bought it before I had a smartphone, and it still works as well as it did when I got it.
Or you couldn't cast your IDE from your tablet to your PC without a net connection.
Oh? I can't host an AP from my laptop, run a VNC or RDP server there, and connect from my tablet? Or run VNC on my tablet and access it from the laptop? I'm not sure what you're claiming, because the most direct interpretations of your post have counterexamples.
Well, useless for anything that needs internet, sure. I can't check email or browse a webpage, but I can program, write, play games, listen to music, watch movies, etc. I mean, it's not like you're using Steam for all your games, Spotify for your music, and Netflix for your video, right?
SDL and SFML are both pretty cool and have large development communities. I haven't used Allegro or Clanlib, but Clanlib's features seem especially close to SFML's (based on examining the API). Allegro has been around for over 20 years. SDL for 17, Clanlib for 16, SFML for just about half of that.
It raises a question in my mind: If Clanlib had been out for that long in 2007, providing a C++ game programming library and being well-known enough to be included in at least one book, then why was there a perceived need for SFML? Was it just a marketing/popularizing failure on the part of clanlib's developers, or was there some technical shortcoming in Clanlib at that time? If the latter, has the shortcoming been corrected? In short, why exactly should we be excited about a new release of Clanlib?
They give me more, and get paid much more. My Facebook has about as much information on it as one of my old instant messaging accounts did. It gives you rope to hang yourself with. Doesn't mean you have to use it.
Facebook doesn't know about my trip because I didn't post about it. My credit card knows a fair amount about it because I don't usually conduct all of my business exclusively in cash. Oddly, I hear a lot more people complaining about Facebook than I do about the massive datamining that credit companies do.
Really? Then what's going on if someone pays me money to mow their lawn? In that case, they're the customer. They hired me, and they're going to pay me for my work. Ditto if I'm doing maintenance on their computer, or something. I've done both. So, in what way does that mean that I haven't been hired+paid by a customer?
Facebook is a middleman for a product. The product is user information, offered by users for sale. Facebook pays their users by providing a service that many of them find useful. There's a trade; if it's a one-sided donation on the user's part, then they got screwed (like in a blood drive, where it's a donation, instead of a trade). If Facebook doesn't provide useful services for trade, then the users will take their product elsewhere.
Of course Facebook translates information into money by analyzing it and selling information to advertisers, so advertisers are the first Facebook customers that actually trade money for a product. So, the users and the ad guys are both customers, just in different senses.
When I started working as a salaried employee doing software development, my employment contract included language to the effect that everything I produced using any company resources, or using internal company information, belonged to them. When you're salaried, you don't really have "your own time", and since they're paying you, most companies would say that your time is another "company resource". I'm not sure how well that would hold up in court, but I'd also expect that most companies could grind their employees into the ground if it came to time in a courtroom.
Realistically, they weren't interested in the little hobby game I was writing (my employer produced business software), so it's unlikely that they'll claim copyright on it. Now, if I developed a new plugin for my employer's product, that's a somewhat more danger-fraught proposition.
What you want is probably some time with a lawyer, and to begin negotiations with your employer for an explicit contract stating that you own copyright on the things you're making, but that you're assigning non-exclusive, but unlimited use+distribution+modification rights to your employer (OK, obviously I'm no lawyer, but I'm sure you get the idea).
You may be on good terms with your employer, but they aren't your friend. They're out to make money off of your work. There needs to be a contract outlining who owns what, what they can do with it, etc. Otherwise, you're opening yourself up for bad times.
Remember, the only information you need is the URL.
Only if the URL makes human-parseable sense, or if I recognize the URL and know what's on the page. The tab title, page layout, colors, etc act as mnemonic devices.
Yet you spend 80MB, valuable screen estate and tab switching space, just to be reminded of that one simple string.
80MB is nothing, and tab groups are great for categorizing open tabs. Firefox and Chrome will both restore previously-open tabs after a crash.
Call it abuse, or not. It works for me.
The malware uses OpenCL. Nothing using a fixed graphics pipeline should be able to be infected, since they aren't capable of general purpose computation.
This is a complete and total lie. There may be one "good" way to do something (for values of good), but there are many ways of doing soemthing.
It's not a "complete and total lie." The Zen of Python, "Python Enhancement Proposal #20", states:
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
It's one of the guiding principles of the language's design. Type "import this" into a Python command-line, and PEP20 gets printed out.
Spinning your SSD is not required, and it complicates the power and data connections.
You aren't allowed to have cell phones, so instead you will use a watch that's designed to operate through your cell phone?
He said "watch", not "smartwatch". Why would a regular wristwatch be banned?
#1: Are you going to guarantee that another webkit browser will have the exact behavior of Safari, in all respects?
#2: You sound like you're assuming that there's a "perfectly good Mac" available, when the earlier AC was complaining about having to pay Apple for hardware to test their software on. I'd assume that in their perfect world, they're running a licensed copy of OSX in a virtualized environment on a Windows or Linux machine.
My company's purpose is to virtualize the OS for development; we don't care about Safari itself, but in the case that we did, there isn't any (legal) way to test it without purchasing Apple hardware.
By their licensing terms, OSX can only be run on "Apple-branded hardware", or words to that effect. My employer virtualizes OSX, but they do it on a old Apple Xserve from about 2009. There arentt any other rackmount options available that I know of.
If the kid's skilled enough to make a game, then surely whoever paid for the computer would recognize that and pay for something worthwhile like a game engine subscription, rather than something frivolous like an mmorpg subscription. And if not? Well, life's not always fair, and this would provide an excellent example of that. The company's got to make money, and there are plenty of free alternatives that the kid could start with anyhow.
Android tablets typically don't run smaller than 7 inches without being designed (and priced) for use with a cellular network. Or should people just buy an entry-level Android phone and use it without a SIM?
...Haven't we covered this already? Is there some downside to using a phone? You talk about it like it's a bad idea. As for the iPod Touch, it's been about 5 years since one was released that could be used without iTunes. If I didn't have a smartphone, I'd use my $20 MP3 player. Smaller+lighter than even a small touchscreen device, cheaper to replace, takes microSD for memory expansion (and thus has more space than my 1st gen iPod Touch, anyhow), and it's too small to break if dropped.
Unless you've bought into the Apple app ecosystem, there are better options than an iPod from any angle. Music player, mini-tablet/personal media device, etc.
I think you didn't understand what you linked to when you stated, "is apparently present for some fairly popular devices, but not activated in software"
Ah, I wasn't aware that the stock firmwares for all of them included support. What I understood was that they were all from product lines that I've heard of and know people that own them (using "well-advertised" and anecdotal evidence as a heuristic for "fairly popular") and that the maintainers of the app had to reverse-engineer support for the hardware. On the latter point, I didn't really know *why* they had to do that, and I appreciate the more knowledgeable perspective.
Even if they aren't familiar with exactly how far a mile is, they know that it's a unit of distance used in similar situations to kilometers. It's reasonable to expect that the meaning of the saying wouldn't be lost on them.
Why is there a "workable business case for" a PDA running locked-down iOS but not a PDA running open-userland Android?
Because most people really don't give a flip about whether a system is open or not. A small percentage of a small percentage is worth ignoring for large companies.
By "off-contract", which of the following did you mean?
Any phone that matches the iPod Touch's specs will be in a similar (or lower) price range at this point. Its lower screen resolution and size, non-expandable memory, single camera, and aging CPU point to a budget phone. Something like a 2nd-generation Motorola Moto G kills it in every spec besides on-device storage, and it has a MicroSD slot to help take care of that. It's available new for $180, directly from Moto. Do you have more requirements that you haven't mentioned? Or are you just trying to be difficult?
[probably as part of the Qualcomm/whomever chip for processing cell phone signals]./ Since the signal is [most likely] coming from the cellular chip
It's apparently part of the bluetooth module in a lot of phones, rather than the cellular radio..
You need an antennae/other external hardware that receives those signals properly.
This is generally accomplished by using headphone wires as antennae.
Hardware-level support for FM is apparently present for some fairly popular devices, but not activated in software. I don't think that the difficulties (power requirements, technical difficulty of implementation, etc) are as serious as you're making them out to be.
AC, Americans don't say "representative to" (or at least they don't in any part of the country I've ever lived in). It sounds unnatural. I would assume that the previous AC either made a typo or isn't a native speaker of English.
Are you claiming that people who don't want yet another phone bill deserve to do without hardware too?
What does "deserve" have to do with business decisions? Someone who isn't willing to pay for a product+service that's available doesn't necessarily deserve to have an alternative that fits there need better. If there's no workable business case for it, it won't happen.
And what does paying for a cellular plan have to do with buying a smartphone, anyhow? There's plenty of capable hardware available off-contract. My last two smartphones see some limited use as PDA-like devices, and my current phone. Sometimes you make some good points. This doesn't look like one of those times.
Lol. Do you not get that I spend a lot of time talking with economists and financial experts around the world?
I think that there are a few problems that people have with your statements, and it doesn't have anything to do with whether they're true or not.
First, that bit that I quoted is a logical fallacy usually called Argument from Authority.
Second, you are making a lot of claims without providing evidence. Since you are making the claims, the burden of proof falls on you; you don't get to dismiss the counterarguments that others have posted (often with backing evidence, like links to studies and papers) since you haven't provided anything to counter them aside from unsupported assertions.
Seriously, do you guys not grok the 100 Gbps Internet 2 or something?
I think we do. Part of the point is that it's wonderfully easy to link to information, since you seem to have it available in abundance. Personally, I'm completely ignorant of the Seattle area. I'm sure that I could find some kind of information about the situation up there, since I'm fairly handy with a search engine; I don't know if it would reflect reality though, or if I'd just find the mouthpiece of someone with an agenda besides truth.
Just for the sake of being clear though: I don't think you're trying to persuade anyone of anything. I think you're just trying to make a lot of noise and see how many people you can hook with a troll line. Congrats; you seem to have a good catch.
Worst of all is when they embark on a rewrite and give up half way through.
I saw something similar happen at my employer. A newer employee was sent on a mostly solo project to rewrite some of the core of our product, to make it easier to make some planned enhancements. Things didn't immediately work perfectly, and some of the founding employees fought the changes. Since they were necessary for the next release, and there wasn't another option for the features that we were required to make available, we ended up with two parallel sections of code that did basically the same thing but in very different ways. That was what we put up with for 4 or 5 *years* before the politics of the situation allowed us to integrate the changes back into a single codepath.
Before that, if you didn't touch that code constantly, it was usually unclear which path was being actively used and which was bitrotted to uselessness.