Right now there are 100's of phones on the market, all running some sort of OS. Each of them appeal to different audiences, with different features, reliability, and carrier compatability.
Essentially, some of those 100's of current models are being replaced with models running Android. Android is an operating system, it does not define the device it runs upon. Just like I can run Linux using just a tty interface over a serial link, or I can run it with a 3d desktop across multiple screens; Android can be similarly used for different phones.
The advantages of Android over existing phone OS's are threefold: 1. cost... there is no cost to the manufacturer of the phone or the carrier. 2. compatibility... applications for Android will be compatable with other manufacturers Android handsets, so different manufacturers will compete on quality of their product rather than the amount of software available. 3. features... Android was developed to be very feature rich, of course manufacturers can disable features but if they want them it is trivial to enable them. If the public begins to demand additional features as ideas change, then Android can be upgraded to include those features.
Essentially, there were no phone OS's that manufacturers could even purchase that would result in a product so refined that it could compete with Apple and Blackberry, and neither of them were licensing their code. Android changes that.
I maintained a smaller, IBM drum unit, mounted on a military plane. I often wonder what it would be like to work on a modern implementation. Imagine, zero seek times, less than 1ms access times, and parallel reads possibly from every track at once (if the bus would allow it).
The system I worked on was a whopping 12Mhz minicomputer... and it's 60's era drum unit was actually faster than any magnetic storage available today (for random reads and writes), I did the math once and it could sustain well over 200MB's (if every track were read at once); not that the system could feed it data that fast or that it had that much capacity.
Don't even get me started on the core memory that was later replaced with bubble memory. Though I do miss the days of a computer maintaining it's state when power is removed.
It's kind of amusing how we have gone backwards from those days. MRAM always seems to be a few years away and in the meantime if the power goes out, we lose everything. Even in the 60's this wasn't the case.
Has a deadline based scheduler been done before? It seems like an excellent idea for time sensitive (real time) processing. I have worked with RT os's before, iRMX mostly, and always wondered how the scheduling worked.
That's easy... it's called a watch and a ruler. Now I'm no watch maker, nor can I create an accurate ruler without one to use for refrence, but if you'll let me give you velocity in strides per "one thousand" count... then I can measure velocity.
That "walking pace" stat could be very impressive if it were given with the proper qualification information.
For example, if it could detect an object moving at that pace over the course of a year at 1 light year away... I would probably not be as impressed if it could do it from 50 light years in a matter of minutes.
1/3 of the participants liked the lower bitrate audio better. So they could indeed tell the difference. In fact, I'd bet the majority of the participants could tell the difference between the samples, but about 1/3 found the lower bitrate samples more enjoyable.
Of course, that 1/3 may have their reasons. For example, the lower the bitrate the greater the amount of low and high frequency muddyness... which can actually make the lyrics and hook more pronounced.
I compare low vs high bitrate as the difference between watching a DVD on a TV and on a decent home theater. Some people just want to watch the movie, and some consider film making an art and want to experience every nuance.
A law's sole purpose is to restrict freedoms... in other words to move further from anarchy.
Sure many laws are necessary because without them society would crumble. However there should be as few laws as necessary to maintain a productive society.
If they try to write network neutrality laws, then they will essentially be writing a law that says what the carriers CAN do as much as they are writing what they CAN'T do. At least right now they are being governed by their customer's interests... once there are laws that say they can do something, they will.
Also, once there is a law, it can be changed. People are much less concerned with amendments to existing laws then new ones. So lets say that a NN law gets passed that prevents all forms of providers charging for access to particular websites. A little lobbying and they can get that amended, often as part of a unrelated bill, to allow them to do something we wouldn't like. Because the law was already in place, we actually made it easier for them to get what they want.
This has nothing to due with the current administration. The ACTA was formed in 2007 and is an international organization. Sure the administration could try and force them to open up... but who knows how high on their list this issue is.
People seem to forget that Obama hasn't even been if office for a year yet. Very few presidents accomplishments are visible in their fist TERM let alone their first year.
If you work for the government, or even a large corporation, having the president say "We will do this" results in several months of people writing and implementing policies, changing the way things have been done, etc. Then you need to break the habits of folks who have been doing it differently for years. Finally you need to fix everything that no one thought of. I could be several years before Obama's transparency promise truely begins to be noticeable... though I have been reading of a lot of things that show of a shift in that direction since he came into office so the trend is in the right direction.
There are alternatives, and if your ISP is preventing you from doing what you need/want to do you would find one. Sure it may not be available right now, as there isn't a need with your current ISP. But say your ISP started charging extra if you wanted to use some popular websites... now there would be enough unhappy customers that a competitor might be able to gain some traction.
Market based solutions are not always swift, but they are usually better than legal based ones.
I know if my local ISP started treating its customers this way, I would start my own community ISP buying and reselling raw bandwidth. The worse they treat their customers the faster I would grow.
Google will digitize and host the books and sell that service to retailers who will then sell the downloads.
Essentially competition will drive the price to $0.01 over what Google's hosting costs. I will setup a website, selling every book google will let me, for exactly $0.01 over what Google is charging me for thier services.... retailers won't stand a chance!
Google is competing with retailers, even if they use this model they will essentially eliminate the ability for retailers to compete. Sure B&N might sell a few for a while, but it won't take long before everyone knows they can get their books cheaper at somecheapbooksite.com and save themselves a trip to the store.
This is actually the most reasonable response I have heard to my question. So the way you understand it is that Google will not have a website to visit at all... they will just digitize and host the books, letting the retailers be responsible for marketing and sales.
Of course I will still open a web storefront that sells the books for $0.01 over whatever I would pay google to host the download. And I would ask google to let me sell their entire catalog of books. I may even ask google to host my site for me... I'll just sit back and make money.
But this actually cleared it up for me. I was thinking along the lines of Amazon's marketplace, which makes no sense in digital media sales.
Until there are abuses, don't make laws. The problem with laws is that they too can be used for good or ill. A law, any law, restricts freedom.. no matter it's intent. I can think of very few well meaning laws that haven't been used in a way that the writers didn't intend.
The great thing about the Internet is that if someone becomes disruptive, they will just be routed around. Until that ability begins to erode, lets keep the law out of it!
This is an electronic download, presumably from Google's servers. Google will pay the publisher, as will the retailer. With multiple retailers selling the exact same digital download, competition will drive the price down to $0.01 over what the retailer pays the publisher... so why bother with a retailer at all. In fact if google does really open with this model, I will start a company that will simply sell thousands of books for 1 cent over what the publisher will charge me.
Imagine iTunes using this model, paying multiple retailers to sell songs in the iTunes store. It just doesn't make sense with digital downloads.
With Amazon, (not digital books) multiple retailer's make sense... it's a physical good and the retailers can compete on speed, pre and post sale support, proximity to the customer, negotiations with their distributors etc. But digital downloads eliminate everything but price.
Why do they need retailers at all? If they are paying the publisher anyway... why not just sell direct and give a larger cut to the publisher. I guess what I want to know is, what role does the retailer play here? It would by like going to iTunes to buy a song, and have to choose which retailer is going to get credit for the sale. It's a download, not a TV, so Amazons retailer model doesn't make sense here, people will simply always buy from the cheapest source and that source will be the one who only takes $.01 above cost (from the publisher) hoping for volume. So essentially 45% will go to the publisher, and a great majority of the other 55% will go the publisher.... why the middle man.
Sure they could... they would issue a restraining order, which if violated could result in criminal charges.
This law is unnecessary and open to abuse, the old system of filing a complaint, getting the courts to issue a restraining order, and daring your enemy to violate the order so that they can get busted is much more fun... and more fair too.
Essentially the old system said "Stop it, I'm serious and I have the law on my side"... the new system will punish harassers without giving them a warning to stop first. There are many circumstances where a harasser might not realize that things have reached the point where the harassed is feeling harassed. Especially in the case of children, where the child may be OK, but the parents see some kid saying mean things about their "baby" and they want retribution... even when their "little angel" has already laughed it off.
Your privacy concerns are valid... however think of the applications for this tech.
Your instant messenger will know when your available or not. Your phone system could direct your calls to you mobile if your away from the desk.
Proximity may also be important break for the future of voice activated computing. If the computer knows your there, it can listen, and when you leave it ignores any sounds.
I think there will be applications for this tech far beyond pc's, especially once it becomes common.
I support a handful of optical fingerprint machines, that cost upwards of $5000/ scanner.
This so called 3-D scanner is simply going to be a very precise laser range finder that scans like a barcode reader. I would imagine that it will be cheaper to manufacture (who knows what the R&D costs will be) but there are significant advantages to this method.
They aren't really interested in the depth, only in sensing where the ridges begin and end... instead of using a finger pressed against something (paper, or glass) to infer where the ridges and valleys are, they will actually measure them.
Read the article and remember they are talking averages here.
They give it away with this line:
Only 8% of DIMMs had errors per year on average. Fewer DIMMs = fewer error problems - good news for users of smaller systems
Essentially, only 8% of their ECC DIMM's reported ANY errors in a given year.
Also this was pretty telling:
Besides error rates much higher than expected - which is plenty bad - the study found that error rates were motherboard, not DIMM type or vendor, dependent.
And this:
For all platforms they found that 20% of the machines with errors make up more than 90% of all observed errors on that platform.
So essentially, they are saying that only 8% of DIMMSs reported errors, 90% of which were on 20% of the machines that had errors, mostly because of motherboard issues... yet DIMMs are less reliable than previously thought.
I would imagine that if you removed all of the bad motherboards, power supplies, environmental, and other issues... that DIMMs are actually more reliable than I previously thought, not less! I wonder what percentage of CPU operations yield incorrect results. With Billions of instructions per second, even an astronomically low average of undetected cpu errors would guarantee an error at least as often as failed DIMMs.
What I did take from the article was that without ECC ram, you have no way of knowing that your RAM has errors. I guess I should rethink my belief that ECC was a waste of money.
I am guessing that you don't count at all... for several reasons:
1. Their survey forms don't have a spot for Linux, and they didn't think that someone might have 11. 2. You probably wouldn't answer their survey anyway. 3. I'd imagine that people like you and I make up a very small portion, so small that we would have an insignificant influence on their data.
It counts except it isn't mine and I have no choice but to run windows. Given a choice, that would run Linux too.
I still consider my household to be Windows free... and better for it! I am no fanboi... I have made a very nice living off of supporting Windows, and currently work in a pure Windows shop. However since converting my household, and my parents household to Linux, I actually spend more time at home doing what I want to do rather than continuing to 'work' for my family too.
I feel all of the shortcomings of using Linux, especially the lack of quality modern games and even, cringe, commercial software. But nothing could convince me to go back to Windows today... properly supported Linux will beat Windows in nearly every category.
I just hope that ARM based laptops lead to a large increase in linux market share. The only ARM OS Microsoft makes is Windows CE... and it's crap.
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You don't understand what is happening at all.
Right now there are 100's of phones on the market, all running some sort of OS. Each of them appeal to different audiences, with different features, reliability, and carrier compatability.
Essentially, some of those 100's of current models are being replaced with models running Android. Android is an operating system, it does not define the device it runs upon. Just like I can run Linux using just a tty interface over a serial link, or I can run it with a 3d desktop across multiple screens; Android can be similarly used for different phones.
The advantages of Android over existing phone OS's are threefold:
1. cost... there is no cost to the manufacturer of the phone or the carrier.
2. compatibility... applications for Android will be compatable with other manufacturers Android handsets, so different manufacturers will compete on quality of their product rather than the amount of software available.
3. features... Android was developed to be very feature rich, of course manufacturers can disable features but if they want them it is trivial to enable them. If the public begins to demand additional features as ideas change, then Android can be upgraded to include those features.
Essentially, there were no phone OS's that manufacturers could even purchase that would result in a product so refined that it could compete with Apple and Blackberry, and neither of them were licensing their code. Android changes that.
I maintained a smaller, IBM drum unit, mounted on a military plane. I often wonder what it would be like to work on a modern implementation. Imagine, zero seek times, less than 1ms access times, and parallel reads possibly from every track at once (if the bus would allow it).
The system I worked on was a whopping 12Mhz minicomputer... and it's 60's era drum unit was actually faster than any magnetic storage available today (for random reads and writes), I did the math once and it could sustain well over 200MB's (if every track were read at once); not that the system could feed it data that fast or that it had that much capacity.
Fun read: http://www.tpub.com/neets/book22/92d.htm
Don't even get me started on the core memory that was later replaced with bubble memory. Though I do miss the days of a computer maintaining it's state when power is removed.
It's kind of amusing how we have gone backwards from those days. MRAM always seems to be a few years away and in the meantime if the power goes out, we lose everything. Even in the 60's this wasn't the case.
Has a deadline based scheduler been done before? It seems like an excellent idea for time sensitive (real time) processing. I have worked with RT os's before, iRMX mostly, and always wondered how the scheduling worked.
That's easy... it's called a watch and a ruler. Now I'm no watch maker, nor can I create an accurate ruler without one to use for refrence, but if you'll let me give you velocity in strides per "one thousand" count... then I can measure velocity.
That "walking pace" stat could be very impressive if it were given with the proper qualification information.
For example, if it could detect an object moving at that pace over the course of a year at 1 light year away... I would probably not be as impressed if it could do it from 50 light years in a matter of minutes.
1/3 of the participants liked the lower bitrate audio better. So they could indeed tell the difference. In fact, I'd bet the majority of the participants could tell the difference between the samples, but about 1/3 found the lower bitrate samples more enjoyable.
Of course, that 1/3 may have their reasons. For example, the lower the bitrate the greater the amount of low and high frequency muddyness... which can actually make the lyrics and hook more pronounced.
I compare low vs high bitrate as the difference between watching a DVD on a TV and on a decent home theater. Some people just want to watch the movie, and some consider film making an art and want to experience every nuance.
Exactly... if they are a monopoly then there are already laws on the books to take care of that... we don't need NN laws.
Since you took the time, so will I.
A law's sole purpose is to restrict freedoms... in other words to move further from anarchy.
Sure many laws are necessary because without them society would crumble. However there should be as few laws as necessary to maintain a productive society.
If they try to write network neutrality laws, then they will essentially be writing a law that says what the carriers CAN do as much as they are writing what they CAN'T do. At least right now they are being governed by their customer's interests... once there are laws that say they can do something, they will.
Also, once there is a law, it can be changed. People are much less concerned with amendments to existing laws then new ones. So lets say that a NN law gets passed that prevents all forms of providers charging for access to particular websites. A little lobbying and they can get that amended, often as part of a unrelated bill, to allow them to do something we wouldn't like. Because the law was already in place, we actually made it easier for them to get what they want.
This has nothing to due with the current administration. The ACTA was formed in 2007 and is an international organization. Sure the administration could try and force them to open up... but who knows how high on their list this issue is.
People seem to forget that Obama hasn't even been if office for a year yet. Very few presidents accomplishments are visible in their fist TERM let alone their first year.
If you work for the government, or even a large corporation, having the president say "We will do this" results in several months of people writing and implementing policies, changing the way things have been done, etc. Then you need to break the habits of folks who have been doing it differently for years. Finally you need to fix everything that no one thought of. I could be several years before Obama's transparency promise truely begins to be noticeable... though I have been reading of a lot of things that show of a shift in that direction since he came into office so the trend is in the right direction.
There are alternatives, and if your ISP is preventing you from doing what you need/want to do you would find one. Sure it may not be available right now, as there isn't a need with your current ISP. But say your ISP started charging extra if you wanted to use some popular websites... now there would be enough unhappy customers that a competitor might be able to gain some traction.
Market based solutions are not always swift, but they are usually better than legal based ones.
I know if my local ISP started treating its customers this way, I would start my own community ISP buying and reselling raw bandwidth. The worse they treat their customers the faster I would grow.
Good now its clear as mud.
Google will digitize and host the books and sell that service to retailers who will then sell the downloads.
Essentially competition will drive the price to $0.01 over what Google's hosting costs. I will setup a website, selling every book google will let me, for exactly $0.01 over what Google is charging me for thier services.... retailers won't stand a chance!
Google is competing with retailers, even if they use this model they will essentially eliminate the ability for retailers to compete. Sure B&N might sell a few for a while, but it won't take long before everyone knows they can get their books cheaper at somecheapbooksite.com and save themselves a trip to the store.
This is actually the most reasonable response I have heard to my question. So the way you understand it is that Google will not have a website to visit at all... they will just digitize and host the books, letting the retailers be responsible for marketing and sales.
Of course I will still open a web storefront that sells the books for $0.01 over whatever I would pay google to host the download. And I would ask google to let me sell their entire catalog of books. I may even ask google to host my site for me... I'll just sit back and make money.
But this actually cleared it up for me. I was thinking along the lines of Amazon's marketplace, which makes no sense in digital media sales.
Until there are abuses, don't make laws. The problem with laws is that they too can be used for good or ill. A law, any law, restricts freedom.. no matter it's intent. I can think of very few well meaning laws that haven't been used in a way that the writers didn't intend.
The great thing about the Internet is that if someone becomes disruptive, they will just be routed around. Until that ability begins to erode, lets keep the law out of it!
I did read the article... and I am still baffled.
This is an electronic download, presumably from Google's servers. Google will pay the publisher, as will the retailer. With multiple retailers selling the exact same digital download, competition will drive the price down to $0.01 over what the retailer pays the publisher... so why bother with a retailer at all. In fact if google does really open with this model, I will start a company that will simply sell thousands of books for 1 cent over what the publisher will charge me.
Imagine iTunes using this model, paying multiple retailers to sell songs in the iTunes store. It just doesn't make sense with digital downloads.
With Amazon, (not digital books) multiple retailer's make sense... it's a physical good and the retailers can compete on speed, pre and post sale support, proximity to the customer, negotiations with their distributors etc. But digital downloads eliminate everything but price.
Why do they need retailers at all? If they are paying the publisher anyway... why not just sell direct and give a larger cut to the publisher. I guess what I want to know is, what role does the retailer play here? It would by like going to iTunes to buy a song, and have to choose which retailer is going to get credit for the sale. It's a download, not a TV, so Amazons retailer model doesn't make sense here, people will simply always buy from the cheapest source and that source will be the one who only takes $.01 above cost (from the publisher) hoping for volume. So essentially 45% will go to the publisher, and a great majority of the other 55% will go the publisher.... why the middle man.
Sure they could... they would issue a restraining order, which if violated could result in criminal charges.
This law is unnecessary and open to abuse, the old system of filing a complaint, getting the courts to issue a restraining order, and daring your enemy to violate the order so that they can get busted is much more fun... and more fair too.
Essentially the old system said "Stop it, I'm serious and I have the law on my side"... the new system will punish harassers without giving them a warning to stop first. There are many circumstances where a harasser might not realize that things have reached the point where the harassed is feeling harassed. Especially in the case of children, where the child may be OK, but the parents see some kid saying mean things about their "baby" and they want retribution... even when their "little angel" has already laughed it off.
I don't understand why they would be paying "the vast majority" (of whats left after paying the publisher) to retailers?
I haven't read the article yet, but either the summary is way off, misleading, or it just doesn't make sense!
Your privacy concerns are valid... however think of the applications for this tech.
Your instant messenger will know when your available or not.
Your phone system could direct your calls to you mobile if your away from the desk.
Proximity may also be important break for the future of voice activated computing. If the computer knows your there, it can listen, and when you leave it ignores any sounds.
I think there will be applications for this tech far beyond pc's, especially once it becomes common.
Ink and paper is going away, slowly but surely.
I support a handful of optical fingerprint machines, that cost upwards of $5000/ scanner.
This so called 3-D scanner is simply going to be a very precise laser range finder that scans like a barcode reader. I would imagine that it will be cheaper to manufacture (who knows what the R&D costs will be) but there are significant advantages to this method.
They aren't really interested in the depth, only in sensing where the ridges begin and end... instead of using a finger pressed against something (paper, or glass) to infer where the ridges and valleys are, they will actually measure them.
where solar or wind were the only power options that did not require fuel to produce power
Other than perhaps tidal/wave energy, aren't solar or wind essentially the only power options that don't require fuel?
The same way you measure the boundaries of anything... you approximate.
Realize that we are talking about something tremendous in size, so the fudge factor is huge.
Even if you were measuring something small, your measurement is still only accurate to a certain place value.
So for them to say "about 5.7 million miles" they are saying that they can approximate to the nearest 100,000 miles, but they don't know exactly.
I agree that astronomically is not the right word, but what is it's opposite.
Microscopic isn't small enough, would you agree with "impossibly low average"?
Read the article and remember they are talking averages here.
They give it away with this line:
Only 8% of DIMMs had errors per year on average. Fewer DIMMs = fewer error problems - good news for users of smaller systems
Essentially, only 8% of their ECC DIMM's reported ANY errors in a given year.
Also this was pretty telling:
Besides error rates much higher than expected - which is plenty bad - the study found that error rates were motherboard, not DIMM type or vendor, dependent.
And this:
For all platforms they found that 20% of the machines with errors make up more than 90% of all observed errors on that platform.
So essentially, they are saying that only 8% of DIMMSs reported errors, 90% of which were on 20% of the machines that had errors, mostly because of motherboard issues... yet DIMMs are less reliable than previously thought.
I would imagine that if you removed all of the bad motherboards, power supplies, environmental, and other issues... that DIMMs are actually more reliable than I previously thought, not less! I wonder what percentage of CPU operations yield incorrect results. With Billions of instructions per second, even an astronomically low average of undetected cpu errors would guarantee an error at least as often as failed DIMMs.
What I did take from the article was that without ECC ram, you have no way of knowing that your RAM has errors. I guess I should rethink my belief that ECC was a waste of money.
I am guessing that you don't count at all... for several reasons:
1. Their survey forms don't have a spot for Linux, and they didn't think that someone might have 11.
2. You probably wouldn't answer their survey anyway.
3. I'd imagine that people like you and I make up a very small portion, so small that we would have an insignificant influence on their data.
It counts except it isn't mine and I have no choice but to run windows. Given a choice, that would run Linux too.
I still consider my household to be Windows free... and better for it! I am no fanboi... I have made a very nice living off of supporting Windows, and currently work in a pure Windows shop. However since converting my household, and my parents household to Linux, I actually spend more time at home doing what I want to do rather than continuing to 'work' for my family too.
I feel all of the shortcomings of using Linux, especially the lack of quality modern games and even, cringe, commercial software. But nothing could convince me to go back to Windows today... properly supported Linux will beat Windows in nearly every category.
I just hope that ARM based laptops lead to a large increase in linux market share. The only ARM OS Microsoft makes is Windows CE... and it's crap.