Well, when you have 5 releases in less than a year, you can't really expect new devices to be using the latest version. The latest version of Android was released about two weeks ago. How many months did it take after Windows Vista was released before most new computers were shipping with it included? And that's a minor change. I mean it's big, but any PC they were making to run XP could run Vista too. Android's not so simple.
While it is true that 2.0 was only released a month after 1.6, I would imagine they were developing for 1.5 and managed to shift to 1.6 fairly easily. But 2.0 is a much bigger update, and it'll probably take time to make it work on a new device. It'll get there, though they'll probably skip straight to 2.2 I would imagine.
Just a couple nights ago, I was (to the best of my knowledge) parked legally . I came out of where I was visiting, and saw a patrol car stopped in the road with his spot light aimed at a house across the street...it's illegal to park along any road in the county, even though it's not posted anywhere, and it's done all the time.
As I said before, it's a stupid law, it should at least be posted, but I don't think the police are the ones who make those decisions. As they say, they don't make the laws, they just enforce them.
I will agree with you though that the cop could have informed him of the situation in a more police way...but that's the only thing I see that he did wrong. I generally jump on the chance to call out wrongdoing by any arm of the government, but the only thing I can see that the cop in this example did wrong is that he said, "You weren't going to drive off while I'm running your plates, were you?" rather than "Hang on a minute, you're parked illegally" or something along those lines.
Also, a law being rarely enforced doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There's a stretch of highway near my house that has a speed limit of 65MPH. I have _never_ seen a police officer anywhere near that road. Nobody ever gets pulled over there. It's so safe that it's generally where I go when I want to try to see the top speed of a car (I've hit 130). But it's still illegal to speed there, and if an officer happens to be there and catches you, saying "people do it all the time and don't get caught" is no excuse.
And you don't see a problem with that? The cop treats the guy like a criminal, he kisses the cop's ass and you say "good for him!"
I would agree completely with you here, except there's one problem. According to the GP post, he was parked illegally, and therefore he apparently _was_ a criminal. Yes, it's a stupid law, but that probably isn't the cop's fault.
Yup. And a lot of it is actually being funded by the drug dealers...somewhat indirectly. As "incentive" for police to catch dealers, they get to keep a large portion of the assets they seize. So rather than catching the drugs on their way in, a lot of departments wait until the drugs have already been sold before busting the dealers. They can't keep the drugs, but any money, cars, etc that they confiscate are fair game. There are some agencies that are funded exclusively through seized assets.
A bunch of guys with military style weaponry, funded entirely from things that they seize from other people. That doesn't sound like a police force anymore. I mean, these are the police. _These_ are the guys who enforce the laws. If the government can't control them through their budgets, then who can?
The actual LEGO construction is _not_ the impressive part here. I built something quite similar 5+ years ago. Many people did. They gave instructions for how to build it in the LEGO Mindstorms Ultimate Builders Set. And there were a huge number of alternatives built as well, to be more accurate or to print on different paper or just built differently. The impressive part of this is all in software. Never seen anything like that before.
While a lot of slashdotters support Software as a Service, very few, if any, would support Music as a Service.
The problem with music as a service is either it doesn't work for the customer or it doesn't work for the business. Either you can't get the music on all your devices, or it's easy to copy and therefore you don't really need to pay for it.
Compare it to subscription software like MMORPGs. When you pay for World of Warcraft, you aren't paying for the software. Software's free. You can load it on as many computers as you want, as many times as you want. Yes, they change for it in stores, but those also come with a free subscription, so really you're paying for the subscription, and happen to get the program on plastic discs along with it. But anyway, the reason it works as a service is because you need Blizzard's servers. That's what you're paying for. If you want to go use some third-party servers, they aren't going to stop you and they aren't going to try to change you for that. That doesn't work with music. You don't need a third party server to play your music.
Now, the alternative is software as a service as in a support contract. But music has no support, either. In this scenario, you would get the music for free and pay the artists to fix any problems you have with it. It's absurd. Music doesn't have tech support. It doesn't have patches.
People support SaaS but not MaaS because with music, there is no service to provide. With SaaS, the service is not actually the software itself, it's some related component that has some very visible cost.
1. Lack of browser support for downloading fonts (CSS @font-face and friends; see @font-face: The Potential of Web Typography, which will also show you if your browser supports the technology they use)
Yup, my browser supports it. Which is why I can barely read anything on that site. I'll stick with my system Sans/Sans-serif fonts, thanks. I don't need this illegible crap that looks like it was written with a pen that was running out of ink by someone who was trying to write as fast as humanly possible. Even the non-cursive fonts on that page look like crap and are difficult to read.
The Mac is the key. Think of it as a great big dongle. It's really the same thing.
Yes, because dongles always cost $2000 and completely replace your existing computer. Dongles, when absolutely required, are generally free.
In a nutshell, Apple doesn't sell computers, they sell lifestyle.
Yea, sure. Sony sells a lifestyle too. So it's perfectly alright for them to change the product after you already own it for that reason, right? It'd be alright for them to say that Sony stereo equipment won't work with equipment from any other companies because they sell a lifestyle, right?
The product they sell isn't a PC, though it duplicates all a PC can do.
Sure. 'It looks like a PC, acts like a PC, feels like a PC, is exactly the same as a PC, but it's not a PC! We promise!'
Unless you go rogue, and Apple allows for that, isn't taking any hackent0sh users to court
Tell that to Pystar. Apple's EULA specifically prohibits any installs not performed by Apple (though they sell it separately for some reason.....), and they _do_ enforce that.
its not about control, it's about selling their hardware.
If it wasn't about control, they wouldn't have the app store. If it wasn't about control, they wouldn't be claiming jailbreakers were criminals (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9127978/Apple_iPhone_Jailbreak_hack_violates_the_law) - after all, those who jailbreak must purchase the hardware, and plenty of people wouldn't buy it in the first place if it wasn't jailbroken. Jobs has specifically said that he feels that it is "his job" to prevent people from using Apple hardware the way they want. (http://www.tuaw.com/2007/09/19/jobs-its-our-job-to-stop-them-breaking-in/)
it's no more artificial than Windows requiring a key.
I would disagree with you there. There's a huge difference between saying 'you can only use our software if you purchase it legally' and 'you can only use our software if it's on our hardware'. If their hardware was different and they didn't want to do extra work to make OS X run on non-mac hardware, fine. But it isn't anymore. There's really no difference between a mac and a high end Dell. The _only reason_ you can't run OS X on a Dell is because Steve Jobs says so. For some reason nobody defends Microsoft saying 'if the hardware changes four times you won't be able to run this copy of Windows anymore without calling us', while Apple can say 'You can't change the hardware' and people still defend them.
In North America at least it all depends on the class of hotel you're staying at. When I travel with my own family, every hotel has free Wi-fi. But we're staying at the Holiday Inn or Super 8. When I travel with my girlfriend's family, not a single place we ever stay has free Wi-fi - but then, they stay at the Ritz or Marriotts
Yes, it is ridiculous, because they sold it to you with the promise that _that would be free_. If when you purchased it, the box stated that you may someday need to pay $7.99/month to use online components, fine. But it doesn't. This isn't about if what they are changing/doing is reasonable. It's about whether or not they can dramatically alter the product _after you buy it_.
Bullshit. You buy a PS3 and then a couple years later they tell you 'ok, now you have to choose between feature A not working and feature B not working'. If Sony is allowed to do this, then that also means it would be legal for them to start charging money for the features that the game consale originally came with and advertised as being free. Why don't they just make the next firmware update required a $50 payment every time you want to eject the current game disk? I mean as long as they let you know that's what it's doing before installing, there's nothing wrong with that, right?
You can't sell something that doesn't do what it's advertised as doing. And you can't sell something that's going to stop functioning at some future date without making that clear at the time of purchase.
Yes. If you wrap a paper towel around it and the paper towel comes back wet (from the grease), then in my book it counts as crap food. Though perhaps your Chick-fil-A is better than mine - I'm on a college campus, and my Sbarro similarly tastes like crap and drips grease, when other Sbarros I've gone to are not so greasy and occasionally are even quite good. Never tried another Chick-fil-A though.
a 1600 X 1200 in 21" format is going to be a killer!
It is. I have one. It's a CRT from a Dell that's got to be nearing a decade old now. Of course, I can't use it at that resolution, because I have two monitors and the brand new, fairly high-end LCD next to it, with the same vertical height, has far less vertical pixels. So either I have some really awkward L-shaped desktop, or I keep my big CRT at a measly 1280x1024
Well the idea for that one was that we could write anything we wanted - absolutely anything. He did some review, and I think the 1000 lines was more of a guideline than a hard rule, but it makes sense to ensure people aren't doing too much or too little effort. My project ended up being close to 3000. But I think part of the 1000 line rule was to make sure you weren't offloading the entire program to 3rd party libraries. This was an introductory OOP class, so the idea of the class is generally getting used to writing code, and you can't really do that if you never write any code.
Makes more sense than a length requirement on a paper - and I've never had a paper without one of those.
That is why most of the comp sci courses I've taken here at PSU have assignments like: "create a program that is at least 1000 lines and uses x, y, and z" or "Create a program that has a GUI using a text box, a button, and radio buttons and outputs data inside the GUI in some form" (well, more complete descriptions than those, but you get the idea). Much harder to cheat that way.
Sure, there are homeworks too in some classes that are much smaller and generally easier to cheat on, but those are usually less than a quarter of the final grade. The rest is projects and exams.
Yea, we have bandwidth caps at my uni too...but there's no shortage of ways around them. Because if I want to download one Linux ISO, I'm already over my weekly cap - and as the VP of the Linux Users Group, there have been times when I needed 3 or 4 DVD images within a span of a couple hours. But as I said, there's no shortage of ways around the caps. You can download from wireless, you can get on someone's connection in town (frats, apartments, businesses), you can connect through the campus proxy server, you can ssh into one of the unix lab machines and download from there, and hell I think you could probably even use one of the many VPN servers that they have to login from home or from the wifi (there's the main campus one and then some departments have their own), though I've never tried that.
In some states doing something like this could be construed as "sexual relations with a minor" (i.e., yourself). Theoretically, that could land you in jail for 5-10 years and forever be labeled a pedophile.
Yea....except the people in this commercial appear to be in their mid-20s....
Yea. Only a few hundred bucks more expensive for the entire laptop, which may not seem like much...but is it really worth it? Of all the things you could have spent that money on, it went to the hard drives? You're adding a few hundred bucks for a part that is usually under a hundred bucks.
Yea, it's only _40 times_ the cost of a regular hard drive.
Why not buy a crapload of regular drives...then you can RAID a bunch of them and have a crapload more left over for when any of them fail. Guarantee 40 TB regular drives could be set up to be both faster and last longer than a 1TB SSD. Would be a bit bigger though....
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Well, when you have 5 releases in less than a year, you can't really expect new devices to be using the latest version. The latest version of Android was released about two weeks ago. How many months did it take after Windows Vista was released before most new computers were shipping with it included? And that's a minor change. I mean it's big, but any PC they were making to run XP could run Vista too. Android's not so simple.
While it is true that 2.0 was only released a month after 1.6, I would imagine they were developing for 1.5 and managed to shift to 1.6 fairly easily. But 2.0 is a much bigger update, and it'll probably take time to make it work on a new device. It'll get there, though they'll probably skip straight to 2.2 I would imagine.
Or, if you modify your emphasis...
Just a couple nights ago, I was (to the best of my knowledge) parked legally . I came out of where I was visiting, and saw a patrol car stopped in the road with his spot light aimed at a house across the street...it's illegal to park along any road in the county, even though it's not posted anywhere, and it's done all the time.
As I said before, it's a stupid law, it should at least be posted, but I don't think the police are the ones who make those decisions. As they say, they don't make the laws, they just enforce them.
I will agree with you though that the cop could have informed him of the situation in a more police way...but that's the only thing I see that he did wrong. I generally jump on the chance to call out wrongdoing by any arm of the government, but the only thing I can see that the cop in this example did wrong is that he said, "You weren't going to drive off while I'm running your plates, were you?" rather than "Hang on a minute, you're parked illegally" or something along those lines.
Also, a law being rarely enforced doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There's a stretch of highway near my house that has a speed limit of 65MPH. I have _never_ seen a police officer anywhere near that road. Nobody ever gets pulled over there. It's so safe that it's generally where I go when I want to try to see the top speed of a car (I've hit 130). But it's still illegal to speed there, and if an officer happens to be there and catches you, saying "people do it all the time and don't get caught" is no excuse.
And you don't see a problem with that?
The cop treats the guy like a criminal, he kisses the cop's ass and you say "good for him!"
I would agree completely with you here, except there's one problem. According to the GP post, he was parked illegally, and therefore he apparently _was_ a criminal. Yes, it's a stupid law, but that probably isn't the cop's fault.
Yup. And a lot of it is actually being funded by the drug dealers...somewhat indirectly. As "incentive" for police to catch dealers, they get to keep a large portion of the assets they seize. So rather than catching the drugs on their way in, a lot of departments wait until the drugs have already been sold before busting the dealers. They can't keep the drugs, but any money, cars, etc that they confiscate are fair game. There are some agencies that are funded exclusively through seized assets.
A bunch of guys with military style weaponry, funded entirely from things that they seize from other people. That doesn't sound like a police force anymore. I mean, these are the police. _These_ are the guys who enforce the laws. If the government can't control them through their budgets, then who can?
Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91490480
The actual LEGO construction is _not_ the impressive part here. I built something quite similar 5+ years ago. Many people did. They gave instructions for how to build it in the LEGO Mindstorms Ultimate Builders Set. And there were a huge number of alternatives built as well, to be more accurate or to print on different paper or just built differently. The impressive part of this is all in software. Never seen anything like that before.
While a lot of slashdotters support Software as a Service, very few, if any, would support Music as a Service.
The problem with music as a service is either it doesn't work for the customer or it doesn't work for the business. Either you can't get the music on all your devices, or it's easy to copy and therefore you don't really need to pay for it.
Compare it to subscription software like MMORPGs. When you pay for World of Warcraft, you aren't paying for the software. Software's free. You can load it on as many computers as you want, as many times as you want. Yes, they change for it in stores, but those also come with a free subscription, so really you're paying for the subscription, and happen to get the program on plastic discs along with it. But anyway, the reason it works as a service is because you need Blizzard's servers. That's what you're paying for. If you want to go use some third-party servers, they aren't going to stop you and they aren't going to try to change you for that. That doesn't work with music. You don't need a third party server to play your music.
Now, the alternative is software as a service as in a support contract. But music has no support, either. In this scenario, you would get the music for free and pay the artists to fix any problems you have with it. It's absurd. Music doesn't have tech support. It doesn't have patches.
People support SaaS but not MaaS because with music, there is no service to provide. With SaaS, the service is not actually the software itself, it's some related component that has some very visible cost.
I bet Beaver Stadium can be seen from space too...
From _space_? Really? Last time I checked, most of the higher resolution images on Google maps were from aircraft, not satellites.
1. Lack of browser support for downloading fonts (CSS @font-face and friends; see @font-face: The Potential of Web Typography, which will also show you if your browser supports the technology they use)
Yup, my browser supports it. Which is why I can barely read anything on that site. I'll stick with my system Sans/Sans-serif fonts, thanks. I don't need this illegible crap that looks like it was written with a pen that was running out of ink by someone who was trying to write as fast as humanly possible. Even the non-cursive fonts on that page look like crap and are difficult to read.
The Mac is the key. Think of it as a great big dongle. It's really the same thing.
Yes, because dongles always cost $2000 and completely replace your existing computer. Dongles, when absolutely required, are generally free.
In a nutshell, Apple doesn't sell computers, they sell lifestyle.
Yea, sure. Sony sells a lifestyle too. So it's perfectly alright for them to change the product after you already own it for that reason, right? It'd be alright for them to say that Sony stereo equipment won't work with equipment from any other companies because they sell a lifestyle, right?
The product they sell isn't a PC, though it duplicates all a PC can do.
Sure. 'It looks like a PC, acts like a PC, feels like a PC, is exactly the same as a PC, but it's not a PC! We promise!'
Unless you go rogue, and Apple allows for that, isn't taking any hackent0sh users to court
Tell that to Pystar. Apple's EULA specifically prohibits any installs not performed by Apple (though they sell it separately for some reason.....), and they _do_ enforce that.
its not about control, it's about selling their hardware.
If it wasn't about control, they wouldn't have the app store. If it wasn't about control, they wouldn't be claiming jailbreakers were criminals (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9127978/Apple_iPhone_Jailbreak_hack_violates_the_law) - after all, those who jailbreak must purchase the hardware, and plenty of people wouldn't buy it in the first place if it wasn't jailbroken. Jobs has specifically said that he feels that it is "his job" to prevent people from using Apple hardware the way they want. (http://www.tuaw.com/2007/09/19/jobs-its-our-job-to-stop-them-breaking-in/)
it's no more artificial than Windows requiring a key.
I would disagree with you there. There's a huge difference between saying 'you can only use our software if you purchase it legally' and 'you can only use our software if it's on our hardware'. If their hardware was different and they didn't want to do extra work to make OS X run on non-mac hardware, fine. But it isn't anymore. There's really no difference between a mac and a high end Dell. The _only reason_ you can't run OS X on a Dell is because Steve Jobs says so. For some reason nobody defends Microsoft saying 'if the hardware changes four times you won't be able to run this copy of Windows anymore without calling us', while Apple can say 'You can't change the hardware' and people still defend them.
In North America at least it all depends on the class of hotel you're staying at. When I travel with my own family, every hotel has free Wi-fi. But we're staying at the Holiday Inn or Super 8. When I travel with my girlfriend's family, not a single place we ever stay has free Wi-fi - but then, they stay at the Ritz or Marriotts
Yes, because that's exactly what we need right now - more expensive SSD memory :)
Yes, it is ridiculous, because they sold it to you with the promise that _that would be free_. If when you purchased it, the box stated that you may someday need to pay $7.99/month to use online components, fine. But it doesn't. This isn't about if what they are changing/doing is reasonable. It's about whether or not they can dramatically alter the product _after you buy it_.
Bullshit. You buy a PS3 and then a couple years later they tell you 'ok, now you have to choose between feature A not working and feature B not working'. If Sony is allowed to do this, then that also means it would be legal for them to start charging money for the features that the game consale originally came with and advertised as being free. Why don't they just make the next firmware update required a $50 payment every time you want to eject the current game disk? I mean as long as they let you know that's what it's doing before installing, there's nothing wrong with that, right?
You can't sell something that doesn't do what it's advertised as doing. And you can't sell something that's going to stop functioning at some future date without making that clear at the time of purchase.
We do Chick-fil-A. Does that count as crap food?
Yes. If you wrap a paper towel around it and the paper towel comes back wet (from the grease), then in my book it counts as crap food. Though perhaps your Chick-fil-A is better than mine - I'm on a college campus, and my Sbarro similarly tastes like crap and drips grease, when other Sbarros I've gone to are not so greasy and occasionally are even quite good. Never tried another Chick-fil-A though.
a 1600 X 1200 in 21" format is going to be a killer!
It is. I have one. It's a CRT from a Dell that's got to be nearing a decade old now. Of course, I can't use it at that resolution, because I have two monitors and the brand new, fairly high-end LCD next to it, with the same vertical height, has far less vertical pixels. So either I have some really awkward L-shaped desktop, or I keep my big CRT at a measly 1280x1024
i'd love to see /. put their source out there, money where their mouth is so to speak.
...You mean like http://www.slashcode.com/about.shtml ?
Well the idea for that one was that we could write anything we wanted - absolutely anything. He did some review, and I think the 1000 lines was more of a guideline than a hard rule, but it makes sense to ensure people aren't doing too much or too little effort. My project ended up being close to 3000. But I think part of the 1000 line rule was to make sure you weren't offloading the entire program to 3rd party libraries. This was an introductory OOP class, so the idea of the class is generally getting used to writing code, and you can't really do that if you never write any code.
Makes more sense than a length requirement on a paper - and I've never had a paper without one of those.
That is why most of the comp sci courses I've taken here at PSU have assignments like: "create a program that is at least 1000 lines and uses x, y, and z" or "Create a program that has a GUI using a text box, a button, and radio buttons and outputs data inside the GUI in some form" (well, more complete descriptions than those, but you get the idea). Much harder to cheat that way.
It seems they've been changing the courses since I've taken them - even in the past semester - but this is generally what the majority of my projects were:
http://php.scripts.psu.edu/djh300/cmpsc221/proj2-open.htm
Sure, there are homeworks too in some classes that are much smaller and generally easier to cheat on, but those are usually less than a quarter of the final grade. The rest is projects and exams.
Yea, we have bandwidth caps at my uni too...but there's no shortage of ways around them. Because if I want to download one Linux ISO, I'm already over my weekly cap - and as the VP of the Linux Users Group, there have been times when I needed 3 or 4 DVD images within a span of a couple hours. But as I said, there's no shortage of ways around the caps. You can download from wireless, you can get on someone's connection in town (frats, apartments, businesses), you can connect through the campus proxy server, you can ssh into one of the unix lab machines and download from there, and hell I think you could probably even use one of the many VPN servers that they have to login from home or from the wifi (there's the main campus one and then some departments have their own), though I've never tried that.
In some states doing something like this could be construed as "sexual relations with a minor" (i.e., yourself). Theoretically, that could land you in jail for 5-10 years and forever be labeled a pedophile.
Yea....except the people in this commercial appear to be in their mid-20s....
Yea. Only a few hundred bucks more expensive for the entire laptop, which may not seem like much...but is it really worth it? Of all the things you could have spent that money on, it went to the hard drives? You're adding a few hundred bucks for a part that is usually under a hundred bucks.
Yea, it's only _40 times_ the cost of a regular hard drive.
Why not buy a crapload of regular drives...then you can RAID a bunch of them and have a crapload more left over for when any of them fail. Guarantee 40 TB regular drives could be set up to be both faster and last longer than a 1TB SSD. Would be a bit bigger though....
Sweet! Maybe now I can replace the 1.3TB of hard drives in my desktop with some solid state!
Oh wait. Nope. I can barely afford a 30GB drive. Let me know when SSDs are less than $1/GB.