Nice, better. I think a lot of the problem seems to be that the D1 discussion pages look like absolute shit now. D2 looks much, much better. Unfortunately, D2 feels like crap and there is still no way to just fetch all the comments in properly threaded mode like I do with D1.
If anybody has a proper way to get a simple, threaded view of all posts in a story with D2 like you can with D1 let me know.:)
Ahhh, I figured it out - if you click on "Account" from the main slashdot.org page (not "Options"), there is an option under Discussions to switch between D1 and D2. I assume D2 still sucks as much as it always has, and brings anything less than a Core i7 crying to its knees, so I'm sticking with D1 until somebody tells me otherwise.
Also - the scrolling is great on Windows, especially after the userContent.css fix. On my Core 2 Duo Macbook, even with FF 4.0beta9, the scrolling is sluggish until I disable Javascript. I assume this difference has something to do with the graphics acceleration FF uses on Windows.
This redesign feels like a first test release from the Slashmonkeys, not something that should have been rolled out to production.
Great, great, great suggestion. Moreover, if you use Firefox 4 and Stylish doesn't work, you can just throw the same block into your userContent.css as I just did.
I am trying to figure out how to switch the discussion threads between the old style, which I'm using, D1 I guess, and the D2 style - the options seem to have disappeared from account configuration. With this fix, and using the D1-style discussion, things are much faster.
I experimented - with Javascript disabled for Slashdot, it fricking FLIES.
So I think the solution is userContent.css/Stylish + enable D1 discussions + NoScript to block Slashdot Javascript crap (have to experiment more with the NoScript stuff to make sure everything basically works with it off).
You can get a case with built in thin USB keyboard for about $25 for the Viewsonic G Tablet (Tegra 2 Android tablet). A lot of people getting them at XDA Developer forums. Lets you use your tablet as a tablet, or as an Android "netbook" essentially. I think this convertible arrangement is ideal, since it lets a single device function for both media consumption, app running, and light office work/light content creation tasks (Word doc editing, spreadsheet editing, heavier duty emailing than you want to do with a touchscreen keyboard, etc.).
I believe the whole deal is that this dwarf dark matter galaxy is on the far side of the milky way and in the same plane (or nearly so) as the majority of the milky way, and thus is difficult to directly detect in terms of gravitational lensing effects. The article wasn't clear however on what the actual technique used was, but obviously it must be *some* form of gravitational lensing.
So either the way they are measuring "interest in violent video games" is very different, or in fact people who engage in targeted school attacks are actually significantly *less* likely than their age cohort to play violent video games. Which doesn't speak at all to causation either, but turns the whole thing on its head.
That other study I linked to shows that mental issues such as depression are predictive of engaging in violent behavior, whereas playing violent video games is not. That was from a month ago.
Lately, that's not so far off from what Facebook has been like. I get a constant barrage of fake/fraudulent friend requests (in recent weeks, at least 1-2 a day) from clearly fake accounts set up solely for data phishing/market research/stealing my private information. At least I can only assume those are their motives, since they sure as hell don't want to be my friends.
Javascript performance - I don't know about on a Mac specifically, but in generally, it's much faster with FF 4's latest betas than it was with 3.6.x. For general comparisons from a few months back trunk code during TraceMonkey+JaegerMonkey integration, see http://arewefastyet.com/ . It's fast now. The extra second of startup time is confusing as an argument either for or against something - this is one second, once every few days or so. Seems kind of irrelevant to me - performance of rendering is the most important thing, Javascript performance secondary, and stuff like startup performance tertiary unless it's really bad.
Not sure about Mac rendering performance, but on Windows, FF is much faster than Chrome or Safari and has been for ages. Javascript performance lagged signifcantly until recently, and they are now all so close as to be irrelevantly different unless you like compiling kernels in your web browser or similarly silly activities.
And remember how good the Matrix seemed when we first saw it, and then how bad it seems in retrospect after seeing the rest of the Wachowski brother's "vision"? That's a movie whose impact was actually lessened by the sequels - it was better when we filled in the blanks with our imagination than when we saw what passed for the "answers" presented in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions (the truly horrid mess of the series).
The original Star Wars movies are, thankfully, separated enough in time and form from the later prequels that many of us can still view them as they were originally (well, assuming you can find a copy of them without George Lucas' idiotic revisions) and simply pretend that the dull drivel made years later doesn't exist.
Yeah, it seems more likely that this guy is garden variety insane with an anti-government edge. But that's honestly not too surprising - I don't think your garden variety ranting Tea Partier (I really want to say Tea Bagger, but I'm trying to keep it civil here) is a cold blooded killer.
A ranter and a rambler, yes. Paranoid, maybe. A bit delusional, sure. Excessively concerned with guns and the second amendment, okay. But I don't think the Tea Party groups are filled with killers - if they were, we'd have seen a lot more of this sort of thing.
I'd recommend the Viewsonic G Tablet now except that the LCD screen sort of sucks. But the performance is absolutely awesome (with updated software - the original stock software it shipped with was very, very buggy and beta quality).
So I'd wait for a 10.1" Tegra 2 option with an IPS or other better quality screen. Twisted Craptastic errr Nemastic LCDs should be outlawed.
He sounds like your basic garden variety crazy of the anti-government persuasion. Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto are basically at the lunatic fringe opposites of the political spectrum - it seems this fellow is more interested in violence against the government then what the particular goal of said violence is.
Well, I do not observe these on a Nexus One running MIUI or a G Tablet running Vegan ROM.
But I do agree that there is a theoretical issue associated with these. In fact, it was a practical issue on first gen devices - I used to observe these on my old G1 due to constrained memory and a slow CPU. You'd see the things stutter when the GC kicked in.
And I am not saying there isn't room to fix up or clean some of the Android UI stuff - accelerated compositing is a good idea, better control of the garbage collection stuff, another one. That wasn't my point.
Just saying that Java/Dalvik works well on second gen Android devices, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Java on a mobile device. The people who think otherwise are generally basing their opinion on experiences with first gen or similarly constrained devices (single core, 500MHz, no JIT, etc.).
Java failed on the desktop because it tried to do too much and failed to provide a consistent, native-like user experience.
Dalvik on Android provides a very consistent, native experience because the platform is built around it.
And it provides a level of abstraction away from hardware that allows an Android app to run on any number of Android devices, if it's well written (i.e. can handle different screen resolutions, etc. - if you hard code tons of shit, you can still write apps that suck or don't work well on certain devices).
So yeah, in this context, there's nothing wrong with Java (or rather Dalvik). As to the question of the best way to accelerate basic UI stuff - I sort of thought this issue was already solved on the Android platform.
Yeah, first gen Android devices were stutter-y and had kinda laggy feeling UIs (i.e. the G1 - ugh). But my year-old Nexus One running a recent MIUI ROM is as smooth as butter in terms of touchscreen sensitivity, animation, etc.
Likewise with my Viewsonic G Tablet running on a hot-shit Tegra 2 - with the updated drivers and software on it, it's ridiculously smooth and pleasant to use - better than an iPad any day.
Furthermore, I understand that Gingerbread has even more improvements in GC and event handling stuff, so should be even better things ahead.
Does the original story's argument about battery life hold up? Maybe, not sure. My G Tablet's one weak area, compared to the iPad, is battery life. One hardware-accelerated tasks like video playback they are comparable. But in terms of app-running and general usage, and particularly standby time, the iPad definitely wins out. But the Tegra 2 platform is fresh, to say the least - have to see how the drivers, suspend-resume and so on improve over the next few months. Battery life may improve quite a bit yet.
If you search for technical problems with ocropus, there's no content to help guide you anyway - that damn thing has no useful documentation anywhere online.
LOL. Come on. I know technically I should have said "US or European IP law *enforcement*". The relevant difference between China and the US on copyright issues is clearly the level of enforcement possible, more than the laws on the books.
Most large software companies can't stop the Chinese from rampantly copying their software illegally, so how exactly is a kernel developer supposed to navigate the massively corrupt Chinese legal system to try to enforce the GPL?
It's taken years to build up enough ammo to scare US and European companies into GPL compliance, and we live in a regime of near-oppressive intellectual property laws.
As soon as we made Viewsonic aware of their obligations and got somebody halfway intelligent there involved (i.e. not just first line customer service people, though we got them to write up notes about the number of callers requesting GPL source code too), this went through marketing and legal, and they got source released within a matter of weeks for the G Tablet. You're right, nobody wants to sit on legal risk for products with slim margins in competitive markets.
If you have a Coby or Sylvania device, just find the email addresses of some of their US execs, and send them emails explaining their legal compliance obligation to distribute source code to the kernel and other GPLed components of an Android device, and they'll push it over to legal quickly enough. Once a lawyer gets involved, yeah, the US-based rebadgers have plenty of leverage with Chinese OEMs. You'll have source code soon enough, depending on the complexity of the situation. With the Viewsonic G Tablet there were at least 4 companies involved - Viewsonic, Tap N Tap (the UI developer and guys that did all the Android software packaging for the G Tablet, US Merchants (the master distributor, apparently), and Malata (the hardware OEM in China). So it took a little while to even figure out who was doing what and had what code and what obligations.
Kernel source, specifically drivers and patches to build your own usable kernel is the issue here.
It's a real problem with tablets. Yeah, in terms of the OS itself, AOSP provides everything we need to build our own, and vendors aren't under any obligation to provide UI layer changes they make to Apache-licensed stuff. That's fine, because 90% of those vendor changes suck anyway.
But many of these tablets ship with buggy, binary-only kernels and driver modules with mysterious patch sets used to build them. Kernel source is key, and we've just recently started getting a lot of these companies to provide source.
I personally couldn't care less about whether the source is shipped on a CD with the device or provided on a website by the hardware vendor. I think that applies to most users and developers. That's a technicality that only a lawyer would love. If the source to all GPL-derived components (i.e. kernel, etc.) is freely available, under the GPL license, with instructions to build it that an experienced developer can easily complete, to anybody who has bought the device, whether by shipping, written offer, or download from the web, they are complying with the spirit of the GPL. Some of the old GPL verbiage about written offers and shipping CDs comes from an era prior to the ubiquity of high bandwidth internet connectivity.
Speaking as one of the Viewsonic G Tablet kernel hackers who helped push for VS to release source and has since identified and helped fix several of the critical kernel bugs, it was a non-trivial business problem to get the code.
Malata, the hardware OEM, is Chinese and thus not subject to US or European IP law regarding things like the GPL. Viewsonic did not develop the software in house, they contracted the whole Android packaging and UI job out to a startup called Tap N Tap based in Cambridge, MA. Tap N Tap was then constrained by the confidentiality agreements they had with Viewsonic. Viewsonic didn't really have any software team on board who understood the legal issues involved and their marketing guys had to help push everything through legal with the help of the Tap N Tap guys. Furthermore, the G Tablet is apparently distributed by a company called US Worldwide under a distribution agreement of some sort with Viewsonic - so not clear that Viewsonic ever even took delivery of a single tablet themselves.
We used Twitter to nag Viewsonic about not having released the kernel source and keep the issue in the public eye. Once they got clearance, they got the source from Tap N Tap, and posted it on the website.
This all just happened on December 24th. So Viewsonic is still most likely working on legal compliance issues for other tablets. I'm sure if people make formal requests for source and send some nagging reminders like we did for the G Tablet, they'll release any GPLed source too - they are making an effort at least, unlike many companies.
But it did take about a month long organized effort from the XDA Developers forums, involving call-ins to customer service, emails to top executives, and twitter posts. Much of that was simply education of people at several layers of the company about their obligations - again, their company never even touched the source code so this probably never went through their own legal people until we pushed it to them.
The result is we were able to merge up a bunch of critical kernel bug fixes from the main NVidia Tegra 2 source tree and we now have custom kernels that support a crap-ton of new features, along with custom ROMs. And we've gotten source for basically all the drivers too and we've started improving some of them.
No, we don't have the full source for the Tap N Tap UI stuff since Android's UI layer is Apache licensed and there's no obligation for Tap N Tap to release that code, but it doesn't affect us too much. We have the full AOSP source, the NVidia source tree, and there are so many custom launchers and stuff to work with out there that we've got several awesome ROMs released now.
I suspect there may be similar legal/logistical issues with the other Viewsonic tablets' source code. I don't know if enough people have even bought those tablets to care enough to request source code though - if you own one, make a request to Viewsonic. Heck, their Marketing VP has an account on the XDA Developer forums now, you can PM him there.
Also - that list is a bit misleading. Since we have the Viewsonic G Tablet kernel source, we basically have all the drivers and kernel code for all the Malata devices now, including the ZPad. In fact, Viewsonic released some of the ZPad drivers that aren't even used in the G Tablet (like the first gen ZPad resistive touchscreen driver).
Additionally, Advent has stated that they are working to release source code for the Vega which is apparently assembled by BYD but as far as we can tell, uses most of the same components and a very similar design to the Malata ZPad. I suspect we have nearly all the drivers and patches for that in our Viewsonic release too, but I'm sure their official kernel source will be out within a few weeks regardless.
So yeah, there are still some legal issues, but at least with the Tegra 2 devices and with most of the mainstream Western vendors, they are working their way to compliance currently.
Maybe when you've got a country with a large GDP pushing to get you locked up and the key thrown away, it's a good idea to have a lawyer that costs the GDP of a small country. Just a thought.
At Harvard, at least back in the day (circa mid-1990s), the boys were separated from the men in the first semester of math freshman year.
Those who thought they were hot shit all started in a class called Math 25/55 and were beaten down with point set topology and real analysis. Those of us who had never gone beyond AP Calculus BC, or even multivariable calculus, in high school got our asses handed to us rapidly.
It was basically all kids from math- and science-focused honor schools who had been exposed to proof-oriented mathematics before who could hack it. After 3 or 4 weeks, they gave a quiz that if you scored less than 50% on, you were tracked into Math 25, honors math for Math concentrators, and if you scored 50% or higher, you were tracked into Math 55, honors math for the people who eventually become Math professors.
I was beaten down pretty severely by this class, though apparently I roughly maintained average scores for the class, and got about a 58% on the quiz as I recall. Though technically I qualified for Math 55, I realized I'd be at the bottom of a group of 10-15 of the smartest people at Harvard.
I decided I'd rather be at the top of a class that didn't drive me nuts, and ended up switching to Math 22, which was the Honors Math for Physics majors track. But it gave me some major prep for all the proof-oriented stuff I did later on in college (Real and Complex Analysis, Computational Theory, Mathematical Logic, etc.).
You can read more about the mythology and some of the famous students who've been through the Math 25/55 ringer on Wikipedia. Bill Gates, Richard Stallman, Lisa Randall, and that's just a few of the more well-known ones.
The point of all this - honors math at the high school level absolutely, 100% needs to introduce real proofs earlier on. Calculus is just not the be-all and end-all of math, and while useful in physics and the sciences, gets way more attention than is really justified. Memorizing lots of schmancy integrals to chain rule together and regurgitate on AP exams is a waste of effort and time.
+1. Roku would love to show you *everything* Hulu has. Hulu won't let them. Specifically because the networks won't let Hulu. And the stuff they won't show on Roku, they won't show elsewhere either.
Feel free to say that Hulu+ sucks, but don't blame Roku for that. I use Roku for Netflix and Amazon VOD content all the time. I have a Hulu+ subscription that I got a few weeks ago but I feel like a chump for paying for advertisement-laden content, especially when the content I want or my wife wants is often blocked anyway by licensing arrangements.
Moreover, I couldn't even find the press release on the net, but now the re-posts of his blog entry about it have spread like wildfire. So anybody who even thinks to Google the topic will instantly see the story about how he's trying to trick journalists. This is an epic fail of an effort to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice, better. I think a lot of the problem seems to be that the D1 discussion pages look like absolute shit now. D2 looks much, much better. Unfortunately, D2 feels like crap and there is still no way to just fetch all the comments in properly threaded mode like I do with D1.
If anybody has a proper way to get a simple, threaded view of all posts in a story with D2 like you can with D1 let me know. :)
Ahhh, I figured it out - if you click on "Account" from the main slashdot.org page (not "Options"), there is an option under Discussions to switch between D1 and D2. I assume D2 still sucks as much as it always has, and brings anything less than a Core i7 crying to its knees, so I'm sticking with D1 until somebody tells me otherwise.
Slashdot - the only internet discussion system that requires a Core i7 and 6GB of RAM to run properly.
Also - the scrolling is great on Windows, especially after the userContent.css fix. On my Core 2 Duo Macbook, even with FF 4.0beta9, the scrolling is sluggish until I disable Javascript. I assume this difference has something to do with the graphics acceleration FF uses on Windows.
This redesign feels like a first test release from the Slashmonkeys, not something that should have been rolled out to production.
Great, great, great suggestion. Moreover, if you use Firefox 4 and Stylish doesn't work, you can just throw the same block into your userContent.css as I just did.
I am trying to figure out how to switch the discussion threads between the old style, which I'm using, D1 I guess, and the D2 style - the options seem to have disappeared from account configuration. With this fix, and using the D1-style discussion, things are much faster.
I experimented - with Javascript disabled for Slashdot, it fricking FLIES.
So I think the solution is userContent.css/Stylish + enable D1 discussions + NoScript to block Slashdot Javascript crap (have to experiment more with the NoScript stuff to make sure everything basically works with it off).
You can get a case with built in thin USB keyboard for about $25 for the Viewsonic G Tablet (Tegra 2 Android tablet). A lot of people getting them at XDA Developer forums. Lets you use your tablet as a tablet, or as an Android "netbook" essentially. I think this convertible arrangement is ideal, since it lets a single device function for both media consumption, app running, and light office work/light content creation tasks (Word doc editing, spreadsheet editing, heavier duty emailing than you want to do with a touchscreen keyboard, etc.).
I believe the whole deal is that this dwarf dark matter galaxy is on the far side of the milky way and in the same plane (or nearly so) as the majority of the milky way, and thus is difficult to directly detect in terms of gravitational lensing effects. The article wasn't clear however on what the actual technique used was, but obviously it must be *some* form of gravitational lensing.
Interesting. From that link: "One-eighth of the attackers exhibited an interest in violent video games (12
percent, n=5)."
And from this study, we see that 40 percent of young people played violent video games in the past month: http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/12/15/study-no-link-between-violent-video-games-youth-aggression/21824.html
So either the way they are measuring "interest in violent video games" is very different, or in fact people who engage in targeted school attacks are actually significantly *less* likely than their age cohort to play violent video games. Which doesn't speak at all to causation either, but turns the whole thing on its head.
That other study I linked to shows that mental issues such as depression are predictive of engaging in violent behavior, whereas playing violent video games is not. That was from a month ago.
Lately, that's not so far off from what Facebook has been like. I get a constant barrage of fake/fraudulent friend requests (in recent weeks, at least 1-2 a day) from clearly fake accounts set up solely for data phishing/market research/stealing my private information. At least I can only assume those are their motives, since they sure as hell don't want to be my friends.
Javascript performance - I don't know about on a Mac specifically, but in generally, it's much faster with FF 4's latest betas than it was with 3.6.x. For general comparisons from a few months back trunk code during TraceMonkey+JaegerMonkey integration, see http://arewefastyet.com/ . It's fast now. The extra second of startup time is confusing as an argument either for or against something - this is one second, once every few days or so. Seems kind of irrelevant to me - performance of rendering is the most important thing, Javascript performance secondary, and stuff like startup performance tertiary unless it's really bad.
Not sure about Mac rendering performance, but on Windows, FF is much faster than Chrome or Safari and has been for ages. Javascript performance lagged signifcantly until recently, and they are now all so close as to be irrelevantly different unless you like compiling kernels in your web browser or similarly silly activities.
And remember how good the Matrix seemed when we first saw it, and then how bad it seems in retrospect after seeing the rest of the Wachowski brother's "vision"? That's a movie whose impact was actually lessened by the sequels - it was better when we filled in the blanks with our imagination than when we saw what passed for the "answers" presented in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions (the truly horrid mess of the series).
The original Star Wars movies are, thankfully, separated enough in time and form from the later prequels that many of us can still view them as they were originally (well, assuming you can find a copy of them without George Lucas' idiotic revisions) and simply pretend that the dull drivel made years later doesn't exist.
Yeah, it seems more likely that this guy is garden variety insane with an anti-government edge. But that's honestly not too surprising - I don't think your garden variety ranting Tea Partier (I really want to say Tea Bagger, but I'm trying to keep it civil here) is a cold blooded killer.
A ranter and a rambler, yes. Paranoid, maybe. A bit delusional, sure. Excessively concerned with guns and the second amendment, okay. But I don't think the Tea Party groups are filled with killers - if they were, we'd have seen a lot more of this sort of thing.
I'd recommend the Viewsonic G Tablet now except that the LCD screen sort of sucks. But the performance is absolutely awesome (with updated software - the original stock software it shipped with was very, very buggy and beta quality).
So I'd wait for a 10.1" Tegra 2 option with an IPS or other better quality screen. Twisted Craptastic errr Nemastic LCDs should be outlawed.
He sounds like your basic garden variety crazy of the anti-government persuasion. Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto are basically at the lunatic fringe opposites of the political spectrum - it seems this fellow is more interested in violence against the government then what the particular goal of said violence is.
Well, I do not observe these on a Nexus One running MIUI or a G Tablet running Vegan ROM.
But I do agree that there is a theoretical issue associated with these. In fact, it was a practical issue on first gen devices - I used to observe these on my old G1 due to constrained memory and a slow CPU. You'd see the things stutter when the GC kicked in.
And I am not saying there isn't room to fix up or clean some of the Android UI stuff - accelerated compositing is a good idea, better control of the garbage collection stuff, another one. That wasn't my point.
Just saying that Java/Dalvik works well on second gen Android devices, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Java on a mobile device. The people who think otherwise are generally basing their opinion on experiences with first gen or similarly constrained devices (single core, 500MHz, no JIT, etc.).
Java failed on the desktop because it tried to do too much and failed to provide a consistent, native-like user experience.
Dalvik on Android provides a very consistent, native experience because the platform is built around it.
And it provides a level of abstraction away from hardware that allows an Android app to run on any number of Android devices, if it's well written (i.e. can handle different screen resolutions, etc. - if you hard code tons of shit, you can still write apps that suck or don't work well on certain devices).
So yeah, in this context, there's nothing wrong with Java (or rather Dalvik). As to the question of the best way to accelerate basic UI stuff - I sort of thought this issue was already solved on the Android platform.
Yeah, first gen Android devices were stutter-y and had kinda laggy feeling UIs (i.e. the G1 - ugh). But my year-old Nexus One running a recent MIUI ROM is as smooth as butter in terms of touchscreen sensitivity, animation, etc.
Likewise with my Viewsonic G Tablet running on a hot-shit Tegra 2 - with the updated drivers and software on it, it's ridiculously smooth and pleasant to use - better than an iPad any day.
Furthermore, I understand that Gingerbread has even more improvements in GC and event handling stuff, so should be even better things ahead.
Does the original story's argument about battery life hold up? Maybe, not sure. My G Tablet's one weak area, compared to the iPad, is battery life. One hardware-accelerated tasks like video playback they are comparable. But in terms of app-running and general usage, and particularly standby time, the iPad definitely wins out. But the Tegra 2 platform is fresh, to say the least - have to see how the drivers, suspend-resume and so on improve over the next few months. Battery life may improve quite a bit yet.
If you search for technical problems with ocropus, there's no content to help guide you anyway - that damn thing has no useful documentation anywhere online.
LOL. Come on. I know technically I should have said "US or European IP law *enforcement*". The relevant difference between China and the US on copyright issues is clearly the level of enforcement possible, more than the laws on the books.
Most large software companies can't stop the Chinese from rampantly copying their software illegally, so how exactly is a kernel developer supposed to navigate the massively corrupt Chinese legal system to try to enforce the GPL?
It's taken years to build up enough ammo to scare US and European companies into GPL compliance, and we live in a regime of near-oppressive intellectual property laws.
As soon as we made Viewsonic aware of their obligations and got somebody halfway intelligent there involved (i.e. not just first line customer service people, though we got them to write up notes about the number of callers requesting GPL source code too), this went through marketing and legal, and they got source released within a matter of weeks for the G Tablet. You're right, nobody wants to sit on legal risk for products with slim margins in competitive markets.
If you have a Coby or Sylvania device, just find the email addresses of some of their US execs, and send them emails explaining their legal compliance obligation to distribute source code to the kernel and other GPLed components of an Android device, and they'll push it over to legal quickly enough. Once a lawyer gets involved, yeah, the US-based rebadgers have plenty of leverage with Chinese OEMs. You'll have source code soon enough, depending on the complexity of the situation. With the Viewsonic G Tablet there were at least 4 companies involved - Viewsonic, Tap N Tap (the UI developer and guys that did all the Android software packaging for the G Tablet, US Merchants (the master distributor, apparently), and Malata (the hardware OEM in China). So it took a little while to even figure out who was doing what and had what code and what obligations.
Kernel source, specifically drivers and patches to build your own usable kernel is the issue here.
It's a real problem with tablets. Yeah, in terms of the OS itself, AOSP provides everything we need to build our own, and vendors aren't under any obligation to provide UI layer changes they make to Apache-licensed stuff. That's fine, because 90% of those vendor changes suck anyway.
But many of these tablets ship with buggy, binary-only kernels and driver modules with mysterious patch sets used to build them. Kernel source is key, and we've just recently started getting a lot of these companies to provide source.
I personally couldn't care less about whether the source is shipped on a CD with the device or provided on a website by the hardware vendor. I think that applies to most users and developers. That's a technicality that only a lawyer would love. If the source to all GPL-derived components (i.e. kernel, etc.) is freely available, under the GPL license, with instructions to build it that an experienced developer can easily complete, to anybody who has bought the device, whether by shipping, written offer, or download from the web, they are complying with the spirit of the GPL. Some of the old GPL verbiage about written offers and shipping CDs comes from an era prior to the ubiquity of high bandwidth internet connectivity.
Speaking as one of the Viewsonic G Tablet kernel hackers who helped push for VS to release source and has since identified and helped fix several of the critical kernel bugs, it was a non-trivial business problem to get the code.
Malata, the hardware OEM, is Chinese and thus not subject to US or European IP law regarding things like the GPL. Viewsonic did not develop the software in house, they contracted the whole Android packaging and UI job out to a startup called Tap N Tap based in Cambridge, MA. Tap N Tap was then constrained by the confidentiality agreements they had with Viewsonic. Viewsonic didn't really have any software team on board who understood the legal issues involved and their marketing guys had to help push everything through legal with the help of the Tap N Tap guys. Furthermore, the G Tablet is apparently distributed by a company called US Worldwide under a distribution agreement of some sort with Viewsonic - so not clear that Viewsonic ever even took delivery of a single tablet themselves.
We used Twitter to nag Viewsonic about not having released the kernel source and keep the issue in the public eye. Once they got clearance, they got the source from Tap N Tap, and posted it on the website.
This all just happened on December 24th. So Viewsonic is still most likely working on legal compliance issues for other tablets. I'm sure if people make formal requests for source and send some nagging reminders like we did for the G Tablet, they'll release any GPLed source too - they are making an effort at least, unlike many companies.
But it did take about a month long organized effort from the XDA Developers forums, involving call-ins to customer service, emails to top executives, and twitter posts. Much of that was simply education of people at several layers of the company about their obligations - again, their company never even touched the source code so this probably never went through their own legal people until we pushed it to them.
The result is we were able to merge up a bunch of critical kernel bug fixes from the main NVidia Tegra 2 source tree and we now have custom kernels that support a crap-ton of new features, along with custom ROMs. And we've gotten source for basically all the drivers too and we've started improving some of them.
No, we don't have the full source for the Tap N Tap UI stuff since Android's UI layer is Apache licensed and there's no obligation for Tap N Tap to release that code, but it doesn't affect us too much. We have the full AOSP source, the NVidia source tree, and there are so many custom launchers and stuff to work with out there that we've got several awesome ROMs released now.
I suspect there may be similar legal/logistical issues with the other Viewsonic tablets' source code. I don't know if enough people have even bought those tablets to care enough to request source code though - if you own one, make a request to Viewsonic. Heck, their Marketing VP has an account on the XDA Developer forums now, you can PM him there.
Also - that list is a bit misleading. Since we have the Viewsonic G Tablet kernel source, we basically have all the drivers and kernel code for all the Malata devices now, including the ZPad. In fact, Viewsonic released some of the ZPad drivers that aren't even used in the G Tablet (like the first gen ZPad resistive touchscreen driver).
Additionally, Advent has stated that they are working to release source code for the Vega which is apparently assembled by BYD but as far as we can tell, uses most of the same components and a very similar design to the Malata ZPad. I suspect we have nearly all the drivers and patches for that in our Viewsonic release too, but I'm sure their official kernel source will be out within a few weeks regardless.
So yeah, there are still some legal issues, but at least with the Tegra 2 devices and with most of the mainstream Western vendors, they are working their way to compliance currently.
Maybe when you've got a country with a large GDP pushing to get you locked up and the key thrown away, it's a good idea to have a lawyer that costs the GDP of a small country. Just a thought.
At Harvard, at least back in the day (circa mid-1990s), the boys were separated from the men in the first semester of math freshman year.
Those who thought they were hot shit all started in a class called Math 25/55 and were beaten down with point set topology and real analysis. Those of us who had never gone beyond AP Calculus BC, or even multivariable calculus, in high school got our asses handed to us rapidly.
It was basically all kids from math- and science-focused honor schools who had been exposed to proof-oriented mathematics before who could hack it. After 3 or 4 weeks, they gave a quiz that if you scored less than 50% on, you were tracked into Math 25, honors math for Math concentrators, and if you scored 50% or higher, you were tracked into Math 55, honors math for the people who eventually become Math professors.
I was beaten down pretty severely by this class, though apparently I roughly maintained average scores for the class, and got about a 58% on the quiz as I recall. Though technically I qualified for Math 55, I realized I'd be at the bottom of a group of 10-15 of the smartest people at Harvard.
I decided I'd rather be at the top of a class that didn't drive me nuts, and ended up switching to Math 22, which was the Honors Math for Physics majors track. But it gave me some major prep for all the proof-oriented stuff I did later on in college (Real and Complex Analysis, Computational Theory, Mathematical Logic, etc.).
You can read more about the mythology and some of the famous students who've been through the Math 25/55 ringer on Wikipedia. Bill Gates, Richard Stallman, Lisa Randall, and that's just a few of the more well-known ones.
The point of all this - honors math at the high school level absolutely, 100% needs to introduce real proofs earlier on. Calculus is just not the be-all and end-all of math, and while useful in physics and the sciences, gets way more attention than is really justified. Memorizing lots of schmancy integrals to chain rule together and regurgitate on AP exams is a waste of effort and time.
+1. Roku would love to show you *everything* Hulu has. Hulu won't let them. Specifically because the networks won't let Hulu. And the stuff they won't show on Roku, they won't show elsewhere either.
Feel free to say that Hulu+ sucks, but don't blame Roku for that. I use Roku for Netflix and Amazon VOD content all the time. I have a Hulu+ subscription that I got a few weeks ago but I feel like a chump for paying for advertisement-laden content, especially when the content I want or my wife wants is often blocked anyway by licensing arrangements.
Moreover, I couldn't even find the press release on the net, but now the re-posts of his blog entry about it have spread like wildfire. So anybody who even thinks to Google the topic will instantly see the story about how he's trying to trick journalists. This is an epic fail of an effort to do so.