The Android Invasion Cometh; Is Resistance Futile?
Look both options have their benefits. But I happen to agree with a recent survey that finds developers think Android is the long term solution while iOS is basically the immediate choice because of its dominance it has enjoyed with being the first. Given that the obvious is already happening, it's just going to take two or three years for developers to really unseat anything else in favor over Android. I was never given a chance to tinker or code for iOS so of course I'm biased towards the one technology out there that is actually trying to empower me without restrictions.
In the end, that sort of empowerment is going to trump any sort of assured device capability or graphical power that Apple can offer me. You may have a different opinion (BWJones did) but I simply cannot see how Apple will retain their lead in this fight.
Resistance is never futile. You could stick to your guns and enjoy immediate sales then moderate sales then fewer and fewer sales. Or you could enjoy moderate sales and then increasingly more and more sales. You might have to do more development if you want to target both TVs and handhelds (inputs get tricky) but I think investing in only iOS at this point is not a prudent decision.
"Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?"
Seriously? Somebody needs to point this guy to Mozilla Labs and tell him to join the community and start working on his own dreams instead of proposing/forcing them on the community.
I mean, PCPro has done a really great job of bringing us news stories before but they've kind of fallen by the wayside and become irrelevant. Maybe if they switched and stuck their nose in something else it would benefit me a lot more so I think they should do that despite the obvious potential of failure. I mean, maybe they should start publishing cures for cancer and AIDS? Imagine all those ideas like a news site that actually pays the reader money. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine tomorrow's news article where they tell me the top ten things that are a threat to my computer. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?
Oh, look at me, I'm the magical man from imaginationland and I live in imagined houses made of fantasy bricks and -- look over there -- it's John Lennon using Firefox's new Office suite!
I like how some talking heads imagine that software "just happens." It doesn't take sleepless nights and thousands of weighty e-mails and collaboration... you just have to say or think something and suddenly it exists.
I also like how Mozilla can afford to spread themselves thin now that they have lost the browser war. If people had his attitude, we'd only see one leader in any field because everyone else gives up and doesn't try to regain the lead.
After all, when we're playing a game of baseball (right, right, I know, this is slashdot), and a ball is coming towards us, we aren't calculating in our heads the velocity, air resistance and other variables involved in catching the ball. We just reach out our arms and our brain makes its best guess based on some sort of heuristic or something to make the catch.
I think the problem with your analogy that there are an unlimited number of dimensions and responses where you could put your arm out to make the catch (well, not unlimited if you consider Planck distances to be the smallest possible distance). But when we are talking about computerized flowers with nectar, you pretty much can only go to one of the flowers next. I think they used RFID to track the bees (or at least this researcher has written about doing that before)? So we can sit there and do a star search on all paths of the 50 flowers and find the shortest one to connect all of them in three dimensions in a particular order (we assume the flight paths are straight lines). The difference is not that we have so many fewer things to search than in the ball catching example but that you take a very finite deterministic path (i.e. 2, 34, 23, 6, 18, etc) and the bees seem to be able to find and learn this very quickly. According to the researcher:
"In nature, bees have to link hundreds of flowers in a way that minimises travel distance, and then reliably find their way home - not a trivial feat if you have a brain the size of a pinhead! Indeed such travelling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days. Studying how bee brains solve such challenging tasks might allow us to identify the minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving."
If this holds true for hundreds of flowers, I think we're talking about a serious search space with a definite path that is far more specific than the heuristics of moving your arm and hand around dynamically in space to collide with a ball. You could have tons of error when trying to catch a ball and still catch it. You (frequently) only have one optimal path in shortest distance problems. It's probably true these traveling salesman problems look obvious to a bee like catching a ball does to us but something particularly interesting is going on there if it is.
Let's say it is an unknown heuristic. I'd wager the network folks would kill to know how that heuristic is so cheaply computed.
I picture a lone Delorean, forever floating through empty space at 88 miles per hour.
I don't understand why you post first about a frame of reference problem and then joke about 88 miles per hour... in reference to what? In the movies the DeLorean is traveling at 88 miles per hour as would be seen by an observer standing on Earth's surface. But to someone standing perfectly still in reference to the absolute center of the solar system -- as you seem to imply time machines are initially calibrated to -- then the velocity of the DeLorean would change with the velocity of the Earth around the Sun. Why are you only referencing the solar system and not galaxy or nebula or universe? So... yeah, 88 miles per hour for those of us still on Earth many miles away. But your own post suffers the same problem that the movie suffers which is a frame of reference to the velocity and position.
Basically for new writers who write a science fiction time travel story you gotta make sure you mention briefly that you solved the orbit/rotation/surface problem and have calibrated your time machine to account for the ever changing topography of the Earth as well as its orbit and rotation... Or maybe claim that you machine is anchored to Earth's gravity well to simplify things a bit more?
They were fun movies and nothing more. It might be fun to dissect them but if this is news, stand back in awe for my dissection of about a hundred other movies...
"They" are Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. Any company that uses this method.
And, assuming you're referring to google, how are they shafting you? It's not your money.
No, it's not my money. It's the communal money that is under so much debate by politicians. And the fact that Google and everyone else has a hundred goddamned lawyers and accountants sitting around saving them billions of dollars does upset me. Because I don't have that. I don't have the option to employ the "double Irish" tactic when trying to save thousands of dollars in taxes each year so I can afford a simple house. Nope, they get that privilege and I don't because I'm poorer than them. So who's being screwed over? Every tax payer that doesn't have or employ those options. If you live in America, that's you. Why is your public education so lacking? Why do your taxes go up? Well, part of it is that companies employ tax evasion methods like the ones listed in the article. I'm not singling out Google, I'm expressing equal anger toward all who employ these methods.
You can call me a socialist, you can call me a communist. That's fine because I know I'm neither of those. I'm just someone that wants a fair playing field when it comes to aggregating X amount of resources so that our government and public services continue to function properly.
The men and women who founded this country cited 'taxation without representation' as one of the reasons. Like them, I'm not okay with lobbyists and tax loopholes that are apparently legal and okay to anyone who has tons and tons and tons of money. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer just because.
Such income shifting costs the U.S. government as much as $60 billion in annual revenue, according to Kimberly A. Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
That's $60 billion total per year. Not just from Google but from every American business using these tax loopholes (Microsoft and Facebook included). The article clarifies:
Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
Emphasis mine. So you can see that it's on average a billion a year that Google saves doing this. Not $60 billion. Do I still feel like they're shafting me? Yes. But not 15% of their stock market worth. That's just unimaginable. Here's a bigger survey of companies using these loopholes with more details.
I'd like to think this would encourage more of the smaller news websites to get actual reporters out there, rather than just being news aggregators. It would be a shot in the arm for the industry, create jobs, and provide us with more varied reporting instead of having the same story repeated 10k times.
Since they're comparing this to the fees that are charged by ASCAP, for say a bar to play recorded music for its patrons, I would imagine your assumption would be equivalent to a bar wanting to play Metallica for its patrons and instead of paying the $400 a year (and I'm just taking a stab at this, I think it depends on the size of the bar and frequency of music) they go out, put together a band, have them write their own music, record it for the bar and then the bar plays it for the patrons. Now, when you say that it would "provide us" then you would also be assuming that said bar would be okay with anyone playing this music in other bars or allow any individual to enjoy it without recouping their losses.
I don't think your assumption is very sound. In fact, I would wager Geeknet, Inc. would food up to a few grand a year to be a licensed news outlet or shut down Slashdot before it started taking on reporters that generate expenses in their footwork trying to find news. If Slashdot did start producing original news, it'd probably be best for them to try to join the AP news clearinghouse to recoup those costs.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, I just think your assumption of which way this will push websites, blogs, etc is grossly misguided. My predictions are either out of business or impose a new cost to do business.
For now, iOS lets me do what I need to do without getting in the way or making me find the right libraries or compile anything.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I have never had to reinstall an app other than during an update for that app. When my DROID updated Android, everything came back up. I have developed Android applications, the SDK is a just a zip that works in Linux, Windows even Mac. And you just unzip it and use the emulator and SDK that comes with it. Awhile ago, I tried to code iPhone apps but given that I don't have a Mac -- no luck!
When I spend time compiling software for the iOS, I want it to do something new and perhaps make some money while doing it.
Wow. Then perhaps you'd like to discuss the fees you had to pay in order to develop something for the iPhone? Are you enrolled in the iOS developer program? I put together the machine I develop on and it was quite inexpensive. And if I wanted to distribute my apps on Android Market I'm not aware of any fee or approval BS that comes with Apple's market. Do some reading:
To run an application on the iPhone, the application needs to be signed. This signed certificate is only granted by Apple after the developer has first developed the software through either the US$99/year Standard package or the US$299/year Enterprise package with the iPhone SDK.
Good luck "making a bit of money" when you're already negative from the get go!
Really, your comment reads like something written by someone who is confusing the customer with the developer and has never tried coding an Android app. You're correct that git and make don't mean anything to a customer but it does if you consider that developers have to embrace the platform before the customer has an apps to use!
Short run: make your money on iPhone. Long run: Android wins out. Trust me on this one.
I can't tell if you're confused or trolling... I read your blog so I know you're not stupid.
A job awaits me after I graduate from Cash Paradise University! With classes like "Botnet or How to Get My Own Bank Accounts" I'll never need to learn math!
I played bass with a drummer that lived far out in the country a few years ago. He was having problems with his brand new Matrix car and when we popped the hood, the spark plug cables leading to the distributor caps were gone. Completely.
Someone was playing a prank on him and I asked him if anyone in his family wanted him stationary for some reason recently. Or perhaps he had upset a neighbor by playing drums late into the night?
No, he told me, groundhogs stole into his garage and crawled up around the engine manifold and ate the cables. Now that was some Car Talk quality humor. I took him to a salvage yard to pick up used cables on the cheap -- the whole way there he described in great detail a groundhog leaving his garage with cables in tow. I figured he was playing quite the elaborate joke, had done something to the wires himself and was embarrassed to admit it or perhaps took more than just tea when he played drums.
Were it not for a lack of content and finances, I would probably buy one.
I am so happy we have blu-ray discs today. I don't own any blu-ray movies nor do I own a blu-ray player. But what I do own is lots of DVDs that I purchased after blu-ray came out. Found a complete X-Files box set for under $100 brand new (over 40 discs!) from some 'deep discount' retailer online. Same with a bunch of other movies I liked but never had the cash to blow $20-$30 to get on DVD. Dr. Strangelove looks pretty much the same to me on DVD -- again, found it on the cheap given the advent of blu-ray. Handbrake allows me to rip the discs to an m4v file so I can stream them to my player on my TV and then put the discs away in safe storage to increase their shelf life. I'm happy. Obviously if I'm compressing them to m4v and enjoying that with no problem, DVDs are more than satisfactory. Could I even still do this with blu-ray and 3D, let alone afford them? Probably not.
Now with the 3D, I was hoping that publishers would be forced to put out three tiers of purchasing: DVD, blu-ray and 3D. And the ceiling would be on 3D while DVDs might shift even lower. I know I'm the minority when I say that I am satisfied with current DVD resolution and am okay with buying into DVDs but the price difference is unreal -- especially used discs.
Of course, this backfires if they 1) stop making DVDs of movies or 2) stop supporting DVD playing in major electronics and players. Since the discs are the same size, I don't ever thing #2 will happen but #1 is a possibility. Until then, my wallet and I are really enjoying these transition periods!
Since the video is little more than quotes from people heralding the stark beauty of Microsoft products when compared to various open-source (and sometimes generic open-source) products, you might wonder where the quotes come from. They're old success stories, most of which are marketed as "Case Studies" on Microsoft.com.
I looked up the quotes in the video and apparently wasn't the only one to notice. Taking the first three quotes your years are 2007, 2009 and 2006. Some of them are more recent than others but I get the feeling that Microsoft needs to dig further back to find quotes deriding open source. I've used OpenOffice.org for a very long time. In college (~2002) I even used StarOffice on the school's Sun machines. And OpenOffice.org used to have some really really shitty aspects. But a few years back, major revisions have made it a lot better. Enough to cause Microsoft to come up with new ideas for their Office Suite. And I'm forced to use MS Office at work and I'm okay with that. It's becoming a contender. And as "tech debt" or "IT debt" begins to be realized for Microsoft and what it did to our history of proprietary format documents, I think OpenOffice.org is only going to look better and better. Yes, there's some cost with OO.o but there's some cost with MS Office as well.
It doesn't always happen but sometimes open source catches up to and even surpasses proprietary software. I cannot say OO.o will pass MS Office but it has made up a lot of ground in the past 2-3 years. A good example of this is the Linux 2.6 kernel and its steadily growing stability and features compared to Windows that remained largely stagnant while this occurred.
With the serious changes to the interface of MS Office suites (not saying they're bad, they're just some of the most major updates I've seen from MS), I think now is going to be the hardest time for Microsoft to find current quotes from customers criticizing open source. Because flipping from MS Word 2007 to OO.o is probably going to be as difficult for users to adapt to as flipping from MS Word 2007 to MS Word 2010.
So the summary went from an anti sexting patent, some parental control application, to learning Spanish by changing the phone's default language, and finally to close a way to protect our celebrities from their antics.
I don't tend to complain about the summaries, but man I guess I am going to have to go and read the article now to make sense of this summary.
Well, I apologize for the apparently incomprehensible summary. I didn't say anything at all about changing the phone's default language. The phone would just ensure that the child is sending or receiving messages with a certain amount of Spanish in them to ensure the child learns Spanish. Basically this patent could be used for censorship and/or replacement. That entails a lot of things and the patent itself alludes to a lot of possibilities. The media jumps on the 'think of the children' point of view but I tried to point out adults need it just as well. This could include anything from blocking certain folks from seeing certain words to replacing English words with Spanish in order to facilitate learning.
You're not going to read the patent but if you read the summary:
Systems, devices, and methods are provided for enabling a user to control the content of text-based messages sent to or received from an administered device. In some embodiments, a message will be blocked (incoming or outgoing) if the message includes forbidden content. In other embodiments, the objectionable content is removed from the message prior to transmission or as part of the receiving process. The content of such a message is controlled by filtering the message based on defined criteria. The criteria may be defined according to a parental control application. These techniques also may be used, in accordance with instructional embodiments, to require the administered devices to include certain text in messages. These embodiments might, for example, require that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish.
Of course given Apple's history, we can only wonder what kind of censorship they're trying to facilitate. It's about filtering text messages and e-mails (which I guess are starting to blend on smart phones). Sorry to stymie you with specific possibilities of what the patent could be used for.
Will it still intercept those messages when kids start inventing new words to have sexual meaning?
Child #1: Yo, man, that party last night was freakin', Smurf! Child #2: You bet your smurf it was! Child #1: Hey, I saw you leaving with Sheila. Child #2: Yeah. Right when we left the party, she started smurfin' me. Child #1: Shut the smurf up! Right in the smurfing parking lot? Child #2: Oh, yeah. Child #1: That's freakin' smurf! Child #2: You betcha. Child #1: Freakin' smurf.
I submitted a story a few days ago. Click the link once, then close the page. Then click the link again. You should get a paywall. I was a bit confused by the comment that iamhassi posted on it until I tried to visit the page again. It's happened before but now their strategy is clear and verified. Oddly enough when Soulskill retooled it and pushed it out, the new link is immune to this.
The Slash code seems to adjust my links sometimes and I've told CmdrTaco about this but it's really evident on nytimes.com articles.
Now can we please get one-time credit card authorization?
You mean like my Discover More Credit Card offers me?
You have the option of re-using the same one for a retailer or just continually requesting a new one if your dealings with them are infrequent or shady.
But what about programs like Badaboom that already use GPU acceleration in their encoding? Patents confuse me to no end.
The patent application was received in October of 2004 according to the article. So I assume Badaboom would have to precede that or produce some form of prior art preceding that date to defend themselves should Microsoft resort to litigation after failing to agree to a licensing deal with Badaboom's creators. Regardless, a cursory glance proves that Microsoft could out lawyer them whether they are right or not so I believe with a 98% confidence that BadaboomIt is facing some serious liabilities.
Oops! Looks like someone coded an infinite conditional into their English post. I mean, will Slashdot ever run out of things to criticize him for?
Clearly his anti-technology agenda is just a cover for him trying to stop websites from spreading data on molesting priests and the parishes they have been hidden at. </sarcasm>
Personally I've given up on ripping apart the Catholic Pope. I am confirmed Catholic. I know The Holy Bible fairly well but whenever I want to discuss what the Pope says I get criticized for not being fluent in whatever the devil this one speaks (Polish?) and therefore any translation I have is immediately rendered useless and possibly flawed by Lucifer. I'm certain this will result in a debate on the mistranslation of "technology" or some such pedantry... not unlike the commentary on The Holy Bible I've read (curiously Isaac Asimov's being one of the most refreshing and providing multiple points of view).
Every time a new MMO launches, I've got this baggage of playing WoW for 2-3 years. I expect the game that comes out to be as polished and as good as WoW. It's unfair but my logic just ends at "why don't I just play WoW instead." I hope other people are different but that's what I keep thinking and what leads to my termination of game play. I don't go back to WoW until an expansion comes out and then I just level max my characters and drop it after a month.
I played Darkfall and it was very unpolished. I've played a lot of MMOs like it. It gets into development and then it feels like the source of funding forces an early release and the thing falls apart. If I think back before WoW to my first MMO which was Star Wars Galaxies, I can recall the complete lack of a tutorial, the completely unpolished game play and the glitches right off the bat. But I stuck with it for a long time right up until the combat upgrade because I didn't know that there was a World of Warcraft. FFXIV lacks any tutorial or basic guide. It lacks polish. And I scrutinize it unfairly and don't give it a chance. I was in the beta and the lag killed me. I'm told that got better but I wasn't giving up another $50-$60 for a month of a game. I don't think that's a bad deal, I just have had it with unpolished games.
I have given up on FFXIV unless my friends inform me otherwise in the future and I now away The Old Republic. For me, it's just looking for that next MMO to sweep me off my feet like SWG and WoW did. Unfortunately, it's going to need the interesting and immense world of SWG with the refined and polished combat of WoW before I dive into it forty hours a week for over a year. So far, there's been three or four candidates that have fallen short. FFXIV is just the latest. I'm starting to feel like it will never end. Please, game publishers, do not release an MMO before it's ready just to make some quick bank only to drop it like a prom night dumpster baby on the pavement. You are killing your developing team's vision.
Side Note: FFXIII was terrible. What a linear game! Have they forgotten how much players like to customize their characters to their own desires and goals?! I think there was maybe one dimension of that game that allowed me to customize my characters through their skill spheres and even that was a no-brainer-everybody-has-to-take-this-path style of game play. I gave up after five levels of "now you must go here, you cannot grind, you cannot do anything interesting, you cannot explore, you can not investigate." What a stark departure from a franchise I have loved!
... when you can buy as many "buckets" as you want server-side and store virtually unlimited data about them?
Because it costs money? My fear is considering what spammers may or may not do with this local storage. I'm not opposed to local storage but I think it needs more user notification when and what is accessing it. Not requiring user intervention but knowledge about who and what is storing that data. I would prefer a browser to let me know if some no name advertiser were storing data there than, say, Slashdot or New York Times doing something to better my reading experience. I welcome it. It needs to happen. The W3C branched this to a totally separate group from the regular HTML 5 group I believe because there's a lot to iron out yet. I hope they change the way things are allowed to access it in the browser implementation yet. I hope.
People get upset when you further facilitate and make it easier for bad people to do bad things. That's how it's been for quite sometime whether the social enemy is a serial rapist or Facebook.
I suspect, as has already been noted that this will simply facilitate more advertisers to do this because now they don't need servers or bandwidth to support your "unlimited data" buckets.
I Am Honored to Have Made Your Signature
on
Largest Genome Ever
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· Score: 1, Informative
From your sig:
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
That's the only part of your post that wasn't stark raving stupidity. I understand you don't like me. That's fine, I'm even happy that you don't like me. Because your behavior is beyond help. You copy amazon reviews as comments (and I've called you out on it because you keep doing it). And I'm calling you out again. The above post that you put up there is copy pasted from creation.com. You can't even come up with your own troll posts.
Slashdot Mirror
The Android Invasion Cometh; Is Resistance Futile?
Look both options have their benefits. But I happen to agree with a recent survey that finds developers think Android is the long term solution while iOS is basically the immediate choice because of its dominance it has enjoyed with being the first. Given that the obvious is already happening, it's just going to take two or three years for developers to really unseat anything else in favor over Android. I was never given a chance to tinker or code for iOS so of course I'm biased towards the one technology out there that is actually trying to empower me without restrictions.
In the end, that sort of empowerment is going to trump any sort of assured device capability or graphical power that Apple can offer me. You may have a different opinion (BWJones did) but I simply cannot see how Apple will retain their lead in this fight.
Resistance is never futile. You could stick to your guns and enjoy immediate sales then moderate sales then fewer and fewer sales. Or you could enjoy moderate sales and then increasingly more and more sales. You might have to do more development if you want to target both TVs and handhelds (inputs get tricky) but I think investing in only iOS at this point is not a prudent decision.
"Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?"
Seriously? Somebody needs to point this guy to Mozilla Labs and tell him to join the community and start working on his own dreams instead of proposing/forcing them on the community.
... you just have to say or think something and suddenly it exists.
I mean, PCPro has done a really great job of bringing us news stories before but they've kind of fallen by the wayside and become irrelevant. Maybe if they switched and stuck their nose in something else it would benefit me a lot more so I think they should do that despite the obvious potential of failure. I mean, maybe they should start publishing cures for cancer and AIDS? Imagine all those ideas like a news site that actually pays the reader money. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine tomorrow's news article where they tell me the top ten things that are a threat to my computer. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?
Oh, look at me, I'm the magical man from imaginationland and I live in imagined houses made of fantasy bricks and -- look over there -- it's John Lennon using Firefox's new Office suite!
I like how some talking heads imagine that software "just happens." It doesn't take sleepless nights and thousands of weighty e-mails and collaboration
I also like how Mozilla can afford to spread themselves thin now that they have lost the browser war. If people had his attitude, we'd only see one leader in any field because everyone else gives up and doesn't try to regain the lead.
Nothing but wishful spurious logic.
After all, when we're playing a game of baseball (right, right, I know, this is slashdot), and a ball is coming towards us, we aren't calculating in our heads the velocity, air resistance and other variables involved in catching the ball. We just reach out our arms and our brain makes its best guess based on some sort of heuristic or something to make the catch.
I think the problem with your analogy that there are an unlimited number of dimensions and responses where you could put your arm out to make the catch (well, not unlimited if you consider Planck distances to be the smallest possible distance). But when we are talking about computerized flowers with nectar, you pretty much can only go to one of the flowers next. I think they used RFID to track the bees (or at least this researcher has written about doing that before)? So we can sit there and do a star search on all paths of the 50 flowers and find the shortest one to connect all of them in three dimensions in a particular order (we assume the flight paths are straight lines). The difference is not that we have so many fewer things to search than in the ball catching example but that you take a very finite deterministic path (i.e. 2, 34, 23, 6, 18, etc) and the bees seem to be able to find and learn this very quickly. According to the researcher:
"In nature, bees have to link hundreds of flowers in a way that minimises travel distance, and then reliably find their way home - not a trivial feat if you have a brain the size of a pinhead! Indeed such travelling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days. Studying how bee brains solve such challenging tasks might allow us to identify the minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving."
If this holds true for hundreds of flowers, I think we're talking about a serious search space with a definite path that is far more specific than the heuristics of moving your arm and hand around dynamically in space to collide with a ball. You could have tons of error when trying to catch a ball and still catch it. You (frequently) only have one optimal path in shortest distance problems. It's probably true these traveling salesman problems look obvious to a bee like catching a ball does to us but something particularly interesting is going on there if it is.
Let's say it is an unknown heuristic. I'd wager the network folks would kill to know how that heuristic is so cheaply computed.
I picture a lone Delorean, forever floating through empty space at 88 miles per hour.
I don't understand why you post first about a frame of reference problem and then joke about 88 miles per hour ... in reference to what? In the movies the DeLorean is traveling at 88 miles per hour as would be seen by an observer standing on Earth's surface. But to someone standing perfectly still in reference to the absolute center of the solar system -- as you seem to imply time machines are initially calibrated to -- then the velocity of the DeLorean would change with the velocity of the Earth around the Sun. Why are you only referencing the solar system and not galaxy or nebula or universe? So ... yeah, 88 miles per hour for those of us still on Earth many miles away. But your own post suffers the same problem that the movie suffers which is a frame of reference to the velocity and position.
... Or maybe claim that you machine is anchored to Earth's gravity well to simplify things a bit more?
...
Basically for new writers who write a science fiction time travel story you gotta make sure you mention briefly that you solved the orbit/rotation/surface problem and have calibrated your time machine to account for the ever changing topography of the Earth as well as its orbit and rotation
They were fun movies and nothing more. It might be fun to dissect them but if this is news, stand back in awe for my dissection of about a hundred other movies
and oh yeah — keep people and vehicles out of the downwind flight path
Thankfully no one was seriously injured or killed. It's been fifty years today since the infamous Nedelin Disaster happened at the Baikonur cosmodrome. It shocks me that as recently as 15 years ago these sort of catastrophes happened.
At least nobody ordered video evidence destroyed.
Given the above incidents and their cover-ups, I'd agree. We must study these mistakes, own up to them and learn from them.
Who's "they"?
"They" are Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. Any company that uses this method.
And, assuming you're referring to google, how are they shafting you? It's not your money.
No, it's not my money. It's the communal money that is under so much debate by politicians. And the fact that Google and everyone else has a hundred goddamned lawyers and accountants sitting around saving them billions of dollars does upset me. Because I don't have that. I don't have the option to employ the "double Irish" tactic when trying to save thousands of dollars in taxes each year so I can afford a simple house. Nope, they get that privilege and I don't because I'm poorer than them. So who's being screwed over? Every tax payer that doesn't have or employ those options. If you live in America, that's you. Why is your public education so lacking? Why do your taxes go up? Well, part of it is that companies employ tax evasion methods like the ones listed in the article. I'm not singling out Google, I'm expressing equal anger toward all who employ these methods.
You can call me a socialist, you can call me a communist. That's fine because I know I'm neither of those. I'm just someone that wants a fair playing field when it comes to aggregating X amount of resources so that our government and public services continue to function properly.
The men and women who founded this country cited 'taxation without representation' as one of the reasons. Like them, I'm not okay with lobbyists and tax loopholes that are apparently legal and okay to anyone who has tons and tons and tons of money. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer just because.
How Google Avoided Paying $60 Billion In Taxes
Yeah, unless you read the article that says:
Such income shifting costs the U.S. government as much as $60 billion in annual revenue, according to Kimberly A. Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
That's $60 billion total per year. Not just from Google but from every American business using these tax loopholes (Microsoft and Facebook included). The article clarifies:
Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
Emphasis mine. So you can see that it's on average a billion a year that Google saves doing this. Not $60 billion. Do I still feel like they're shafting me? Yes. But not 15% of their stock market worth. That's just unimaginable. Here's a bigger survey of companies using these loopholes with more details.
I'd like to think this would encourage more of the smaller news websites to get actual reporters out there, rather than just being news aggregators. It would be a shot in the arm for the industry, create jobs, and provide us with more varied reporting instead of having the same story repeated 10k times.
Since they're comparing this to the fees that are charged by ASCAP, for say a bar to play recorded music for its patrons, I would imagine your assumption would be equivalent to a bar wanting to play Metallica for its patrons and instead of paying the $400 a year (and I'm just taking a stab at this, I think it depends on the size of the bar and frequency of music) they go out, put together a band, have them write their own music, record it for the bar and then the bar plays it for the patrons. Now, when you say that it would "provide us" then you would also be assuming that said bar would be okay with anyone playing this music in other bars or allow any individual to enjoy it without recouping their losses.
I don't think your assumption is very sound. In fact, I would wager Geeknet, Inc. would food up to a few grand a year to be a licensed news outlet or shut down Slashdot before it started taking on reporters that generate expenses in their footwork trying to find news. If Slashdot did start producing original news, it'd probably be best for them to try to join the AP news clearinghouse to recoup those costs.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, I just think your assumption of which way this will push websites, blogs, etc is grossly misguided. My predictions are either out of business or impose a new cost to do business.
For now, iOS lets me do what I need to do without getting in the way or making me find the right libraries or compile anything.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I have never had to reinstall an app other than during an update for that app. When my DROID updated Android, everything came back up. I have developed Android applications, the SDK is a just a zip that works in Linux, Windows even Mac. And you just unzip it and use the emulator and SDK that comes with it. Awhile ago, I tried to code iPhone apps but given that I don't have a Mac -- no luck!
When I spend time compiling software for the iOS, I want it to do something new and perhaps make some money while doing it.
Wow. Then perhaps you'd like to discuss the fees you had to pay in order to develop something for the iPhone? Are you enrolled in the iOS developer program? I put together the machine I develop on and it was quite inexpensive. And if I wanted to distribute my apps on Android Market I'm not aware of any fee or approval BS that comes with Apple's market. Do some reading:
To run an application on the iPhone, the application needs to be signed. This signed certificate is only granted by Apple after the developer has first developed the software through either the US$99/year Standard package or the US$299/year Enterprise package with the iPhone SDK.
Good luck "making a bit of money" when you're already negative from the get go!
... I read your blog so I know you're not stupid.
Really, your comment reads like something written by someone who is confusing the customer with the developer and has never tried coding an Android app. You're correct that git and make don't mean anything to a customer but it does if you consider that developers have to embrace the platform before the customer has an apps to use!
Short run: make your money on iPhone. Long run: Android wins out. Trust me on this one.
I can't tell if you're confused or trolling
the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"
The best part is Andy Rubin started as an engineer at Apple in 1989.
A job awaits me after I graduate from Cash Paradise University! With classes like "Botnet or How to Get My Own Bank Accounts" I'll never need to learn math!
I played bass with a drummer that lived far out in the country a few years ago. He was having problems with his brand new Matrix car and when we popped the hood, the spark plug cables leading to the distributor caps were gone. Completely.
Someone was playing a prank on him and I asked him if anyone in his family wanted him stationary for some reason recently. Or perhaps he had upset a neighbor by playing drums late into the night?
No, he told me, groundhogs stole into his garage and crawled up around the engine manifold and ate the cables. Now that was some Car Talk quality humor. I took him to a salvage yard to pick up used cables on the cheap -- the whole way there he described in great detail a groundhog leaving his garage with cables in tow. I figured he was playing quite the elaborate joke, had done something to the wires himself and was embarrassed to admit it or perhaps took more than just tea when he played drums.
Guess I owe him an apology.
Were it not for a lack of content and finances, I would probably buy one.
I am so happy we have blu-ray discs today. I don't own any blu-ray movies nor do I own a blu-ray player. But what I do own is lots of DVDs that I purchased after blu-ray came out. Found a complete X-Files box set for under $100 brand new (over 40 discs!) from some 'deep discount' retailer online. Same with a bunch of other movies I liked but never had the cash to blow $20-$30 to get on DVD. Dr. Strangelove looks pretty much the same to me on DVD -- again, found it on the cheap given the advent of blu-ray. Handbrake allows me to rip the discs to an m4v file so I can stream them to my player on my TV and then put the discs away in safe storage to increase their shelf life. I'm happy. Obviously if I'm compressing them to m4v and enjoying that with no problem, DVDs are more than satisfactory. Could I even still do this with blu-ray and 3D, let alone afford them? Probably not.
Now with the 3D, I was hoping that publishers would be forced to put out three tiers of purchasing: DVD, blu-ray and 3D. And the ceiling would be on 3D while DVDs might shift even lower. I know I'm the minority when I say that I am satisfied with current DVD resolution and am okay with buying into DVDs but the price difference is unreal -- especially used discs.
Of course, this backfires if they 1) stop making DVDs of movies or 2) stop supporting DVD playing in major electronics and players. Since the discs are the same size, I don't ever thing #2 will happen but #1 is a possibility. Until then, my wallet and I are really enjoying these transition periods!
Therefore, Fractions are Good. Decimals are Evil!
Agreed. While I haven't seen the exact plans for 9/11 I'm pretty sure that they used decimals when calculating the fuel ...
...
Wait a minute! 9/11 = 0.81818181
Oh. My. God. Alert the truthers!
Since the video is little more than quotes from people heralding the stark beauty of Microsoft products when compared to various open-source (and sometimes generic open-source) products, you might wonder where the quotes come from. They're old success stories, most of which are marketed as "Case Studies" on Microsoft.com.
I looked up the quotes in the video and apparently wasn't the only one to notice. Taking the first three quotes your years are 2007, 2009 and 2006. Some of them are more recent than others but I get the feeling that Microsoft needs to dig further back to find quotes deriding open source. I've used OpenOffice.org for a very long time. In college (~2002) I even used StarOffice on the school's Sun machines. And OpenOffice.org used to have some really really shitty aspects. But a few years back, major revisions have made it a lot better. Enough to cause Microsoft to come up with new ideas for their Office Suite. And I'm forced to use MS Office at work and I'm okay with that. It's becoming a contender. And as "tech debt" or "IT debt" begins to be realized for Microsoft and what it did to our history of proprietary format documents, I think OpenOffice.org is only going to look better and better. Yes, there's some cost with OO.o but there's some cost with MS Office as well.
It doesn't always happen but sometimes open source catches up to and even surpasses proprietary software. I cannot say OO.o will pass MS Office but it has made up a lot of ground in the past 2-3 years. A good example of this is the Linux 2.6 kernel and its steadily growing stability and features compared to Windows that remained largely stagnant while this occurred.
With the serious changes to the interface of MS Office suites (not saying they're bad, they're just some of the most major updates I've seen from MS), I think now is going to be the hardest time for Microsoft to find current quotes from customers criticizing open source. Because flipping from MS Word 2007 to OO.o is probably going to be as difficult for users to adapt to as flipping from MS Word 2007 to MS Word 2010.
So the summary went from an anti sexting patent, some parental control application, to learning Spanish by changing the phone's default language, and finally to close a way to protect our celebrities from their antics.
I don't tend to complain about the summaries, but man I guess I am going to have to go and read the article now to make sense of this summary.
Well, I apologize for the apparently incomprehensible summary. I didn't say anything at all about changing the phone's default language. The phone would just ensure that the child is sending or receiving messages with a certain amount of Spanish in them to ensure the child learns Spanish. Basically this patent could be used for censorship and/or replacement. That entails a lot of things and the patent itself alludes to a lot of possibilities. The media jumps on the 'think of the children' point of view but I tried to point out adults need it just as well. This could include anything from blocking certain folks from seeing certain words to replacing English words with Spanish in order to facilitate learning.
You're not going to read the patent but if you read the summary:
Systems, devices, and methods are provided for enabling a user to control the content of text-based messages sent to or received from an administered device. In some embodiments, a message will be blocked (incoming or outgoing) if the message includes forbidden content. In other embodiments, the objectionable content is removed from the message prior to transmission or as part of the receiving process. The content of such a message is controlled by filtering the message based on defined criteria. The criteria may be defined according to a parental control application. These techniques also may be used, in accordance with instructional embodiments, to require the administered devices to include certain text in messages. These embodiments might, for example, require that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish.
Of course given Apple's history, we can only wonder what kind of censorship they're trying to facilitate. It's about filtering text messages and e-mails (which I guess are starting to blend on smart phones). Sorry to stymie you with specific possibilities of what the patent could be used for.
Will it still intercept those messages when kids start inventing new words to have sexual meaning?
Child #1: Yo, man, that party last night was freakin', Smurf!
Child #2: You bet your smurf it was!
Child #1: Hey, I saw you leaving with Sheila.
Child #2: Yeah. Right when we left the party, she started smurfin' me.
Child #1: Shut the smurf up! Right in the smurfing parking lot?
Child #2: Oh, yeah.
Child #1: That's freakin' smurf!
Child #2: You betcha.
Child #1: Freakin' smurf.
(stolen from Family Guy)
I submitted a story a few days ago. Click the link once, then close the page. Then click the link again. You should get a paywall. I was a bit confused by the comment that iamhassi posted on it until I tried to visit the page again. It's happened before but now their strategy is clear and verified. Oddly enough when Soulskill retooled it and pushed it out, the new link is immune to this.
The Slash code seems to adjust my links sometimes and I've told CmdrTaco about this but it's really evident on nytimes.com articles.
Now can we please get one-time credit card authorization?
You mean like my Discover More Credit Card offers me?
You have the option of re-using the same one for a retailer or just continually requesting a new one if your dealings with them are infrequent or shady.
But what about programs like Badaboom that already use GPU acceleration in their encoding? Patents confuse me to no end.
The patent application was received in October of 2004 according to the article. So I assume Badaboom would have to precede that or produce some form of prior art preceding that date to defend themselves should Microsoft resort to litigation after failing to agree to a licensing deal with Badaboom's creators. Regardless, a cursory glance proves that Microsoft could out lawyer them whether they are right or not so I believe with a 98% confidence that BadaboomIt is facing some serious liabilities.
OK, when you're done ripping on the pope ...
Oops! Looks like someone coded an infinite conditional into their English post. I mean, will Slashdot ever run out of things to criticize him for?
... not unlike the commentary on The Holy Bible I've read (curiously Isaac Asimov's being one of the most refreshing and providing multiple points of view).
Clearly his anti-technology agenda is just a cover for him trying to stop websites from spreading data on molesting priests and the parishes they have been hidden at. </sarcasm>
Personally I've given up on ripping apart the Catholic Pope. I am confirmed Catholic. I know The Holy Bible fairly well but whenever I want to discuss what the Pope says I get criticized for not being fluent in whatever the devil this one speaks (Polish?) and therefore any translation I have is immediately rendered useless and possibly flawed by Lucifer. I'm certain this will result in a debate on the mistranslation of "technology" or some such pedantry
Every time a new MMO launches, I've got this baggage of playing WoW for 2-3 years. I expect the game that comes out to be as polished and as good as WoW. It's unfair but my logic just ends at "why don't I just play WoW instead." I hope other people are different but that's what I keep thinking and what leads to my termination of game play. I don't go back to WoW until an expansion comes out and then I just level max my characters and drop it after a month.
I played Darkfall and it was very unpolished. I've played a lot of MMOs like it. It gets into development and then it feels like the source of funding forces an early release and the thing falls apart. If I think back before WoW to my first MMO which was Star Wars Galaxies, I can recall the complete lack of a tutorial, the completely unpolished game play and the glitches right off the bat. But I stuck with it for a long time right up until the combat upgrade because I didn't know that there was a World of Warcraft. FFXIV lacks any tutorial or basic guide. It lacks polish. And I scrutinize it unfairly and don't give it a chance. I was in the beta and the lag killed me. I'm told that got better but I wasn't giving up another $50-$60 for a month of a game. I don't think that's a bad deal, I just have had it with unpolished games.
I have given up on FFXIV unless my friends inform me otherwise in the future and I now away The Old Republic. For me, it's just looking for that next MMO to sweep me off my feet like SWG and WoW did. Unfortunately, it's going to need the interesting and immense world of SWG with the refined and polished combat of WoW before I dive into it forty hours a week for over a year. So far, there's been three or four candidates that have fallen short. FFXIV is just the latest. I'm starting to feel like it will never end. Please, game publishers, do not release an MMO before it's ready just to make some quick bank only to drop it like a prom night dumpster baby on the pavement. You are killing your developing team's vision.
Side Note: FFXIII was terrible. What a linear game! Have they forgotten how much players like to customize their characters to their own desires and goals?! I think there was maybe one dimension of that game that allowed me to customize my characters through their skill spheres and even that was a no-brainer-everybody-has-to-take-this-path style of game play. I gave up after five levels of "now you must go here, you cannot grind, you cannot do anything interesting, you cannot explore, you can not investigate." What a stark departure from a franchise I have loved!
I think "Playstation Network" is a #videogame (http://bit.ly/cnJWSD)
... when you can buy as many "buckets" as you want server-side and store virtually unlimited data about them?
Because it costs money? My fear is considering what spammers may or may not do with this local storage. I'm not opposed to local storage but I think it needs more user notification when and what is accessing it. Not requiring user intervention but knowledge about who and what is storing that data. I would prefer a browser to let me know if some no name advertiser were storing data there than, say, Slashdot or New York Times doing something to better my reading experience. I welcome it. It needs to happen. The W3C branched this to a totally separate group from the regular HTML 5 group I believe because there's a lot to iron out yet. I hope they change the way things are allowed to access it in the browser implementation yet. I hope.
People get upset when you further facilitate and make it easier for bad people to do bad things. That's how it's been for quite sometime whether the social enemy is a serial rapist or Facebook.
I suspect, as has already been noted that this will simply facilitate more advertisers to do this because now they don't need servers or bandwidth to support your "unlimited data" buckets.
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
That's the only part of your post that wasn't stark raving stupidity. I understand you don't like me. That's fine, I'm even happy that you don't like me. Because your behavior is beyond help. You copy amazon reviews as comments (and I've called you out on it because you keep doing it). And I'm calling you out again. The above post that you put up there is copy pasted from creation.com. You can't even come up with your own troll posts.
... and yet you login to relay these ramblings to us. Does not compute.
You have the weird CmdrTaco sexual fetishes under your name. You manage to pack homophobia and xenophobia all into one post. You are well versed in the art of cruise control for awesome. You're all over the road in the spectrum of what's wrong with posts on Slashdot
I'm honored to be so diametrically opposed to you that you must call me an idiot in your sig but seriously what drives you, man?