At a 100 pages its going to be a while before I can say I have RTFA, but I'll get back with any relevance in a few days after I have digested it. I suggest any post claiming other wise are a bit hasty.
You can read section one (the introduction) and get a high level walk through of what he's doing. Just be prepared to have a requisite in the following to make it through that:
In order to apply this analysis to the space of solutions of random constraint satisfaction problems, we utilize and expand upon ideas from several fields spanning logic, statistics, graphical models, random ensembles, and statistical physics.
On the one hand it seems this will take a general expert in the math related sciences to verify but on the other you would think that -- like with the E8 and Lie groups -- this sort of proof would require a rather large unified theory to be able to reduce the N=NP? problem down to a provable situation. I'm no expert and it's been three or four years since I've even been in academia but even the subsections of this paper are noteworthy if they are true. It could be we're looking at something that jumps so far ahead like the famous papers of Turing and Shannon.
Carriers and phone vendors are demonstrating that they can even lock down Android so "open" doesn't mean f-ckall to the end consumer.
Thus providing a very widespread example of why the EFF released the GPLv3.
Let me tell you something (and sort of answer this other confused post), the people who decide which operating system gets put on a phone are not you and me. The end consumer doesn't get to decide that. You don't get to go through a checklist when you select your carrier then model of phone then operating system for it. We would all like that but we know that you select a carrier then they have a sub-selection of phones and each of those phones is stuck with a single operating system. For instance, I cannot get a Verizon plan on an iPhone 4 running Android 2.2.
There are big bucks at stake when it comes to mobile programs being sold to huge swaths of customers and the CEOs and jerkfaces that run the carriers and phone manufacturing plants aren't about to let that chunk of change slip through to the people who actually write those apps. So by sacrificing openness, they know they can lock you into a certain market application or operating system with a built in validation routine for marketing applications. This ensures you do business through them and their affiliates. "Oh, you can't uninstall the NASCAR App that sells you NASCAR crap? Too bad, NASCAR gave me five million to put that piece of trash on all my customer's phones! And honestly, we both knew that wasn't a dealbreaker on your purchase. "
Google knows this. If Google released Android and went to the carriers and phone makers and said "Look, I think you should use Android but when you release it on your device it has to stay open and you can't do this and you can't do that because that harms the end user experience." What do you think the carriers and phone makers would say? You think they'd line up to join the Open Handset Alliance? Nexus One would be the only phone running Android.
So Google makes an open mobile operating system and who's it open for? The people that decide it gets used. It's not you and me, it's not the customer, it's the people running the show.
So what would you rather have? Situation A where we're all running the traditional locked down Symbian/iOS/Microcrap Mobile operating system with no ability to see the kernel source? Or Situation B where parts of the phone are locked down like you can't install a different operating system on most of them and you can't install any marketplace app and some of them have programs you can't remove BUT you can see every line of source code for the underlying kernel!
This isn't perfect but this is progress. Any other attempt at open source and the who party would have walked away from Google. You're out of your goddamn mind if you're going to criticize the current scenario. After Android mops the floor with iOS and other mobile operating systems, we might even edge closer and closer to true openness where I can install whatever Android ROM I want on my phone the second it comes out of the box and my carrier isn't breathing down my neck when I do it. Until then, you gotta take what you can get.
So does this mean that Android is not truly open source, i.e. available to anyone without right holder approval?
You can browse the source right here. All of that code should be Apache 2.0 license. I think the issue at stake is that they took a module of code that connects to Google's Market place for Android and they're not supposed to be doing that unless they are a member of the Open Handset Alliance. It's not like Google's launching a lawsuit against them but I'd imagine Google doesn't really appreciate that. Hosting that sort of thing can't be cheap (look at how much Apple claims it loses distributing apps) and maybe that's why your membership is needed -- to support that and keep it going.
I never realized that one had to a member of fruity club to develop Android hardware. I thought that was the point, anyone could innovate without corporate approval. It is just a gimmick to sell phones with promise of multi vendor support 'open apps', like MS?
You can get the source yourself and do whatever the hell you want with it. Carriers and phone vendors are demonstrating that they can even lock down Android so "open" doesn't mean f-ckall to the end consumer. You want to get down and dirty and hose up your own version of Android? Go ahead and pull it from that git repository linked above and do something fancy with the sqlite phonebook tree or whatever you want.
It's open source as can be but how do you "open source" a centralized app store with tons of traffic? I guess you're free to make your own app store and as far as I know, more are emerging. With sideloading you could make it as simple as a file download as long as the user's Android supports sideloading.
Augen included proprietary Google software in their product via an unauthorized vendor. Google only licenses its software to partners and OHA [Open Handset Alliance] members directly.
And Augen's CEO responded saying it was unintentional:
the Google Mobile Service and Android Apps were pre installed during the development process on our tablets for testing purposes, and were not removed unintentionally before releasing the products in the market place. Google and Augen came to a mutual understanding that the Google Mobile Services Application Suite pre-installed on the GENTOUCH/ GENBOOK Series; could not be removed due to technological constraints for the products that were sold, shipped, or already produced. For future production runs and deliveries, Augen will block and remove the Google Mobile Services Application Suite from the current devices until further notice.
The GENTOUCH78 is a sleek Android powered tablet with a 7” touch screen that connects you with hundreds of your favorite applications from the App Store.
For infringement of intellectual property. The judge put a restraining order on the bees to remain at least two hundred yards away from all Mansanto plants and fined them $2,320 for each unlicensed strand of DNA collected from Mansanto plants and distributed to a competing plant.
Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait...
DancesWithBlowTorch, keep an eye on Mozilla's Bespin. I've used the very basic skeleton project they had and think they're on track but it's coming along and will hopefully firm up once HTML5 support and standards become common place. I don't know how fluid it will become with real time updates but imagine editing your code anytime from any browser that is HTML 5 compliant and your collaborators seeing that. Not sure how many languages they plan on incorporating but when it's done, your source will exist and be compiled in the cloud. Maybe not ideal for a business but for open source collaboration... really neat!
I've Heard of It a Few Times
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Why Wave Failed
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· Score: 5, Funny
.. he is probably right. I never heard of the thing before now (though I probably would not have been interested).
I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...
on
Why Wave Failed
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Whatever the reason for Wave’s failure is, the fact remains: There are two types of people, the ones that love Wave, and the ones that don’t know what it is.
Well, I guess I don't exist then. I tried Wave, I understand that it's supposed to be a collaboration tool more than just a glorified IM Client. And I don't love it -- I don't hate it, either. If it cost money I would hate it. But since it's open source and free I kind of view it as a solution to a problem I don't have. My coworkers and I played around with it for a day, noticed some tiny problems with arrival times of messages and the like (things that would probably be ironed out) but after that small amount of time, I grew bored of it and didn't consider it a viable or necessary communication channel. Of course, I'm not trying to write code with someone on the other side of the world either.
Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave. Requiring a separate window guarantees that I wouldn't use it regularly.
Well, to counter that, I personally found it to be too confusing and not intuitive enough. Adding in my e-mail would have just made it an indiscernible mess. GMail is already busy enough, I'm not going to be able to consume that inside Wave. Doing one thing really well is often more valuable to me than doing a lot of things really well and trying to cram them into one experience... this UI bloat really wears on me.
Meanwhile, we’ll have to include Wave to Google’s increasing list flops: The Nexus One, Google Answers, Google Checkout, Google Viewer, the Knol, Orkut, Wave, and Buzz.
Fail early, fail often, right? I feel bad for Novel's Pulse and SAP's Cloudave which I think were built up to interact with Wave but at the same time I don't think it was forced on them nor do either of them have to stop working on that product if Google is dropping out of the game (open source is great!). Google's failures are far less painful to me than another company's failures so I'll gladly tolerate them... maybe even appreciate them because they'll get something right one of these days (look at Android going nuts).
Isn't this the first proper test of GPL in a court of law?
I'm not a lawyer so maybe I'm not understanding the weight of "first proper test" but there have been many court cases I think most are settled out of court though. Example:
In 2002, MySQL AB sued Progress NuSphere for copyright and trademark infringement in United States district court. NuSphere had allegedly violated MySQL's copyright by linking code for the Gemini table type into the MySQL server. After a preliminary hearing before Judge Patti Saris on February 27, 2002, the parties entered settlement talks and eventually settled. At the hearing, Judge Saris "saw no reason" that the GPL would not be enforceable.
This might be the first one inside the United States to come down to a court decision without being short circuited by a settlement, yes. Keep in mind that they claim to find one violation per day so it's awfully kind of them to give years worth of warning before starting to take legal action. I'm sure that if someone with money really wanted to stick it to their competitors and they are listed as violators of the GPL (like any retailer who competes with Best Buy) they could probably be a real thorn in their side. The last thing you want is big companies afraid to use GPL'd code because it's a legal liability -- adoption and buy in from a huge company is one of the best things that could happen to a small GPL project because it means you'll always be around.
Well, in the article they say that one firm's explanation is that high frequency traders are injecting quotes into the system because they know about them and don't have to sort through them when they are posted... but their competitor's bots have to look at that data and sort out the real data that are actual useful quotes instead of the outliers which are quotes that will never be taken.
So scam is close but spam might be a better word for this.
I also get a kick out of how periodically in this article they remind us that high frequency trading is good for the market and these people that don't do anything that act as middle men are actually good for the market because they up availability or "eliminate inefficiencies" (that's my favorite). And they're all taking money out of this magical unending bucket of cash... quant funds and high frequency traders are so 1929 I don't even know where to begin.
4-97. If you do not have antibiotics and the wound has become severely infected, does not heal, and ordinary debridement is impossible, consider maggot therapy as stated below, despite its hazards:
*Expose the wound to flies for one day and then cover it. *Check daily for maggots. *Once maggots develop, keep wound covered but check daily. *Remove all maggots when they have cleaned out all dead tissue and before they start on healthy tissue. Increased pain and bright red blood in the wound indicate that the maggots have reached healthy tissue. *Flush the wound repeatedly with sterile water or fresh urine to remove the maggots. *Check the wound every 4 hours for several days to ensure all maggots have been removed. *Bandage the wound and treat it as any other wound. It should heal normally.
By no means a pleasant option but an interesting way to remove infection.
Do they have trucks in that area? Wouldn't that pose a minor issue?
I don't speak Chinese but from watching the video it appears that there is a warning signal when a truck is detected as approaching from behind or in front of the bus. In addition to this there are black and yellow poles that apparently act as truck detractors like the upside down U-shaped hoops in lawn croquet. The bus would fit over these perfectly but a truck in this same section of traffic would hit one of these before endangering the bus. It appears that this would designate which lanes are okay for trucks (however they then also pose a bit of a traffic obstacle where they come down in between lanes).
My bigger concern is turning and how the sections bend and twist between themselves (as seen at around 5:30 in the video). Is this on a rail or not? Because I could see that being potentially problematic and accident prone if drivers fail to yield to you. I'm interested that they're already planning on deploying this as I think there are things to iron out yet.
It is rare these days to see companies devote 10% of their budget to R&D. Most tend to just not bother with R&D because it doesn't give ROI this quarter, and when they do, they gain the technology by buying a startup, or just copying someone else's work and improving on it.
Isn't that an argument for patents, though? I mean, you're saying that R&D isn't profitable in the eyes of most companies and why is that? I mean, we complain about patents but then if you look at the amount of innovation going on in countries where intellectual property is not enforced it seems to be fractions of what goes on in countries that enforce IP law. I'm not arguing for this but your complaint that not enough companies dump 10% into R&D seems, in my mind, to be heavily linked to the lack of reward. I thought patents and licensing those patents were supposed to be that reward or recoup mechanism.
60 year old glass? Most enterprises can't even think past the next couple quarters or to the next FY, much less this far. Almost any other company would have long since chucked the manufacturing process for it because it wasn't immediately profitable.
Well, from the article, it sounds as though they had pretty much shelved it and "In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla." Again, if you think about it, a patent is good for only ~20 years? So maybe when they 'tweaked' it they did that so they also could repatent it? They have a lot of patents related to glass composition.
Can their competitors just fire up a plant right now and start making Chemcor? You bet. Gorilla is probably repatented though to protect them from that and that illustrates why you don't see a whole lot of companies taking the Corning path.
Well then maybe we shouldn't be doing it in the first place. Doy.
As long as bad people exist, you will always need to keep certain information secured. Whether you're a government or a citizen. How would you respond if Wikileaks put up your credit card information, bank account numbers, social security number and all your known residences and acquaintances?
I'm not implying that our current scenario is as cut and dried as World War II but how would you react if Wikileaks had been broadcasting over a magical radio station that blanketed the Earth the location of allied forces in 1942? Would you so callously respond that "maybe the Allies shouldn't be doing that in the first place?"
Yes, as an American, I am concerned about the people fighting for my country abroad. I'm not concerned one bit about the politicians and generals, it's the grunts and people out in the field that could suffer from this. And most of all the people helping those forces by giving them intelligence. War is not a cover-up. It has necessary secrets. It has since Roman times and it will continue to as long as humans exist. You know the names and locations of people informing American forces about where the Taliban are needs to be classified. At this point it's not even using this information against me sitting at home in comfort but about the people in Afghanistan and their safety.
The war, over there, has been over for years. Now, they are just working as cops.
Do you really feel that car bombs are just police work? Let me try to rephrase it for people that are living comfortably: if two car bombs went off in New York city and killed eight, would you just shrug that off as normal everyday police work?
Some of this stuff -- stuff that even happened today -- requires the intelligence collection and expertise of people trained to do more than "just work as cops." I would suggest you are selling our troops short in their ongoing work at preventing and disarming these kinds of attacks. I think we're all hoping that the Iraqi security forces meet or exceed the current work going on in a country that occasionally shows signs of instability and something more opposed to the US than everyday criminals as we know them.
You're kidding, right? It guarantees that the few remaining insurgent groups will prepare for the date, and then attack with whatever they have left.
That was the criticism in the article based on two car bombs and a drive-by killing eight in Iraq today -- the day of this announcement. I guess a better question should have been "will Iraqi security forces be able to contain the unavoidable violence following this withdrawal?"
That's why you *don't have a specific date* nor do you release your plans to the enemy.
Or perhaps you gamble and show the world that the situation is under control by releasing your "plans" of withdrawal showing that those now in charge are very capable hands. Otherwise what do you do? Sit there and then just magically disappear one day? And when that happens, you think you're not in the same scenario you just mentioned? No matter how you cut it, it's a delicate situation.
Or because the average user is running around the Internet looking for instant gratification and simply won't learn about security.
But what if that's changing?
We can bitch and moan about how worthless Facebook is but these privacy debacles seem to finally be waking people up to the real issues at stake. Thankfully to raise this issue it took just a few sensitive pictures of some fools to get out after they posted them to the world instead of a totally invasive all knowing nexus of everyone's everything. Seems like the past 20 or so years it's slowly been getting worse and worse on the internet. And now WSJ has this huge "expose" called What They Know with an intuitive display of what's affecting you without your knowledge. And that indicates that WSJ thinks people want to hear about this and that it will sell eyeballs. I say it's about damned time. I hope it doesn't stop here with Microsoft or even stop at browsers. It should continue from websites all the way back to The Patriot Act. Hopefully the spirit of privacy from government and corporations has merely been sleeping in Americans and not completely dead/relinquished. Unfortunately they say it's always much harder to win back liberties lost than to give them up.
I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason is they're afraid that it would be seen as an anti-competitive move against Google...
Oh, it's very competitive. Whenever Microsoft arrives late to the game, you know they bring lots of money with them. Why has Bing Cashback stopped?
The problem with your post is that you can't imagine a company being both a "spooty ad company" and a company that actually makes actual products. You don't have to be one or the other.
The Journal's examination of the top 50 most popular U.S. websites showed that Microsoft placed third-party tracking devices on 27 of the top 46 sites that it doesn't itself own.
It's about tracking your movements/interests, harvesting that data and then using that data to advertise to you better... which usually means handing it off to those advertisers to better target you. And they're not the only ones:
Many also have big stakes in online advertising. Microsoft bought aQuantive, a Web-ad firm, in 2007 for more than $6 billion, to build a business selling ads online. Google, already a giant in online marketing, in September 2008 launched a Web browser, Chrome, that gives it new insight into Internet users' habits. Apple has launched an ad network, iAds, for its iPhone and iPad. And Adobe last year paid $1.8 billion to buy Omniture, which measures the effectiveness of online ads.
WGA/WPA isn't going to get a hold of this kind of data. That's a sort of digital rights management for validating Windows, not tracking users with cookies and making bank off of it. They profit when they sell you Windows (with IE8) and they'll profit when you use IE8 on the internet.
Save money, save power, save bandwidth. I'm getting one!
Indeed, I made the statement that this reader would have to be under $100 for me to get one when I first saw the Kindle. And now we're down to $139 so it edges even closer.
When I first saw that it would have 3G, I went searching for videos on the surfing experience and was not impressed. Unless drastic improvements were made in how it renders and handles web pages, it looks like it would be tedious and almost unusable except for outlying circumstances.
Now, that doesn't mean some software or new mobilized content mentality couldn't change all of that but from what I've seen it looks to be little more than a novelty like the web browser I have on my Nintendo DS.
So, like you note, the purpose of 3G really boils down to selling books while you're sitting around -- which is nice but not a crucial need. I guess I could imagine using 3G to get books off of Gutenberg or some other open repository of open formatted books but again that wouldn't really be worth a 35% price increase.
Is anyone able to comment on what the browsing functionality actually does for them? Is there news that you actually digest in a productive fashion? Certain news sites that work flawlessly? Blog technologies (like Wordpress or something) that always work? And how is the 3G coverage and reliability? I have so many questions about these devices and can find so little on reviewing this web browser functionality on the Kindle.
Good job on price but I don't ever see the Kindle replacing my Asus Netbook with Ubuntu on it. Yeah, you're going to have a large price delta and I think there's a long way to go -- much longer than the 18 months or sooner that the article mentioned -- before these two consumer products converge. Battery life is just one thing. Price, general purpose computing abilities and the ability to install open source software are big factors for me (not sure about other folks).
I seem to recall a device that Microsoft had announced that acted as a sort of courier between the user and the internet by couriering data back and forth. You could even send courrier electronique... sorry, what's the English for that? Ah, yes, e-mail. Say you worked for a package company and you had to act as a courier for packages, well then this device might have helped you. But I'll guess we'll never be able to gauge the couriering possibilities of said device.
I just wish I could remember what that hyped device that never saw the light of day was called. I think it was called "The Tablet That Couldn't Slow Down."
Ah, now those were the days when Microsoft's future was a bright and promising vista.
Yeah, turns out if you chuck $5 at Slashdot you can see the stories 30 minutes before they pop. Big secret nobody knows about because nobody subscribes except those of us who appreciate Slashdot.
And despite trying to hold my tongue on opinion and just refer the reader the NOAA, that post is already moderated as Troll. Slashdot has gotten to the point where you can't even refer to the people that devote their lives to the study of climatology across the world without being called a Troll. And the real awesome thing is that I see people who haven't even read the report in question being moderated up up up up. People who have never studied climatology are deriving their own reason to disbelieve what's in this report. If it's not one thing, it's another.
I don't think there is much doubt that global warming is real. The Earth has experienced both global warming and global cooling many times in its past.
Okay and from the expert:
'greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation' for 0.56C (1F) warming over the last 50 years.
Tell me, Mr. Arm Chair Expert I Referred to in My First Post, where in this 'long history of global warming and global cooling' did the average temperature rise 0.56C (1F) a degree in 50 years?
Read the report. I'm not going to keep posting the same damned thing over and over. It's all over there with convincing evidence that man-made or "anthropogenic" changes are attributing to this in serious ways. No, it does not account for 100% of all the warming but certainly some of it.
2. we MUST do something DRASTIC AND IMMEDIATE to stop it
And where the hell did anyone propose that? Huh? You think energy star ratings are drastic? You think that putting a date 30 years out to curb our countries carbon emissions is drastic? Do you know what drastic means? Do you know what rationing is? Apparently not.
Here's the only place I'd like to get to: agreeing that 1) climate is warming to a point of unnatural irreversible damage and 2) man made factors are contributing to it. You don't even have to change anything right now. Just make your base agreements and then lets start voting on how much we should react to it and keep a measurable pace of results if possible.
This is why I hate commenting on this shit. It upsets me, it makes me swear and lash out at complete strangers who don't have the time to read the material they are commenting on.
Slashdot Mirror
At a 100 pages its going to be a while before I can say I have RTFA, but I'll get back with any relevance in a few days after I have digested it. I suggest any post claiming other wise are a bit hasty.
You can read section one (the introduction) and get a high level walk through of what he's doing. Just be prepared to have a requisite in the following to make it through that:
In order to apply this analysis to the space of solutions of random constraint satisfaction problems, we utilize and expand upon ideas from several fields spanning logic, statistics, graphical models, random ensembles, and statistical physics.
My computer science, math and statistics are still fairly sharp but the physics and graph theory are a bit much. Indeed this will take a while to digest. If he hasn't made a mistake in something like bridging together least fixed point logic and functions with Markov-Gibbs properties (correspondence and equivalence).
On the one hand it seems this will take a general expert in the math related sciences to verify but on the other you would think that -- like with the E8 and Lie groups -- this sort of proof would require a rather large unified theory to be able to reduce the N=NP? problem down to a provable situation. I'm no expert and it's been three or four years since I've even been in academia but even the subsections of this paper are noteworthy if they are true. It could be we're looking at something that jumps so far ahead like the famous papers of Turing and Shannon.
Carriers and phone vendors are demonstrating that they can even lock down Android so "open" doesn't mean f-ckall to the end consumer.
Thus providing a very widespread example of why the EFF released the GPLv3.
Let me tell you something (and sort of answer this other confused post), the people who decide which operating system gets put on a phone are not you and me. The end consumer doesn't get to decide that. You don't get to go through a checklist when you select your carrier then model of phone then operating system for it. We would all like that but we know that you select a carrier then they have a sub-selection of phones and each of those phones is stuck with a single operating system. For instance, I cannot get a Verizon plan on an iPhone 4 running Android 2.2.
There are big bucks at stake when it comes to mobile programs being sold to huge swaths of customers and the CEOs and jerkfaces that run the carriers and phone manufacturing plants aren't about to let that chunk of change slip through to the people who actually write those apps. So by sacrificing openness, they know they can lock you into a certain market application or operating system with a built in validation routine for marketing applications. This ensures you do business through them and their affiliates. "Oh, you can't uninstall the NASCAR App that sells you NASCAR crap? Too bad, NASCAR gave me five million to put that piece of trash on all my customer's phones! And honestly, we both knew that wasn't a dealbreaker on your purchase. "
Google knows this. If Google released Android and went to the carriers and phone makers and said "Look, I think you should use Android but when you release it on your device it has to stay open and you can't do this and you can't do that because that harms the end user experience." What do you think the carriers and phone makers would say? You think they'd line up to join the Open Handset Alliance? Nexus One would be the only phone running Android.
So Google makes an open mobile operating system and who's it open for? The people that decide it gets used. It's not you and me, it's not the customer, it's the people running the show.
So what would you rather have? Situation A where we're all running the traditional locked down Symbian/iOS/Microcrap Mobile operating system with no ability to see the kernel source? Or Situation B where parts of the phone are locked down like you can't install a different operating system on most of them and you can't install any marketplace app and some of them have programs you can't remove BUT you can see every line of source code for the underlying kernel!
This isn't perfect but this is progress. Any other attempt at open source and the who party would have walked away from Google. You're out of your goddamn mind if you're going to criticize the current scenario. After Android mops the floor with iOS and other mobile operating systems, we might even edge closer and closer to true openness where I can install whatever Android ROM I want on my phone the second it comes out of the box and my carrier isn't breathing down my neck when I do it. Until then, you gotta take what you can get.
So does this mean that Android is not truly open source, i.e. available to anyone without right holder approval?
You can browse the source right here. All of that code should be Apache 2.0 license. I think the issue at stake is that they took a module of code that connects to Google's Market place for Android and they're not supposed to be doing that unless they are a member of the Open Handset Alliance. It's not like Google's launching a lawsuit against them but I'd imagine Google doesn't really appreciate that. Hosting that sort of thing can't be cheap (look at how much Apple claims it loses distributing apps) and maybe that's why your membership is needed -- to support that and keep it going.
I never realized that one had to a member of fruity club to develop Android hardware. I thought that was the point, anyone could innovate without corporate approval. It is just a gimmick to sell phones with promise of multi vendor support 'open apps', like MS?
You can get the source yourself and do whatever the hell you want with it. Carriers and phone vendors are demonstrating that they can even lock down Android so "open" doesn't mean f-ckall to the end consumer. You want to get down and dirty and hose up your own version of Android? Go ahead and pull it from that git repository linked above and do something fancy with the sqlite phonebook tree or whatever you want.
It's open source as can be but how do you "open source" a centralized app store with tons of traffic? I guess you're free to make your own app store and as far as I know, more are emerging. With sideloading you could make it as simple as a file download as long as the user's Android supports sideloading.
Augen included proprietary Google software in their product via an unauthorized vendor. Google only licenses its software to partners and OHA [Open Handset Alliance] members directly.
And Augen's CEO responded saying it was unintentional:
the Google Mobile Service and Android Apps were pre installed during the development process on our tablets for testing purposes, and were not removed unintentionally before releasing the products in the market place. Google and Augen came to a mutual understanding that the Google Mobile Services Application Suite pre-installed on the GENTOUCH/ GENBOOK Series; could not be removed due to technological constraints for the products that were sold, shipped, or already produced. For future production runs and deliveries, Augen will block and remove the Google Mobile Services Application Suite from the current devices until further notice.
Augen is not listed as a member of the Open Handset Alliance. Augen's website still says:
The GENTOUCH78 is a sleek Android powered tablet with a 7” touch screen that connects you with hundreds of your favorite applications from the App Store.
But does not indicate which "App Store."
Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, so seeing him say that university isn't necessary is a little unsurprising.
And yet four months ago, he advised students not to do that. There can only be one or two Bill Gates' so advising millions of people to do that is not a great idea. And, to poke a hole in your logic he technically did graduate.
For infringement of intellectual property. The judge put a restraining order on the bees to remain at least two hundred yards away from all Mansanto plants and fined them $2,320 for each unlicensed strand of DNA collected from Mansanto plants and distributed to a competing plant.
Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait...
DancesWithBlowTorch, keep an eye on Mozilla's Bespin. I've used the very basic skeleton project they had and think they're on track but it's coming along and will hopefully firm up once HTML5 support and standards become common place. I don't know how fluid it will become with real time updates but imagine editing your code anytime from any browser that is HTML 5 compliant and your collaborators seeing that. Not sure how many languages they plan on incorporating but when it's done, your source will exist and be compiled in the cloud. Maybe not ideal for a business but for open source collaboration ... really neat!
.. he is probably right. I never heard of the thing before now (though I probably would not have been interested).
CC.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about we've covered it a few times.
Whatever the reason for Wave’s failure is, the fact remains: There are two types of people, the ones that love Wave, and the ones that don’t know what it is.
Well, I guess I don't exist then. I tried Wave, I understand that it's supposed to be a collaboration tool more than just a glorified IM Client. And I don't love it -- I don't hate it, either. If it cost money I would hate it. But since it's open source and free I kind of view it as a solution to a problem I don't have. My coworkers and I played around with it for a day, noticed some tiny problems with arrival times of messages and the like (things that would probably be ironed out) but after that small amount of time, I grew bored of it and didn't consider it a viable or necessary communication channel. Of course, I'm not trying to write code with someone on the other side of the world either.
Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave. Requiring a separate window guarantees that I wouldn't use it regularly.
Well, to counter that, I personally found it to be too confusing and not intuitive enough. Adding in my e-mail would have just made it an indiscernible mess. GMail is already busy enough, I'm not going to be able to consume that inside Wave. Doing one thing really well is often more valuable to me than doing a lot of things really well and trying to cram them into one experience ... this UI bloat really wears on me.
Meanwhile, we’ll have to include Wave to Google’s increasing list flops: The Nexus One, Google Answers, Google Checkout, Google Viewer, the Knol, Orkut, Wave, and Buzz.
Fail early, fail often, right? I feel bad for Novel's Pulse and SAP's Cloudave which I think were built up to interact with Wave but at the same time I don't think it was forced on them nor do either of them have to stop working on that product if Google is dropping out of the game (open source is great!). Google's failures are far less painful to me than another company's failures so I'll gladly tolerate them ... maybe even appreciate them because they'll get something right one of these days (look at Android going nuts).
Isn't this the first proper test of GPL in a court of law?
I'm not a lawyer so maybe I'm not understanding the weight of "first proper test" but there have been many court cases I think most are settled out of court though. Example:
In 2002, MySQL AB sued Progress NuSphere for copyright and trademark infringement in United States district court. NuSphere had allegedly violated MySQL's copyright by linking code for the Gemini table type into the MySQL server. After a preliminary hearing before Judge Patti Saris on February 27, 2002, the parties entered settlement talks and eventually settled. At the hearing, Judge Saris "saw no reason" that the GPL would not be enforceable.
This might be the first one inside the United States to come down to a court decision without being short circuited by a settlement, yes. Keep in mind that they claim to find one violation per day so it's awfully kind of them to give years worth of warning before starting to take legal action. I'm sure that if someone with money really wanted to stick it to their competitors and they are listed as violators of the GPL (like any retailer who competes with Best Buy) they could probably be a real thorn in their side. The last thing you want is big companies afraid to use GPL'd code because it's a legal liability -- adoption and buy in from a huge company is one of the best things that could happen to a small GPL project because it means you'll always be around.
The "market" is a fucking scam.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it.
Well, in the article they say that one firm's explanation is that high frequency traders are injecting quotes into the system because they know about them and don't have to sort through them when they are posted ... but their competitor's bots have to look at that data and sort out the real data that are actual useful quotes instead of the outliers which are quotes that will never be taken.
... quant funds and high frequency traders are so 1929 I don't even know where to begin.
So scam is close but spam might be a better word for this.
I also get a kick out of how periodically in this article they remind us that high frequency trading is good for the market and these people that don't do anything that act as middle men are actually good for the market because they up availability or "eliminate inefficiencies" (that's my favorite). And they're all taking money out of this magical unending bucket of cash
By no means a pleasant option but an interesting way to remove infection.
Do they have trucks in that area? Wouldn't that pose a minor issue?
I don't speak Chinese but from watching the video it appears that there is a warning signal when a truck is detected as approaching from behind or in front of the bus. In addition to this there are black and yellow poles that apparently act as truck detractors like the upside down U-shaped hoops in lawn croquet. The bus would fit over these perfectly but a truck in this same section of traffic would hit one of these before endangering the bus. It appears that this would designate which lanes are okay for trucks (however they then also pose a bit of a traffic obstacle where they come down in between lanes).
My bigger concern is turning and how the sections bend and twist between themselves (as seen at around 5:30 in the video). Is this on a rail or not? Because I could see that being potentially problematic and accident prone if drivers fail to yield to you. I'm interested that they're already planning on deploying this as I think there are things to iron out yet.
It is rare these days to see companies devote 10% of their budget to R&D. Most tend to just not bother with R&D because it doesn't give ROI this quarter, and when they do, they gain the technology by buying a startup, or just copying someone else's work and improving on it.
Isn't that an argument for patents, though? I mean, you're saying that R&D isn't profitable in the eyes of most companies and why is that? I mean, we complain about patents but then if you look at the amount of innovation going on in countries where intellectual property is not enforced it seems to be fractions of what goes on in countries that enforce IP law. I'm not arguing for this but your complaint that not enough companies dump 10% into R&D seems, in my mind, to be heavily linked to the lack of reward. I thought patents and licensing those patents were supposed to be that reward or recoup mechanism.
60 year old glass? Most enterprises can't even think past the next couple quarters or to the next FY, much less this far. Almost any other company would have long since chucked the manufacturing process for it because it wasn't immediately profitable.
Well, from the article, it sounds as though they had pretty much shelved it and "In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla." Again, if you think about it, a patent is good for only ~20 years? So maybe when they 'tweaked' it they did that so they also could repatent it? They have a lot of patents related to glass composition.
Can their competitors just fire up a plant right now and start making Chemcor? You bet. Gorilla is probably repatented though to protect them from that and that illustrates why you don't see a whole lot of companies taking the Corning path.
Well then maybe we shouldn't be doing it in the first place. Doy.
As long as bad people exist, you will always need to keep certain information secured. Whether you're a government or a citizen. How would you respond if Wikileaks put up your credit card information, bank account numbers, social security number and all your known residences and acquaintances?
I'm not implying that our current scenario is as cut and dried as World War II but how would you react if Wikileaks had been broadcasting over a magical radio station that blanketed the Earth the location of allied forces in 1942? Would you so callously respond that "maybe the Allies shouldn't be doing that in the first place?"
Yes, as an American, I am concerned about the people fighting for my country abroad. I'm not concerned one bit about the politicians and generals, it's the grunts and people out in the field that could suffer from this. And most of all the people helping those forces by giving them intelligence. War is not a cover-up. It has necessary secrets. It has since Roman times and it will continue to as long as humans exist. You know the names and locations of people informing American forces about where the Taliban are needs to be classified. At this point it's not even using this information against me sitting at home in comfort but about the people in Afghanistan and their safety.
The war, over there, has been over for years. Now, they are just working as cops.
Do you really feel that car bombs are just police work? Let me try to rephrase it for people that are living comfortably: if two car bombs went off in New York city and killed eight, would you just shrug that off as normal everyday police work?
Some of this stuff -- stuff that even happened today -- requires the intelligence collection and expertise of people trained to do more than "just work as cops." I would suggest you are selling our troops short in their ongoing work at preventing and disarming these kinds of attacks. I think we're all hoping that the Iraqi security forces meet or exceed the current work going on in a country that occasionally shows signs of instability and something more opposed to the US than everyday criminals as we know them.
You're kidding, right? It guarantees that the few remaining insurgent groups will prepare for the date, and then attack with whatever they have left.
That was the criticism in the article based on two car bombs and a drive-by killing eight in Iraq today -- the day of this announcement. I guess a better question should have been "will Iraqi security forces be able to contain the unavoidable violence following this withdrawal?"
That's why you *don't have a specific date* nor do you release your plans to the enemy.
Or perhaps you gamble and show the world that the situation is under control by releasing your "plans" of withdrawal showing that those now in charge are very capable hands. Otherwise what do you do? Sit there and then just magically disappear one day? And when that happens, you think you're not in the same scenario you just mentioned? No matter how you cut it, it's a delicate situation.
Or because the average user is running around the Internet looking for instant gratification and simply won't learn about security.
But what if that's changing?
We can bitch and moan about how worthless Facebook is but these privacy debacles seem to finally be waking people up to the real issues at stake. Thankfully to raise this issue it took just a few sensitive pictures of some fools to get out after they posted them to the world instead of a totally invasive all knowing nexus of everyone's everything. Seems like the past 20 or so years it's slowly been getting worse and worse on the internet. And now WSJ has this huge "expose" called What They Know with an intuitive display of what's affecting you without your knowledge. And that indicates that WSJ thinks people want to hear about this and that it will sell eyeballs. I say it's about damned time. I hope it doesn't stop here with Microsoft or even stop at browsers. It should continue from websites all the way back to The Patriot Act. Hopefully the spirit of privacy from government and corporations has merely been sleeping in Americans and not completely dead/relinquished. Unfortunately they say it's always much harder to win back liberties lost than to give them up.
When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads?
2007 and earlier.
I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason is they're afraid that it would be seen as an anti-competitive move against Google ...
Oh, it's very competitive. Whenever Microsoft arrives late to the game, you know they bring lots of money with them. Why has Bing Cashback stopped?
The problem with your post is that you can't imagine a company being both a "spooty ad company" and a company that actually makes actual products. You don't have to be one or the other.
when they have WGA/WPA?
The article is focusing on this:
The Journal's examination of the top 50 most popular U.S. websites showed that Microsoft placed third-party tracking devices on 27 of the top 46 sites that it doesn't itself own.
It's about tracking your movements/interests, harvesting that data and then using that data to advertise to you better ... which usually means handing it off to those advertisers to better target you. And they're not the only ones:
Many also have big stakes in online advertising. Microsoft bought aQuantive, a Web-ad firm, in 2007 for more than $6 billion, to build a business selling ads online. Google, already a giant in online marketing, in September 2008 launched a Web browser, Chrome, that gives it new insight into Internet users' habits. Apple has launched an ad network, iAds, for its iPhone and iPad. And Adobe last year paid $1.8 billion to buy Omniture, which measures the effectiveness of online ads.
WGA/WPA isn't going to get a hold of this kind of data. That's a sort of digital rights management for validating Windows, not tracking users with cookies and making bank off of it. They profit when they sell you Windows (with IE8) and they'll profit when you use IE8 on the internet.
Save money, save power, save bandwidth. I'm getting one!
Indeed, I made the statement that this reader would have to be under $100 for me to get one when I first saw the Kindle. And now we're down to $139 so it edges even closer.
When I first saw that it would have 3G, I went searching for videos on the surfing experience and was not impressed. Unless drastic improvements were made in how it renders and handles web pages, it looks like it would be tedious and almost unusable except for outlying circumstances.
Now, that doesn't mean some software or new mobilized content mentality couldn't change all of that but from what I've seen it looks to be little more than a novelty like the web browser I have on my Nintendo DS.
So, like you note, the purpose of 3G really boils down to selling books while you're sitting around -- which is nice but not a crucial need. I guess I could imagine using 3G to get books off of Gutenberg or some other open repository of open formatted books but again that wouldn't really be worth a 35% price increase.
Is anyone able to comment on what the browsing functionality actually does for them? Is there news that you actually digest in a productive fashion? Certain news sites that work flawlessly? Blog technologies (like Wordpress or something) that always work? And how is the 3G coverage and reliability? I have so many questions about these devices and can find so little on reviewing this web browser functionality on the Kindle.
Good job on price but I don't ever see the Kindle replacing my Asus Netbook with Ubuntu on it. Yeah, you're going to have a large price delta and I think there's a long way to go -- much longer than the 18 months or sooner that the article mentioned -- before these two consumer products converge. Battery life is just one thing. Price, general purpose computing abilities and the ability to install open source software are big factors for me (not sure about other folks).
I seem to recall a device that Microsoft had announced that acted as a sort of courier between the user and the internet by couriering data back and forth. You could even send courrier electronique ... sorry, what's the English for that? Ah, yes, e-mail. Say you worked for a package company and you had to act as a courier for packages, well then this device might have helped you. But I'll guess we'll never be able to gauge the couriering possibilities of said device.
I just wish I could remember what that hyped device that never saw the light of day was called. I think it was called "The Tablet That Couldn't Slow Down."
Ah, now those were the days when Microsoft's future was a bright and promising vista.
And yet you managed to get in so early too.
Yeah, turns out if you chuck $5 at Slashdot you can see the stories 30 minutes before they pop. Big secret nobody knows about because nobody subscribes except those of us who appreciate Slashdot.
And despite trying to hold my tongue on opinion and just refer the reader the NOAA, that post is already moderated as Troll. Slashdot has gotten to the point where you can't even refer to the people that devote their lives to the study of climatology across the world without being called a Troll. And the real awesome thing is that I see people who haven't even read the report in question being moderated up up up up. People who have never studied climatology are deriving their own reason to disbelieve what's in this report. If it's not one thing, it's another.
I don't think there is much doubt that global warming is real. The Earth has experienced both global warming and global cooling many times in its past.
Okay and from the expert:
'greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation' for 0.56C (1F) warming over the last 50 years.
Tell me, Mr. Arm Chair Expert I Referred to in My First Post, where in this 'long history of global warming and global cooling' did the average temperature rise 0.56C (1F) a degree in 50 years?
1. humans are causing it
Read the report. I'm not going to keep posting the same damned thing over and over. It's all over there with convincing evidence that man-made or "anthropogenic" changes are attributing to this in serious ways. No, it does not account for 100% of all the warming but certainly some of it.
2. we MUST do something DRASTIC AND IMMEDIATE to stop it
And where the hell did anyone propose that? Huh? You think energy star ratings are drastic? You think that putting a date 30 years out to curb our countries carbon emissions is drastic? Do you know what drastic means? Do you know what rationing is? Apparently not.
Here's the only place I'd like to get to: agreeing that 1) climate is warming to a point of unnatural irreversible damage and 2) man made factors are contributing to it. You don't even have to change anything right now. Just make your base agreements and then lets start voting on how much we should react to it and keep a measurable pace of results if possible.
This is why I hate commenting on this shit. It upsets me, it makes me swear and lash out at complete strangers who don't have the time to read the material they are commenting on.