The file contains only unique wifi spots seen over time period, each once.
It sounds like this is the data it uses for location-based apps between the time it takes to switch on the GPS radio and get a lock on enough satellites for a real location. Not many people realise this, but unless you are constantly monitoring the satellites, it can take a significant amount of time to get a location via GPS alone. So vendors like Apple fake it by getting a "good enough" location via more immediate means (e.g. remembering where Wi-Fi base stations are) and then give the app an update when it gets a real GPS signal. The alternatives are to keep the GPS radio on at all times (drains battery) or let the user wait (can take 30 seconds before you get a location).
No, OS X is almost entirely standardised in this respect. To get to application preferences, you go to the application menu or hit cmd-comma. Pretty much the only applications where this doesn't work are full-screen games and apps mainly targeted at other OSs ported by people who don't care about platform conventions.
I'm sorry, as much as I loathe Microsoft, what you are saying is nonsense. Newer operating systems offer greater functionality. It's entirely possible for an application - browser or otherwise - to require features that older operating systems don't have without nefarious "interaction".
Just recently, I've stopped supporting iOS 3 because iOS 4 offers features that cut down development time significantly. My applications are sandboxed away from the operating system just like any other, much more separate than any typical application running on a desktop machine. There's nothing sinister about it, it's simply more cost-effective that way.
The material I've linked to doesn't automatically link back.
Actually, the web as it stands already includes this functionality. Trackback, Pingback and referrer sniffing have all been used to provide this functionality for years, not to mention features provided by browser extensions to show relevant content.
This makes sense: All the leveldesigners, modelers, texture- and concept artists; They all work on Steam...
Don't forget the programmers themselves. I'm sure Valve thought it made complete sense to take the developers working on a 3D game engine and put them to work on an Adobe AIR container for a lobotomised web browser. It's practically the same thing, right?
If making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet, that means that the demand for tablets is being driven by Apple rather than a need for tablets.
No, making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet because the competitor is a great tablet. That doesn't mean the demand is being driven by Apple, it just means Apple are outperforming everybody else.
if the need was real, then similar products should be also be popular
There aren't any similar products. The hardware might be similar, but the value to the users isn't. The users don't buy the iPad for the hardware, they buy it to use apps on it, and no competing tablet has anything even remotely close to matching what's available on the App Store.
I do see a lot of potential for their use in niche areas
I see the opposite. I see a huge amount of interest from people who wouldn't ordinarily be interested in computers. Friends who've only ever used a computer at work are buying them. Clients who hate computers are using them to give presentations. Salesmen who work out of printed books are switching to apps running on the iPad. The iPad is the computer equivalent of the Wii - Apple aren't just going after the existing demographic of computer users, they are expanding the market to include everybody else.
That's not an alternative in this case. The NYT has recently put up a paywall so that only paying members can read articles. They aren't entirely stupid, they realise this will make people stop linking to them, so they've added exceptions to make sharing articles more likely.
One of these exceptions is for Twitter - if somebody links to the article from their Twitter account, you don't have to pay to read the article. Cue a Twitter account that posts links to all of their articles, thus subverting the paywall.
How is identi.ca an alternative? The NYT hasn't made an exception for identi.ca, they've made an exception for Twitter. If the exact same service was running on identi.ca, it wouldn't have the same effect as it does running on Twitter.
Under the system, state and local police officers also will eventually use hand-held devices to scan suspects' fingerprints and send the images electronically to the FBI center. 'It's a quick scan to let police officers know if they should let the person go, or take him into custody,' Morris said. In later stages, NGI system also will be expanded to include the analysis of palm prints, handwriting, faces, human irises and voices
This project does nothing of the sort. They've successfully convinced the FBI that they can build something of that description. Headline should read "Salesman successfully convinces FBI to buy expensive, unproven system off the back of some big promises".
iTunes U is not subject to the App Store rules. Apple have said that if you want to criticise a religion, don't submit to the App Store, but submit to one of their other stores, such as the iBookstore. They have different rules regarding each of their stores.
It received a '4' rating from Apple, which indicates the company considered the app to contain 'no objectionable material.'
Apple don't rate the apps in the App Store in this way. The developers themselves rate the app when they submit it. All Apple do is approve it or reject it. Sometimes they accept things they shouldn't. Either the reviewer clicks the wrong button, they make a decision that doesn't reflect company policy, whatever. It happens. Another example is the "baby shaker" app. It was mistakenly approved, then yanked as soon as it was called to their attention.
This, claims testing firm Blaze.io, is news to the world.
No, it's not news to the world, it's news to Blaze.io. It was already widely reported that UIWebView didn't support the latest Safari speed boost days before their study was published.
Nobody said that. You are arguing against a straw man, not me.
Emoticons are displayed in very predictable ways
They really aren't. For instance, some badly-written software, to put smileys into a message, switches to the Wingdings font, which has a smiley face at (if memory serves) the codepoint reserved for the letter P, then puts the letter 'P' into the text and switches back to the original font. End result for people with that font installed = smiley. End result for people without that font installed = the letter P. I've seen flamewars kick off due to this because it totally changed the tone of what somebody was saying.
The rest of the evidence was more than enough to compensate for that trivial error.
Please go back and read my comment again, you obviously didn't do it properly the first time. You seem to be under the impression that I think this is not a trivial, inconsequential error, and you are arguing otherwise. We agree on this point. I do think this is a trivial, inconsequential error. My point is that it's the jury's responsibility to decide that, and the jury's opinion of this that matters in the eyes of justice. Your opinion on whether this is an important difference doesn't matter. Mine doesn't matter. The judge's doesn't matter. It was the jury's responsibility to make that decision and it was taken out of their hands by somebody who tampered with the evidence.
it was probably a printed transcript, which can't be animated.
There's no reason why they can't show animations to the jury. If the reason was that it was printed, then it was a mistake to print it instead of showing it on a screen.
Are you also saying that photographs should be inadmissible, since they aren't animated? Not to mention that they're 2D and only contain a limited frame.
I'm not complaining that they weren't animated because I value animation. I'm complaining that the jury were misled. Everybody understands that photographs don't tell the whole story. Not everybody understands that a printed transcript may not accurately replicate what the guy was reading.
Look at it this way: if he'd sent an animated GIF to somebody he knew was epileptic to intentionally cause a seizure, would you be okay with the jury being shown a print out of the first frame of the GIF showing a smiley face and the jury being told "hey, he just sent a picture of a smiley face"?
Yes, this guy is probably guilty and belongs behind bars. No, it probably wouldn't make a difference to show animated emoticons. But that's not the point. The point is that he was convicted by a jury of his peers when that jury was shown evidence that differed from what was actually the case. In essence, the evidence was tampered with. It shouldn't be up to a judge to decide if that is a material difference, it should be up to the jury to decide. They were deprived of that choice, and all judgements that followed from that point on should be considered null and void.
Yeah, it will cost the taxpayer money to have a retrial. But that money is worth it to ensure the integrity of the justice system. If you care so much, take it out of the salary of the person that fucked up the evidence.
On a side note, I think it's pretty despicable that this was filed under "idle", as if we are supposed to point and laugh at the stupid defence. This goes right to the heart of how we are supposed to enact justice, it's not a laughing matter. I'd rather the guy went free than we jailed him on the basis of faulty evidence. The moment we decide it's okay to skip due process when we're "sure" of guilt, we give up the foundation of modern justice and undo centuries of civilisation.
Maybe they just don't consider things like that to be "highly personal". By default, most of that information is available by doing such mundane things as registering a domain name. I don't consider contact information to be "highly personal". Somebody younger than me who grew up with social networking is even less likely to.
Why hang on to all of the old vestiges of traditional time to complicate matters? Scrap time zones. Everybody in the world is on the same clock. Decimal time. Why should we divide 356/24/60/60? Keeping the concept of day makes sense for biological reasons, as humans pretty much need to sleep once per day.
Not just games, lots of apps can make use of that. It's pretty easy to write multithreaded apps with iOS using NSOperationQueue. I'm developing an app at the moment that uses it to asynchronously generate thumbnails for a fair number of documents at once. That'll go twice as quickly on the iPad 2 without me having to change a single line of code or recompile.
No it isn't. A trademark is not ownership of a word. It is a tool to allow the public to know that they are getting the genuine thing when they buy something. Referring to somebody else's trademarked goods is fine. Representing your own goods with somebody else's trademark is not. These buttons merely referred to Tolkein, they did not give the impression that they were one of his works.
If merely referring to a trademarked good was infringement, your comment would be infringing Zazzle's trademark.
Good luck supporting a family on the wages of a job without such restriction.
I have a "day job" of around 24 hours a week that pays me a comfortable wage, more than enough to support a family. They are fine with me freelancing in my spare time. I don't know where you got the idea that control freak companies are the only ones who pay a decent wage, but in my experience, the exact opposite is true. The companies that are more pleasant to work for generally pay more too, because happy developers are productive, profitable developers.
In order to compete with firms based in India, firms based in the United States are going to have to cut costs somewhere.
Only the firms that put out shitty work have to do that. It's not hard to compete with firms based in India on quality, in fact, it's quite profitable (if tedious) to make a nice chunk of money out of fixing things for people who thought it would be a good idea to outsource to India. If all you've got going for you is low cost, then yeah, you're in trouble, but then again, you always were.
I think the idea that they are aiming towards businesses is quite relevant. iOS took off in a big way as a platform precisely because anybody could develop for it. Some of the biggest successes on the App Store are from lone developers or just a couple of people collaborating. You might very well get rid of the shit by raising the bar... but unfortunately you'll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Note that you can get started developing for iOS at no cost with a single download.
I don't think that's an entirely fair comparison... in order to get started developing for the Playbook, you need VMWare, in order to get started developing for iOS, you need a Mac. The latter is quite a bit more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
They dropped support in the last version, released a year ago.
It sounds like this is the data it uses for location-based apps between the time it takes to switch on the GPS radio and get a lock on enough satellites for a real location. Not many people realise this, but unless you are constantly monitoring the satellites, it can take a significant amount of time to get a location via GPS alone. So vendors like Apple fake it by getting a "good enough" location via more immediate means (e.g. remembering where Wi-Fi base stations are) and then give the app an update when it gets a real GPS signal. The alternatives are to keep the GPS radio on at all times (drains battery) or let the user wait (can take 30 seconds before you get a location).
No, OS X is almost entirely standardised in this respect. To get to application preferences, you go to the application menu or hit cmd-comma. Pretty much the only applications where this doesn't work are full-screen games and apps mainly targeted at other OSs ported by people who don't care about platform conventions.
I'm sorry, as much as I loathe Microsoft, what you are saying is nonsense. Newer operating systems offer greater functionality. It's entirely possible for an application - browser or otherwise - to require features that older operating systems don't have without nefarious "interaction".
Just recently, I've stopped supporting iOS 3 because iOS 4 offers features that cut down development time significantly. My applications are sandboxed away from the operating system just like any other, much more separate than any typical application running on a desktop machine. There's nothing sinister about it, it's simply more cost-effective that way.
Actually, the web as it stands already includes this functionality. Trackback, Pingback and referrer sniffing have all been used to provide this functionality for years, not to mention features provided by browser extensions to show relevant content.
Don't forget the programmers themselves. I'm sure Valve thought it made complete sense to take the developers working on a 3D game engine and put them to work on an Adobe AIR container for a lobotomised web browser. It's practically the same thing, right?
No, making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet because the competitor is a great tablet. That doesn't mean the demand is being driven by Apple, it just means Apple are outperforming everybody else.
There aren't any similar products. The hardware might be similar, but the value to the users isn't. The users don't buy the iPad for the hardware, they buy it to use apps on it, and no competing tablet has anything even remotely close to matching what's available on the App Store.
I see the opposite. I see a huge amount of interest from people who wouldn't ordinarily be interested in computers. Friends who've only ever used a computer at work are buying them. Clients who hate computers are using them to give presentations. Salesmen who work out of printed books are switching to apps running on the iPad. The iPad is the computer equivalent of the Wii - Apple aren't just going after the existing demographic of computer users, they are expanding the market to include everybody else.
Really? I've been using Android phones for a few years now and have yet to find one I'm happy with. My requirements:
I have a Desire Z at the moment, and it's a miserable piece of shit. Suggestions for a replacement are much appreciated.
That's not an alternative in this case. The NYT has recently put up a paywall so that only paying members can read articles. They aren't entirely stupid, they realise this will make people stop linking to them, so they've added exceptions to make sharing articles more likely.
One of these exceptions is for Twitter - if somebody links to the article from their Twitter account, you don't have to pay to read the article. Cue a Twitter account that posts links to all of their articles, thus subverting the paywall.
How is identi.ca an alternative? The NYT hasn't made an exception for identi.ca, they've made an exception for Twitter. If the exact same service was running on identi.ca, it wouldn't have the same effect as it does running on Twitter.
This project does nothing of the sort. They've successfully convinced the FBI that they can build something of that description. Headline should read "Salesman successfully convinces FBI to buy expensive, unproven system off the back of some big promises".
iTunes U is not subject to the App Store rules. Apple have said that if you want to criticise a religion, don't submit to the App Store, but submit to one of their other stores, such as the iBookstore. They have different rules regarding each of their stores.
Apple don't rate the apps in the App Store in this way. The developers themselves rate the app when they submit it. All Apple do is approve it or reject it. Sometimes they accept things they shouldn't. Either the reviewer clicks the wrong button, they make a decision that doesn't reflect company policy, whatever. It happens. Another example is the "baby shaker" app. It was mistakenly approved, then yanked as soon as it was called to their attention.
No, it's not news to the world, it's news to Blaze.io. It was already widely reported that UIWebView didn't support the latest Safari speed boost days before their study was published.
Nobody said that. You are arguing against a straw man, not me.
They really aren't. For instance, some badly-written software, to put smileys into a message, switches to the Wingdings font, which has a smiley face at (if memory serves) the codepoint reserved for the letter P, then puts the letter 'P' into the text and switches back to the original font. End result for people with that font installed = smiley. End result for people without that font installed = the letter P. I've seen flamewars kick off due to this because it totally changed the tone of what somebody was saying.
Please go back and read my comment again, you obviously didn't do it properly the first time. You seem to be under the impression that I think this is not a trivial, inconsequential error, and you are arguing otherwise. We agree on this point. I do think this is a trivial, inconsequential error. My point is that it's the jury's responsibility to decide that, and the jury's opinion of this that matters in the eyes of justice. Your opinion on whether this is an important difference doesn't matter. Mine doesn't matter. The judge's doesn't matter. It was the jury's responsibility to make that decision and it was taken out of their hands by somebody who tampered with the evidence.
There's no reason why they can't show animations to the jury. If the reason was that it was printed, then it was a mistake to print it instead of showing it on a screen.
I'm not complaining that they weren't animated because I value animation. I'm complaining that the jury were misled. Everybody understands that photographs don't tell the whole story. Not everybody understands that a printed transcript may not accurately replicate what the guy was reading.
Look at it this way: if he'd sent an animated GIF to somebody he knew was epileptic to intentionally cause a seizure, would you be okay with the jury being shown a print out of the first frame of the GIF showing a smiley face and the jury being told "hey, he just sent a picture of a smiley face"?
Yes, this guy is probably guilty and belongs behind bars. No, it probably wouldn't make a difference to show animated emoticons. But that's not the point. The point is that he was convicted by a jury of his peers when that jury was shown evidence that differed from what was actually the case. In essence, the evidence was tampered with. It shouldn't be up to a judge to decide if that is a material difference, it should be up to the jury to decide. They were deprived of that choice, and all judgements that followed from that point on should be considered null and void.
Yeah, it will cost the taxpayer money to have a retrial. But that money is worth it to ensure the integrity of the justice system. If you care so much, take it out of the salary of the person that fucked up the evidence.
On a side note, I think it's pretty despicable that this was filed under "idle", as if we are supposed to point and laugh at the stupid defence. This goes right to the heart of how we are supposed to enact justice, it's not a laughing matter. I'd rather the guy went free than we jailed him on the basis of faulty evidence. The moment we decide it's okay to skip due process when we're "sure" of guilt, we give up the foundation of modern justice and undo centuries of civilisation.
Maybe they just don't consider things like that to be "highly personal". By default, most of that information is available by doing such mundane things as registering a domain name. I don't consider contact information to be "highly personal". Somebody younger than me who grew up with social networking is even less likely to.
I thought it was really obnoxious to have the headline refer to it as the "Nobel Prize" instead of by its real name.
Why hang on to all of the old vestiges of traditional time to complicate matters? Scrap time zones. Everybody in the world is on the same clock. Decimal time. Why should we divide 356/24/60/60? Keeping the concept of day makes sense for biological reasons, as humans pretty much need to sleep once per day.
Not just games, lots of apps can make use of that. It's pretty easy to write multithreaded apps with iOS using NSOperationQueue. I'm developing an app at the moment that uses it to asynchronously generate thumbnails for a fair number of documents at once. That'll go twice as quickly on the iPad 2 without me having to change a single line of code or recompile.
No it isn't. A trademark is not ownership of a word. It is a tool to allow the public to know that they are getting the genuine thing when they buy something. Referring to somebody else's trademarked goods is fine. Representing your own goods with somebody else's trademark is not. These buttons merely referred to Tolkein, they did not give the impression that they were one of his works.
If merely referring to a trademarked good was infringement, your comment would be infringing Zazzle's trademark.
I have a "day job" of around 24 hours a week that pays me a comfortable wage, more than enough to support a family. They are fine with me freelancing in my spare time. I don't know where you got the idea that control freak companies are the only ones who pay a decent wage, but in my experience, the exact opposite is true. The companies that are more pleasant to work for generally pay more too, because happy developers are productive, profitable developers.
Only the firms that put out shitty work have to do that. It's not hard to compete with firms based in India on quality, in fact, it's quite profitable (if tedious) to make a nice chunk of money out of fixing things for people who thought it would be a good idea to outsource to India. If all you've got going for you is low cost, then yeah, you're in trouble, but then again, you always were.
I think the idea that they are aiming towards businesses is quite relevant. iOS took off in a big way as a platform precisely because anybody could develop for it. Some of the biggest successes on the App Store are from lone developers or just a couple of people collaborating. You might very well get rid of the shit by raising the bar... but unfortunately you'll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't think that's an entirely fair comparison... in order to get started developing for the Playbook, you need VMWare, in order to get started developing for iOS, you need a Mac. The latter is quite a bit more expensive.