We always talk about how Newton is the father of modern physics, and we describe planetary motion as derived from Kepler. However it is important that we not forget the man who paved the way for all these heliocentric concepts. Copernicus risked personal safety by advocating a heliocentric theory of the universe (he didn't grasp that perhaps Sol wasn't the center of everything). He broke us away from epicycles and complicated conceptual constructs to show us a simple and elegant model of planetary motion.
Science has come a long way since then, but this was the first true seed of modern physics.
So too can we look back on Apple's simple iPhone as the genesis of all future handheld devices. From the form-factor to the necessary features, the iPhone provided a framework upon which others can improve and expand.
Now with the iPad, Apple pushes the limits even more. However, like all true pioneers, they are left in the dust by prospectors in the ensuing goldrush. Apple will continue to go their own way, but the monied investors are looking for the next big thing. Luckily for Apple, the customers are looking for the next best thing.
You know, despite the seemingly ultranerdy reputation of Dungeons and Dragons, there are actually quite a few un-nerdy people who play it. Skipping past a slew of big names, I think one super-cool, hyper-athletic example is enough. Vin Diesel. This guy, who plays total badasses in his movies, is actually a laid back D&D player in his spare time.
How can you effectively attack a position without a comprehensive understanding of it? If you want to say piracy is not leading to a decline in sales, then you need real numbers to back it up. For all the vitriol we throw around here on/., there is a whole lot of anecdotal posturing, but not a whole lot of solid numbers. The same goes both ways, of course, and I'm ecstatic to see the GAO investigating these claims.
Let's lay myths to rest. The truth is where we must start from, not from our foundation of biases. As long as you think that D&D is just for loser nerds, you'll never be able to understand the game and its enthusiastic audience.
I've seen fire and I've seen rain. But the amount of work game programmers put in, and for such meager rewards in most cases, makes me raise a pint or 4 to them.
Publishing houses are the same as record companies. Suck promising little guys in, work them to death, and make tons of money off the talent. Ask Ziggy Gold Dust how much trickles down to the ones doing the grunt work. How many years of youth are lost to endless deathmarches?
Why is it surprising? The EU has been jumping down the throats of successful American businesses for years. After they got through with Microsoft, it only makes sense that they would shake down Google as their next target.
It also shows a fundamental problem with "cloud" business plans. As long as you are piggybacking on someone else's technology, from web services like S3, AppEngine, and Azure, all the way down to the physical cables, you're at their mercy. I'm surprised it took these European companies this long to force Google to pay up.
I played Starcraft for a while, and I was very impressed with how balanced the gameplay was and how thought out the interface was. Blizzard did a great job making that game.
But it really stifles the creativity of the player by restricting actions to a very specific set of pre-programmed actions. You *must* farm for Vespene gas. you *must* collect crystals. There is little room for true creativity and adventuring. Today's FPS games are actually getting better at allowing this kind of freedom.
But to really get the most out of a game, you have to use your imagination. There's nothing more challenging than interacting with your friends and working out puzzles with nothing more than paper, dice, and pewter figurines. Dungeons and Dragons (and other clones of it) is the ultimate game because it removes artificially created limits and depends completely on how much you are invested in it.
If people are cheating and rigging game competitions, it's only because there is something to rig. Try cheating in D&D and you'll find that you only cheat yourself.
But finally, I disagree with the implication that your "second type of Free Software" should be considered a threat to a competitive ecosystem. Firefox hasn't locked out competing browsers and OpenOffice hasn't locked out existing office suites. MySQL hasn't locked out all other databases. Other FOSS can compete, and they can even start by forking the existing project. If proprietary software is superior enough that people are still willing to pay for it, then people will buy it. FOSS isn't a threat. to anyone doing a good job. It's only a threat to companies who want to rest on their laurels and rely on vendor lock-in to make a profit.
I think you misunderstood my point. By entering what is essentially a competitive software product (VP8 codec) into the infrastructure, you lose all the benefits that competition provides. Competition among open source projects is a good thing (whether it be codecs, browsers, databases, or productivity suites).
Yes, there should be standards. But why should one particular technology (VP8 in this particular instance) be preferred over the multitude of other available options? This is where the market should decide which technology they like better. Take two competing plugin runtimes: Flash vs Java. Neither is part of any standard, but one became the de facto standard applet implementation technology on the web. If the standards committee decided at the outset that Java should be part of the web browsing technology standard, we'd never have seen something as good as Flash (YMMV) and Java itself would have stagnated.
There are two types of Free Software, and it has a direct analog in government vs private sector.
The first type is infrastructure. This is operating systems, compilers, networking protocol stacks, and other things that should be standardized. Sure, you could implement your own, but only at the risk of losing interoperability and compatibility with most other systems.
The second type of Free Software is everything else. Apps, tools, graphics subsystems, and the types of things that people should and do constantly dream up and implement. These things require competition to grow and innovate.
However the problem I see is that a video codec is not an infrastructure type of software. It is one among many competing software tools. By entering this On2 codec into the open like this, Google has essentially locked out any other competing codec since content creators will mostly only support the most widely available codec.
By introducing a codec as an infrastructure type software, we lose the crucial competition that improves the ecosystem for everyone.
So who is the book for?
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Building a PC from scratch? What FOSS is? How to use Ubuntu?
I'm sorry, this doesn't sound like a particularly good book for *anyone*
iPhone/iPad is great because Apple owns every aspect of it.
An Android "gPad" would suck because Google would have to give up some control to an OEM. The alternative is that they produce the HW themselves, but we saw what happens when they do that (Nexus One).
It's amusing that these guys are sometimes lumped in with actual programmers under the terribly wide "IT" catchall. I'd liken it to calling garbagemen "sanitation engineers", but that's probably a bit mean.
You gotta hand it to the CIA. When they attack something like Wikileaks, they really take the long view.
First, show how Wikileaks is somehow providing incorrect/incomplete/biased information. Now, set the founder up for more publicity, implicitly encouraging violence upon him.
It's a chilling effect on anyone who might be initially inclined to provide information to Wikileaks under their cover of anonymity.
Are you being argumentative just to be argumentative?
Here's what I said there is so little petty crime and violence there compared to the U.S.
Then you said But saying that there's little to no petty crime isn't being true, there's plenty of it. Of course, I never said anything of the sort.
Then you said Petty crime for the most part I agree, but I figure it has to do with the police not taking too kind a turn at people committing the crimes.
So you agree with me, but think what I said is false? The mental gymnastics required to hold such clearly conflicting opinions simultaneously must be difficult and take lifelong practice. Are you Japanese?
No, try explaining it to them without describing it as "retarded". See how many will say, "Yeah, that makes sense. Only paying users should have access."
If you explain it with a certain bias, you'll find them agreeing with you, whether they hold that opinion or not.
The Yakuza is part and parcel of that code. It isn't an aberration at all. It is a product of the same culture that brings you pedophilia dressed up cartoon outfits, hugely xenophobic attitudes towards other races, hivemind-like business practices, a deep insecurity of own culture, the equating of product defects with moral defects, institutionalized misogyny, and widespread depression among males.
It's a fucked up, oppressive culture that creates many terrible things, but at the same time many beautiful things. You can't separate the Yakuza from Japanese culture, just as you can't separate the geisha or sushi or cherry blossoms or Honda cars from it.
I remember when I was willing to shell out a few bucks a year for a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, our American business paper. And then Rupert Murdoch bought it and turned it into Pravda with better paper.
Now, I'm not saying that the Japanese Nikkei is any better (yes, I am), but you have to understand that in Japan there is a strict code of honor that everyone implicitly abides by. This is why there is so little petty crime and violence there compared to the U.S. It's also why people are willing to pay for music rather than download it. The penalty for disobedience and "going your own way" is social ostracization.
So it makes sense in the Japanese worldview to demand a virtual face-to-face meeting in order to link to information and stories. The linker is a supplicant who must throw himself at the feet of the information "daimyo". To do any less would shame both the supplicant and the lord.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's how it is over there. Over here, we're free to say stuff like "FIX YOUR FUCKING WEBSITE, YOU IDIOTS! IT'S BEEN BROKEN FOR HOURS!"
I don't mean to take anything away from the Japanese who are clearly leading in the robotics industry. Especially with technologies like this, humanoid robots like Asimo, and even those creepy robots that have the bad latex skin, these are all really impressive displays of Japan's prowess in this field. More importantly, the control mechanisms are being refined at both the software and hardware interconnects, so this isn't just "robotics", but rather the whole field covers a much broader scope than merely software or just hardware.
Why isn't the U.S. leading in this area? Why have we decided that we're happy enough building Facebook applications? It's sad to see that we aren't as focused on building real systems that will have an actual physical impact on our surroundings. We took Laertes' ridiculous admonition "to thine own self be true" and turned ourselves and our energies into the very worst of what we are as a nation. We have become exactly what the Japanese saw 20 years ago: a nation of lazy, overpaid workers. And, I hate to say it, we are paying the price for that with our jobs.
Millions of years ago, Africa was a continent teeming with life and different varieties of life. As the continents shifted and mountain ranges like the Himalayas rose to block crucial winds to Saharan Africa, the lucky species were able to get out and into Europe and Asia. The not so lucky ones dried up in the desert or learned to survive in the lean environment of the savanna. As European and Asian lifeforms grew more diverse, this giant continent became a sort of Lost World separated from the rest of the world by a large, and largely impassible, desert.
We like to talk about Drake's equation, but sometimes just looking at our planet reveals how unlikely intelligent life is, given how close we as a species came to never being.
Slashdot Mirror
What a bunch of rubes. If they didn't screw up so badly last century, they could take a nice long rest on some laurels like us Americans.
That's not necessarily true. Sharp's Netwalker is based on the Freescale i.MX51 which is ARM Cortex-A8 and Ubuntu.
It even has Flash(Lite).
Linux isn't tied to x86.
We always talk about how Newton is the father of modern physics, and we describe planetary motion as derived from Kepler. However it is important that we not forget the man who paved the way for all these heliocentric concepts. Copernicus risked personal safety by advocating a heliocentric theory of the universe (he didn't grasp that perhaps Sol wasn't the center of everything). He broke us away from epicycles and complicated conceptual constructs to show us a simple and elegant model of planetary motion.
Science has come a long way since then, but this was the first true seed of modern physics.
So too can we look back on Apple's simple iPhone as the genesis of all future handheld devices. From the form-factor to the necessary features, the iPhone provided a framework upon which others can improve and expand.
Now with the iPad, Apple pushes the limits even more. However, like all true pioneers, they are left in the dust by prospectors in the ensuing goldrush. Apple will continue to go their own way, but the monied investors are looking for the next big thing. Luckily for Apple, the customers are looking for the next best thing.
Even if it doesn't support Flash.
You know, despite the seemingly ultranerdy reputation of Dungeons and Dragons, there are actually quite a few un-nerdy people who play it. Skipping past a slew of big names, I think one super-cool, hyper-athletic example is enough. Vin Diesel. This guy, who plays total badasses in his movies, is actually a laid back D&D player in his spare time.
How can you effectively attack a position without a comprehensive understanding of it? If you want to say piracy is not leading to a decline in sales, then you need real numbers to back it up. For all the vitriol we throw around here on /., there is a whole lot of anecdotal posturing, but not a whole lot of solid numbers. The same goes both ways, of course, and I'm ecstatic to see the GAO investigating these claims.
Let's lay myths to rest. The truth is where we must start from, not from our foundation of biases. As long as you think that D&D is just for loser nerds, you'll never be able to understand the game and its enthusiastic audience.
This is the IBM PC Jr of SSDs.
I've seen fire and I've seen rain. But the amount of work game programmers put in, and for such meager rewards in most cases, makes me raise a pint or 4 to them.
Publishing houses are the same as record companies. Suck promising little guys in, work them to death, and make tons of money off the talent. Ask Ziggy Gold Dust how much trickles down to the ones doing the grunt work. How many years of youth are lost to endless deathmarches?
Here's to you, guys.
Why is it surprising? The EU has been jumping down the throats of successful American businesses for years. After they got through with Microsoft, it only makes sense that they would shake down Google as their next target.
It also shows a fundamental problem with "cloud" business plans. As long as you are piggybacking on someone else's technology, from web services like S3, AppEngine, and Azure, all the way down to the physical cables, you're at their mercy. I'm surprised it took these European companies this long to force Google to pay up.
I played Starcraft for a while, and I was very impressed with how balanced the gameplay was and how thought out the interface was. Blizzard did a great job making that game.
But it really stifles the creativity of the player by restricting actions to a very specific set of pre-programmed actions. You *must* farm for Vespene gas. you *must* collect crystals. There is little room for true creativity and adventuring. Today's FPS games are actually getting better at allowing this kind of freedom.
But to really get the most out of a game, you have to use your imagination. There's nothing more challenging than interacting with your friends and working out puzzles with nothing more than paper, dice, and pewter figurines. Dungeons and Dragons (and other clones of it) is the ultimate game because it removes artificially created limits and depends completely on how much you are invested in it.
If people are cheating and rigging game competitions, it's only because there is something to rig. Try cheating in D&D and you'll find that you only cheat yourself.
BadAnalogyGuy (aka Black Leaf)
But finally, I disagree with the implication that your "second type of Free Software" should be considered a threat to a competitive ecosystem. Firefox hasn't locked out competing browsers and OpenOffice hasn't locked out existing office suites. MySQL hasn't locked out all other databases. Other FOSS can compete, and they can even start by forking the existing project. If proprietary software is superior enough that people are still willing to pay for it, then people will buy it. FOSS isn't a threat. to anyone doing a good job. It's only a threat to companies who want to rest on their laurels and rely on vendor lock-in to make a profit.
I think you misunderstood my point. By entering what is essentially a competitive software product (VP8 codec) into the infrastructure, you lose all the benefits that competition provides. Competition among open source projects is a good thing (whether it be codecs, browsers, databases, or productivity suites).
Yes, there should be standards. But why should one particular technology (VP8 in this particular instance) be preferred over the multitude of other available options? This is where the market should decide which technology they like better. Take two competing plugin runtimes: Flash vs Java. Neither is part of any standard, but one became the de facto standard applet implementation technology on the web. If the standards committee decided at the outset that Java should be part of the web browsing technology standard, we'd never have seen something as good as Flash (YMMV) and Java itself would have stagnated.
There are two types of Free Software, and it has a direct analog in government vs private sector.
The first type is infrastructure. This is operating systems, compilers, networking protocol stacks, and other things that should be standardized. Sure, you could implement your own, but only at the risk of losing interoperability and compatibility with most other systems.
The second type of Free Software is everything else. Apps, tools, graphics subsystems, and the types of things that people should and do constantly dream up and implement. These things require competition to grow and innovate.
However the problem I see is that a video codec is not an infrastructure type of software. It is one among many competing software tools. By entering this On2 codec into the open like this, Google has essentially locked out any other competing codec since content creators will mostly only support the most widely available codec.
By introducing a codec as an infrastructure type software, we lose the crucial competition that improves the ecosystem for everyone.
Building a PC from scratch? What FOSS is? How to use Ubuntu?
I'm sorry, this doesn't sound like a particularly good book for *anyone*
iPhone/iPad is great because Apple owns every aspect of it.
An Android "gPad" would suck because Google would have to give up some control to an OEM. The alternative is that they produce the HW themselves, but we saw what happens when they do that (Nexus One).
It's amusing that these guys are sometimes lumped in with actual programmers under the terribly wide "IT" catchall. I'd liken it to calling garbagemen "sanitation engineers", but that's probably a bit mean.
You gotta hand it to the CIA. When they attack something like Wikileaks, they really take the long view.
First, show how Wikileaks is somehow providing incorrect/incomplete/biased information. Now, set the founder up for more publicity, implicitly encouraging violence upon him.
It's a chilling effect on anyone who might be initially inclined to provide information to Wikileaks under their cover of anonymity.
Why would Nokia waste time implementing a non-DRM scheme just for China? It seems like a problem that would have worked itself out on its own.
Are you being argumentative just to be argumentative?
Here's what I said
there is so little petty crime and violence there compared to the U.S.
Then you said
But saying that there's little to no petty crime isn't being true, there's plenty of it.
Of course, I never said anything of the sort.
Then you said
Petty crime for the most part I agree, but I figure it has to do with the police not taking too kind a turn at people committing the crimes.
So you agree with me, but think what I said is false? The mental gymnastics required to hold such clearly conflicting opinions simultaneously must be difficult and take lifelong practice. Are you Japanese?
No, try explaining it to them without describing it as "retarded". See how many will say, "Yeah, that makes sense. Only paying users should have access."
If you explain it with a certain bias, you'll find them agreeing with you, whether they hold that opinion or not.
The Yakuza is part and parcel of that code. It isn't an aberration at all. It is a product of the same culture that brings you pedophilia dressed up cartoon outfits, hugely xenophobic attitudes towards other races, hivemind-like business practices, a deep insecurity of own culture, the equating of product defects with moral defects, institutionalized misogyny, and widespread depression among males.
It's a fucked up, oppressive culture that creates many terrible things, but at the same time many beautiful things. You can't separate the Yakuza from Japanese culture, just as you can't separate the geisha or sushi or cherry blossoms or Honda cars from it.
I remember when I was willing to shell out a few bucks a year for a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, our American business paper. And then Rupert Murdoch bought it and turned it into Pravda with better paper.
Now, I'm not saying that the Japanese Nikkei is any better (yes, I am), but you have to understand that in Japan there is a strict code of honor that everyone implicitly abides by. This is why there is so little petty crime and violence there compared to the U.S. It's also why people are willing to pay for music rather than download it. The penalty for disobedience and "going your own way" is social ostracization.
So it makes sense in the Japanese worldview to demand a virtual face-to-face meeting in order to link to information and stories. The linker is a supplicant who must throw himself at the feet of the information "daimyo". To do any less would shame both the supplicant and the lord.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's how it is over there. Over here, we're free to say stuff like "FIX YOUR FUCKING WEBSITE, YOU IDIOTS! IT'S BEEN BROKEN FOR HOURS!"
I don't mean to take anything away from the Japanese who are clearly leading in the robotics industry. Especially with technologies like this, humanoid robots like Asimo, and even those creepy robots that have the bad latex skin, these are all really impressive displays of Japan's prowess in this field. More importantly, the control mechanisms are being refined at both the software and hardware interconnects, so this isn't just "robotics", but rather the whole field covers a much broader scope than merely software or just hardware.
Why isn't the U.S. leading in this area? Why have we decided that we're happy enough building Facebook applications? It's sad to see that we aren't as focused on building real systems that will have an actual physical impact on our surroundings. We took Laertes' ridiculous admonition "to thine own self be true" and turned ourselves and our energies into the very worst of what we are as a nation. We have become exactly what the Japanese saw 20 years ago: a nation of lazy, overpaid workers. And, I hate to say it, we are paying the price for that with our jobs.
What are you checking up on google? And would making a decision based on any of that information make you liable to a lawsuit?
Perhaps there's a reason you're not the boss...
Step 1: Create an Ask Slashdot looking for (ironically) *good* programmers
Step 2: Identify all self-identified good programmers
Done!
You really don't need anything more than compressed files with timestamps.
Anything more than that is overkill, especially if you're trying to get ISO9001.
The preferred term is size-challenged planets.
Millions of years ago, Africa was a continent teeming with life and different varieties of life. As the continents shifted and mountain ranges like the Himalayas rose to block crucial winds to Saharan Africa, the lucky species were able to get out and into Europe and Asia. The not so lucky ones dried up in the desert or learned to survive in the lean environment of the savanna. As European and Asian lifeforms grew more diverse, this giant continent became a sort of Lost World separated from the rest of the world by a large, and largely impassible, desert.
We like to talk about Drake's equation, but sometimes just looking at our planet reveals how unlikely intelligent life is, given how close we as a species came to never being.