Absolutely nothing. But it's just a rusty chip in my car - it can only do what it was designed to do. Would you consider a single logic gate a computer? What about a (non-programmable) calculator?
You differentiate on whether or not it does something more than entertainment. But entertainment is subjective. Furthermore, the concept of being entertaining is entirely unrelated to whether or not it is a computer - a calculator is neither entertaining nor a computer. Similarly, a PC built and used solely for gaming, or one of the WOW servers, is both entertaining and a computer.
Here's the definition from the Oxford dictionary:
an electronic device which is capable of receiving information (data) in a particular form and of performing a sequence of operations in accordance with a predetermined but variable set of procedural instructions (program) to produce a result in the form of information or signals. (emphasis added)
If you can't program it, then it's not a computer. Most smart phones are closed computers - they could let you compile and run your own code, but the OS won't let you.
I prefer the following definition: a computer is anything you can compile and run your own code on. The relevant questions are whether the OS allows you to, and how much difficulty is involved in replacing it.
Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.
Agreed. Whoever thought that unlocking the screen by dragging the screen up could make sense in any way on a desktop was retarded.
My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.
This is less a praise of Win8 and more one of modern mobile phone technology. Tegra 2 chipsets (which will be obsolete soon) easily meet the minimum requirements for WinXP (apart from having the wrong architecture). Tegra 3 chipsets easily meet those of Win7/Win8. The real comparison will be how it performs compared to Android and more mainstream Linux distros.
Those games are well known specifically because they're outliers. The majority of games can't sustain that level of entertainment. This would result in a substantial decrease in the number of games available in the app store. Because the app store's revenue is a proportion of the total value (qty*cost) of apps sold, a decrease in the number of games available would reduce their revenue. Furthermore, the decrease in revenue would result in an increase in the market fees, increasing the cost of the apps.
Additionally, if only high quality apps were available, the cost of the apps would be higher. Angry Birds sells for $1 because most of the apps sell at $1. The price most people are willing to pay is determined by the expected (average) value of an app. If you increase the average value of all apps, then the cost will also increase.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be the way you're saying - raising the overall quality of the app store would benefit the entire platform. I'm just saying that the reduction in purchases/revenue (caused by the increase in cost) wouldn't justify it, from Apple/Google's perspective.
But a real refund policy, such as a 30-day policy, would do the job. Anybody who actually pays attention to their bank account probably looks at it at least once per month.
The problem is that a $1 app isn't going to give you even a week's worth of entertainment. The refund period has to be less than the period for which the app is useful/entertaining. A month refund period only makes sense for purchases a few orders of magnitude higher than that. Otherwise, you need a decent method of distinguishing between people who have been hacked/scammed and people who just got bored with the app. Even if the app were to phone home on installation with a device specific ID, it would be too easy for that ID to be modified on a rooted device.
However, this smacks of forcing every reader to endure some non-author bozo's music selections. It has nothing to do with the book.
A poor selection in music will presumably negatively impact the sales. This is where capitalism should kick in, as another poster recognizes. Besides, it's not like Android lacks a volume/mute control if you don't like the music. And there's always the original PDF.
The idea is fairly innovative - I find it odd that so many slashdotters are so quick to criticise it. Even if a bad idea, surely the innovation itself is worth acknowledging.
I like the idea. A combination of music (via headphones) and books would make the experience more immersive - with just books you can still hear ambient noise. I agree that the only person who has the right to choose the soundtrack is the author, but they won't even have that choice without the platform. Also, it's the author's (or publisher's) choice whether to let them do that or not - an ebook with a soundtrack is quite clearly a derivative work, so if only the right to redistribute was granted, it's infringing.
There are Nvidia Tegra 2s being sold clocked at 1.2 GHz (dual core) right now. The Tegra 3 line will be quad core 1.5 GHz with 1.5 GB RAM. With Win8 supporting ARM, I can easily see ARM netbooks/laptops becoming commonplace within the next few years.
I do something similar. I'm pretty sure it's because I never officially, learned to touch type - I just keep my fingers in the home position and let them wander over the keyboard as necessary, using whatever fingers are closest to the relevant key.
In other words, Android not sucking reduces the pressure for tablet-specific optimization. Of course tablet-specific apps will make better use of the screen size, but we're talking about the apps already available. Even WebOS does well if we consider the apps written specifically for it, but those apps won't get written unless there are enough usable apps to begin with to drive demand.
Besides, not all apps benefit to a significant extent from tablet-specific optimization. Simple apps that exist to perform a single function (e.g. BTEP, or SSHDroid) work perfectly fine scaled - it's hard to see what a tablet specific optimization could add to those.
As you said, the utility of a tablet is dependant on the apps. But it's worth noting that in terms of apps, Android is better positioned than iOS. Both have apps designed for touch interfaces, but Android's were designed to handle different resolutions. I have an Android tablet*, and you don't even notice that the app was written for a phone-sized display, unlike the iPad's bitmap scaling.
At the moment, every non-apple brand of tablet is a compromise
Why? This based on the presumption that the iPad is intrinsically better, but you haven't explained why beyond referring to apps.
* The problem with both Android and iOS is the app/process management is not a good fit for a device closer to a laptop than a phone. Apps arbitrarily lose their state depending on whether more memory was needed, and there's no difference between minimizing and closing a program - the user has less control. Something like Maemo/Meego or Gnome 3 is a far better fit - each running instance corresponds to a window, with a limit on the no. of windows you can open. When these operating systems were first created they were faced with hardware constraints, but given that by the end of the year we'll be seeing ARM chipsets with quad-core CPUs and 1.5 GB RAM, I'd say some change is in order...
Agreed, but the best thing about KDE is how flexible it is while still providing extremely usable defaults. Also, the selection/click metaphor works great on tablets.
I haven't read the article, but I'm pretty sure the 5 minutes only refers to how long it will take the data to be be sent, not received. Latency on interplanetary communications is a bitch.
Average distance between Earth and Mars: 230 * 10^6 km (from Wikipedia) 230 * 10^6 km / c = 12.78 minutes (via Google)
I can see the value of a touch screen oriented interface. I'm running Ubuntu on an Asus Transformer, which has a touch screen* (and the keyboard disconnects, effectively turning it into a tablet). But I'm using KDE over Gnome 3. Gnome 3 looks like it may have potential, but only as a tablet OS. For anything else, Gnome 2 / KDE are better choices. Maybe in a year or two I might revisit it, but for now it's far too unstable.
*Actually, since I'm yet to get the touchpad working (the kernel is a work in progress), the touch screen is the only interface apart from the keyboard.
Except that all the authoritative versions of cases can only be accessed through the publishers of the big law reports. Since each publisher has a monopoly on a subset of cases (e.g. Thomson Reuters publishes the Commonwealth Law Reports, the authoritative source for Australian High Court judgments), the subscription fees are fairly large.
What can you tell us about the trading algorithms? I understand that it's mostly trade secrets, but if you could even say what broad area it's in, I'd appreciate it.
The French TGV is also pretty impressive. Despite holding the world record for the highest speed derailment, there hasn't been a single fatality when operating on high speed lines.
Agreed. The use of emoticons and affection strikes me as obvious - anyone who was serious about projecting a false identity would type with a different personality.
It seems to me that using nonymity to suppress the trolls implies the classic argument that, "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide." Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting to conceal your identity, such as having an unpopular political opinion / religion / sexuality. G+ attempts to acknowledge this through their concept of circles, but the fact that the same name is tied to all of them does make it exceptionally easy to join the dots. It's not inconceivable that someone could create a fake account (with a real-sounding name) and use it to join those groups, for the purpose of identifying it's members. (I haven't actually used G+, so I could be a little off about the details. My point is that using the same identity in circles is a risk, even when there is partitioning between them.)
A superior alternative would be to use a measure of reputation, which could be equivalent to how many friends a person has, or a subset of that - the no. of friends who have approved them (approval should be anonymous to avoid social pressures).
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely nothing. But it's just a rusty chip in my car - it can only do what it was designed to do. Would you consider a single logic gate a computer? What about a (non-programmable) calculator?
You differentiate on whether or not it does something more than entertainment. But entertainment is subjective. Furthermore, the concept of being entertaining is entirely unrelated to whether or not it is a computer - a calculator is neither entertaining nor a computer. Similarly, a PC built and used solely for gaming, or one of the WOW servers, is both entertaining and a computer.
Here's the definition from the Oxford dictionary:
an electronic device which is capable of receiving information (data) in a particular form and of performing a sequence of operations in accordance with a predetermined but variable set of procedural instructions (program) to produce a result in the form of information or signals.
(emphasis added)
If you can't program it, then it's not a computer. Most smart phones are closed computers - they could let you compile and run your own code, but the OS won't let you.
I prefer the following definition: a computer is anything you can compile and run your own code on. The relevant questions are whether the OS allows you to, and how much difficulty is involved in replacing it.
Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.
Agreed. Whoever thought that unlocking the screen by dragging the screen up could make sense in any way on a desktop was retarded.
My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.
This is less a praise of Win8 and more one of modern mobile phone technology. Tegra 2 chipsets (which will be obsolete soon) easily meet the minimum requirements for WinXP (apart from having the wrong architecture). Tegra 3 chipsets easily meet those of Win7/Win8. The real comparison will be how it performs compared to Android and more mainstream Linux distros.
Citation needed. Also a copy of the bot.
Those games are well known specifically because they're outliers. The majority of games can't sustain that level of entertainment. This would result in a substantial decrease in the number of games available in the app store. Because the app store's revenue is a proportion of the total value (qty*cost) of apps sold, a decrease in the number of games available would reduce their revenue. Furthermore, the decrease in revenue would result in an increase in the market fees, increasing the cost of the apps.
Additionally, if only high quality apps were available, the cost of the apps would be higher. Angry Birds sells for $1 because most of the apps sell at $1. The price most people are willing to pay is determined by the expected (average) value of an app. If you increase the average value of all apps, then the cost will also increase.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be the way you're saying - raising the overall quality of the app store would benefit the entire platform. I'm just saying that the reduction in purchases/revenue (caused by the increase in cost) wouldn't justify it, from Apple/Google's perspective.
But a real refund policy, such as a 30-day policy, would do the job. Anybody who actually pays attention to their bank account probably looks at it at least once per month.
The problem is that a $1 app isn't going to give you even a week's worth of entertainment. The refund period has to be less than the period for which the app is useful/entertaining. A month refund period only makes sense for purchases a few orders of magnitude higher than that. Otherwise, you need a decent method of distinguishing between people who have been hacked/scammed and people who just got bored with the app. Even if the app were to phone home on installation with a device specific ID, it would be too easy for that ID to be modified on a rooted device.
However, this smacks of forcing every reader to endure some non-author bozo's music selections. It has nothing to do with the book.
A poor selection in music will presumably negatively impact the sales. This is where capitalism should kick in, as another poster recognizes.
Besides, it's not like Android lacks a volume/mute control if you don't like the music. And there's always the original PDF.
The idea is fairly innovative - I find it odd that so many slashdotters are so quick to criticise it. Even if a bad idea, surely the innovation itself is worth acknowledging.
I do actually. Now that we're done making unfounded assertions, care to provide some reasoning?
I like the idea. A combination of music (via headphones) and books would make the experience more immersive - with just books you can still hear ambient noise.
I agree that the only person who has the right to choose the soundtrack is the author, but they won't even have that choice without the platform. Also, it's the author's (or publisher's) choice whether to let them do that or not - an ebook with a soundtrack is quite clearly a derivative work, so if only the right to redistribute was granted, it's infringing.
There are Nvidia Tegra 2s being sold clocked at 1.2 GHz (dual core) right now. The Tegra 3 line will be quad core 1.5 GHz with 1.5 GB RAM. With Win8 supporting ARM, I can easily see ARM netbooks/laptops becoming commonplace within the next few years.
I do something similar. I'm pretty sure it's because I never officially, learned to touch type - I just keep my fingers in the home position and let them wander over the keyboard as necessary, using whatever fingers are closest to the relevant key.
In other words, Android not sucking reduces the pressure for tablet-specific optimization. Of course tablet-specific apps will make better use of the screen size, but we're talking about the apps already available. Even WebOS does well if we consider the apps written specifically for it, but those apps won't get written unless there are enough usable apps to begin with to drive demand.
Besides, not all apps benefit to a significant extent from tablet-specific optimization. Simple apps that exist to perform a single function (e.g. BTEP, or SSHDroid) work perfectly fine scaled - it's hard to see what a tablet specific optimization could add to those.
If even 10% of the population encrypted everything, the government wouldn't have enough wrenches or people to use the wrenches.
As you said, the utility of a tablet is dependant on the apps. But it's worth noting that in terms of apps, Android is better positioned than iOS. Both have apps designed for touch interfaces, but Android's were designed to handle different resolutions. I have an Android tablet*, and you don't even notice that the app was written for a phone-sized display, unlike the iPad's bitmap scaling.
At the moment, every non-apple brand of tablet is a compromise
Why? This based on the presumption that the iPad is intrinsically better, but you haven't explained why beyond referring to apps.
* The problem with both Android and iOS is the app/process management is not a good fit for a device closer to a laptop than a phone. Apps arbitrarily lose their state depending on whether more memory was needed, and there's no difference between minimizing and closing a program - the user has less control. Something like Maemo/Meego or Gnome 3 is a far better fit - each running instance corresponds to a window, with a limit on the no. of windows you can open. When these operating systems were first created they were faced with hardware constraints, but given that by the end of the year we'll be seeing ARM chipsets with quad-core CPUs and 1.5 GB RAM, I'd say some change is in order...
Agreed, but the best thing about KDE is how flexible it is while still providing extremely usable defaults. Also, the selection/click metaphor works great on tablets.
I haven't read the article, but I'm pretty sure the 5 minutes only refers to how long it will take the data to be be sent, not received. Latency on interplanetary communications is a bitch.
Average distance between Earth and Mars: 230 * 10^6 km (from Wikipedia)
230 * 10^6 km / c = 12.78 minutes (via Google)
I'm surprised no one else has picked up on the fact that it bears starting similarities to the KDE file copy dialog.
Here are the images, for those who didn't RTFA:
Link 1
Link 2
I can see the value of a touch screen oriented interface. I'm running Ubuntu on an Asus Transformer, which has a touch screen* (and the keyboard disconnects, effectively turning it into a tablet). But I'm using KDE over Gnome 3. Gnome 3 looks like it may have potential, but only as a tablet OS. For anything else, Gnome 2 / KDE are better choices. Maybe in a year or two I might revisit it, but for now it's far too unstable.
*Actually, since I'm yet to get the touchpad working (the kernel is a work in progress), the touch screen is the only interface apart from the keyboard.
It actually is pretty useful - thanks to it, mine is running Ubuntu now.
But I do agree that it's completely separate to the Android source.
Except that all the authoritative versions of cases can only be accessed through the publishers of the big law reports. Since each publisher has a monopoly on a subset of cases (e.g. Thomson Reuters publishes the Commonwealth Law Reports, the authoritative source for Australian High Court judgments), the subscription fees are fairly large.
What can you tell us about the trading algorithms? I understand that it's mostly trade secrets, but if you could even say what broad area it's in, I'd appreciate it.
The French TGV is also pretty impressive. Despite holding the world record for the highest speed derailment, there hasn't been a single fatality when operating on high speed lines.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Accidents
Agreed. The use of emoticons and affection strikes me as obvious - anyone who was serious about projecting a false identity would type with a different personality.
It seems to me that using nonymity to suppress the trolls implies the classic argument that, "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide." Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting to conceal your identity, such as having an unpopular political opinion / religion / sexuality. G+ attempts to acknowledge this through their concept of circles, but the fact that the same name is tied to all of them does make it exceptionally easy to join the dots. It's not inconceivable that someone could create a fake account (with a real-sounding name) and use it to join those groups, for the purpose of identifying it's members. (I haven't actually used G+, so I could be a little off about the details. My point is that using the same identity in circles is a risk, even when there is partitioning between them.)
A superior alternative would be to use a measure of reputation, which could be equivalent to how many friends a person has, or a subset of that - the no. of friends who have approved them (approval should be anonymous to avoid social pressures).
The problem isn't kickbacks, it's competition. The books are set by the lecturers, who have no incentive to choose the cheapest one.