IMO,.NET has 2 killer features: -it is extremely easy to write parallel code as of 4.0. You don't need to worry about threads, just call Parallel.For with the loop body as a delegate. Given the steady increase in CPU cores, this will be relevant even to mobile systems soon -cross-architecture compatibility. The same exe will be able to run on both x86-64 and ARM (once Win8 comes out). This will be extremely important when Ms is pushing the ARM edition of Win8.
I just spent the last week looking at different Linux distros after establishing that I wasn't going to be using Unity. So far, Kubuntu seems to be my favourite (largely because I'm familiar with Ubuntu and wanted to keep the same backend). It seems quite polished and everything appears to work together quite well. It also doesn't shit itself when it realises that the PC doesn't have hardware acceleration. (On a side note, I'd appreciate it if anyone could tell me how to get Gnome 3 working VirtualBox or any other virtual machine with usable performance. Unity works fine, so it should be possible.)
I wouldn't be surprised if KDE becomes a lot more popular now, hopefully reversing a rather disturbing trend....
A: If a security hole in Android comes out, and a phone can't be patches, people are likely to upgrade or buy a new phone.
While I agree with your other points, you're delusional if you think that any significant number of people are so security conscious that they're willing to buy a new phone over a vulnerability in their existing one.
We might not have a Bill of Rights enshrined in the constitution, but we have 800 years of common law to draw on, given the courts recognise British court decisions as being relevant to Australian laws. Many of the rights you cry poor over have been ruled on in past legal cases.
I am an Australian law student (not a lawyer), and you're missing something very important: precedence. Legislation is superior to common law, and the constitution to legislation. It doesn't matter if there's a long line of cases supporting a right that was affirmed by the High Court, if an act says that right goes out the window, it's gone. Additionally, English cases do not form binding precedent - it's a the judges' discretion as to whether we should adopt English law or diverge from it.
In Victoria (and a few other states) we have the Charter of Human Rights, and all it does is require parliament to say, "We are removing this right in this act". It can't do anything more than this because no act can limit other acts - the specific cases overrule the general ones. Other states don't even have this - they can lose rights implicitly depending on the wording of an act (or even a regulation empowered by an act, which doesn't even need approval from parliament). One example of this was the recent stop and search powers granted to the police.
It is because legislation arises from political battles that these rights can be lost on a whim, unless they are protected by the constitution. This is why it is so difficult to make changes to the constitution - because all other laws are inferior to and limited by it. I'm hoping that in the future we may get a Bill of Rights that would in fact be more in line with contemporary rights (e.g. privacy) than the US one, but I think it very unlikely at present.
You can program it, but only in TI-BASIC, not assembly. TI-BASIC is an interpreted language, so naturally it's very slow and limited to textual I/O. The assembly programs were powerful enough to make clearing the calculators a problem, since they could run virtual consoles that didn't clear the memory as instructed.
IMO, the requirement to clear the memory of a graphical calculator is ridiculous. I live in Australia, and every test/exam I've had in secondary school and uni either allowed graphical calculators and was open book, or was closed book and allowed at most a scientific calculator. It was expected that we would use programs during the math exams to speed up things like the Euler method for approximation.
Clearing the calculator's memory is incredibly labour intensive - if you're not going to provide the calculators used for the tests, you may as well admit that you have no control over them. When you're looking at something like a state level exam (we now have national ones) that allows a range of different calculators, training those invigilators (who are usually senior citizens with nothing better to do, since letting teachers supervise for a national exam runs the risk of bias/turning a blind eye) further increases the difficulty involved.
To insist on rote problems that can be easily solved by the simple application of logic (and thus an extremely basic program) is to remain in the past - as technology develops, the focus should be increasingly on understanding how to state the problem using mathematical notation. e.g. understanding area is expressed through integrals, then letting a calculator/computer actually calculate that integral. Where there is a need to learn those basics (such as how to calculate the integral), it makes sense to have a closed book/tech free exam. For the last years of secondary school in Australia, each math subject has 2 exams - one which allows the use of notes and a graphical calculator, and one which does not. The one which allows the use of notes is consistently recognized as the more difficult of the two, since it requires students to actually understand what they are doing rather than simply reciting formulae.
"A patent is not the grant of a right to make or use or sell. It does not, directly or indirectly, imply any such right. It grants only the right to exclude others. The supposition that a right to make is created by the patent grant is obviously inconsistent with the established distinctions between generic and specific patents, and with the well-known fact that a very considerable portion of the patents granted are in a field covered by a former relatively generic or basic patent, are tributary to such earlier patent, and cannot be practiced unless by license thereunder." - Herman v. Youngstown Car Mfg. Co., 191 F. 579, 584-85, 112 CCA 185 (6th Cir. 1911)
As I understand it, patents prevent one from making and selling/distributing products using said patent. If you use the patent in an internal system that you build yourself and never give to anyone else, I don't believe that would be actionable.
One issue I see with this is that the average person is going to tune into a section of a criminal trial, hear the prosecution's side of things and tune out, having made up their mind that So-and-so is a criminal. Then they'll start talking about it among their friends, some of whom might blog or tweet about it, and before you know it the person is presumed guilty in the public eye. All that before the defense can cross-examine the first witness. When you're limited to being there in person, there's a barrier to entry that tends to weed out the casual gossiper whose only interest is the soap opera nature of a trial.
This is why in Sweden it is illegal to publish the name/identity of the accused until they are convicted. A similar law may be necessary in other countries as such tech becomes more common - a lot of existing laws that balance rights involving privacy assume a certain level of difficulty in accessing the information (e.g. going to the courthouse) that may no longer be the case.
According to Wikipedia, Splashtop boots in 5 seconds.
My desktop has an SSD and Ubuntu boots in 10 seconds. (Which is still fast enough to feel pretty damn fast.)
Why bother with an atomic OS when you can get the same degree of speed with an SSD and a full Linux distro*?
* Despite the SSD, Windows still takes as long to boot as it did before.
I laughed EXTREMELY HARD. The vast majority of tablets are not going to be tied to data plans. They're more like netbooks than smartphones, people are less likely to be roaming the streets with a massive tablet than sitting near a WiFi hotspot.
Yes, but as the name suggests a large portion of the netbooks' functionality depends on the internet. And the number of WiFi hotspots around depends entirely on where you live, and how much you're willing to pay for them. While I concede most of them won't be tied to data plans, that doesn't mean it's not an option for some of them. In my area you can get a decent amount of data for as little as $10 / month, and in some countries they even issue a 2nd SIM card so you can use the same account and data plan for a tablet as you do for your mobile. This is especially useful given that not everyone has a phone capable of tethering, and even those that do may find it quickly drains their phone's battery.
Just because it doesn't make sense in your context, don't assume others won't find it useful.
Do you have a citation/link for that? I'm not talking about the 16 GB, Wifi-only model, I mean the one with 3G. I can't find the link for it at the moment, but I definitely remember one of the reviews said it would only be out next quarter.
Speaking as an Australian, they have. All the major channels allow you to stream shows from their websites within 1 week of them airing.
As for the regional effect mentioned in another post, that seems very likely to me. Australia is often forgotten when it comes to licensing - most of the shows airing in the US only here after a year or so. And even then they mess around with the time slots, break up seasons etc.
There's very little difference to a consumer between streaming a show from a website and torrenting it.
While it's the single most promising Android tablet, Asus shot themselves in the foot. They've promised to release a 32 GB, 3G version of the Transformer next quarter, which will cannibalise their current sales. They're going to lose a lot of customers to other 3G capable tablets in the interim.
I'm wondering what options there are, if any, to do real Android application development on something like this? I need to replace my old MacBook
I wouldn't consider Android 3.0 a reasonable replacement for OSX. One is a mature OS, the other is very immature and still having the bugs ironed out. That said, I've heard that the eeePad is extremely easy to root and can therefore run any ARM Linux (e.g. Ubuntu), which would be much more powerful than Android. (And before you start complaining about the UI, consider that Gnome 3.0 will work pretty well for this).
Does anyone know where I could get a copy of the last version that was actually open? Even if it's out of date, it would really useful as a starting point for writing emulators and he like.
Twitter seems limited to 2 major applications: announcements and ideas.
If you have a large no of people (or bots) you need to broadcast an announcement to, then it fits the bill pretty well. The idea seems to be that the message should be short and sweet, or a short summary with a link to another page providing more detail. It's a pity that Twitter requires you to host that page on a seperate server though - they should have intergrated it or at least provided their own URL shortening service.
The other application is ideas, or to be more specific, any random concept/idea/piece of info that goes through your mind and you think is interesting enough to share with other people. It's essentially a blog except the entries are much shorter (and consequently suffers from the same problem as blogs -most people don't have anything interesting to say). This is more dependant on the quality of the poster - one feed might containing generally insightful tweets about the state of Linux on ARM, while another may have more inane posts.
The bad thing about minority governments *when there are 2 large parties* is that some tiny party ends up with all the power. Look at the current Australian government - Labor is in power, but the Greens have them by the balls on anything that the Liberals don't agree with. End result is that we're going to get a carbon tax because the Greens (who hold only 9 of the 76 seats in the senate) want one, regardless of what everyone else thinks.
If you want a decent government, you need to have lots of small, roughly equally sized parties (like Canada). If there's at least 4 parties vying for power, then one party can't hold the others hostage.
Having read the comments, it seems to me that Samsung is facing a problem which plagues most of the other phone manufacturers: they're used to (and only want) to producing hardware. The modern smartphone has as much computing power as a desktop did 1 decade ago, but we're still using the old, hardware-specific firmware model. We should be moving to a similar model that PCs use - the manufacturer sells you the hardware (with an OS-preinstalled), but you can pick whichever one you want and install it. The responsibility for software updates falls entirely to the software company, except for drivers. We're moving in that direction with Android, but we're still a long way off.
Nokia's problem is they were in a different phase to the other big players. From what I've heard, the N900 was never intended to compete directly with the iPhone, etc. - it was supposed to be used for research to see how people interacted with a phone that that had actual computing capabilities. If you look at its predecessors, you can see how it was never marketed strongly - it was a niche product to gauge the demand. Had they launched a series of smartphones at a range of price points that ran it, they would probably have done rather well.
Instead, they formed a partnership with Intel, who also had their own similar OS called Moblin. As a compromise, they decided to merge both into MeeGo. This meant that there was now 2 obsolete OSs (Maemo & MeeGo) and 1 new, incomplete OS (MeeGo). Which means they still don't have anything to use with a smartphones (having relegated Symbian to the feature phones) and therefore can't meaningfully compete with the Android/iPhone. Consequently, they had to turn to MS.
tldr; Nokia threw away Maemo and then needed an OS so they went with Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, .NET has 2 killer features:
-it is extremely easy to write parallel code as of 4.0. You don't need to worry about threads, just call Parallel.For with the loop body as a delegate. Given the steady increase in CPU cores, this will be relevant even to mobile systems soon
-cross-architecture compatibility. The same exe will be able to run on both x86-64 and ARM (once Win8 comes out). This will be extremely important when Ms is pushing the ARM edition of Win8.
1.0 // We are selling it
1.1 // Now it works, we swear
2.0 // We know you wouldn't shell out for version 1.5
3.0 // Just to keep you updating
Am I the only one thinking of the .NET Framework? (at least 3.5 added some nice features)
I just turned 20 and I don't know any of them either.
I just spent the last week looking at different Linux distros after establishing that I wasn't going to be using Unity. So far, Kubuntu seems to be my favourite (largely because I'm familiar with Ubuntu and wanted to keep the same backend). It seems quite polished and everything appears to work together quite well. It also doesn't shit itself when it realises that the PC doesn't have hardware acceleration. (On a side note, I'd appreciate it if anyone could tell me how to get Gnome 3 working VirtualBox or any other virtual machine with usable performance. Unity works fine, so it should be possible.)
I wouldn't be surprised if KDE becomes a lot more popular now, hopefully reversing a rather disturbing trend....
A: If a security hole in Android comes out, and a phone can't be patches, people are likely to upgrade or buy a new phone.
While I agree with your other points, you're delusional if you think that any significant number of people are so security conscious that they're willing to buy a new phone over a vulnerability in their existing one.
We might not have a Bill of Rights enshrined in the constitution, but we have 800 years of common law to draw on, given the courts recognise British court decisions as being relevant to Australian laws. Many of the rights you cry poor over have been ruled on in past legal cases.
I am an Australian law student (not a lawyer), and you're missing something very important: precedence. Legislation is superior to common law, and the constitution to legislation. It doesn't matter if there's a long line of cases supporting a right that was affirmed by the High Court, if an act says that right goes out the window, it's gone. Additionally, English cases do not form binding precedent - it's a the judges' discretion as to whether we should adopt English law or diverge from it.
In Victoria (and a few other states) we have the Charter of Human Rights, and all it does is require parliament to say, "We are removing this right in this act". It can't do anything more than this because no act can limit other acts - the specific cases overrule the general ones. Other states don't even have this - they can lose rights implicitly depending on the wording of an act (or even a regulation empowered by an act, which doesn't even need approval from parliament). One example of this was the recent stop and search powers granted to the police.
It is because legislation arises from political battles that these rights can be lost on a whim, unless they are protected by the constitution. This is why it is so difficult to make changes to the constitution - because all other laws are inferior to and limited by it. I'm hoping that in the future we may get a Bill of Rights that would in fact be more in line with contemporary rights (e.g. privacy) than the US one, but I think it very unlikely at present.
You can program it, but only in TI-BASIC, not assembly. TI-BASIC is an interpreted language, so naturally it's very slow and limited to textual I/O. The assembly programs were powerful enough to make clearing the calculators a problem, since they could run virtual consoles that didn't clear the memory as instructed.
IMO, the requirement to clear the memory of a graphical calculator is ridiculous. I live in Australia, and every test/exam I've had in secondary school and uni either allowed graphical calculators and was open book, or was closed book and allowed at most a scientific calculator. It was expected that we would use programs during the math exams to speed up things like the Euler method for approximation.
Clearing the calculator's memory is incredibly labour intensive - if you're not going to provide the calculators used for the tests, you may as well admit that you have no control over them. When you're looking at something like a state level exam (we now have national ones) that allows a range of different calculators, training those invigilators (who are usually senior citizens with nothing better to do, since letting teachers supervise for a national exam runs the risk of bias/turning a blind eye) further increases the difficulty involved.
To insist on rote problems that can be easily solved by the simple application of logic (and thus an extremely basic program) is to remain in the past - as technology develops, the focus should be increasingly on understanding how to state the problem using mathematical notation. e.g. understanding area is expressed through integrals, then letting a calculator/computer actually calculate that integral. Where there is a need to learn those basics (such as how to calculate the integral), it makes sense to have a closed book/tech free exam. For the last years of secondary school in Australia, each math subject has 2 exams - one which allows the use of notes and a graphical calculator, and one which does not. The one which allows the use of notes is consistently recognized as the more difficult of the two, since it requires students to actually understand what they are doing rather than simply reciting formulae.
"A patent is not the grant of a right to make or use or sell. It does not, directly or indirectly, imply any such right. It grants only the right to exclude others. The supposition that a right to make is created by the patent grant is obviously inconsistent with the established distinctions between generic and specific patents, and with the well-known fact that a very considerable portion of the patents granted are in a field covered by a former relatively generic or basic patent, are tributary to such earlier patent, and cannot be practiced unless by license thereunder." - Herman v. Youngstown Car Mfg. Co., 191 F. 579, 584-85, 112 CCA 185 (6th Cir. 1911)
As I understand it, patents prevent one from making and selling/distributing products using said patent. If you use the patent in an internal system that you build yourself and never give to anyone else, I don't believe that would be actionable.
One issue I see with this is that the average person is going to tune into a section of a criminal trial, hear the prosecution's side of things and tune out, having made up their mind that So-and-so is a criminal. Then they'll start talking about it among their friends, some of whom might blog or tweet about it, and before you know it the person is presumed guilty in the public eye. All that before the defense can cross-examine the first witness. When you're limited to being there in person, there's a barrier to entry that tends to weed out the casual gossiper whose only interest is the soap opera nature of a trial.
This is why in Sweden it is illegal to publish the name/identity of the accused until they are convicted. A similar law may be necessary in other countries as such tech becomes more common - a lot of existing laws that balance rights involving privacy assume a certain level of difficulty in accessing the information (e.g. going to the courthouse) that may no longer be the case.
According to Wikipedia, Splashtop boots in 5 seconds. My desktop has an SSD and Ubuntu boots in 10 seconds. (Which is still fast enough to feel pretty damn fast.) Why bother with an atomic OS when you can get the same degree of speed with an SSD and a full Linux distro*? * Despite the SSD, Windows still takes as long to boot as it did before.
On that note, what are we going to call Ubuntu + Gnome 3? Gubuntu?
I laughed EXTREMELY HARD. The vast majority of tablets are not going to be tied to data plans. They're more like netbooks than smartphones, people are less likely to be roaming the streets with a massive tablet than sitting near a WiFi hotspot.
Yes, but as the name suggests a large portion of the netbooks' functionality depends on the internet. And the number of WiFi hotspots around depends entirely on where you live, and how much you're willing to pay for them. While I concede most of them won't be tied to data plans, that doesn't mean it's not an option for some of them. In my area you can get a decent amount of data for as little as $10 / month, and in some countries they even issue a 2nd SIM card so you can use the same account and data plan for a tablet as you do for your mobile. This is especially useful given that not everyone has a phone capable of tethering, and even those that do may find it quickly drains their phone's battery. Just because it doesn't make sense in your context, don't assume others won't find it useful.
Found them: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/12/asus-eee-pad-transformer-and-slider-another-look/ http://www.slashgear.com/asus-eee-pad-transformer-first-impressions-video-30143387/
Do you have a citation/link for that? I'm not talking about the 16 GB, Wifi-only model, I mean the one with 3G. I can't find the link for it at the moment, but I definitely remember one of the reviews said it would only be out next quarter.
Speaking as an Australian, they have. All the major channels allow you to stream shows from their websites within 1 week of them airing. As for the regional effect mentioned in another post, that seems very likely to me. Australia is often forgotten when it comes to licensing - most of the shows airing in the US only here after a year or so. And even then they mess around with the time slots, break up seasons etc. There's very little difference to a consumer between streaming a show from a website and torrenting it.
While it's the single most promising Android tablet, Asus shot themselves in the foot. They've promised to release a 32 GB, 3G version of the Transformer next quarter, which will cannibalise their current sales. They're going to lose a lot of customers to other 3G capable tablets in the interim.
I'm wondering what options there are, if any, to do real Android application development on something like this? I need to replace my old MacBook
I wouldn't consider Android 3.0 a reasonable replacement for OSX. One is a mature OS, the other is very immature and still having the bugs ironed out. That said, I've heard that the eeePad is extremely easy to root and can therefore run any ARM Linux (e.g. Ubuntu), which would be much more powerful than Android. (And before you start complaining about the UI, consider that Gnome 3.0 will work pretty well for this).
Thanks. Please post a link here when you do.
Would you be able to put them online as a torrent or something?
Does anyone know where I could get a copy of the last version that was actually open? Even if it's out of date, it would really useful as a starting point for writing emulators and he like.
Twitter seems limited to 2 major applications: announcements and ideas. If you have a large no of people (or bots) you need to broadcast an announcement to, then it fits the bill pretty well. The idea seems to be that the message should be short and sweet, or a short summary with a link to another page providing more detail. It's a pity that Twitter requires you to host that page on a seperate server though - they should have intergrated it or at least provided their own URL shortening service. The other application is ideas, or to be more specific, any random concept/idea/piece of info that goes through your mind and you think is interesting enough to share with other people. It's essentially a blog except the entries are much shorter (and consequently suffers from the same problem as blogs -most people don't have anything interesting to say). This is more dependant on the quality of the poster - one feed might containing generally insightful tweets about the state of Linux on ARM, while another may have more inane posts.
The bad thing about minority governments *when there are 2 large parties* is that some tiny party ends up with all the power. Look at the current Australian government - Labor is in power, but the Greens have them by the balls on anything that the Liberals don't agree with. End result is that we're going to get a carbon tax because the Greens (who hold only 9 of the 76 seats in the senate) want one, regardless of what everyone else thinks. If you want a decent government, you need to have lots of small, roughly equally sized parties (like Canada). If there's at least 4 parties vying for power, then one party can't hold the others hostage.
Give me FLAC or give me death!
Having read the comments, it seems to me that Samsung is facing a problem which plagues most of the other phone manufacturers: they're used to (and only want) to producing hardware. The modern smartphone has as much computing power as a desktop did 1 decade ago, but we're still using the old, hardware-specific firmware model. We should be moving to a similar model that PCs use - the manufacturer sells you the hardware (with an OS-preinstalled), but you can pick whichever one you want and install it. The responsibility for software updates falls entirely to the software company, except for drivers. We're moving in that direction with Android, but we're still a long way off.
Nokia's problem is they were in a different phase to the other big players. From what I've heard, the N900 was never intended to compete directly with the iPhone, etc. - it was supposed to be used for research to see how people interacted with a phone that that had actual computing capabilities. If you look at its predecessors, you can see how it was never marketed strongly - it was a niche product to gauge the demand. Had they launched a series of smartphones at a range of price points that ran it, they would probably have done rather well. Instead, they formed a partnership with Intel, who also had their own similar OS called Moblin. As a compromise, they decided to merge both into MeeGo. This meant that there was now 2 obsolete OSs (Maemo & MeeGo) and 1 new, incomplete OS (MeeGo). Which means they still don't have anything to use with a smartphones (having relegated Symbian to the feature phones) and therefore can't meaningfully compete with the Android/iPhone. Consequently, they had to turn to MS. tldr; Nokia threw away Maemo and then needed an OS so they went with Windows.