... that Google is trying to liberate it's own data?
Not really. The project is to ease exporting data from and importing data to Google's offerings. Its essentially a product to improve the functionality and documentation of a set of features that are important to users in a way which crosses products. I don't think its "ironic" that company would do that.
I'm very curious how they are going to liberate the user added data in Google Maps/Mapmaker.
I'm not sure if this covers the "user added data" you are concerned about, but -- from the Data Liberation Front page linked in TFA -- the main mechanism for getting your data (either "My Maps" or "Saved Locations") out of Google Maps is via KML export.
This is both the big advantage (for providers) and disadvantage (for customers) with SaaS-type "cloud" services: data lock-in. Its interesting that Google believes that they can compete enough on quality that lock-in is no longer an advantage to them because it scares away more potential customers than it traps.
Actually, I think Google thinks that avoiding lock-in itself is a competitive advantage that is bigger than lock-in itself would be. If people are afraid to use your product for critical uses because of fear of lock-in, it doesn't help you that they can't leave once they start.
So the idea is that making it easier to leave google makes you more likely to stay with google?
No, the idea is that making it easier to leave particular Google services makes it more likely that people will use those services in the first place, not that it makes them more likely to stay with them once they start using them.
Another great argument to use is when they try to claim that "games cost so much because of piracy". Really? The average price of a computer game isn't much more than it was around 15 years ago, when piracy was essentially non-existent (it may have been around, but not in an amount that would really have an impact).
15 years ago, piracy was nothing even vaguely like "nonexistent". It was downright rampant. And, in fact, the argument that piracy was driving up prices and that all kinds of copy protection schemes which interfered with usability existed to reduce piracy and thereby keep prices down was common. Heck, it was common 20+ years ago, too; in the 1980s, dedicated programs and even hardware to defeat copy protection (notionally, for making usable archival copies; frequently used for piracy) were widely available. The copy protection vs. copying armsrace, with the same arguments used on both sides, has been going on as long as computer software has been a significant industry, and games have always been the central front.
A curse on Wikipedia and the [citation needed] meme. It would all be very well if the meme people actually promoted critical thinking, healthy scepticism and proper fact checking. But as it is, the meme just promotes the petty and frankly groundless rebuttals typified by the parent post. Instead of actually bothering to critique specific points in the grandparent, the whole thing is simply tarnished with the [citation needed] brush in a fairly transparent attempt to outright dismiss it.
That an argument relies on (or, a fortiori, is simply a claim of) facts for which no evidence is provided is a legitimate basis for dismissing it. (Its not evidence that it is wrong, just a reason not to grant it further consideration without evidence for the facts it relies on being true.) That is a pretty basic part of critical thinking and healthy skepticism.
Considering that the meme originated on Wikipedia
The "meme" that fact claims require evidence to be accepted is considerably older than Wikipedia. Sure, the particular "[citation needed]" expression came from Wikipedia, but it isn't different in any substantive way from responses with equivalent meaning like a simple one-word "Evidence?" response one might have seen in response to an unsupported claim in any Usenet discussion group even prior to the invention of the WWW, much less Wikipedia.
From there, it has moved smoothly into the mainstream as a general purpose discussion terminating cliche. I have never seen actual honest debaters of any kind ask for citations in this way. Its a rhetorical technique, not an honest rebuttal.
Using "[citation needed]", as such, is not even on its face an attempt at rebuttal, in the sense of a counterargument for the falsity of the argument it responds to. It is a dismissal, that is, a simple statement that the argument presented relies on unsupported fact claims and does not warrant further consideration without support given for those fact claims. Where the fact claims are not genuinely controversial (e.g., "the Earth is an oblate spheroid") it may be ingenuous distraction, but at the same time it is fairly easy to address it in those cases (and, further, the attempt at dismissal won't tend to influence readers much.) Where the fact claims are controversial but supportable, attempting to dismiss them with "[citation needed]" won't serve as a "discussion ending" rhetorical device if those making the initial argument are willing and able to support the fact claims at issue.
It only effectively serves as a discussion-ending device when used against people who are blowing smoke in the first place, in which case the effect is quite appropriate.
That's because with Windows/Mac, programmers write programs for the user. With Linux, programmers write programs for other programmers.
Quite often, the very same programs are available for Windows/Mac as for Linux, so I'm not sure how this works. Its probably true (at least, it should be if the people involved are competent) that software that is developed by a company as part of a consumer focussed business strategy rather than by programmers scratching their own itches is more attractive to consumers, but plenty of Linux apps, even open-source ones, are developed that way.
I used to think that if Apple turned NeXT's OS into something usable in just a few years, they could have done something really special with BeOS.
NeXT's OS was quite usable from when it first came out in 1988, which is why NeXT switched from a computer company to a software company with its main product being the NeXTSTEP (late OPENSTEP) operating system in 1993. By 1996, when Apple considered buying BeOS and ended up buying NeXT, NeXT's OS had considerable penetration in key markets; probably the only reason BeOS was considered is that Apple thought they could get it cheap.
Does anyone happen to know why Apple only wanted to pay about $115M for BeOS, when they eventually paid something like $400M for NeXT?
(1) NeXTSTEP had more of an established market presence, (2) NeXT had some things besides NeXTSTEP of interest (e.g., WebObjects), (3) NeXT had Steve Jobs (which was probably seen as positive for Apple, though it turned out not to be positive rather quickly for Apple CEO Gil Amelio.)
By now we should have netbooks with 3" screens that go in your pocket that complete with smartphones and devices like the ipod touch. A budget OQO, basically. To me, netbooks should not be considered a netbook if the screen is larger than 8". Anything bigger and you're in portable laptop territory, regardless of processor speed.
Netbooks are intended to be low cost portable laptops intended principally for network-(and especially browser-) based applications (rather than hosting lots of local apps and data).
UMPCs with a 3" screen that are, like netbooks, targetted for use with networked apps might be useful, but they wouldn't be netbooks.
Perhaps you should reread the post your responded to. He did not say TomTom sued first. He said they threatened to sue first.
Actually, perhaps you should reread it: the poster first claimed that Tom Tom threatened to sue first, and then, in the same post, claimed that Microsoft did not sue first.
In fact, Microsoft did sue first, even though Tom Tom threatened first.
The use of the FAT patent was not an attack on Linux, it was an attack on TomTom... basically, when you are involved in a patent lawsuit, you bring every patent to bear that could possibly be relevant.
Microsoft wasn't involved in a patent lawsuit until they initiated one.
Don't know if it's what I'd call FUD, exactly -- the very idea of patenting "associating a piece of data with multiple categories" is still absurd.
And, strictly speaking, isn't what the patent at issue claims; as is common in patent stories, what the claimed mechanism achieves is confused here with what is claimed. Patents don't cover results, they cover particular mechanisms for acheiving them.
As the article mentions, shot length in film has been declining for decades. The average is now around five seconds. In 3D, more adaptation time is required at shot changes. The article says 10-15 seconds is required. If you do too many fast focal length changes, viewers get eyestrain.
If 3D forces a return in general to longer shots, then that's something I'll be thankful for.
OTOH, its quite possible to do fast cuts without doing gast focal length changes, it just restricts the kinds of cuts you can do frequently.
I think not. I know a lot of people who still don't have a HDTV. I still use my 20" CRT TV from 1996. Same with my parents, relatives, friends, strangers.
I suspect that much like the PS3 driving bluray adoption whatever format the winning console chooses will be the new 3D TV format of choice.
Wouldn't that be "unlike the PS3 driving bluray adoption", since by most standards the PS3 didn't (and still isn't) winning the war for the current generation of consoles. OTOH, it was the only one in the current generation of consoles for which an HD video disc playback capability was bundled, so it boosted Bluray without winning the console war.
(If Bluray-3D is something Sony can add playback support for to the PS3 via a software update, that could give them a boost in setting the standard for 3D delivery, as long as the PS3 remains a viable console, even if its not the clear "winner" of its generation.)
Plays, BTW, are very much 2D. Theatre, by contrast...;-)
As essentially linear sequences, plays are arguably 1D. Sure, they are usually printed on pages each of which is (in terms of the printed surface) 2D, and delivered in bound collections of pages which are 3D, but if you are distinguishing content from the delivery...
What format wars? If Sony beats everyone else to market by a few years, Sony wins the next few decades, end of discussion.
They won't beat everyone else to market by years. There's a number of different 3D TV technologies from different manufacturers expected to be released in the next couple of years (I think some of them are already selling in specialized markets and are just expected to be released in general consumer versions in the next couple of years.)
Now, if (as has happened so often in Sony's history) someone else comes to market with a similar product at half the price... Well, BetaMax 3d, we hardly knew ye...
Depends how similar, and if it really is half the price. HD-DVD was similar to Blu-Ray and otherwise comparable players were cheaper, and ISTR that the disks were cheaper as well.
if they think anyone is gonna jump on their new darling tech that will require millions for a network to outfit just ONE studio with they are on some really good drugs.
Actually, I think that they think that the content will initially be 3D content originally produced for theaters (of which there is quite a bit), and that providing home viewing opportunities will expand the market for such content for the studios that are already producing it (some of which are owned by Sony, incidentally.)
It's like pulling teeth to get Tv stations and networks to go 720p HD. and they want to try and make it even more prohibitive for these penny pinchers?
Considerably less than 2x the bandwidth, if you have an intelligent encoding/compression scheme that exploits the similarity between right and left visual channels.
You are quite correct. The exactly two times I stated in GP in response to the "at least an order of magnitude" expectation expressed in GP was really for the most naive implementation possible. I could say I was assuming that naturally you would want to minimize the the work on the receiver end, so using the worst-case bandwidth to avoid decompression overhead would be sensible, but really I just had a kneejerk reaction to the "order of magnitude" claim and didn't think things through.
Seems to me the bandwidth will be at least an order of magnitude more than HDTV.
The bandwidth for stereoscopic TV with a given resolution and framerate per eye should be exactly twice the bandwidth required for single-image TV with the same resolution and framerate, since you are exactly providing two single-image streams.
If by "3D" they mean stereo images, then 3D TV is going to die a quick death. Stereo images are best viewed from one correct place, which means ONE seat in the center and at exactly the correct distance. It also means not tilting your head while watching. Headaches will ensue for a large part of the audience, and all other sorts of discomfort.
Which is, I suppose, why stereo "3D" doesn't work in movie theaters and isn't being adopted more broadly by studios and theaters as the technology to do it becomes more accessible.
If first person games haven't driven sales of "3D" computer monitors through the roof (or even off the floor) what makes anyone think 3D TV has a snowballs chance?
I dunno, maybe the FPS gamer market isn't much like the TV market, in terms of size, demographics, or anything else.
A much smaller screen, a well done sound system and a DVD can yield you a much more effective "cinematic experience" than most HDTV setups.
This is why Lucas pushed for better sound in cinemas.
No, its not.
Lucas pushed for better sound in cinemas because sound quality is important to immersive cinematic experience, to be sure, but the relative effect of better sound vs. moving from SDTV to HDTV quality visuals wasn't part of that consideration, because film as used in theaters has (both now and at the time Lucas first made the push) a higher effective resolution than HDTV to start with, so Lucas wasn't comparing the effect of moving from SDTV visual quality to HDTV visual quality with the effect of sound improvements and choosing the latter.
You could say the same for doctors, malpractice insurance, and damage caps.
Well, except that the number of practicing doctors (per population, not just absolute) keeps growing, even in jurisdictions without the caps. While political activists -- some of whom are or notionally represent doctors, more of whom are or represent the insurance industry -- lobby for malpractice caps, and assert that there absence absence is driving doctor's out of business, there is no actual shortage, the rhetoric is hollow.
Sure, it covers the functionality needed by little Johnny figuring out what a spreadsheet is, but the minute you need to do any *real* spreadsheet work, Google Apps just doesn't deliver.
Most of the things Google Apps spreadsheet doesn't work for are things for which a spreadsheet isn't a good solution in the first place, though they are commonly used because corporate IT policies often let anyone build complex spreadsheets (which become unmaintainable nightmare apps) but prevent most employees from using real programming tools, and because ponderous internal coordination at many corporations simply make building relatively small apps that require formal IT involvement not worth the internal project overhead it takes to get them built.
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Not really. The project is to ease exporting data from and importing data to Google's offerings. Its essentially a product to improve the functionality and documentation of a set of features that are important to users in a way which crosses products. I don't think its "ironic" that company would do that.
I'm not sure if this covers the "user added data" you are concerned about, but -- from the Data Liberation Front page linked in TFA -- the main mechanism for getting your data (either "My Maps" or "Saved Locations") out of Google Maps is via KML export.
Actually, I think Google thinks that avoiding lock-in itself is a competitive advantage that is bigger than lock-in itself would be. If people are afraid to use your product for critical uses because of fear of lock-in, it doesn't help you that they can't leave once they start.
No, the idea is that making it easier to leave particular Google services makes it more likely that people will use those services in the first place, not that it makes them more likely to stay with them once they start using them.
15 years ago, piracy was nothing even vaguely like "nonexistent". It was downright rampant. And, in fact, the argument that piracy was driving up prices and that all kinds of copy protection schemes which interfered with usability existed to reduce piracy and thereby keep prices down was common. Heck, it was common 20+ years ago, too; in the 1980s, dedicated programs and even hardware to defeat copy protection (notionally, for making usable archival copies; frequently used for piracy) were widely available. The copy protection vs. copying armsrace, with the same arguments used on both sides, has been going on as long as computer software has been a significant industry, and games have always been the central front.
That an argument relies on (or, a fortiori, is simply a claim of) facts for which no evidence is provided is a legitimate basis for dismissing it. (Its not evidence that it is wrong, just a reason not to grant it further consideration without evidence for the facts it relies on being true.) That is a pretty basic part of critical thinking and healthy skepticism.
The "meme" that fact claims require evidence to be accepted is considerably older than Wikipedia. Sure, the particular "[citation needed]" expression came from Wikipedia, but it isn't different in any substantive way from responses with equivalent meaning like a simple one-word "Evidence?" response one might have seen in response to an unsupported claim in any Usenet discussion group even prior to the invention of the WWW, much less Wikipedia.
Using "[citation needed]", as such, is not even on its face an attempt at rebuttal, in the sense of a counterargument for the falsity of the argument it responds to. It is a dismissal, that is, a simple statement that the argument presented relies on unsupported fact claims and does not warrant further consideration without support given for those fact claims. Where the fact claims are not genuinely controversial (e.g., "the Earth is an oblate spheroid") it may be ingenuous distraction, but at the same time it is fairly easy to address it in those cases (and, further, the attempt at dismissal won't tend to influence readers much.) Where the fact claims are controversial but supportable, attempting to dismiss them with "[citation needed]" won't serve as a "discussion ending" rhetorical device if those making the initial argument are willing and able to support the fact claims at issue.
It only effectively serves as a discussion-ending device when used against people who are blowing smoke in the first place, in which case the effect is quite appropriate.
There are existing commercial and open source forks of OpenOffice.org.
I don't think I'd describe OpenOffice as being more modern than KOffice.
Quite often, the very same programs are available for Windows/Mac as for Linux, so I'm not sure how this works. Its probably true (at least, it should be if the people involved are competent) that software that is developed by a company as part of a consumer focussed business strategy rather than by programmers scratching their own itches is more attractive to consumers, but plenty of Linux apps, even open-source ones, are developed that way.
NeXT's OS was quite usable from when it first came out in 1988, which is why NeXT switched from a computer company to a software company with its main product being the NeXTSTEP (late OPENSTEP) operating system in 1993. By 1996, when Apple considered buying BeOS and ended up buying NeXT, NeXT's OS had considerable penetration in key markets; probably the only reason BeOS was considered is that Apple thought they could get it cheap.
(1) NeXTSTEP had more of an established market presence,
(2) NeXT had some things besides NeXTSTEP of interest (e.g., WebObjects),
(3) NeXT had Steve Jobs (which was probably seen as positive for Apple, though it turned out not to be positive rather quickly for Apple CEO Gil Amelio.)
Netbooks are intended to be low cost portable laptops intended principally for network-(and especially browser-) based applications (rather than hosting lots of local apps and data).
UMPCs with a 3" screen that are, like netbooks, targetted for use with networked apps might be useful, but they wouldn't be netbooks.
Actually, perhaps you should reread it: the poster first claimed that Tom Tom threatened to sue first, and then, in the same post, claimed that Microsoft did not sue first.
In fact, Microsoft did sue first, even though Tom Tom threatened first.
Microsoft wasn't involved in a patent lawsuit until they initiated one.
And, strictly speaking, isn't what the patent at issue claims; as is common in patent stories, what the claimed mechanism achieves is confused here with what is claimed. Patents don't cover results, they cover particular mechanisms for acheiving them.
If 3D forces a return in general to longer shots, then that's something I'll be thankful for.
OTOH, its quite possible to do fast cuts without doing gast focal length changes, it just restricts the kinds of cuts you can do frequently.
All those people still use your 20" CRT?
Wouldn't that be "unlike the PS3 driving bluray adoption", since by most standards the PS3 didn't (and still isn't) winning the war for the current generation of consoles. OTOH, it was the only one in the current generation of consoles for which an HD video disc playback capability was bundled, so it boosted Bluray without winning the console war.
(If Bluray-3D is something Sony can add playback support for to the PS3 via a software update, that could give them a boost in setting the standard for 3D delivery, as long as the PS3 remains a viable console, even if its not the clear "winner" of its generation.)
As essentially linear sequences, plays are arguably 1D. Sure, they are usually printed on pages each of which is (in terms of the printed surface) 2D, and delivered in bound collections of pages which are 3D, but if you are distinguishing content from the delivery...
They won't beat everyone else to market by years. There's a number of different 3D TV technologies from different manufacturers expected to be released in the next couple of years (I think some of them are already selling in specialized markets and are just expected to be released in general consumer versions in the next couple of years.)
Depends how similar, and if it really is half the price. HD-DVD was similar to Blu-Ray and otherwise comparable players were cheaper, and ISTR that the disks were cheaper as well.
Actually, I think that they think that the content will initially be 3D content originally produced for theaters (of which there is quite a bit), and that providing home viewing opportunities will expand the market for such content for the studios that are already producing it (some of which are owned by Sony, incidentally.)
So? Who needs TV stations?
You are quite correct. The exactly two times I stated in GP in response to the "at least an order of magnitude" expectation expressed in GP was really for the most naive implementation possible. I could say I was assuming that naturally you would want to minimize the the work on the receiver end, so using the worst-case bandwidth to avoid decompression overhead would be sensible, but really I just had a kneejerk reaction to the "order of magnitude" claim and didn't think things through.
The bandwidth for stereoscopic TV with a given resolution and framerate per eye should be exactly twice the bandwidth required for single-image TV with the same resolution and framerate, since you are exactly providing two single-image streams.
Which is, I suppose, why stereo "3D" doesn't work in movie theaters and isn't being adopted more broadly by studios and theaters as the technology to do it becomes more accessible.
I dunno, maybe the FPS gamer market isn't much like the TV market, in terms of size, demographics, or anything else.
No, its not.
Lucas pushed for better sound in cinemas because sound quality is important to immersive cinematic experience, to be sure, but the relative effect of better sound vs. moving from SDTV to HDTV quality visuals wasn't part of that consideration, because film as used in theaters has (both now and at the time Lucas first made the push) a higher effective resolution than HDTV to start with, so Lucas wasn't comparing the effect of moving from SDTV visual quality to HDTV visual quality with the effect of sound improvements and choosing the latter.
Well, except that the number of practicing doctors (per population, not just absolute) keeps growing, even in jurisdictions without the caps. While political activists -- some of whom are or notionally represent doctors, more of whom are or represent the insurance industry -- lobby for malpractice caps, and assert that there absence absence is driving doctor's out of business, there is no actual shortage, the rhetoric is hollow.
Most of the things Google Apps spreadsheet doesn't work for are things for which a spreadsheet isn't a good solution in the first place, though they are commonly used because corporate IT policies often let anyone build complex spreadsheets (which become unmaintainable nightmare apps) but prevent most employees from using real programming tools, and because ponderous internal coordination at many corporations simply make building relatively small apps that require formal IT involvement not worth the internal project overhead it takes to get them built.