I thought from reading around on slashdot that Japanese phones were 10+ years ahead of American ones? How did we catch up so quickly?
We didn't. The average Japanese cell phone is still vastly higher-tech than the average US cell phone.
In terms of feature set, the iPhone isn't particularly remarkable compared to run-of-the-mill Japanese handsets. The reason it's become so popular is the same reason it's done so everywhere else: the quality of the UI and the gestalt user experience absolutely blow everything else away.
For major releases, I think the market has actually adapted quite well. Consumers are given a pretty good tradeoff spectrum to decide how much a game is worth to them:
If a game looks to you like a good enough value proposition that you're willing to buy it at launch, you pay $60.
If a game looks worthwhile but you don't need it at launch, you can hold off for a few months and someone will have it for $40 (eventually MSRP reflects this).
If a game looks fun but you wouldn't pay more than a budget title for it (and it isn't a consistent bestseller), play other games for a few more months and you'll see it for $20.
The last game I paid $60 for was LittleBigPlanet, just over a year ago. I've played some other great games this year that I'd been looking forward to, but I haven't paid over $40 for a single one.
Now, download-based games are another story. Steam is getting it right on the PC with the frequent sale promotions and bundles, but Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo barely ever do it. They'll figure it out in time.
Normally I'm against captain-obvious troll-feeding, but this is one case where I think a response is merited.
ACTA awareness needs to reach as far as it possibly can. We are, quite literally, talking about the future of the world here: A global treaty that promises to have a profound effect upon the freedom of all of us is being negotiated in secret.
The maximum must be brought to light before the widest audience. If that means dupe stories, then I'm all for dupes.
This electricity you speak of is only being used for piracy of our content! People are staying up after dark, laboring by the light of these electrical lamps to copy down note-for-note the contents of our valuable original content!
What we propose is a law of three-strikes, not unlike that of baseball. Upon the third finding that a person has been engaged in illegal copying, their electricity is to be cut off forever, preventing their copying in the future.
It is of the utmost importance to our industry and culture that the use of electricity be carefully monitored and restricted, lest it be used illegally. With vigilance and diligence, we can combat the menace that electricity poses to the future of our nation.
The more I learn about this, the more it looks like one of those failed relationships where the guy thought things were getting serious and the girl was never looking for a long-term attachment.
Neither one can be blamed or absolved completely; they both were under the illusion that the other shared their view. Of course, the couple should have talked a little more about what they both wanted out of the relationship, as should Arrington and Fusion Garage have.
Love, or that dizzying sense that you're going to change an industry. Both serotonin.
If your image has a totally different shape (e.g. a few white patches on a black background), find a new image:P
Even then, you'd probably get something basically recognizable -- I'd imagine the error diffusion just puts a lot of noise in a black area that's too big. Heck, it may even run an unsharp mask over the image to exaggerate details when the predicted output noise reaches a certain threshold.
I bet the algorithms for this bear a number of similarities to photomosaic systems as they're both working with a known set of "subpixel units."
It's the gradients on the pieces, and the principles of human vision that JPEG takes advantage of, that give this puzzle its cool effect, creating the appearance of a much higher resolution than the 15x20 "pixels" everyone else is referring to.
You can't make a (easily) recognizable Mona Lisa in 15x20 pixels. You can in 15x20 cosine gradients.
You don't seem to understand how Beacon worked. This wasn't some kind of cross-publishing of blog posts -- it was covert publishing of transactions you made in online stores!
That said, even if it were only covert cross-publishing of already public information such as blogs: Did it occur to you that perhaps people choose to publish some information under their real name and some under an alias? As a hypothetical, perhaps you would like to keep your posts on a sexual health message board separate from conversations with your boss? Or would you feel "entitled to some sense of privacy"?
Your best bet, if you must play FB games, is to maintain an entirely separate profile just for that purpose, and put nothing personally identifiable on it.
Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use.
In practice, this probably doesn't matter, as long as you don't spam or start making alts, but it's something that has thus far made me uneasy enough to not make that "work account" lest my primary account get banned.
The A5/1 cracking project aims to compress the 128-petabyte A5/1 codebook -- which would require more than 100 000 years of computing by a single PC to crack--to around 2 or 3 terabytes of data, and a computing time of around three months, with the help of about 80 computers.
Any crypto experts want to take a stab at explaining, in lay geek terms, how this is even remotely possible? That's a ~50,000:1 compression ratio.
I don't think ChromeOS will catch on as an "early boot" option any more than some of the options the BIOS manufacturers have been pitching for a few years. The benefits of ChromeOS are pretty much mitigated by sticking it on a full laptop -- you're lugging a fully-featured computer around and you don't have access to any of it, and you could get the whole thing just by waiting around another 30 seconds.
ChromeOS is about having a bare minimum of hardware required to have a smooth internet experience. It's about the proliferation of internet access, always having something nearby that will connect you to whatever you're looking for.
Ever since the introduction of 2G mobile technology, we've just been throwing data back and forth between the towers, and yet even in 2009 the telcos still charge us differently for minutes, text messages, and "data."
It was always going to take a disruptive force to get them to recognize data as data and price it as such. Maybe Google will serve as just that disruption.
See, that's the thing that Apple does so well. They don't invent things. They make other inventions actually work.
Through exhaustive design iteration and engineering, they develop ideas that are "nice on paper but useless in practice" into things that actually deliver on the invention's promise. From desktop UNIX to high-capacity music players to the mobile web browser, Apple invented none of these, yet they all sucked until Apple treated each one not as a feature problem but as a design and usability problem.
That's not invention. But if it isn't innovation, I don't know what is.
Honestly, this is a parallel direction I'd love to see Google expand into. They have great services, but I just don't really like ads that much -- even ads as subtle as Google's. I'd use GMail more if I could pay a reasonable annual fee to skip the ads and have a nice, clean web UI.
I know Google offers an enterprise solution to this effect, but I've never seen a consumer solution marketed.
This is one of those issues I'd love to hear a real patent attorney weigh in on: If someone files a patent on something you can prove you demonstrated publicly at an earlier date, what are your options? Can you file an opposition to the patent? How does it work?
What if, through the developers' virtual arms race, the AIs discover that rushing isn't actually the best way to win? Given enough room to experiment, could new, anti-rush gambits emerge that human players wouldn't have thought of?
About a month ago, I ran into a girl who was obviously
a) not a geek, and
b) would not have a geek boyfriend
and was carrying a jailbroken iPhone. With the easy GUI that the Dev Team has had for awhile, I think it's at the point where it's possible for mainstream users to do it.
While Jobs did need a certain part of his six-month hiatus this year to recover from the liver transplant, the majority of it was recovering from seeing an early prototype of the hardware in question.
As someone who just signed up for two years with AT&T, I can't wait for the iPhone exclusivity to end. Not because I want to jump ship, but because it should make things better for everyone.
The people who are the heaviest users and the most dissatisfied with the service will pretty quickly cough up the ETF and switch to the first competitor that offers it. After a few months, this alone may very well have a noticeable effect on network performance.
More importantly, though, as AT&T actually begins to feel the financial effects of fleeing iPhone users, they're going to have no choice but to ramp up the infrastructure upgrades to compete. In other words, the market will actually start working like it's supposed to.
Jobs is basically that guy who may not be very artistically inclined himself, but has absolutely uncanny taste and runs a gallery in SOHO that turns unknowns full of potential into superstars of the art world.
Only instead of starving artists, it's technologies.
I think it's safe to say that Doctorow was influential in the adoption of the Creative Commons. Most everyone I know who is familiar with CC tracks back their first experience with it to BoingBoing.
Slashdot Mirror
We didn't. The average Japanese cell phone is still vastly higher-tech than the average US cell phone.
In terms of feature set, the iPhone isn't particularly remarkable compared to run-of-the-mill Japanese handsets. The reason it's become so popular is the same reason it's done so everywhere else: the quality of the UI and the gestalt user experience absolutely blow everything else away.
I think your balmy attempt at dry humor has unraveled and it's just about time to wrap it up before it elicits any more groans or curses.
For major releases, I think the market has actually adapted quite well. Consumers are given a pretty good tradeoff spectrum to decide how much a game is worth to them:
If a game looks to you like a good enough value proposition that you're willing to buy it at launch, you pay $60.
If a game looks worthwhile but you don't need it at launch, you can hold off for a few months and someone will have it for $40 (eventually MSRP reflects this).
If a game looks fun but you wouldn't pay more than a budget title for it (and it isn't a consistent bestseller), play other games for a few more months and you'll see it for $20.
The last game I paid $60 for was LittleBigPlanet, just over a year ago. I've played some other great games this year that I'd been looking forward to, but I haven't paid over $40 for a single one.
Now, download-based games are another story. Steam is getting it right on the PC with the frequent sale promotions and bundles, but Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo barely ever do it. They'll figure it out in time.
Normally I'm against captain-obvious troll-feeding, but this is one case where I think a response is merited.
ACTA awareness needs to reach as far as it possibly can. We are, quite literally, talking about the future of the world here: A global treaty that promises to have a profound effect upon the freedom of all of us is being negotiated in secret.
The maximum must be brought to light before the widest audience. If that means dupe stories, then I'm all for dupes.
This electricity you speak of is only being used for piracy of our content! People are staying up after dark, laboring by the light of these electrical lamps to copy down note-for-note the contents of our valuable original content!
What we propose is a law of three-strikes, not unlike that of baseball. Upon the third finding that a person has been engaged in illegal copying, their electricity is to be cut off forever, preventing their copying in the future.
It is of the utmost importance to our industry and culture that the use of electricity be carefully monitored and restricted, lest it be used illegally. With vigilance and diligence, we can combat the menace that electricity poses to the future of our nation.
The more I learn about this, the more it looks like one of those failed relationships where the guy thought things were getting serious and the girl was never looking for a long-term attachment.
Neither one can be blamed or absolved completely; they both were under the illusion that the other shared their view. Of course, the couple should have talked a little more about what they both wanted out of the relationship, as should Arrington and Fusion Garage have.
Love, or that dizzying sense that you're going to change an industry. Both serotonin.
Even then, you'd probably get something basically recognizable -- I'd imagine the error diffusion just puts a lot of noise in a black area that's too big. Heck, it may even run an unsharp mask over the image to exaggerate details when the predicted output noise reaches a certain threshold.
I bet the algorithms for this bear a number of similarities to photomosaic systems as they're both working with a known set of "subpixel units."
Mod parent up.
It's the gradients on the pieces, and the principles of human vision that JPEG takes advantage of, that give this puzzle its cool effect, creating the appearance of a much higher resolution than the 15x20 "pixels" everyone else is referring to.
You can't make a (easily) recognizable Mona Lisa in 15x20 pixels. You can in 15x20 cosine gradients.
I was attacked by a UFO once.
Then I identified the flying object. It was a stuffed animal thrown by my brother.
You don't seem to understand how Beacon worked. This wasn't some kind of cross-publishing of blog posts -- it was covert publishing of transactions you made in online stores!
That said, even if it were only covert cross-publishing of already public information such as blogs: Did it occur to you that perhaps people choose to publish some information under their real name and some under an alias? As a hypothetical, perhaps you would like to keep your posts on a sexual health message board separate from conversations with your boss? Or would you feel "entitled to some sense of privacy"?
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=721
In practice, this probably doesn't matter, as long as you don't spam or start making alts, but it's something that has thus far made me uneasy enough to not make that "work account" lest my primary account get banned.
TFA:
Any crypto experts want to take a stab at explaining, in lay geek terms, how this is even remotely possible? That's a ~50,000:1 compression ratio.
I don't think ChromeOS will catch on as an "early boot" option any more than some of the options the BIOS manufacturers have been pitching for a few years. The benefits of ChromeOS are pretty much mitigated by sticking it on a full laptop -- you're lugging a fully-featured computer around and you don't have access to any of it, and you could get the whole thing just by waiting around another 30 seconds.
ChromeOS is about having a bare minimum of hardware required to have a smooth internet experience. It's about the proliferation of internet access, always having something nearby that will connect you to whatever you're looking for.
Why does the 3D-rendered "Googlephone" in TFA appear to be running Windows Mobile?
This is a fun rumor, but I don't really get much of a sense of its veracity from this article.
Ever since the introduction of 2G mobile technology, we've just been throwing data back and forth between the towers, and yet even in 2009 the telcos still charge us differently for minutes, text messages, and "data."
It was always going to take a disruptive force to get them to recognize data as data and price it as such. Maybe Google will serve as just that disruption.
See, that's the thing that Apple does so well. They don't invent things. They make other inventions actually work.
Through exhaustive design iteration and engineering, they develop ideas that are "nice on paper but useless in practice" into things that actually deliver on the invention's promise. From desktop UNIX to high-capacity music players to the mobile web browser, Apple invented none of these, yet they all sucked until Apple treated each one not as a feature problem but as a design and usability problem.
That's not invention. But if it isn't innovation, I don't know what is.
Honestly, this is a parallel direction I'd love to see Google expand into. They have great services, but I just don't really like ads that much -- even ads as subtle as Google's. I'd use GMail more if I could pay a reasonable annual fee to skip the ads and have a nice, clean web UI.
I know Google offers an enterprise solution to this effect, but I've never seen a consumer solution marketed.
This is one of those issues I'd love to hear a real patent attorney weigh in on: If someone files a patent on something you can prove you demonstrated publicly at an earlier date, what are your options? Can you file an opposition to the patent? How does it work?
I think that was the goal of OpenMoko, and it failed because it couldn't deliver even a basically competitive user experience.
Fortunately, Android is reasonably FOSSy, and I think that's going to be the best you'll find.
What if, through the developers' virtual arms race, the AIs discover that rushing isn't actually the best way to win? Given enough room to experiment, could new, anti-rush gambits emerge that human players wouldn't have thought of?
About a month ago, I ran into a girl who was obviously
a) not a geek, and
b) would not have a geek boyfriend
and was carrying a jailbroken iPhone. With the easy GUI that the Dev Team has had for awhile, I think it's at the point where it's possible for mainstream users to do it.
While Jobs did need a certain part of his six-month hiatus this year to recover from the liver transplant, the majority of it was recovering from seeing an early prototype of the hardware in question.
Redmond isn't the only place they throw chairs.
As someone who just signed up for two years with AT&T, I can't wait for the iPhone exclusivity to end. Not because I want to jump ship, but because it should make things better for everyone.
The people who are the heaviest users and the most dissatisfied with the service will pretty quickly cough up the ETF and switch to the first competitor that offers it. After a few months, this alone may very well have a noticeable effect on network performance.
More importantly, though, as AT&T actually begins to feel the financial effects of fleeing iPhone users, they're going to have no choice but to ramp up the infrastructure upgrades to compete. In other words, the market will actually start working like it's supposed to.
Jobs is basically that guy who may not be very artistically inclined himself, but has absolutely uncanny taste and runs a gallery in SOHO that turns unknowns full of potential into superstars of the art world.
Only instead of starving artists, it's technologies.
I think it's safe to say that Doctorow was influential in the adoption of the Creative Commons. Most everyone I know who is familiar with CC tracks back their first experience with it to BoingBoing.