Recently it was mentioned on a documentary I've seen: 10,000 years of evolution, and the best thing to conserve information we came up with was stone tablets.
It's unfortunately true.
Wouldn't laser etching on a hardened-carbon (aka diamond) surface fare better than a stone tablet? As a bonus, you get to write a lot smaller than you could on a stone tablet, so you can pack a lot more information per tablet.
Perhaps it's true that the concept of a stone tablet is the best way to store information, but I'd bet there's a modern, high-tech way of implementing that concept that's far better than what the ancient world was able to produce.
It would be a very interesting project to try something like that with the goal to make information last millenia.
You mean something like this? Their main goal is to make a clock that will last 10,000 years, but it looks like they're working on library-ish projects too.
That's along the lines of what I was thinking when I read the original question. If the difference in battery life comes while playing a DVD, it's very possible that the application running under windows is making use of a hardware decoder and the application running under Linux is not. From the looks of the W500 product page, it looks like it comes with an ATI video card that has support for hardware decoding of lots of formats, including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, so it's likely that the Windows side is taking advantage of the capabilities of the GPU.
The poster should pull up the task manager under Windows to get an idea of the processor utilization and then get that from top on the Linux side and I'd bet that the Linux side is using a lot more CPU. He could also measure apples to apples and see what the battery life is like when browsing the internet using both OSs. It's likely that this comparison would be much more favorable to Linux. If it is the case that the difference in battery life is due to Linux decoding in software, there are likely forums for the Linux DVD playing application that could help the poster enable hardware decoding.
FWIW, I use Handbrake to rip to mp4 on my Mac and can easily get through 2 films before I get a battery warning. Running the optical drive while playing the movie uses more battery. I haven't tried a direct VOB rip, but I imagine it would be fairly similar to similar to the mp4 since both get offloaded to my laptop's GPU.
Telling him he can't use social networking sites to do so is a more narrow restriction, what's more there is a rational justification for it.
That's also pretty broad. A more narrow law would force sex offenders to include that fact in their profile. It could also force social networking sites to ask new users whether they've ever been convicted of a sex crime and put certain warnings in place to ensure that other users know when they're dealing with someone who has. Provisions could also be made for limiting or prohibiting interactions with minors as well, since just about every social networking site makes you give age/birth date.
If social networking sites were forced to implement something like that (which shouldn't be too complicated) and people were legally obligated to answer it truthfully, no one's speech would be limited. It would be more akin to the current laws that force sex offenders to notify people in the area where they live of their status. Free speech protects a person's right to say something, not the right for what gets said to be heard by others. If the laws were aimed at ensuring that potential listeners know just who they are listening to, you get the same effect without limiting the right for anyone to say whatever they want.
Why would you have to expose your videos over the web? Chrome already uses FFMpeg for decoding, is it that much of a stretch to believe that they'd include encoding support in Chrome OS and have a JavaScript API for dealing with it? And with HTML5's local storage facilities, the original and resulting files can be stored locally, so they don't need to be sent anywhere.
It feels like people have pre-judged Chrome before it's been released and are making assumptions that it's just an OS which launches a web browser. If that's all it is, I'll be very disappointed with Google. But knowing Google and some of their vision for computing going forward, I highly doubt that's what they'll create. I'm expecting something that's more along the lines of an OS that lets you build your application using web technologies (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS) while not being subjected to the limitations of a web application. But because they do use web technologies, it will become extremely easy to integrate desktop applications with web content. How easy is it to integrate Google Maps support into a desktop application now? Some toolkits have a Browser widget that makes it somewhat possible, but if the app was coded in JavaScript, it just uses Google's existing embedding API. HTML5 and O3D make a lot of things possible using web technologies that, up until now, haven't been possible and I expect Chrome OS to show that.
We seem to be the ONLY country that is buying into this totally open "free trade" crap, and look what it has gotten us: we no longer have a manufacturing base, we no longer have electronics being produced here. Hell if a major war broke out tomorrow could we even provide for our troops without Chinese supplies? Probably not.
The problem I see with your line of reasoning is your use of the term "we." The notion that national borders are what group people with common interests together is an antiquated one. It's much more apt to group people by their economic condition. The wealthy that run the companies that benefit from cheap manufacturing and off-shored IT do not share the same interests as US IT workers. Third-world workers are another group themselves.
Governments are tools used by the powerful groups to further their interests. They have created a system of government with the illusion of choice to keep people thinking that they have some measure of control over their government and that their national allegiance binds them together with everyone else in their country. Globalization has enabled the rich and powerful to wage class warfare on a global scale. We've seen the steady erosion of the US middle class for quite some time now. Whereas it used to be possible for a family to live comfortably on a single salary, it now takes two salaries to be comfortable. They've sold the notion of Women's liberation and equality (which aren't conceptually bad) to mask the fact that the second salary is what's maintaining the lifestyle we've become accustomed to.
'We' need to wake up and realize who is an who isn't representing our interests or we'll continue to be taken advantage of.
Anyone here old enough to remember the first ecology movement?
You mean the one where, among other things, John Muir convinced president Roosevelt to set aside the land that's now our national parks? I'm guessing there aren't too many people around who are old enough to remember that, but I'd say that movement was pretty damn successful.
Or was there one before that that you're referring to?
FWIW, at one of the sessions at Google I/O, a Chrome dev offered a reason for why they do that. From what he said, Chrome will use usage patterns from other Chrome users to pre-fetch DNS results of likely off-site links. For example, a Chrome user that views this story will likely have their browser find DNS results for googleblog.blogspot.com and www.appscout.com prior to clicking on either of those two links since a significant proportion of previous visitors will have clicked on those links. Of course, [insert joke about no one RTFA here].
From his whole presentation, I got the distinct impression that Chrome developers are almost blindly focused on performance, often to a fault. I do wish that Chrome gave you the ability to turn off some of these optimizations, but I can appreciate Google's attempts to make a browser that is as fast as can be. Given Chrome's current position as mainly a concept browser that's pushing other vendors to improve performance, I like that Chrome developers are trying anything and everything to make browsing faster. That doesn't mean that I'll use Chrome as my primary browser any time soon, but there's no denying that Firefox and Safari are better browsers today due in part to Chrome, so for that I'm happy.
I say let them keep their last mile infrastructure, but we take back the $200 billion they pocketed that we gave them to build out the broadband infrastructure and combine it with the funds Obama has allocated for broadband infrastructure and create a program to help communities deploy last-mile fiber. The government agency could provide guidance, planning, bulk purchasing power and partial matching funds to communities that want to pitch in for the rest of the cost.
If a sizable portion of the country received broadband through municipally-owned last-mile infrastructure, competition would sort out the entire net neutrality debate since the barrier for entry to become a broadband provider would go way down. More competition would mean consumers have a choice between neutral and non-neutral networks. If neutrality is really important to people, they'll choose neutral networks. If it's just BitTorrent users wanting to max out their pipes at the expense of others, they'll all choose neutral providers while the rest of the people will choose cheaper, non-neutral providers. Either way, people will get the option to pay for what they actually want.
The guy said he was from Switzerland where, last time I checked, English wasn't an official language. I've yet to meet a Swiss person who speaks less than 3 languages.
Let me put it this way...his English is way better than your German, French, Italian or any of the hybrids spoken in his country. And he probably speaks at least 2 of those languages.
The flaw in his post was that he was comparing a relatively wealthy monoculture that's mostly socialist government with America's multi-cultural capitalist society. His country has spent the past 400 years sitting in the middle of Europe's squabbles all the while gladly holding onto the vast sums of wealth of other European nations. And when you take a rich country and ensure that everyone is provided for, you don't end up with absentee parents, poverty or classes with a 40:1 student-teacher ratio.
Is it any wonder that a child with a drug-addicted single parent would grow up to be less well behaved than a child that grew up with two middle-class parents? Well, guess what, the kids in the schools in the rich suburbs are much like the Swiss kids he described. The schools are well funded by local bond initiatives and fund raisers. The kids all have college-educated parents and are expected to follow that path. And, for the most part, they do. Having been a student at both an inner-city public school (you may remember a certain "Ebonics" fiasco that garnered my school district national attention) and a prep high school, I've seen both extremes. I've seen where the inner-city kids are coming from. And I've seen where the upper-middle-class kids were coming from. And that's the part that makes all the difference.
The bad kids need to be identified as early as possible, and shunted off into a different program where they're prepared for careers as janitors and burger-flippers
While I agree with some of this, the janitors and burger-flippers part is wrong. The point of identifying these kids early would be to segregate those kids that are capable of learning and contributing something original to society from those that can't. But those that can't can become janitors or burger-flippers without any education...those jobs are frequently cited as needing zero experience to be able to do. What we need to do is take the kids that aren't on the college track and put them onto the trade school track. Something that's specialized to a certain skilled job and is followed up by an apprenticeship with someone actually in the field.
You can teach kids what they'd need to know to be a plumber, electrician or other skilled profession that will allow them to earn a real living rather than trying to make it on minimum wage jobs. We do kids a disservice by trying to make them learn things they're just not equipped to learn in school rather than teaching them something they can apply in the real world to earn a living.
I'd never advocate making the trade school route mandatory, since I believe everyone should at least have the opportunity to try to go to college. But I think if you gave kids the choice of traditional high school or 2 years at a trade school followed up by a 1 year internship, you'd get a lot of takers that would get out of the way of the people going to college.
Right, and that doesn't even account for all the shares that are owned by funds where the fund managers act as a proxy for the actual shareholders. I own quite a bit of stock in my 401k and yet I've never voted for anything. So it's very likely that some of the actual voters weren't even shareholders.
However unlikely, it's technically possible for 62% of the stock to vote for the deal without a single shareholder doing so.
Songwriters are a safer bet than performers. If a band or "artist" has an album that tanks, their next albums don't sell as well and they fade into obscurity. A songwriter can have a few songs that are not well received and only the artist that performs them takes the hit. This allows the record company to keep a relative few songwriters in reserve pumping out songs to be sung by the latest "attractive person that can almost sing in tune." You can always find pretty people that can sing well enough to fool the American public into thinking they're talented...hell, you can turn it into a TV show and earn massive ratings and, in the process, handle most of the initial marketing needed to gain the public's attention.
By ensuring that only songwriters get paid, the record companies can ensure that no one ever has any leverage over them. Songwriters can be replaced and can't exactly release albums on their own since they're usually not pretty, famous or talented enough to succeed on their own. The only times that the record companies lose control are when the songwriters become popular performing their own works. At that point, they can hold out for more money or, worse yet, have the money and popularity necessary to start their own labels. The more you can separate the money and the fame and place yourself between the two, the more necessary you become and the more money you make.
I see it as more of a way to get a bit more muscle behind their lobby. OTA radio has a long tradition that has lobbied successfully to get to the position it's currently in. If Pandora can sell the argument that webcasters are no different than OTA broadcasters, they can then backup the lobbyists of the OTA broadcasters when it comes to fighting the record companies. But as long as OTA broadcasters have different rules from webcasters, the webcasters will be on their own in the fight against the record companies.
It really doesn't seem like a backhanded rebuttal to the recording industry since they're commenting in support of a bill lobbied for by the recording industry. It seems like the industry has already decided that it thinks OTA radio should pay more. It seems like a smart play, to me, for Pandora to first win the argument that they're no different from OTA radio. Then, once they've established that, they can argue for lower fees from a position that's easier to argue. People can conceptualize OTA radio since it's a known quantity. It's not something that was introduced to us as a new concept, so people can think more rationally about it. Lot's of us have bemoaned the glut of "X on the internet" legislation that codifies nothing new except to apply a different standard for an existing concept to the application of that concept on the internet. If Pandora and other webcasters can break down the distinction between broadcasting OTA and broadcasting on the internet, that's the first step to a sane discussion about what the fair licensing rates should be.
I'm betting that if this play succeeds, this is the first step in banding together to jointly fight against the record companies.
This whole subject has sparked a huge debate in the Java community over the proposed specification for Java modules (basically OSGi, but with language support and entirely incompatible.) Google for "JSR 277 controversy" and you'll find plenty of forum threads and articles with everyone arguing for their own version numbering scheme. The developers of the spec claim to have done a fairly exhaustive survey of real-world version numbering, but then seem to have chosen to standardize the version numbering used at Sun, which has caused a bit of an uproar. The only thing that has been agreed upon is that there really isn't one versioning scheme that everyone can agree on.
The main issue, as I understand it, is finding a versioning scheme that allows for automatic sorting to allow fuzzy dependencies (i.e. version 3.5 or later.) In theory, this sounds like a great thing and one that should be easy to accomplish. And it is simple for any one versioning scheme. But when you hit real-world usage, things start to get complex.
1) Not every app belongs on the web. In fact, most do not.
Why is everyone assuming that an OS built around a web browser won't be able to run apps installed locally? Google was one of the first large companies to venture into the offline mode for their web applications with Gears and has been a strong supporter of the offline storage capabilities in HTML 5.
I'd be willing to bet that the Chrome OS encourages developers to use web technologies, but also allows them to package them in some way that gets installed locally and run with data stored locally. Sure, it will be trivially easy for applications to include web content, but it won't be a requirement. And if they do it right, they can also make it really easy for applications to update themselves. This strikes me as an interesting idea in that it will blur the lines between a desktop and web application since they're both implemented with the same programming languages/paradigms. They've already done this to a certain extent with GWT by giving developers of web applications a toolkit similar to what's available to native application developers. This seems like a similar effort to bring developers the ability to create native apps using the same technologies they currently use to create web applications.
The whole things strikes me as similar to WebOS on the Pre. Like that platform, there will probably be JavaScript APIs to access capabilities of the local hardware not normally available to web applications. One foray they've already made into this area is their O3D API which allows web pages to take advantage of hardware graphic acceleration. If you look at some of the demos they have available, I don't see any reason to believe that it won't be possible to write CAD, image manipulation (i.e. Photoshop) or even games using web technologies. And those are the commonly-cited examples of applications that don't work as web applications.
I see this is as yet another effort on their part to make web programming the dominant programming paradigm. The more applications are developed in this way, the easier it will be for Google to allow developers to embed their services into applications. Google has been very successful in getting adoption of their embedding APIs in websites and I gather they'd like to do the same thing when it comes to desktop applications.
Re:Some say that the freebie version will end, too
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Google Apps Leave Beta
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I know it's not ending, but I would be fine with them ending it so long as they created a price tier between $0 and $50 per user per year. Even if they didn't drop the free version, I'd be willing to pay for a few extra features. If I could pay $50 per year for specific users, I'd probably go for it for my own account and those of my immediate family. But I've got about 30 friends who I've given email accounts to and there's no way I'm paying $1500/year.
I think there's a real opportunity for them to make a bit more on Apps if they separated out some of the enterprise-level features (SSO, support, etc) from the non-enterprise-but-pay-for features (no ads, increased storage). Give me a chance to pay $200/year or below for increased features and I'll do it, if only because the service is worth $200/year to me in its current free form.
But I cannot believe so many of us have brains that need chemical help to function adequately.
I don't think it's that people need these drugs to function adequately, I think it's more of a coping mechanism for a lifestyle that we're just not well adapted to. Our society is so overstimulated that many people can't cope with it over long periods of time. For many people, this results in a constant level of stress. And not the touchy-feely stress that people talk about, stress that directly leads to the release of certain chemicals, like adrenaline, in our bodies that are intended for short-term use in survival situations.
My personal belief is that the majority of the people on anti-depressants would get better if they could remove as many of the stress-causing elements of their lives. For example, ditch the cell phone, TV and limit yourself to only a couple of hours in front of a computer each day (including work), and I think a lot of people would find they don't need the drugs. Unfortunately, these kinds of lifestyle changes just aren't feasible for most people so the drugs end up being used as the coping mechanism.
So I agree with you that most people do not need these drugs in an absolute sense, but I do believe that so many people need them in the context of the lives they're living.
FWIW, I live in San Francisco proper and pay about $7k/year in rent. I ride my bike to work, so my monthly expenses for are only a couple hundred on top of that. When you add in food and other expenses, I could easily get by on $20k/year. I probably end up living on around $35k, because I like gadgets and eat lunch out with coworkers most days.
So $80k can definitely be a living wage. That said, I live so frugally and sock away so much of my salary (more 50%) so that I might buy a property in the city at some point in the relatively near future. That this is necessary on a mid-6 figure salary does argue for your point. It all depends on your definition of a living wage. If that means eventually owning a home in SF and having enough to raise kids, then $80k doesn't seem like a whole lot. But for a young renter with no kids, $80k is quite a bit more than is necessary to live comfortably in San Francisco.
Re:It still has quite a bit of "suckiness"
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Unlocking Android
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There's the HTC Magic that's out in some countries. This is the phone that Google gave to all the attendees at their recent I/O conference.
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but I thought I'd add a few other suggestions...
- In addition to green tea, drink lots of water. Dehydration is another source of stress that is easily remedied. However sometimes people don't realize that they're dehydrated when they're drinking fluids with caffeine.
- Get rid of your television. This may sound reactionary, but this had the biggest impact for me. Watching TV stimulated my brain in such a way that my mind wouldn't "turn off" when I needed to get to sleep. After switching to reading books in the evenings, my sleep has become much more restorative. Add to that the one-way nature of TV and you get put into a passive mode that's hard to break out of when you need to start contributing something.
- Exercise regularly. Getting lots of exercise can help stabilize your mood and has other health benefits on top of that. It's also a great chance to think through problems you're running into in your work. For me, the vast majority of my coding is done in my head or scribbled on post-its long before I sit down in front of a computer to type it out.
- Get lots of sunlight. Jobs that require us to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours straight too often deprive us of natural light for much of the day. Natural light is, IMHO, essential to maintaining our internal clocks and allowing us to truly shutdown and recuperate each night.
- Take a daily multi-vitamin. With the highly-processed nature of foods these days, it's all too easy to have a diet that's nutrient-poor in some area. Taking a multi-vitamin is probably the easiest way to remedy this. Also good is adjusting the diet to include more unprocessed foods and finding free-range meats that don't have hormones.
There's a bunch more specific recommendations my doctor gave me that have helped too, but these are the ones that I've found to be most helpful.
I thought the same thing until an international flight a couple of years ago. I was flying home from Japan and knew the flight would be long and I always get dehydrated when flying, so I brought 4 empty bottles with me. This worked fine at Narita and I was able to fill one of them up for the short first leg of my flight. And it even looked like it would work at the Seoul airport since I was able to fill up all 4 once I was beyond the security checkpoint.
But then it came time to board the airplane and there was yet another checkpoint for all flights to the US where they took all 4 of my bottles. The checkpoint was literally at the gate just before boarding the airplane, so there was no opportunity to fill the bottles beyond the checkpoint. And, of course, the flight attendant said they didn't have enough water on board to give me my own bottle.
So yes, there are many times where you can fill up your bottle beyond the security checkpoints. But no, it's not always possible and there are instances where people have a legitimate gripe about the availability of water.
P.S. As someone who does what you say for most flights, you can avoid the pressure issue by filling your bottle to the brim with water since the volume of water doesn't really change when the pressure changes. It's only when there's air in the bottle that you have to worry about pressure changes.
I'd say relying on robots rather than having our troops shot at and bombed is a GOOD thing.
Not necessarily. To quote a particularly terrible movie which had a few redeeming lines (Stealth), "I just don't think war should turn into a video game." Removing the human cost to war removes a lot of the incentive to avoid war. And so long as there are people dying on either side, it's probably better that both sides see casualties rather than only one side.
Until we can arrange for all wars to be fought between robotic fighting forces, war will remain a terrible thing. And it needs to be terrible for people to give it the kind of respect that it deserves. It's already bad enough that the US is so much more advanced everyone else. We've seen what happens when you put someone with an itchy trigger finger in charge of an army that, for all intents and purposes, can't be defeated. The more we put robots in harm's way rather than soldiers, the more we're going to see putting those robots in harm's way as a solution to our problems.
Morally, there should be no difference between an American life and a foreign life. The mindset of "as long as it isn't anyone I know" is morally corrupt. Robotic fighting forces perpetuate that morally corrupt mindset.
There's another option...and no, it's not whining about it online hoping that AT&T will generously forgo the profits they're contractually obligated to receive.
There are plenty of sites that offer you out of your contract if they or you can find someone who wants in to take your place. If you own an iPhone 3G that's in good condition, you can offer people the option to get an iPhone 3G and a 1-year contract with no up-front cost. If they were buying the iPhone not-S 3G new, they would have to pay $99-$199 up front and have a 2-year contract. There's got to be plenty of people that would find that offer appealing.
And at that point, you're out of your contract and free to drop $299 on the new one.
Also his comment is just stupid because any contributor to ffmpeg has "standing to enforce" and sue google.
Regardless of the legality of what Google is doing, the point that only the ffmpeg folks are able to enforce the LGPL is still significant. Google's relationship with the project is likely quite good. They're sponsoring 9 students as part of their Summer of Code program. If one of the contributors were to file suit, it's likely that other project members could persuade that person to drop the suit.
Even if they are in violation of the letter of the law, they're not really in violation of the spirit of the law. They're giving back to the open source community by releasing the source to their browser. And they're paying to add new functionality to ffmpeg. The only issue is that their legal team felt the need to cover the company by purchasing a license. And they would have been foolish not to, since the threat of a LGPL lawsuit is much less than a patent infringement lawsuit. AFAIK, even if they were to lose, they would be given a chance to come into compliance. And this only becomes an issue if someone who contributed to ffmpeg feels that this minor issue merits the hassle of a lawsuit and probably end any GSoC sponsorship for the project in the future...seems unlikely to me.
So the point that only the ffmpeg contributor have standing to attempt to enforce the LGPL seems pretty important since it likely means that no one with the right to do so will go through a ton of hassle to iron out a few legal details when the company has been nothing but gracious towards the project as a whole and even towards the open source community as a whole. There's far too many companies violating the (L)GPL that are acting in bad faith attempting to leach off the open source community that would make better targets. ffmpeg even maintains a list of such companies on their site.
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Wouldn't laser etching on a hardened-carbon (aka diamond) surface fare better than a stone tablet? As a bonus, you get to write a lot smaller than you could on a stone tablet, so you can pack a lot more information per tablet.
Perhaps it's true that the concept of a stone tablet is the best way to store information, but I'd bet there's a modern, high-tech way of implementing that concept that's far better than what the ancient world was able to produce.
You mean something like this? Their main goal is to make a clock that will last 10,000 years, but it looks like they're working on library-ish projects too.
That's along the lines of what I was thinking when I read the original question. If the difference in battery life comes while playing a DVD, it's very possible that the application running under windows is making use of a hardware decoder and the application running under Linux is not. From the looks of the W500 product page, it looks like it comes with an ATI video card that has support for hardware decoding of lots of formats, including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, so it's likely that the Windows side is taking advantage of the capabilities of the GPU.
The poster should pull up the task manager under Windows to get an idea of the processor utilization and then get that from top on the Linux side and I'd bet that the Linux side is using a lot more CPU. He could also measure apples to apples and see what the battery life is like when browsing the internet using both OSs. It's likely that this comparison would be much more favorable to Linux. If it is the case that the difference in battery life is due to Linux decoding in software, there are likely forums for the Linux DVD playing application that could help the poster enable hardware decoding.
FWIW, I use Handbrake to rip to mp4 on my Mac and can easily get through 2 films before I get a battery warning. Running the optical drive while playing the movie uses more battery. I haven't tried a direct VOB rip, but I imagine it would be fairly similar to similar to the mp4 since both get offloaded to my laptop's GPU.
That's also pretty broad. A more narrow law would force sex offenders to include that fact in their profile. It could also force social networking sites to ask new users whether they've ever been convicted of a sex crime and put certain warnings in place to ensure that other users know when they're dealing with someone who has. Provisions could also be made for limiting or prohibiting interactions with minors as well, since just about every social networking site makes you give age/birth date.
If social networking sites were forced to implement something like that (which shouldn't be too complicated) and people were legally obligated to answer it truthfully, no one's speech would be limited. It would be more akin to the current laws that force sex offenders to notify people in the area where they live of their status. Free speech protects a person's right to say something, not the right for what gets said to be heard by others. If the laws were aimed at ensuring that potential listeners know just who they are listening to, you get the same effect without limiting the right for anyone to say whatever they want.
You mean something like this? I'm betting that the reason they created it was at least partially motivated by the need for it in Chrome OS.
Why would you have to expose your videos over the web? Chrome already uses FFMpeg for decoding, is it that much of a stretch to believe that they'd include encoding support in Chrome OS and have a JavaScript API for dealing with it? And with HTML5's local storage facilities, the original and resulting files can be stored locally, so they don't need to be sent anywhere.
It feels like people have pre-judged Chrome before it's been released and are making assumptions that it's just an OS which launches a web browser. If that's all it is, I'll be very disappointed with Google. But knowing Google and some of their vision for computing going forward, I highly doubt that's what they'll create. I'm expecting something that's more along the lines of an OS that lets you build your application using web technologies (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS) while not being subjected to the limitations of a web application. But because they do use web technologies, it will become extremely easy to integrate desktop applications with web content. How easy is it to integrate Google Maps support into a desktop application now? Some toolkits have a Browser widget that makes it somewhat possible, but if the app was coded in JavaScript, it just uses Google's existing embedding API. HTML5 and O3D make a lot of things possible using web technologies that, up until now, haven't been possible and I expect Chrome OS to show that.
The problem I see with your line of reasoning is your use of the term "we." The notion that national borders are what group people with common interests together is an antiquated one. It's much more apt to group people by their economic condition. The wealthy that run the companies that benefit from cheap manufacturing and off-shored IT do not share the same interests as US IT workers. Third-world workers are another group themselves.
Governments are tools used by the powerful groups to further their interests. They have created a system of government with the illusion of choice to keep people thinking that they have some measure of control over their government and that their national allegiance binds them together with everyone else in their country. Globalization has enabled the rich and powerful to wage class warfare on a global scale. We've seen the steady erosion of the US middle class for quite some time now. Whereas it used to be possible for a family to live comfortably on a single salary, it now takes two salaries to be comfortable. They've sold the notion of Women's liberation and equality (which aren't conceptually bad) to mask the fact that the second salary is what's maintaining the lifestyle we've become accustomed to.
'We' need to wake up and realize who is an who isn't representing our interests or we'll continue to be taken advantage of.
You mean the one where, among other things, John Muir convinced president Roosevelt to set aside the land that's now our national parks? I'm guessing there aren't too many people around who are old enough to remember that, but I'd say that movement was pretty damn successful.
Or was there one before that that you're referring to?
FWIW, at one of the sessions at Google I/O, a Chrome dev offered a reason for why they do that. From what he said, Chrome will use usage patterns from other Chrome users to pre-fetch DNS results of likely off-site links. For example, a Chrome user that views this story will likely have their browser find DNS results for googleblog.blogspot.com and www.appscout.com prior to clicking on either of those two links since a significant proportion of previous visitors will have clicked on those links. Of course, [insert joke about no one RTFA here].
From his whole presentation, I got the distinct impression that Chrome developers are almost blindly focused on performance, often to a fault. I do wish that Chrome gave you the ability to turn off some of these optimizations, but I can appreciate Google's attempts to make a browser that is as fast as can be. Given Chrome's current position as mainly a concept browser that's pushing other vendors to improve performance, I like that Chrome developers are trying anything and everything to make browsing faster. That doesn't mean that I'll use Chrome as my primary browser any time soon, but there's no denying that Firefox and Safari are better browsers today due in part to Chrome, so for that I'm happy.
I say let them keep their last mile infrastructure, but we take back the $200 billion they pocketed that we gave them to build out the broadband infrastructure and combine it with the funds Obama has allocated for broadband infrastructure and create a program to help communities deploy last-mile fiber. The government agency could provide guidance, planning, bulk purchasing power and partial matching funds to communities that want to pitch in for the rest of the cost.
If a sizable portion of the country received broadband through municipally-owned last-mile infrastructure, competition would sort out the entire net neutrality debate since the barrier for entry to become a broadband provider would go way down. More competition would mean consumers have a choice between neutral and non-neutral networks. If neutrality is really important to people, they'll choose neutral networks. If it's just BitTorrent users wanting to max out their pipes at the expense of others, they'll all choose neutral providers while the rest of the people will choose cheaper, non-neutral providers. Either way, people will get the option to pay for what they actually want.
You really want to go there?
The guy said he was from Switzerland where, last time I checked, English wasn't an official language. I've yet to meet a Swiss person who speaks less than 3 languages.
Let me put it this way...his English is way better than your German, French, Italian or any of the hybrids spoken in his country. And he probably speaks at least 2 of those languages.
The flaw in his post was that he was comparing a relatively wealthy monoculture that's mostly socialist government with America's multi-cultural capitalist society. His country has spent the past 400 years sitting in the middle of Europe's squabbles all the while gladly holding onto the vast sums of wealth of other European nations. And when you take a rich country and ensure that everyone is provided for, you don't end up with absentee parents, poverty or classes with a 40:1 student-teacher ratio.
Is it any wonder that a child with a drug-addicted single parent would grow up to be less well behaved than a child that grew up with two middle-class parents? Well, guess what, the kids in the schools in the rich suburbs are much like the Swiss kids he described. The schools are well funded by local bond initiatives and fund raisers. The kids all have college-educated parents and are expected to follow that path. And, for the most part, they do. Having been a student at both an inner-city public school (you may remember a certain "Ebonics" fiasco that garnered my school district national attention) and a prep high school, I've seen both extremes. I've seen where the inner-city kids are coming from. And I've seen where the upper-middle-class kids were coming from. And that's the part that makes all the difference.
While I agree with some of this, the janitors and burger-flippers part is wrong. The point of identifying these kids early would be to segregate those kids that are capable of learning and contributing something original to society from those that can't. But those that can't can become janitors or burger-flippers without any education...those jobs are frequently cited as needing zero experience to be able to do. What we need to do is take the kids that aren't on the college track and put them onto the trade school track. Something that's specialized to a certain skilled job and is followed up by an apprenticeship with someone actually in the field.
You can teach kids what they'd need to know to be a plumber, electrician or other skilled profession that will allow them to earn a real living rather than trying to make it on minimum wage jobs. We do kids a disservice by trying to make them learn things they're just not equipped to learn in school rather than teaching them something they can apply in the real world to earn a living.
I'd never advocate making the trade school route mandatory, since I believe everyone should at least have the opportunity to try to go to college. But I think if you gave kids the choice of traditional high school or 2 years at a trade school followed up by a 1 year internship, you'd get a lot of takers that would get out of the way of the people going to college.
Right, and that doesn't even account for all the shares that are owned by funds where the fund managers act as a proxy for the actual shareholders. I own quite a bit of stock in my 401k and yet I've never voted for anything. So it's very likely that some of the actual voters weren't even shareholders.
However unlikely, it's technically possible for 62% of the stock to vote for the deal without a single shareholder doing so.
Songwriters are a safer bet than performers. If a band or "artist" has an album that tanks, their next albums don't sell as well and they fade into obscurity. A songwriter can have a few songs that are not well received and only the artist that performs them takes the hit. This allows the record company to keep a relative few songwriters in reserve pumping out songs to be sung by the latest "attractive person that can almost sing in tune." You can always find pretty people that can sing well enough to fool the American public into thinking they're talented...hell, you can turn it into a TV show and earn massive ratings and, in the process, handle most of the initial marketing needed to gain the public's attention.
By ensuring that only songwriters get paid, the record companies can ensure that no one ever has any leverage over them. Songwriters can be replaced and can't exactly release albums on their own since they're usually not pretty, famous or talented enough to succeed on their own. The only times that the record companies lose control are when the songwriters become popular performing their own works. At that point, they can hold out for more money or, worse yet, have the money and popularity necessary to start their own labels. The more you can separate the money and the fame and place yourself between the two, the more necessary you become and the more money you make.
I see it as more of a way to get a bit more muscle behind their lobby. OTA radio has a long tradition that has lobbied successfully to get to the position it's currently in. If Pandora can sell the argument that webcasters are no different than OTA broadcasters, they can then backup the lobbyists of the OTA broadcasters when it comes to fighting the record companies. But as long as OTA broadcasters have different rules from webcasters, the webcasters will be on their own in the fight against the record companies.
It really doesn't seem like a backhanded rebuttal to the recording industry since they're commenting in support of a bill lobbied for by the recording industry. It seems like the industry has already decided that it thinks OTA radio should pay more. It seems like a smart play, to me, for Pandora to first win the argument that they're no different from OTA radio. Then, once they've established that, they can argue for lower fees from a position that's easier to argue. People can conceptualize OTA radio since it's a known quantity. It's not something that was introduced to us as a new concept, so people can think more rationally about it. Lot's of us have bemoaned the glut of "X on the internet" legislation that codifies nothing new except to apply a different standard for an existing concept to the application of that concept on the internet. If Pandora and other webcasters can break down the distinction between broadcasting OTA and broadcasting on the internet, that's the first step to a sane discussion about what the fair licensing rates should be.
I'm betting that if this play succeeds, this is the first step in banding together to jointly fight against the record companies.
This whole subject has sparked a huge debate in the Java community over the proposed specification for Java modules (basically OSGi, but with language support and entirely incompatible.) Google for "JSR 277 controversy" and you'll find plenty of forum threads and articles with everyone arguing for their own version numbering scheme. The developers of the spec claim to have done a fairly exhaustive survey of real-world version numbering, but then seem to have chosen to standardize the version numbering used at Sun, which has caused a bit of an uproar. The only thing that has been agreed upon is that there really isn't one versioning scheme that everyone can agree on.
The main issue, as I understand it, is finding a versioning scheme that allows for automatic sorting to allow fuzzy dependencies (i.e. version 3.5 or later.) In theory, this sounds like a great thing and one that should be easy to accomplish. And it is simple for any one versioning scheme. But when you hit real-world usage, things start to get complex.
Why is everyone assuming that an OS built around a web browser won't be able to run apps installed locally? Google was one of the first large companies to venture into the offline mode for their web applications with Gears and has been a strong supporter of the offline storage capabilities in HTML 5.
I'd be willing to bet that the Chrome OS encourages developers to use web technologies, but also allows them to package them in some way that gets installed locally and run with data stored locally. Sure, it will be trivially easy for applications to include web content, but it won't be a requirement. And if they do it right, they can also make it really easy for applications to update themselves. This strikes me as an interesting idea in that it will blur the lines between a desktop and web application since they're both implemented with the same programming languages/paradigms. They've already done this to a certain extent with GWT by giving developers of web applications a toolkit similar to what's available to native application developers. This seems like a similar effort to bring developers the ability to create native apps using the same technologies they currently use to create web applications.
The whole things strikes me as similar to WebOS on the Pre. Like that platform, there will probably be JavaScript APIs to access capabilities of the local hardware not normally available to web applications. One foray they've already made into this area is their O3D API which allows web pages to take advantage of hardware graphic acceleration. If you look at some of the demos they have available, I don't see any reason to believe that it won't be possible to write CAD, image manipulation (i.e. Photoshop) or even games using web technologies. And those are the commonly-cited examples of applications that don't work as web applications.
I see this is as yet another effort on their part to make web programming the dominant programming paradigm. The more applications are developed in this way, the easier it will be for Google to allow developers to embed their services into applications. Google has been very successful in getting adoption of their embedding APIs in websites and I gather they'd like to do the same thing when it comes to desktop applications.
I know it's not ending, but I would be fine with them ending it so long as they created a price tier between $0 and $50 per user per year. Even if they didn't drop the free version, I'd be willing to pay for a few extra features. If I could pay $50 per year for specific users, I'd probably go for it for my own account and those of my immediate family. But I've got about 30 friends who I've given email accounts to and there's no way I'm paying $1500/year.
I think there's a real opportunity for them to make a bit more on Apps if they separated out some of the enterprise-level features (SSO, support, etc) from the non-enterprise-but-pay-for features (no ads, increased storage). Give me a chance to pay $200/year or below for increased features and I'll do it, if only because the service is worth $200/year to me in its current free form.
I don't think it's that people need these drugs to function adequately, I think it's more of a coping mechanism for a lifestyle that we're just not well adapted to. Our society is so overstimulated that many people can't cope with it over long periods of time. For many people, this results in a constant level of stress. And not the touchy-feely stress that people talk about, stress that directly leads to the release of certain chemicals, like adrenaline, in our bodies that are intended for short-term use in survival situations.
My personal belief is that the majority of the people on anti-depressants would get better if they could remove as many of the stress-causing elements of their lives. For example, ditch the cell phone, TV and limit yourself to only a couple of hours in front of a computer each day (including work), and I think a lot of people would find they don't need the drugs. Unfortunately, these kinds of lifestyle changes just aren't feasible for most people so the drugs end up being used as the coping mechanism.
So I agree with you that most people do not need these drugs in an absolute sense, but I do believe that so many people need them in the context of the lives they're living.
FWIW, I live in San Francisco proper and pay about $7k/year in rent. I ride my bike to work, so my monthly expenses for are only a couple hundred on top of that. When you add in food and other expenses, I could easily get by on $20k/year. I probably end up living on around $35k, because I like gadgets and eat lunch out with coworkers most days.
So $80k can definitely be a living wage. That said, I live so frugally and sock away so much of my salary (more 50%) so that I might buy a property in the city at some point in the relatively near future. That this is necessary on a mid-6 figure salary does argue for your point. It all depends on your definition of a living wage. If that means eventually owning a home in SF and having enough to raise kids, then $80k doesn't seem like a whole lot. But for a young renter with no kids, $80k is quite a bit more than is necessary to live comfortably in San Francisco.
There's the HTC Magic that's out in some countries. This is the phone that Google gave to all the attendees at their recent I/O conference.
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but I thought I'd add a few other suggestions...
- In addition to green tea, drink lots of water. Dehydration is another source of stress that is easily remedied. However sometimes people don't realize that they're dehydrated when they're drinking fluids with caffeine.
- Get rid of your television. This may sound reactionary, but this had the biggest impact for me. Watching TV stimulated my brain in such a way that my mind wouldn't "turn off" when I needed to get to sleep. After switching to reading books in the evenings, my sleep has become much more restorative. Add to that the one-way nature of TV and you get put into a passive mode that's hard to break out of when you need to start contributing something.
- Exercise regularly. Getting lots of exercise can help stabilize your mood and has other health benefits on top of that. It's also a great chance to think through problems you're running into in your work. For me, the vast majority of my coding is done in my head or scribbled on post-its long before I sit down in front of a computer to type it out.
- Get lots of sunlight. Jobs that require us to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours straight too often deprive us of natural light for much of the day. Natural light is, IMHO, essential to maintaining our internal clocks and allowing us to truly shutdown and recuperate each night.
- Take a daily multi-vitamin. With the highly-processed nature of foods these days, it's all too easy to have a diet that's nutrient-poor in some area. Taking a multi-vitamin is probably the easiest way to remedy this. Also good is adjusting the diet to include more unprocessed foods and finding free-range meats that don't have hormones.
There's a bunch more specific recommendations my doctor gave me that have helped too, but these are the ones that I've found to be most helpful.
I thought the same thing until an international flight a couple of years ago. I was flying home from Japan and knew the flight would be long and I always get dehydrated when flying, so I brought 4 empty bottles with me. This worked fine at Narita and I was able to fill one of them up for the short first leg of my flight. And it even looked like it would work at the Seoul airport since I was able to fill up all 4 once I was beyond the security checkpoint.
But then it came time to board the airplane and there was yet another checkpoint for all flights to the US where they took all 4 of my bottles. The checkpoint was literally at the gate just before boarding the airplane, so there was no opportunity to fill the bottles beyond the checkpoint. And, of course, the flight attendant said they didn't have enough water on board to give me my own bottle.
So yes, there are many times where you can fill up your bottle beyond the security checkpoints. But no, it's not always possible and there are instances where people have a legitimate gripe about the availability of water.
P.S. As someone who does what you say for most flights, you can avoid the pressure issue by filling your bottle to the brim with water since the volume of water doesn't really change when the pressure changes. It's only when there's air in the bottle that you have to worry about pressure changes.
Not necessarily. To quote a particularly terrible movie which had a few redeeming lines (Stealth), "I just don't think war should turn into a video game." Removing the human cost to war removes a lot of the incentive to avoid war. And so long as there are people dying on either side, it's probably better that both sides see casualties rather than only one side.
Until we can arrange for all wars to be fought between robotic fighting forces, war will remain a terrible thing. And it needs to be terrible for people to give it the kind of respect that it deserves. It's already bad enough that the US is so much more advanced everyone else. We've seen what happens when you put someone with an itchy trigger finger in charge of an army that, for all intents and purposes, can't be defeated. The more we put robots in harm's way rather than soldiers, the more we're going to see putting those robots in harm's way as a solution to our problems.
Morally, there should be no difference between an American life and a foreign life. The mindset of "as long as it isn't anyone I know" is morally corrupt. Robotic fighting forces perpetuate that morally corrupt mindset.
There's another option...and no, it's not whining about it online hoping that AT&T will generously forgo the profits they're contractually obligated to receive.
There are plenty of sites that offer you out of your contract if they or you can find someone who wants in to take your place. If you own an iPhone 3G that's in good condition, you can offer people the option to get an iPhone 3G and a 1-year contract with no up-front cost. If they were buying the iPhone not-S 3G new, they would have to pay $99-$199 up front and have a 2-year contract. There's got to be plenty of people that would find that offer appealing.
And at that point, you're out of your contract and free to drop $299 on the new one.
Regardless of the legality of what Google is doing, the point that only the ffmpeg folks are able to enforce the LGPL is still significant. Google's relationship with the project is likely quite good. They're sponsoring 9 students as part of their Summer of Code program. If one of the contributors were to file suit, it's likely that other project members could persuade that person to drop the suit.
Even if they are in violation of the letter of the law, they're not really in violation of the spirit of the law. They're giving back to the open source community by releasing the source to their browser. And they're paying to add new functionality to ffmpeg. The only issue is that their legal team felt the need to cover the company by purchasing a license. And they would have been foolish not to, since the threat of a LGPL lawsuit is much less than a patent infringement lawsuit. AFAIK, even if they were to lose, they would be given a chance to come into compliance. And this only becomes an issue if someone who contributed to ffmpeg feels that this minor issue merits the hassle of a lawsuit and probably end any GSoC sponsorship for the project in the future...seems unlikely to me.
So the point that only the ffmpeg contributor have standing to attempt to enforce the LGPL seems pretty important since it likely means that no one with the right to do so will go through a ton of hassle to iron out a few legal details when the company has been nothing but gracious towards the project as a whole and even towards the open source community as a whole. There's far too many companies violating the (L)GPL that are acting in bad faith attempting to leach off the open source community that would make better targets. ffmpeg even maintains a list of such companies on their site.