I'll try to put together some specific thoughts on *why* I think VisualIDs did it better, and what the issues with Vash are, in the morning. For the time being, I guess I'll just throw that out there as a conversation-seed and let people Google it....
There's no economic incentive for individuals and small to medium-sized businesses to invent things when a big company can just take the idea and easily outcompete due to greater resources. And without the patent system, there's no incentive to release inventions into the public domain rather than try to protect them as trade secrets.
Which is why I use 320Kbps VBR mp3. Not only is it proven multiple times to be not distinguishable from the CD in double-blind tests, it also saves a lot of space over FLAC and actually works in pretty much any audio player anywhere that plays anything more than just straight CDs. Compatibility is more important to me than a purely theoretical difference in sound quality.
I can tell the difference between mp3 vs. Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, regardless of bitrate: mp3's inability to indicate what data is actually audio vs. junk used to pad-out a frame leaves glitches between tracks--because there's no way for players to identify the padding as such, they just play it to completion of the frame. Ogg and FLAC don't have that problem.
It's not the code, silly. That's easy. It's having some sort of official database of legal music that is the problem... which the poster was apparently hoping existed. I doubt any such thing does exist.
The database of who has paid whom for what is currently being built--it's called "Bitcoin".
'The development of a legal online market is impossible in Finland if illegal services like The Pirate Bay are freely allowed to continue their operations,' said Lauri Rechardt, a spokesman for Finland's branch of IFPI.
That sounds backward: isn't it difficult-to-impossible to get an illegal trade under control unless there are legal alternatives competing with it?
Adding an icon means the developer doesn't need to add as many strings to an application's localization database.
It sounds good..., but anyone not familiar with whatever `universal' iconography the designer chose would disagree.
The whole `office desk' metaphor, for example, is completely lost on people who've never either experienced an actual office-like setting (with desks, file-folders, documents, etc.) or been trained on the metaphor itself. Red means `something bad' in America, `something good' in China, and nothing in particular to the 10% of people worldwide who just can't see it. For a blind user interacting via a screen-reader, custom text is likely to be infinitely better than custom icons.
Sometimes none of these things matter, sometimes they all do. Sometiimes your users are literally illiterate, and any kind of iconography is more learnable than textual labels, but that's also a minority case.
Of course, if what you meant was `not localising is a way of cheaping-out', I'll agree with that.
To answer your question: no, there's not much hyperbole in what I said.
I see 3G service depicted on that T-Mobile coverage-map as a few tiny black splotches located on major population-centres; and, going by that map, >99% of the US has neither `Fast Mobile Web' nor `Very Fast Mobile Web'--and about 50% of the country still has No Mobile Web.
Of course, the AT&T map looks pretty similar, as I recallâ"so the specific idea that iPhone users in one of AT&T's many and large `no 3G' zones would be bothered by the lack of 3G service on T-mobile is at least a little goofy.
What exactly are you seeing that you think contradicts what I'm saying?
T-Mobile supports the iPhone... just no 3G service....
3G service in the US is still pretty close to nonexistent outside of a couple of major metropolitan areas, anyway. If the network isn't there, it doesn't really matter what your phone supports.
And one of the most disturbing prospects of a merger between the two GSM/UMTS network owners is that it's actually going to reduce the incentives for any provider improve that situation with new infrastructure buildout, which is pretty dangerous when the existing incentive is already zero.
And we're not just talking about reducing the competitive forces (which ESR cites as being the only thing motivating new buildout) by a mere ~25%, we're talking about reducing the competitive forces in the international standards-based market by 100%, moving us into a situation where moving to a different carrier guarantees the hardship of buying a whole new set of phones--and, if you're moving away from `the GSM company', the additional hardship of giving up international roaming.
We may well see network-growth stop, as a result of this--or at least slow down a whole lot.
The limit to any organisational scheme that you're going to end up using is where, after drilling down through whatever directory-structure you come up with, you end up in a folder with a bunch of files in it, and then the *parcticular* file that you want is somewhere in that folder--sitting right in front of you, along with all of the other files that ended up in the same group, and the question at that point is how long it's going to take you to recognise the one among all the others.
Different types of organisation-schemes basically try to minimise this problem by reducing the number of not-easily-distinguishable items that you have to deal with at any given time.
The obvious approach is to try splitting-up large, flat collections into smaller collections and adding levels of indirection when a given tier has too many items in it to be maneagable, so the first task is to figure out what `too many items to be manageable'--and you want to avoid splitting things up too much beyond the point of `small enough to manage', because there's really a trade-off going on: in order to reduce the complexity at each particular level of your structured collection of stuff, you add some navigational complexity.
So, while that will help you tackle the `number' part of the problem, there actually be some interesting (and useful!) work done toward figuring out ways of making larger collections more manageablewithout splitting them (i.e.: tackling the `not-easily-distinguishable' part); one of the more notable ones is a scheme for fixing the homogeneity of file-icons--because it's significantly easier to recognise a thing when it actually appears distinct from its surroundings; J.P. Lewis et al. published an essay on this, a while back, called "VisualIDs: Automatic Distinctive Icons for Desktop Interfaces", and included the results of their user testing; Lewis has a website (with the title, "VisualIDs: Scenery for Data Worlds") that's worth looking at:
He has a master's degree in chemical engineering, and was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship to MIT, and just happened to get co-opted into being a movie-star while en route.
If you read the quotations, he's evidently intelligent and witty. He's also an actual martial-arts master, and a family-photo of his actually scared-off a couple of burlars who made the mistake of breaking into his house and attacking his wife (`your husband is who!? So sorry, ma'am!').
I've always heard of git as a distributed version control system, and as such I've been ignoring it. Ie, all my coworkers are in the office usually, not distantly separated and loosely connected kernel devs. Examples I've seen of where people love git tend to be nearly exclusively open source projects composed of distributed developers.
So where does having a local repository (and the huge space this entails) actually help the person who's sitting in a cube with a fast lan to the server?
If you actually compare the stats for space used by different systems, you'll find that, between all of the different DVCS tools (Git, Bazaar, Mercurial, etc.) and Subversion, Subversion checkouts actually tend to use the most space: yes, a Subversion checkout without a local repository--which means that it only gives you immediate access to one version, and doesn't allow you to do annotations or anything else without round-tripping through the server--actually tends to use more space than a local DVCS repository that stores all of the history and allows you to batch and group commits, do fast annotates, deal with merge-conflicts more easily, be immune to server/network reliability issues, etc.
Try a comparison--do a svn checkout of some project, then import the project into the DVCS of your choice and compare the space used by each. I usually use Bazaar with bzr-svn for this, with "bzr branch " to import just the trunk, or with "bzr svn-import " to import all of the branches. Bazaar is the DVCS that everyone wails on for `using more space than Git', so I was initially hesitant to use it; but then I realised that it still uses only half as much space as a checkout from Subversion.
I love change sets; I often have multiple ongoing tasks in the same source directory, or the same task that I want to split into multiple commits. CVS has zero support for this. Perforce has full support. SVN lets me group into change-lists, but none of this is remembered at the back end from what I can see. Git has this at the back end so you can do things like cherry pick, but you can't group your working files into different sets and then say "commit this set only".
Actually, yes you can. Selecting which files to commit is actually even part of the normal workflow.
Yep, And as a lactose intoleree, dairy-free Sorbetto is just wonderful... until you run out. I have yet to find a decent cheese substitute though, but then I'm of French descent and my standards for cheese are pretty high.
There are actually plenty of real (dairy-based) cheeses that contain little or no lactose, due to the bacteria having eaten it all in the process of cheesification....
As an avid cyclist, I often have to ride long stretches amongst traffic. Often times there's no cars on the road and then a single car will pass me on a lone stretch of road. If I hear the car coming, I can move more to the right of the road/bicycle lane. Prius' just come up with no warning.
People driving in cars actual have exactly that same issue with other people driving in cars. We can't hear them coming, either--and I mean we can't hear *any* of them. The solution we've found is to attach rear-view mirrors to our cars, keep an eye on them, and always explicitly check them before attempting to move out of our lane.
There are such mirrors available for bicycles, also.
Apple is not going to kill the desktop OS that is required to write applications for their mobile OS.. Steve Jobs isn't stupid, he knows that people aren't going to be coding 3D games or run photoshop or whatever on iOS. Killing OSX would kill iOS, and Apple knows that.
As a FOSS geek I'm not interested in apple and have identified a bunch of really nice looking alternatives to the iPad. It's just a shame none of them seem to quite make it to market!
Eh, there were several `iPad alternatives' on the market before the iPad even existed.
AlwaysInnovating started selling Touchbook beta units a month before Archos introduced their tablets--8 months before the iPad came to market.
And there were/are numerous others, too. I'm not sure whether it makes sense to compare the Nokia N-series tablets, since they're smaller, but they've been on the market for *years*, and they're not the end of the list.
Of course, that's not even counting the `iPad alternatives' that came to market *after* the iPad.
I'm having trouble understanding your "shame none of them seem to quite make it to market" comment--and even more trouble making sense out of others' comments to the effect of `if only there were any other tablet computers other than the iPad'....
Yahoo! *didn't have* their own search-engine
on
What Went Wrong At Yahoo
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.
Indeed: as I recall, the `Yahoo! search-engine' *was* AltaVista (with Yahoo! decorations, but a little "powered by AltaVista" footnote at the bottom)--at least at some point; I think there were different back-ends that they used at different points....
Yahoo! may have actually done their own thing for the last few years, but only for the last few years.
The reason that I have trouble appreciating this perspective, but even more difficulty appreciating the `cars need to make noise so that attentive pedestrians can hear them coming and jump out of the way'... is that, where I live..., we have wildlife.
And I'm not talking about squirrels, or ducks, or armadillos; we have *deer* that will *really* jump out in front of cars--*on 65-MPH highways*. What's more, we have *moose* that do the same thing. And we, as drivers here, are expected to be able to avoid hitting these amazingly quick-moving things (that really do just `suddenly appear') that apparently have deathwishes but can win in collisions with even large vehicles.
How much *harder*(!?) could it possibly be to avoid slower-moving human beings who are less likely to `just jump out and stand there', especially at lower vehicle-speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll try to put together some specific thoughts on *why* I think VisualIDs did it better, and what the issues with Vash are, in the morning. For the time being, I guess I'll just throw that out there as a conversation-seed and let people Google it....
cf.: http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/06/08/status-quo/
I can tell the difference between mp3 vs. Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, regardless of bitrate: mp3's inability to indicate what data is actually audio vs. junk used to pad-out a frame leaves glitches between tracks --because there's no way for players to identify the padding as such, they just play it to completion of the frame. Ogg and FLAC don't have that problem.
The database of who has paid whom for what is currently being built--it's called "Bitcoin".
New Hampshire.
That sounds backward: isn't it difficult-to-impossible to get an illegal trade under control unless there are legal alternatives competing with it?
Adding an icon means the developer doesn't need to add as many strings to an application's localization database.
It sounds good..., but anyone not familiar with whatever `universal' iconography the designer chose would disagree.
The whole `office desk' metaphor, for example, is completely lost on people who've never either experienced an actual office-like setting (with desks, file-folders, documents, etc.) or been trained on the metaphor itself. Red means `something bad' in America, `something good' in China, and nothing in particular to the 10% of people worldwide who just can't see it. For a blind user interacting via a screen-reader, custom text is likely to be infinitely better than custom icons.
Sometimes none of these things matter, sometimes they all do. Sometiimes your users are literally illiterate, and any kind of iconography is more learnable than textual labels, but that's also a minority case.
Of course, if what you meant was `not localising is a way of cheaping-out', I'll agree with that.
What does that make me?
To answer your question: no, there's not much hyperbole in what I said.
I see 3G service depicted on that T-Mobile coverage-map as a few tiny black splotches located on major population-centres; and, going by that map, >99% of the US has neither `Fast Mobile Web' nor `Very Fast Mobile Web'--and about 50% of the country still has No Mobile Web.
Of course, the AT&T map looks pretty similar, as I recallâ"so the specific idea that iPhone users in one of AT&T's many and large `no 3G' zones would be bothered by the lack of 3G service on T-mobile is at least a little goofy.
What exactly are you seeing that you think contradicts what I'm saying?
T-Mobile supports the iPhone... just no 3G service....
3G service in the US is still pretty close to nonexistent outside of a couple of major metropolitan areas, anyway. If the network isn't there, it doesn't really matter what your phone supports.
And one of the most disturbing prospects of a merger between the two GSM/UMTS network owners is that it's actually going to reduce the incentives for any provider improve that situation with new infrastructure buildout, which is pretty dangerous when the existing incentive is already zero .
And we're not just talking about reducing the competitive forces (which ESR cites as being the only thing motivating new buildout) by a mere ~25%, we're talking about reducing the competitive forces in the international standards-based market by 100%, moving us into a situation where moving to a different carrier guarantees the hardship of buying a whole new set of phones--and, if you're moving away from `the GSM company', the additional hardship of giving up international roaming.
We may well see network-growth stop, as a result of this--or at least slow down a whole lot.
Maybe this is motivation for contributing to the Freedom Box project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/721744279/push-the-freedombox-foundation-from-0-to-60-in-30
The limit to any organisational scheme that you're going to end up using is where, after drilling down through whatever directory-structure you come up with, you end up in a folder with a bunch of files in it, and then the *parcticular* file that you want is somewhere in that folder--sitting right in front of you, along with all of the other files that ended up in the same group, and the question at that point is how long it's going to take you to recognise the one among all the others.
Different types of organisation-schemes basically try to minimise this problem by reducing the number of not-easily-distinguishable items that you have to deal with at any given time.
The obvious approach is to try splitting-up large, flat collections into smaller collections and adding levels of indirection when a given tier has too many items in it to be maneagable, so the first task is to figure out what `too many items to be manageable'--and you want to avoid splitting things up too much beyond the point of `small enough to manage', because there's really a trade-off going on: in order to reduce the complexity at each particular level of your structured collection of stuff, you add some navigational complexity.
So, while that will help you tackle the `number' part of the problem, there actually be some interesting (and useful!) work done toward figuring out ways of making larger collections more manageable without splitting them (i.e.: tackling the `not-easily-distinguishable' part); one of the more notable ones is a scheme for fixing the homogeneity of file-icons--because it's significantly easier to recognise a thing when it actually appears distinct from its surroundings; J.P. Lewis et al. published an essay on this, a while back, called "VisualIDs: Automatic Distinctive Icons for Desktop Interfaces", and included the results of their user testing; Lewis has a website (with the title, "VisualIDs: Scenery for Data Worlds") that's worth looking at:
http://scribblethink.org/Work/VisualIDs/visualids.html
There's even a link, at the bottom of that page, to a reference implementation--and even patches to integrate VisualIDs into Nautilus.
Sharp introduced an Ubuntu tablet 6 months ago, as part of their `Netwalker' line.
I think Always Innovating was supporting Ubuntu on their tablets before that.
Maybe there are others, also; still, each new one is nice to see.
"open source is just a philosophy on how to develop software in a collaborative manner "
No it isn't.
I can open source stuff and be vehemently opposed to working with others!
Well, George Howlett certainly seems to have been able to....
For those who think this is a joke, cf. Lundgren's Wikipedia page, or his IMDB bio.
He has a master's degree in chemical engineering, and was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship to MIT, and just happened to get co-opted into being a movie-star while en route.
If you read the quotations, he's evidently intelligent and witty. He's also an actual martial-arts master, and a family-photo of his actually scared-off a couple of burlars who made the mistake of breaking into his house and attacking his wife (`your husband is who!? So sorry, ma'am!').
I've always heard of git as a distributed version control system, and as such I've been ignoring it. Ie, all my coworkers are in the office usually, not distantly separated and loosely connected kernel devs. Examples I've seen of where people love git tend to be nearly exclusively open source projects composed of distributed developers.
So where does having a local repository (and the huge space this entails) actually help the person who's sitting in a cube with a fast lan to the server?
If you actually compare the stats for space used by different systems, you'll find that, between all of the different DVCS tools (Git, Bazaar, Mercurial, etc.) and Subversion,
Subversion checkouts actually tend to use the most space: yes, a Subversion checkout without a local repository--which means that it only gives you immediate access to one version, and doesn't allow you to do annotations or anything else without round-tripping through the server--actually tends to use more space than a local DVCS repository that stores all of the history and allows you to batch and group commits, do fast annotates, deal with merge-conflicts more easily, be immune to server/network reliability issues, etc.
Try a comparison--do a svn checkout of some project, then import the project into the DVCS of your choice and compare the space used by each. I usually use Bazaar with bzr-svn for this, with "bzr branch " to import just the trunk, or with "bzr svn-import " to import all of the branches. Bazaar is the DVCS that everyone wails on for `using more space than Git', so I was initially hesitant to use it; but then I realised that it still uses only half as much space as a checkout from Subversion.
I love change sets; I often have multiple ongoing tasks in the same source directory, or the same task that I want to split into multiple commits. CVS has zero support for this. Perforce has full support. SVN lets me group into change-lists, but none of this is remembered at the back end from what I can see. Git has this at the back end so you can do things like cherry pick, but you can't group your working files into different sets and then say "commit this set only".
Actually, yes you can. Selecting which files to commit is actually even part of the normal workflow.
I can visibly see a difference in ALL the pictures. The WebP version is slightly murkier and less shows less detail than the JPEG version.
Well, yeah--aren't the WebP versions derived from the JPEGs? Doesn't the same thing happen if you just run through a second round of JPEG compression?
Yep, And as a lactose intoleree, dairy-free Sorbetto is just wonderful... until you run out. I have yet to find a decent cheese substitute though, but then I'm of French descent and my standards for cheese are pretty high.
There are actually plenty of real (dairy-based) cheeses that contain little or no lactose, due to the bacteria having eaten it all in the process of cheesification....
As an avid cyclist, I often have to ride long stretches amongst traffic. Often times there's no cars on the road and then a single car will pass me on a lone stretch of road. If I hear the car coming, I can move more to the right of the road/bicycle lane. Prius' just come up with no warning.
People driving in cars actual have exactly that same issue with other people driving in cars. We can't hear them coming, either--and I mean we can't hear *any* of them. The solution we've found is to attach rear-view mirrors to our cars, keep an eye on them, and always explicitly check them before attempting to move out of our lane.
There are such mirrors available for bicycles, also.
Apple is not going to kill the desktop OS that is required to write applications for their mobile OS.. Steve Jobs isn't stupid, he knows that people aren't going to be coding 3D games or run photoshop or whatever on iOS. Killing OSX would kill iOS, and Apple knows that.
Couldn't they just ship XCode for Windows?
As a FOSS geek I'm not interested in apple and have identified a bunch of really nice looking alternatives to the iPad. It's just a shame none of them seem to quite make it to market!
Eh, there were several `iPad alternatives' on the market before the iPad even existed.
Archos was selling their Android tablets 7 months before the iPad, and Archos first published an `actual Linux' firmware (using OpenEmbedded) and started contributing to upstream some 4 months before the iPad hit the market.
AlwaysInnovating started selling Touchbook beta units a month before Archos introduced their tablets--8 months before the iPad came to market.
And there were/are numerous others, too. I'm not sure whether it makes sense to compare the Nokia N-series tablets, since they're smaller, but they've been on the market for *years*, and they're not the end of the list.
Of course, that's not even counting the `iPad alternatives' that came to market *after* the iPad.
I'm having trouble understanding your "shame none of them seem to quite make it to market" comment--and even more trouble making sense out of others' comments to the effect of `if only there were any other tablet computers other than the iPad'....
What universe did you live in? There was a little thing AltaVista in that time period.
Indeed: as I recall, the `Yahoo! search-engine' *was* AltaVista (with Yahoo! decorations, but a little "powered by AltaVista" footnote at the bottom)--at least at some point; I think there were different back-ends that they used at different points.... Yahoo! may have actually done their own thing for the last few years, but only for the last few years.
The reason that I have trouble appreciating this perspective, but even more difficulty appreciating the `cars need to make noise so that attentive pedestrians can hear them coming and jump out of the way'... is that, where I live..., we have wildlife. And I'm not talking about squirrels, or ducks, or armadillos; we have *deer* that will *really* jump out in front of cars--*on 65-MPH highways*. What's more, we have *moose* that do the same thing. And we, as drivers here, are expected to be able to avoid hitting these amazingly quick-moving things (that really do just `suddenly appear') that apparently have deathwishes but can win in collisions with even large vehicles. How much *harder*(!?) could it possibly be to avoid slower-moving human beings who are less likely to `just jump out and stand there', especially at lower vehicle-speeds.
No, you can't. Not a single store sells them and the company behind it doesn't even bother to put out a english version of their mandarin site.
Just click on the link on http://www.lemote.com/ that says "English" (in the upper-right corner) and it'll take you to the English version: http://www.lemote.com/en/
In fact, does this product even exist beyond press releases and marketing ploys?
Freedom Included sells them in the US: http://freedomincluded.com/