What do you think a subsidized e-book would go for? -$5.00 perhaps?:-)
I'm partly serious. There are still production (scanning, proofing, formatting) and distribution (whispernet) costs even though they're smaller than with hardcopy, and royalties which are unchanged.
They do subsidize the books (if by subsidize you mean "sell for less than hardcopy"). I just bought Outliers for Kindle for $9.99; hardcopy is $14.83 from Amazon, or $18.19 from B&N.
I agree with you, and as a would-be Android dev and ADP owner I want them to succeed too. They had to do something, knowing it would be broken. They could have done a little bit more than install into a private dir. But it wouldn't have taken any longer than it has to break it, and the results would be pretty identical from a user's perspective. I think the Pre is DOA though
From a technical perspective this comes about from the app DRM just being about protected folders which developers can access, Google needs a more solid solution.
There is no more solid solution. ADP phones got root, and the OS is fully open source (no HDMI-like "protected path").
What about folded optics? Minolta had a camera like this with a 45 degree mirror behind the lens and the sensor down one side a few years ago. Gives longer focal length in a slim body. Don't know if any of the camphone companies are doing this though, there's probably not enough empty space in the case.
I've been looking forward to Spore for over a year, and so has my son. There is no way we will buy this game now, I won't risk damaging my main PC with SecuROM. I had seriously considered buying it and then installing the crack, but at this point I'd rather just let it go. I can't afford a separate PC just for games like this, and the time to reformat/ghost my machine is time I can't afford to spend either. Sorry, Will Wright. I would have loved to play Spore.
They're going to have to deliver that Bluetooth API pretty quick if they don't want to tank their OS right out of the gate
Why? Which of these other OSes (WinMob, Symbian, and Palm) has a bluetooth API? None, I think. Of course they all support Bluetooth, but we're talking about a software API to it. Maybe Symbian does, I know next to nothing about it.
How about updating the Funnies list instead? Many of the ones there don't even update anymore (Under Power, Totalitarian Burger), and a few (Helen) the links don't even work anymore because the comic is dead. And a bunch more have devolved into sitcoms and soap operas. Fix the bugs first, then add new features!
think of how hard it would be to run a business if you depended on software with this level of copy protection. Not sure what planet you're living on, but in the audio/video post-production world, all pro Linux/Mac/Win software is copy protected. Autodesk, Adobe, Avid, Nuke, Maya, even Apple's pro apps -- they all phone home to activate or use flexlm or something like it. Pretty much anyone running a video/film/audio business today does depend on software with exactly this level of copy protection.
Fair enough. I'm thinking of all those tremendously useful little free utilities you can get for WM and Palm; seems like paying up front before you even really get started is a barrier to entry. But as you say, $99 isn't really that much if it's a serious project.
again from TFA:
Developers are required to register for a DRM license key, which costs $99 There is no freeware license. Unless I'm mistaken (which is quite possible!), that means every freeware project has to pony up $99 to get started.
From TFA:
Still, neither of the iPhone DRM licenses enables the collaborative development that typifies open source projects. So Apple created a new "ad hoc" license that allows developers private distribution of iPhone executables to up to 100 registered handsets. Groups of coders can share work in progress binaries via e-mail or source code control.
However, even the ad hoc license is not the wide-open solution that the open source community ultimately desires. An iPhone user should be able to opt into installing and running unsigned applications, a capability offered by all competing mobile platforms. This is the showstopper for me. A smartphone without a real freeware ecosystem will never truly thrive, for the same reasons that that open source development and commercial s/w development drive each other on standard platforms.
Exactly my point. A huge fraction of AE and Flame (and Avid, etc.) are the signal processing algorithms, realtime disk access and I/O (to hardware and screen), thread management for avoiding dropped frames and so on -- what you classify as "extensions". Sure, you could write the non-critical parts in python, but you'd be switching into extension-land so often, and most of the meaty code is in the algorithms, it's not clear what you'd gain.
I'm just saying, not everything is a web app or a word processor or a single clever algorithm wrapped in a huge GUI. And those hard realtime and performance-critical apps are still the sweet spot for C/C++, as they always have been and will continue to be.
For image processing (film/video), real-time audio or any serious signal processing, the overhead of anything but C/C++ is killer. It'll be news when Adobe After Effects or Autodesk Flame is rewritten in python.
Besides, measuring the popularity of a language by the size of its web presence is the worst kind of fallacious reasoning.
I have a G1G1 and mine is working fine. Have installed new OS updates (joyride branch) every couple of weeks since Christmas and it keeps getting better. Never had the stuck key problem, though the original release had some trackpad bugs, long since fixed.
... and it was totally amazing. Like looking out a huge picture window. They had some stored content (playing off a fast RAID array I believe) and some streaming content from a camera array mounted on the roof. The projector alignment tech was awesome; there were no visible seams anywhere. This was in a room basically the same size as the one on the linked web site; maybe 50' x 30'; viewing distance around 10-20'. It was beautiful.
But, they could only run it about 10 minutes per hour. Not sure whether it was heat, storage, or whatever, but it was definitely not at all ready for prime time. Still, when it worked it was just stunningly gorgeous.
10 fold means "10 times as much". And "markup" is the amount added to a cost price in calculating a selling price, so if cost price is CP, selling price (SP) is 20, and markup is 10*CP, then SP=(CP + 10*CP) gives 2.00 = 11*CP or CP = 2.00/11 or around 18 cents. Which I think is quite possible for a Chinese-manufactured printer cable in bulk.
Or do you know a different definition for 10 fold?
I think a demonstration of large-scale quantum computation could falsify competing interpretations. (If you believe that computation can only be carried out by physical processes anyway, something about Church & Turing:-)) If the computation's large enough, there wouldn't be enough matter/energy in the experimental apparatus to perform it in the given time.
Sorry, he may have been (and still be) a nut case, but the book was 100% pure inspiration to me and lots of others of my generation. The idea that computers should be *personal* was shocking back then. I have no doubt the ideas in that book helped get me into MIT. And the graphics section was basically how I got into CG. I have a lot of fond memories thanks to that book. Thanks, Ted, wherever you are!
Because the Schroedinger Wave Equation predicts that it will, and the SWE is all there is. The Copenhagen Interpretation (collapse of the wavefunction) is dead. The MWI is the only decent interpretation left that makes sense; Cramer's Transactional Interpretation is interesting, but poses too many new effects, like backwards causality. The MWI says the SWE is all there is; it implies (no, demands) that worlds split whenever anything happens. In one world, the laser "behaves as a particle" (handwaving, but it's from TFA) and in the other as a wave. Deutsch has a good paper on the EPR experiment and how the MWI explanation works (see section 4).
In this experiment (basically garden variety EPR with some small twists), experimenter EA performs a measurement on beam A. EB performs a measurement on EB. Now what the MWI says happened is this: as soon as the entangled beams left the laser, there were already two worlds. One of each polarization, let's say (for simplicity -- the current experiment is more complicated but the theory is the same). In one world both beams are polarized vertically, in the other they're polarized horizontally. Now when EA does her measurement, the Copenhagenists say this "collapses the wavefunction". MWI says nothing special happens; in those worlds where the beam was vertically polarized and EA's polarizer what vertical, the beam gets through. In other worlds, not. All the measurement tells EA is, which world is she in. Now EB does the same thing; so far nothing superluminal has happened. There are now (at least) two versions of EA and EB each. Now, at regular subluminal speeds, they take their rockets back to earth and communicate their results to each other. When they meet, "magically" their results match all the time! Why? Superluminal signaling? No; just because the ones who can meet to match results are (obviously) the ones who were in compatible worlds to begin with. The incompatible ones decohere rapidly, and can't be detected by the others within picoseconds. In other worlds, the alternate EA and EB meet and also confirm their results (opposite to the original pair) also match.
Oh well, that's way too much for a quick slashdot article. Read e.g. Tegmark at Arxiv for a nice readable overview of the current state of the world.
One of the tenets of the MWI is that everything that is physically possible (i.e. is consistent with the evolution of the Schroedinger Wave Equation, or similarly, consistent with physical law) happens in some universes. Maybe with extremely low probability, indeed (10^-30 or even lower), but nonetheless it happens somewhere. Things like all the coffee molecules in the cup simultaneously moving upward and the coffee appearing to jump out of the cup, for instance. You can compute these probabilities: p(one coffee molecule moves up) ^ n_coffee_molecules, over some time t.
So the answer to your question is, there are infinitely many universes where the gun jams, even if the proportion of those universes is tiny compared to all the universes in which you pull the trigger. That's the MWI definition of probability: p(gunjam given pulltrigger) = n_universes(gunjam)/n_universes(pulltrigger), more or less. Of course in a few other universes, you suffer a nearly fatal heart attack just as you pull the trigger. And in others, the ceiling falls in on you just as you pull it, and so on.
The outcome of the two-slit experiment is perfectly predicted by the SWE with no collapse, so indeed as you say some outcomes are not physically possible. The analogy with QSuicide would be there's no universe in which you're instantly transformed 100 miles away faster than the speed of light, rather than dying. Not physically possible.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think a subsidized e-book would go for? -$5.00 perhaps? :-)
I'm partly serious. There are still production (scanning, proofing, formatting) and distribution (whispernet) costs even though they're smaller than with hardcopy, and royalties which are unchanged.
They do subsidize the books (if by subsidize you mean "sell for less than hardcopy"). I just bought Outliers for Kindle for $9.99; hardcopy is $14.83 from Amazon, or $18.19 from B&N.
I agree with you, and as a would-be Android dev and ADP owner I want them to succeed too. They had to do something, knowing it would be broken. They could have done a little bit more than install into a private dir. But it wouldn't have taken any longer than it has to break it, and the results would be pretty identical from a user's perspective. I think the Pre is DOA though
From a technical perspective this comes about from the app DRM just being about protected folders which developers can access, Google needs a more solid solution.
There is no more solid solution. ADP phones got root, and the OS is fully open source (no HDMI-like "protected path").
End of story.
What about folded optics? Minolta had a camera like this with a 45 degree mirror behind the lens and the sensor down one side a few years ago. Gives longer focal length in a slim body. Don't know if any of the camphone companies are doing this though, there's probably not enough empty space in the case.
I've been looking forward to Spore for over a year, and so has my son. There is no way we will buy this game now, I won't risk damaging my main PC with SecuROM. I had seriously considered buying it and then installing the crack, but at this point I'd rather just let it go. I can't afford a separate PC just for games like this, and the time to reformat/ghost my machine is time I can't afford to spend either. Sorry, Will Wright. I would have loved to play Spore.
Wow, pretty cool! Thanks for the links!
They're going to have to deliver that Bluetooth API pretty quick if they don't want to tank their OS right out of the gate
Why? Which of these other OSes (WinMob, Symbian, and Palm) has a bluetooth API? None, I think. Of course they all support Bluetooth, but we're talking about a software API to it. Maybe Symbian does, I know next to nothing about it.
How about updating the Funnies list instead? Many of the ones there don't even update anymore (Under Power, Totalitarian Burger), and a few (Helen) the links don't even work anymore because the comic is dead. And a bunch more have devolved into sitcoms and soap operas. Fix the bugs first, then add new features!
pins x & 4 are shorted (actually a small resistor) at the phone end on a Moto USB charger. You can easily mod a standard one to work, there's instructions on the web. E.g. http://pinouts.ru/CellularPhones-A-N/razrv3_charger_pinout.shtml
Other similar phones use different but similar schemes.
Fair enough. I'm thinking of all those tremendously useful little free utilities you can get for WM and Palm; seems like paying up front before you even really get started is a barrier to entry. But as you say, $99 isn't really that much if it's a serious project.
Is that true? I thought you still need a $99 dev license to get the app signed, otherwise it won't run on the hardware. But I could be mistaken.
However, even the ad hoc license is not the wide-open solution that the open source community ultimately desires. An iPhone user should be able to opt into installing and running unsigned applications, a capability offered by all competing mobile platforms. This is the showstopper for me. A smartphone without a real freeware ecosystem will never truly thrive, for the same reasons that that open source development and commercial s/w development drive each other on standard platforms.
Exactly my point. A huge fraction of AE and Flame (and Avid, etc.) are the signal processing algorithms, realtime disk access and I/O (to hardware and screen), thread management for avoiding dropped frames and so on -- what you classify as "extensions". Sure, you could write the non-critical parts in python, but you'd be switching into extension-land so often, and most of the meaty code is in the algorithms, it's not clear what you'd gain.
I'm just saying, not everything is a web app or a word processor or a single clever algorithm wrapped in a huge GUI. And those hard realtime and performance-critical apps are still the sweet spot for C/C++, as they always have been and will continue to be.
For image processing (film/video), real-time audio or any serious signal processing, the overhead of anything but C/C++ is killer. It'll be news when Adobe After Effects or Autodesk Flame is rewritten in python.
Besides, measuring the popularity of a language by the size of its web presence is the worst kind of fallacious reasoning.
I have a G1G1 and mine is working fine. Have installed new OS updates (joyride branch) every couple of weeks since Christmas and it keeps getting better. Never had the stuck key problem, though the original release had some trackpad bugs, long since fixed.
... and it was totally amazing. Like looking out a huge picture window. They had some stored content (playing off a fast RAID array I believe) and some streaming content from a camera array mounted on the roof. The projector alignment tech was awesome; there were no visible seams anywhere. This was in a room basically the same size as the one on the linked web site; maybe 50' x 30'; viewing distance around 10-20'. It was beautiful.
But, they could only run it about 10 minutes per hour. Not sure whether it was heat, storage, or whatever, but it was definitely not at all ready for prime time. Still, when it worked it was just stunningly gorgeous.
10 fold means "10 times as much". And "markup" is the amount added to a cost price in calculating a selling price, so if cost price is CP, selling price (SP) is 20, and markup is 10*CP, then SP=(CP + 10*CP) gives 2.00 = 11*CP or CP = 2.00/11 or around 18 cents. Which I think is quite possible for a Chinese-manufactured printer cable in bulk.
Or do you know a different definition for 10 fold?
I think a demonstration of large-scale quantum computation could falsify competing interpretations. (If you believe that computation can only be carried out by physical processes anyway, something about Church & Turing :-)) If the computation's large enough, there wouldn't be enough matter/energy in the experimental apparatus to perform it in the given time.
But this is not really the place to discuss it.
Sorry, he may have been (and still be) a nut case, but the book was 100% pure inspiration to me and lots of others of my generation. The idea that computers should be *personal* was shocking back then. I have no doubt the ideas in that book helped get me into MIT. And the graphics section was basically how I got into CG. I have a lot of fond memories thanks to that book. Thanks, Ted, wherever you are!
Because the Schroedinger Wave Equation predicts that it will, and the SWE is all there is. The Copenhagen Interpretation (collapse of the wavefunction) is dead. The MWI is the only decent interpretation left that makes sense; Cramer's Transactional Interpretation is interesting, but poses too many new effects, like backwards causality. The MWI says the SWE is all there is; it implies (no, demands) that worlds split whenever anything happens. In one world, the laser "behaves as a particle" (handwaving, but it's from TFA) and in the other as a wave. Deutsch has a good paper on the EPR experiment and how the MWI explanation works (see section 4).
In this experiment (basically garden variety EPR with some small twists), experimenter EA performs a measurement on beam A. EB performs a measurement on EB. Now what the MWI says happened is this: as soon as the entangled beams left the laser, there were already two worlds. One of each polarization, let's say (for simplicity -- the current experiment is more complicated but the theory is the same). In one world both beams are polarized vertically, in the other they're polarized horizontally. Now when EA does her measurement, the Copenhagenists say this "collapses the wavefunction". MWI says nothing special happens; in those worlds where the beam was vertically polarized and EA's polarizer what vertical, the beam gets through. In other worlds, not. All the measurement tells EA is, which world is she in. Now EB does the same thing; so far nothing superluminal has happened. There are now (at least) two versions of EA and EB each. Now, at regular subluminal speeds, they take their rockets back to earth and communicate their results to each other. When they meet, "magically" their results match all the time! Why? Superluminal signaling? No; just because the ones who can meet to match results are (obviously) the ones who were in compatible worlds to begin with. The incompatible ones decohere rapidly, and can't be detected by the others within picoseconds. In other worlds, the alternate EA and EB meet and also confirm their results (opposite to the original pair) also match.
Oh well, that's way too much for a quick slashdot article. Read e.g. Tegmark at Arxiv for a nice readable overview of the current state of the world.
One of the tenets of the MWI is that everything that is physically possible (i.e. is consistent with the evolution of the Schroedinger Wave Equation, or similarly, consistent with physical law) happens in some universes. Maybe with extremely low probability, indeed (10^-30 or even lower), but nonetheless it happens somewhere. Things like all the coffee molecules in the cup simultaneously moving upward and the coffee appearing to jump out of the cup, for instance. You can compute these probabilities: p(one coffee molecule moves up) ^ n_coffee_molecules, over some time t.
So the answer to your question is, there are infinitely many universes where the gun jams, even if the proportion of those universes is tiny compared to all the universes in which you pull the trigger. That's the MWI definition of probability: p(gunjam given pulltrigger) = n_universes(gunjam)/n_universes(pulltrigger), more or less. Of course in a few other universes, you suffer a nearly fatal heart attack just as you pull the trigger. And in others, the ceiling falls in on you just as you pull it, and so on.
The outcome of the two-slit experiment is perfectly predicted by the SWE with no collapse, so indeed as you say some outcomes are not physically possible. The analogy with QSuicide would be there's no universe in which you're instantly transformed 100 miles away faster than the speed of light, rather than dying. Not physically possible.