Posts by Bob 18127 posts • joined Thursday 18th June 2009 16:14 GMT
Google is crying foul here? What about Android, where their built-in browser is about the only thing that works. Even worse, it is just not possible on Android to choose any search engine other than Google. Nor is it possible to turn off cookies and take other privacy measures that are possible with (say) Firefox on the desktop.
We all know Android isn't really open like, say, Ubuntu. But in the 1990's, Windows was the "open" alternative to the Mac, and it was open enough to win handsomely. Moreover, Windows was, and has always been, more open than iOS today. Microsoft never tried to dictate which third-party programs you can and cannot run on your Windows box.
I think Android's got a great long-term future, even if it is never more open than today.
Not radically different? Sorry, Macs are physically the best-constructed laptops out there. Nobody else even attempts the unibody construction. I've had many laptops, and my Mac hardware has been the best. And it keeps going, and going too.
Most of the "inherent advantages" of tablets listed in this article are simply due to the use of inefficient x86 processors in laptops. Laptops will get the battery life advantage too when they start using ARM. Apple will lead the way, and then everyone else will scramble to catch up.
There's a difference between scientists spouting off random predictions, and scientists publishing peer-reviewed research. Let's look at some of the past peer-reviewed publications. For example, Jim Hansen's paper on CO2 and climate change from 1981. (Hansen is considered "climate alarmist enemy number 1" by the climate change denial cabal). His predictions from 1981 have been pretty spot-on, actually a little on the LOW side. I think that's pretty remarkable.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/
Sure, the Earth hasn't been fried yet (and hopefully never will). But 10 years is a blink of an eye in geological time. If Hansen's predictions continue to hold true for the next 30 years, we'll be dealing with some serious consequences.
"There have been both warmer and colder times (whether global or local). There have been times with more rain and less rain. There has been more CO2 in the air and less etc.etc. What we're seeing here has all happened before and will happen again in the future. Climate change (in general) is perfectly normal and part of the natural cycle for the Earth as has been shown for millions of years. "
As was pointed out, "There has never been this high level of CO2 in the atmosphere in the history of human evolution." That means, it is not clear that the biosphere will be able to sustain 7 billion people as the climate shifts far more rapidly than many species can adapt.
Another problem with this argument is that the last time CO2 levels were really high and the Earth was really warm, the sun was 10% dimmer than it is today. We need lower CO2 levels now than in the distant past in order to just maintain the SAME climate.
Yet another cherry-picked fact, mis-represented by Lewis Page in support of a pre-determined agenda. There is no debate that glaciers worldwide are retreating at an alarming rate: this is immediately evident from numerous before-and-after photos.
The Himalayan glaciers are remote, and not so well studied because they are remote and hard to access. The recent data showing that they are not currently shrinking is therefore incredibly valuable. We can speculate why, of course, but that doesn't negate the well established fact that glaciers worldwide are retreating at an alarming rate.
Mass balance of a glacier is a complex interplay between many factors, including temperature and snowfall. Increased snowfall could cause glaciers to advance even in the face of warmer climate. Increased precipitation (thus snowfall) is the Himilayas could easily be caused by a warmer Indian Ocean: more water evaporates, so more snow falls in the mountains.
Speculation aside, more work is require to get the story on what's going on here. It's interesting science. But that does not negate the main story of glacial retreat, or anthropogenic climate change, or what we might need to do about it.
Amazon may have a lot of e-book market share. But they got there by being a price leader. As long as there is effective competition in the e-book market, they will not be able to simply jack up prices, Apple style. And right now, I see plenty of competition. Amazon may sell a lot of Kindles, but Apple sells at least as many iPads.
I think Apple was just trying to use their monopoly position in iPad to leverage into controlling the eBook market. Which MOST DEFINITELY runs afoul of anti-trust laws.
Good luck to the poor Jurors who will undoubtedly end up spending months away from their jobs on this case.
Looks like they're trying to catch the cool that is all the rage at Apple these days. Unfortunately, they don't have the designers that Apple has, or the cool cachet. Instead, they mistakenly send developers back to the land of FORTRAN 77 --- all-caps and Black-and-White.
It would be funny, if it weren't a company the size of Microsoft doing it.
along with newspaper classified ads, neighborhood record stores, etc. Why would I ever pay to get my papers printed? I do everything electronically with PDFs these days. The old journal business model is a total dinosaur.
According to the latest info I could get, Apple's P/E ratio is 16 or 17. That is not usually considered a bubble. So... I must conclude that Apple's high price is justified by its enormous profits.
Will those profits continue? They are based on high market share and high margins, both of which will likely drop in the future. Will Apple find another blockbuster product to maintain such a high level of profitability? Nobody knows...
Can someone please explain to me how manned missions to Mars would EVER be profitable? What on Earth could justify spending all those billions to send people to Mars (and maybe back)?
I don't see what bitcoin is supposed to do (for the normal legitimate user who pays taxes) that would improve on our traditional banking system. And I see plenty of downsides.
Large populations evolve more slowly than small ones. At 7 billion, the human population is incredibly large, probably larger than any mammal population in the past. So we're not evolving anywhere very fast at this point.
This could be changed either if the human population overall shrinks substantially, or if we stop traveling around the globe (which we've been doing, as far as evolution is concerned, for the past 30K+ years). Neither is very likely in the near term.
MS Office won't come out for Linux because Linux doesn't play well with commercial software. Anything in the distro is super-easy to install, that's one of its great strengths. But since the Linux market is so fragmented, supporting commercial software on all the different variants is a nightmare. And then when you upgrade, you find that the commercial software you paid good $$ for stops working.
Mac OS X is almost as good as Linux for the open source software (especially now with MacPorts). And it's WAY better than Linux for running commercial software.
There are so many alternatives to MS Office these days, will anyone notice or care when Microsoft's take on these apps gets to the iPad? iOS is losing out to Android anyway.
Wake me up when LibreOffice runs on my Android.
The idea of a place that's guaranteed full of legal music is a good one. But I don't like the way they restrict it to industry association members. The RIAA is increasingly irrelevant in the age of the Internet. Musicians who decline to be a part of the association should still be able to participate in the .music TLD.
It's been abundantly clear for a while that Android is about as secure as Windows 98. iPhone too. I would never do anything financial on my Android phone. No quick trade broker apps for me.
The payment problem will be solved soon when the credit card companies replace magnetic strips with smart cards. And they will be MUCH harder to hack/crack than anything on a smartphone.
Dropbox should have taken the 9-figure buyout offer from Apple. There are just not enough barriers to entry in the hard-disk-in-the-cloud space to justify a continued sky-high valuation over the long run.
Zuck wrote about how much challenging engineering they went through to enable this "rewiring." But I would point out that all this fancy networking and data center stuff is only necessary if you want to collect all this private data in one place and sell it to advertisers. The infrastructure required for a distributed social network like Diaspora (or Email) is a lot simpler.
I've long ago concluded that the religious right is hypocritical with respect to these issues. Look at where we are now. Our president, a regular church-goer, happily married with two daughters, lives family values to the max. And yet, the right wing claims that he's trying to "destroy traditional family values" (and religion too) --- even while these candidates go cavorting around, treating women like yesterday's trash. The amazing thing is, people believe these goons.
Anyway, I'm all for family values myself. LGBT couples should be allowed to marry so they can build stable, long-lasting families just like everybody else. Their children deserve no less.
For years, Linux desktops did everything they could to copy Microsoft. Under the misguided belief that users could only be attracted if Linux looked like Windows, KDE and Gnome both did everything they could to look and feel like a warmed-over version of Windows 95. Real innovation was sorely lacking, and most users saw nothing in these desktops to get them to switch from Windows.
Now they are copying Apple instead. But this may not be such a change: Microsoft itself has copied Apple in its recent revamp of the Taskbar. So we could say that KDE and Gnome continue to follow the lead of Microsoft.
"By remaining wary of climate change mitigation policies, the US economy seems to have dodged a bullet."
...in the short term at least... unless climate predictions are really even halfway accurate. In which case we're dodging a bullet, only to be hit by a nuclear missile.
See here for an intelligent, quantitative analysis of the issues by some leading climate scientists:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/11/ice-age-constraints-on-climate-sensitivity/#more-9939
When Google announced that initiative, I felt it was the height of arrogance. Google hit a home run by revolutionizing search and advertising --- and now they believed that they could do the same for renewable energy, philantropy, and probably other areas as well. It was obvious at the time they were going to fall far short of their stated goals. It's a common pitfall in business --- when we're successful at one thing, we can mistakenly believe that we'll be just as successful at anything we try.
US Law specifies you have to be born in the United States (a country) to be president. Asia is a continent, not a country. If parts of the USA are in Asia, then being born in those parts will qualify you to be president.
But of course, as someone else pointed out... Hawaii is not part of any continent.
So true about the horrid Android email client. But for those who are stuck with Android and want something better --- or who might consider buying Android but are put off by the email client --- I installed K-9 mail from the Android Marketplace. It is free, and made me very very happy. No more misgivings about email after that.
I do IMAP, not Gmail. The standard Android IMAP client was practically unusable, a truly horrible program. I stopped noticing/hating my Android email when I switched to K-9. It's been perfect.
Try telling one flat-panel LCD monitor from the next by looking at it. Wake up guys, a screen with a black border is pretty generic.
Copyright protects the EXPRESSION of an idea, not the IDEA itself. If the TZ database files are a wholesale byte-for-byte copy of the astrology tables, then that might be copyright infringement. But simply using it as a source and re-working the timezone information into your own expression --- I doubt the case has much merit.
...gotta love it!
Last night, I tried to download OpenOffice from their website. No cigar. So I guess the biggest difference between the two is that you can actually download and install LibreOffice.
What's wrong with Silverlight and JavaFX? How is Dash/Dart significantly different from those previous efforts (other than it's made by Google)?
Yes, this looks like a proprietary IMAP, probably with some improvements over the standard protocol. Remember Microsoft's Embrace and Extend? Remember Exchange Server?
Apple has great industrial design, and many have tried to copy it. The amazing thing about it is that plenty of other companies have failed to make anything half as good. These are all well-funded companies full of smart, ambitious people. But not Steve Jobs. I think Jobs is Apple's secret weapon here.
I hope they have a big fence around the whole place.
This week, I rode my electric bike into a golf course, and the guard started chasing me around in a golf cart. Very funny, comic in a way. The thing is... my electric bike, at 20mph, is a LOT faster than his electric golf cart. He never got close to me.
The problem here is, over half the movies I want to watch are not available in streaming format. They should offer a "streaming preferred" plan --- normally, you watch streaming videos, except it would include DVDs for titles not available streaming.
"Larger files might move more slowly when tipped towards the virtual opening, while smaller files might zip quickly through."
If this becomes popular, it will become oh so much harder to teach kids in intro physics that all things fall at the same rate.
Google makes their money selling ads. As long as they're the front-runner in that market, it doesn't really matter whether their infrastructure is passable or top-notch. The marginal value of Google's infrastructure being better than Facebook's is questionable.
I'm going to defend Apple on this one.
First of all, we ALREADY have a situation in which large amounts of email no longer travel over POP or IMAP between server and client. It's called GMail. And the protocol involved is whatever the Googlers hacked up to run between the JavaScript GMail front-end and the Google GMail back-end. Just because no one ever noticed this as a proprietary protocol doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
GMail's proprietary protocol was created for good reason --- because POP and IMAP don't do what's needed to make the GMail client work well. If Apple wishes to create a compelling email client that can compete with GMail, then they need to do the same. RIM did the same thing as well --- ever notice how much better email works on a Blackberry than on an IMAP-compliant Android phone? Again, it goes over Blackberry's proprietary protocol.
I don't blame Apple for doing this. I DO blame the standards people --- who have failed to come up with any better protocols, even 5+ years after GMail and Blackberry have shown us how short the existing ones really fall.
Who care? Skype is far from being the only internet phone/video protocol. It isn't even the first company to produce a net-to-phone system (remember Net2Phone?). It just seems to be the most successful commercial venture in that space, whereas its competitors failed.
So why do I care about a reverse-engineered Skype protocol? There are plenty of open-source VOIP protocols I can use if I want one.
They should put the +1 button on Chrome Browser itself. Then it's automatically extended to the entire web (for those who want Google to know what they're browsing, which I do not, so I use Firefox).
HDD's will be replaced soon by SSDs, and then this whole cooling stuff will go by the wayside anyway.
Google is a software company, and many of its employees spend their time programming. I've never heard of any serious web-based IDEs or other programming tools. I wonder if Google has something they're not telling us about --- or else, maybe only support staff will go to ChromeOS.
Moving from the legal to the technical aspects of this offer... the lack of decent interconnect will make it useful for only a small fraction of supercomputing tasks. Anyone wishing to do complex physics simulations will be out of luck.
I respect the FSF's mission, but think that this tactic is misplaced.
GMail is essentially a client-server application. The client is written in JavaScript, and the server is embedded in Google's back-end infrastructure. The protocol between the two is proprietary and undocumented.
Google wrote its own email protocol because POP and IMAP, while standard, do not meet the needs of what people really want to do today. By throwing out the standards, they build a better end-user experience. This is not so different from the way Microsoft built its own proprietary email protocols in the past.
The most valuable thing the FSF could do here would be to:
1. Get people talking about standardized advanced-functionality email protocols, beyond POP/IMAP. Then we could all start building advanced email clients and servers with the great features that GMail has.
2. If they're going to prod Google to open something up, they should be asking for the protocol, not the JavaScript client. All they're going to get from the client is a bunch of GUI and network interface code that gives little insight of the actual heavy lifting going on behind the scenes. But realistically, the protocol probably won't give much more anyway.
The GMail back-end is what would really be interesting. But I sincerely doubt Google would even THINK of open-sourcing the GMail back-end. FSF should just start a project to write that kind of stuff itself.
Let's hope MS uses a big enough font this time.
Linus Torvalds says there's no problem.
Eblen Moglen says there's no problem.
Heck, even Richard Stallman says there's no problem.
The FSF folks are not shy to sue --- or offer help to sue --- when they feel the terms of the GPL are being violated. And they tend to do so based on the facts of the case, not on whether or not they like the counterparty. Moreover... their lawsuits tend to focus on getting the company involved into compliance, not on destroying it.
Given that even the FSF folks don't think there's a problem, I just can't see Google getting sued.
RealPlayer had no viable business model, that's their fundamental problem. They had a codec --- maybe one of the first, but eventually everyone had a codec as well. They're no different from Netscape, whose flagship product became a commodity that they could no longer profit off of.
And for everyone who remembers... RealPlayer was a pretty evil piece of annoyware/spyware.
Good riddance.
