Posts by DrXym 5327 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2007
The only way you're going to run faster than bare metal (i.e. an OS running straight against the hardware) is if you're cheating on things like filesystem virtualization, e.g. holding a honking great big chunk of fs in memory. As such, what's to stop the baremetal os doing the same? What does it mean also for what happens if the power goes?
They'd make that back with the sale of 5 games which doesn't seem unreasonable over the lifetime of the unit. I'm sure they'll be flogging other stuff too - apps, music, vids, subscriptions etc.
What boggles the mind is why the 3G version doesn't use a software sim so it could be turned on in any country and just automatically connect to the local preferred provider. It could allow free access to PSN and downloads (just like Amazon & the Kindle) and sell day / week internet passes. They'd make their money back a lot faster that way through impulse sales and the like.
Amazon's android based tablet is likely to launch soon (possibly in various form factors) and might cut the legs from under the iPad. That will be interesting to see though I suspect it will be as proprietary and tied into Amazon's service as an iPad is into Apple's. I truly think that the reason Google has been so coy about opening the Android 3 source code is because they don't want Amazon to lay their hands on it.
The reason to use Java (as the language) was it allowed leveraging of a massive amount of existing tools and libraries. For example Eclipse is a great IDE so using Java immediately gives the SDK a leg up. Dalvik is also pretty much capable of using any 3rd party J2SE library of which there are a multitude.
There is no doubt that iPhone & Android share a far degree of similar touch based mechanics. However Android's desktop really is nothing like the one in iOS except on the most superficial level. Users can arrange layouts, they can install widgets. Apps are not so much monolithic apps that run at the expense of other apps as they are things which can be strung together. And things like multitasking are well thought out and implemented. The difference is even more pronounced in Android 3.0.
So yeah maybe they could junk Java for something else, but why should they. As for the UI, there is more than enough to distinguish it from iOS and always has been.
HTC et al are getting picked off one by one because Microsoft / Apple can threaten them with patent lawsuits and their partner Google hasn't got much to throw back the other way. By buying Motorola they would have a veritable raft of patents that they can fight back with. So it affords some protection to everyone in the Android camp.
I don't know what Motorola aside from patents has to offer Google. I joked the other day that Nokia and Motorola should merge so they could fail everywhere. Motorola really is a has-been provider in Europe and foundering elsewhere. It's kit is uninspiring and/or very expensive and the lack of updates is frequently commented on. Maybe Google intend to use them for Google branded phones and tablets and it's therefore seen a good fit for the long term.
NetBSD is not supported by driver / chipset companies who usually provide SDKs based on WinCE and Linux. If NetBSD were compelling for its licence it would be the defacto choice for such solutions already. As a general point it's nowhere near as robust, world proven as Linux either and is probably severely deficient especially for multicore architectures.
Anyway there is nothing to stop Android switching it were proved to be worth it. The entire userland of Android is BSD based and I expect most apps really don't know or care what kernel is underneath it all. Google would make the appropriate changes and throw a BSD kernel and userland would be much the same.
In this instance the "violation" is a big deal about nothing. The noname chinese knockoff dists are in violation by not offering the kernel source, but then again they probably just grab and build the kernels straight from the Android repository. So yeah they're in violation, no there isn't any amazing trade secrets behind it all.
NaCl executes programs which are written with native instructions (e.g. x86) sandboxed with hacks which not all CPUs may support properly.
It boggles the mind Google are even bothering with this considering they're supposedly working on a Portable NaCl which uses LLVM so the same program runs anywhere.
Google are muddying their own waters here and they'll be lumbered with this silly stopgap for years to come.
It's a wonder how anyone can claim the original movies are film-like any more. They were scanned, digitally remastered (i.e. fixing blemishes, scratches, colour issues), AND suffered the indignity of shoddy CGI and reshot scenes, and then pushed back out to 35mm. I wouldn't be surprised that for the reshot stuff the "grain" was digitally inserted.
It's certainly not the case they're at their highest resolution ever. I assume the special editions were presented theatrically in at least 2k or 4k resolution on 35mm which means they had 4-16x the resolution of Blu Ray. Blu Ray would also suffer from some amount of compression and chroma subsampling artifacts on top of that.
I'm sure it looks wonderful, the best it ever has in a home cinema but I despise marketspeak.
The problem with ebooks is you're not buying a book, you're buying a licence for a book. Hence you get whacked with VAT and Amazon / Apple / whomever can revoke your licence whenever they feel like, or even shutdown their service entirely with no repercussions.
If you want to be exempt from VAT, you need to be petitioning for some legal definition of digital property that ebooks (and other media) can be classified as. A person can own a such a book, they can sell / transfer their ownership to someone else in an irrevocable way. Basically they can do exactly the same things they can with their digital property as they can with physical property and be subject to the same taxes and laws.
I don't believe this is impossible either. If bitcoins can establish the concept of owner ship of currency then digital files such as books, videos, music should be possible too.
There are laws in place to prevent incitement, racial hatred etc. and some of them apply specifically to electronic communication. So use them. If necessary wave some lawsuits under the noses of corps to cough up log files that can be used to track down offenders.
I certainly see no way at all that social networks can proactively prevent people inciting to riot. There are millions of tweets / Facebook posts a minute and most of these riot monkeys can't even write properly. So how can you scan their words in realtime? How can you vet these people for approval beforehand? You can't. All you can do is put a framework in place to prosecute and perhaps a standard of data retention that assists with investigation. But squeeze too hard and yoofs will simply move to another form of communication which is harder to track. It's not hard to obtain encrypted messaging products so push too hard and people might actually start using them.
Small countries have been doing this commemorative crap for years. Pobjoy mint and others specialise in printing coins like these for small countries and you can buy coins with Snoopy and all sorts on them. They know only collectors bother to buy these sets so it's a convenient source of income for these countries who exchange their funny money for proper currency.
Not just coins but stamps too. As a kid I remember comic books used to have ads for stamp firms who'd send out books of "stamps" on approval from the Pitcairn Islands, Vanatu and other places which were purely for collectors. They even stuck a phony postmark onto the stamps to make pretend these stamps were actually circulated.
The bill of materials of the 3G enabled, 32GB iPad is $323. Almost half its retail price. So obscene markup.
The bill of materials of a tablet which had 16GB and no 3G and forgoing superfluous crap like GPS, camera, metal / glass enclosures would be less than $323 probably by $50-80. And that's bill of materials is in dollars, not euros as I referred to.
So it's eminently achievable to sell a perfectly functional tablet for less than €300. And when tier-1 tablet manufacturers start doing it, perhaps they will get the sales they deserve. At the moment they are in greed mode and it is doing them no favours.
As I said perhaps the penny will drop when someone like Amazon turns up and tries to steal their lunch. I expect Amazon will undercut Apple far more aggressively than other tablet makers have bothered to do and it might kick them into action.
The problem at the moment is the premium tablet manufacturers look at the markups that Apple charges and try to emulate it. And then they fall into a trap of their own making. Any consumers prepared to pay stupid money for a tablet will just buy an iPad. Samsung is the worst culprit here with their Galaxy Tab which not only aped an iPad in price but also in it's appearance and proprietary connectors.
There is absolutely zero reason that a nice wifi enabled 10" capacitive tablet with 512MB+ RAM / 16GB running Android 3.x should cost more than €300 with a nice fat margin for the manufacturer. None.
The first manufacturer who snaps out of greed mode and figures that out will enjoy brisk sales. Stop competing with Apple and start competing with other tablets. I suspect with Amazon due about to launch a tablet imminently that perhaps we'll see the penny drop soon enough.
Is for every phone store to hold a list of the IMEI numbers of all unsold stock. If a store gets looted, it should be simple enough to distribute the list to every phone network and the cops. I bet they could monitor for some of the high value phones to be turned on and track them in realtime. Some dumbasses will use their existing SIM cards with their real name and address which would lead to some easy arrests.
Linux has real time extensions you know so assuming they were necessary they are there to be used. As for bloat, the kernel is as large as the number of modules you link into it. Given that Linux is found more often than not on random set top boxes, tvs, blu ray players etc., as well as smart phones, firewalls, NASs, it's certainly a big deal.
QNX is certainly a nice OS but that doesn't mean a phone built over the top of it is any better than what already exists. I used to hear the stupid argument from Linux-heads about PDAs, how PalmOS or Windows CE stunk, about how we should all be using Linux but the reality is that it's not the kernel that matters but the user experience.
Android phones aren't selling because Linux is in there somewhere. They're selling because they're fully functional phones with a nice user interface.
If Blackberry wants to regain its thunder it has to remember that. No one gives a crap about the kernel if the GUI is deficient. Fix the GUI and it could be running on the tears of kittens for all anyone cares.
I think it was fairly obvious that the claims that there were no email clients on the tablet "for security" was complete nonsense. More likely their software is monolithic piece of crap developed over 10 years, touched by countless hands, fragile, arcane, with business & UI logic inextricably linked together and simply just very hard to port from one disparate OS to another.
They'll get there eventually but it was such a hugely silly situation to find themselves in.
Groupon is a ridiculous proposition from the get go. If reports are true, they're leaving a trail of angry businesses in their wake, moving cash through the back door to satisfy investors, and burning through the rest like nobody's business. It's not even like what they offer is unique or not done by hundreds of other sites. At some point word of mouth will be so bad amongst businesses that the only groupons they'll be selling will be for fish foot massages and little else. When the deals go, so will the people buying them.
Then the hold wobbling hyperexpanded edifice will come crashing down. The IPO investors will be the ones who get burnt. The original investors will have taken the money and run.
How can it be HTML5 based? The PS3's browser is a barely HTML4 compliant piece of crap called Netfront.
Perhaps BBC aren't using HTML5 at all or their app includes a version of Webkit to run more complex content.
There have been murmurings that the built-in browser is to improve. It would be nice if the Netfront one was dumped (except for legacy uses) for something more modern. But I wonder what the likelihood is of that happening.
At some point you have to let human beings access the data. All any company can do is limit the risk, limit who is permitted access to the data, advise their staff & partner firms how to handle it, store it in an encrypted form, audit for compliance. But if someone is criminally inclined they steal it no matter what.
I see nothing wrong with having an attractive desktop, eye candy as you put it, but there is more to it than that. OS X, Windows 7 and more recently Linux now compose their desktops using hardware acceleration which means each window is a surface. Dragging a window over other windows is faster because underlying windows do not need to be repainted.
In the old world, every damaged window would require a repaint (i.e. wake the app up and tell it to repaint some damaged clip region) whereas now the desktop just needs to be recomposed. Furthermore since windows are loaded into surfaces in the GPU it means the CPU isn't working so hard. It also allows the desktop to do nice things such as show thumbnails of windows (e.g. in the task bar hover or ALT+TAB) to zoom, scale, rotate, filter / blend windows too. So by disabling Aero in Windows you're basically crippling your PC and making it work harder.
It's certainly got some stupid deficiencies and behaviour but I think they're on the right track. I'm hoping that as one may expect with a .0 release they listen, learn and improve in 3.2 and 3.4.
The biggest fault for me is the offscreen task bar thing. Some people want it on screen all the time, or as some edge activated thing. The lack of desktop shortcuts is also very bizarre seeing as it can be reinstated using a tweak tool. When GNOME 3 drops into "classic" mode it actually is quite pleasant. I think if they fixed the task bar and also filled out on some the notification stuff that it would be a very nice, attractive, simple GUI. But it needs a point release or two.
Unity is also in the same boat, implementing some really stupid default behaviour. I hope it's recent debut as the default desktop has impressed on devs the need to fix certain things, especially with regard to larger desktops where it works really badly.
As for KDE... KDE is KDE. It's a kitchen sink of desktops, attempting to play the notes of every other desktop, simultaneously, and badly. It's a mess, it's always been a mess. While GNOME often crosses the line at least there is a sense of coherency underpinning it.
Not sure I like the clam shell design at all (what happens if you need to run your finger from one screen over to the other?) but the wedge like tablet might be quite nice. The chunky end gives it a nice slope and doubles up as something to hold it with. A bit like the Notion Ink device.
Samsung probably looked at Apple's product and wrongly concluded if they aped it in every respect including price, form factor, proprietary connectors and other arbitrary restrictions they'd produce some amazing selling device. Problem is, anyone who wants an iPad will just buy an iPad. There is nothing about this thing aside from the OS to justify buying it. So to me it seems more likely people will shrug their shoulders, say meh and favour one of the competing Android tablets which DO offer these things, and DO offer reasonable price discounts over an iPad. I really think Samsung have really screwed up here.
Next on the batting line is Sony with their S1 / S2 devices. I wonder if they'll strike out too. At least their devices look innovative even if they may not be cheap.
"In the UK this phone is free (eg. with Vodafone) if you get a 24 month, £36 contract. "
So you spend £864 and you get a "free phone". That's the point I'm making. It's not free. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, providers do this to prevent churn and to lock you into a higher priced contract which I doubt very many people make full use of.
If providers were compelled to sell phones on an as-is basis, possibly SIM free there would be vastly more transparency in the way they operate and do business. They might actually have to compete with each other harder for one thing.
Work out the price of the SIM free phone and a contract or payg that genuinely suits your predicted uses and chances are it would be the same price or less than being locked into their service for 2 years. It would also mean you have a SIM free phone with timely firmware updates rather than waiting for the provider to supply them (if ever) and when they do enjoying all the extra crapware and restrictions they've baked into it.
Just because you agree to it doesn't mean it's not one sided. Lots of contracts are like this, usually when one of the parties isn't in a position to negotiate.
As for your points, it isn't hard to find commentators saying that Amazon inserted the "you get nothing" clause after the fact exempting Amazon from paying devs anything. They also suggested that giving the app away free was a good way to generate sales on the days when it wasn't.
I'd also say that having thousands of freeloaders pile on your app is not necessarily a good thing AT ALL. It depends on the app of course but anything with a backend infrastructure could get slammed by all these new users and you would have to support them FOREVER despite never gaining a penny off them. I expect if the app were client only and ad supported it might not be bad.
As for Amazon's making money, it's more a case of gaining users at this point. Even if they don't make money from the free apps, they certainly make money for pay apps and they're free to knock up to 80% of the price of an app if they feel like it to shift it. Devs don't have a say in this matter of course.
"Devs are free to not sign up!"
That doesn't mean Amazon should be immune from criticism or that we shouldn't learn from the experiences of people who feel themselves ripped off by a 1-sided "deal". It reminds me of Groupon in so many ways, shafting the people who put in the effort to create an app by making misleading promises of their potential returns.
On Android Marketplace, the price you set is the price your app is sold for and you get 70% of that. On Amazon App Store the price you set is the list price and Amazon can discount it anywhere down to 20% of that.
It means Amazon can always undercut your own price on marketplace, even listing it all the way down to 80% off.
And you can't do anything about it. They set the price, not you and you end up competing against yourself. You can't even hike the list price up to compensate since the contract requires the Amazon price to be equal or lower than other stores.
Amazon have done a great job of alienating developers. What I predict happening is that app makers will start producing "Amazon edition" versions of their apps where the name or branding changes and the functionality is slightly different. The purpose being to so they can escape the price matching clause and can jack up the Amazon price to compensate for the discounting. It will be the Amazon tablet customers who'll ultimately suffer from all this. I wouldn't be surprised if jail breaks become extremely popular on the devices when they finally appear.
Virtually the same tech was being demoed for the PS2. Look for the clips on YouTube. I'd add that even when the Wii was new people were turning up the patents for the Sony device. The major difference was the Wii remote contains the camera and syncs with a light bar on the TV whereas the Sony solution sees the camera on the TV and the light on the controller.
It may be that Sony chose to release Move in response to the Wii but it is eminently clear it was no afterthought.
You could remotely control the PS3 and play videos and even a few games. The impediment of course was the PSP controller has less buttons and sticks. I suppose the Vita could be a closer match though games would have to have the spare CPU and latency to make remote play possible. I expect the Vita could also act as a super controller, acting like a dualshock with the display / touch screen supplying additional controls.
The Wii-U is basically treading the same ground here though since the controller is part of the console the functionality is likely to be employed by more games.
Unless you live in a sealed mineshaft. It's very likely you are subject to lots of background noise from one source or another. Cars, the rumble of lorries, wind & weather, cows, the sea & rivers, trees & leaves rustling, central heating systems, the washing machine, next door neighbours, pipes, birds like crows pecking on the the roof, binmen, aircraft, overhead pylons, tractors, drunk people in the street etc. etc.
It seems a little peculiar to identify one source of noise and proclaim psychological harm especially in the absence of research which you demand in the same breath. It sounds a teensy weensy bit like someone putting the cart before the horse. If this professor has been in the pay of tobacco firms as someone suggests it certainly does make one wonder about his motives this time around.
One thing notable about the demo is there is no animation or physics. There is also a lot of repeated content cut and pasted over and over lined up in neat little x / y rows which could have a major impact on memory and transformations.
I think when we see a demo consisting of procedurally generated trees on a random landscape with some measure of animation (swaying trees, flags, a few NPCs walking around etc) then we're talking about a potentially viable solution.
At the moment it could just be so much smoke and mirrors.
Java's look and feel in Swing is skinnable and the default behaviour is to adopt the appearance of the platform its running on. Proper use of layouts also means the gui would cope with changes caused by user's default theme, font sizes and so on. A "normal" app really has no excuse for going off and doing its own thing.
IMO it's more likely the UI designer decided that the familiarity, predictable behaviour, and decades of experience that went into building the operating system's buttons and other controls weren't for this app. Instead they should all be tossed out for some stupid eye candy.
You can supply a 2.2 manifest and set the min supported api to 2.1. Use 2.2 tags and they get ignored by the old version. So yes you can support moving apps to sd.
Google have also changed marketplace so even if this were not possible that now you can upload multiple apks under the same product name and it gets matched up to the right device by magic.
The move app to sd doesn't strictly do that though. It moves resources to sd (within an encrypted loopback device), but keeps the app code on the protected flash. If your app were really large, it would still consume a lot of space. The solution to that is probably to write a custom dex loader, shifting out some classes into an external dex which is treated like a resource but it could be a lot of effort.
Both the PSP and PS3 imposed restrictions through firmware which were gradually loosened as updates appeared through console's lifecycle. The PSP unlocked higher clock speeds. The PS3 freed up system memory. I expect as the firmware develops and is optimized and new features are added, firmware devs have a fairer idea how much memory they need and can return some to games.
It's also not uncommon for specs to change between announcement and release. The PS3 supposedly had two HDMI outs to begin with and then it became one. Maybe at the time 1080p wasn't viable over a single cable but then with 1.3 it was so the spec changed. Maybe if they're cutting memory it's with the realisation that they don't need as much as they originally thought.
If you were to draw a graph of gamers with 100% pirates on the left and 100% customers on the right that most people would fall some way away from these extremes. The 100% pirates, the lamers obviously would never buy a game, but as you go across to the right the inclination to buy increases. As a publisher, the idea is to move the inclination bar left and scoop up a lot more sales.
Ways to do that might include:
* DRM
* Serial codes for online play
* Frequent patches that add new content, features.
* Cheaper store prices
* Collectible stuff in the box
* Trial versions which can be unlocked with the purchase of a key
... and meanwhile ...
* Prosecute pirates
* Release glitched, broken / buggy versions into p2p channels to frustrate people who spend days downloading 9GB games for them to not even work.
I suppose Ubisoft's "big idea" is to ignore the other ways they could incentivize people to buy and squeeze on the DRM as hard as they can. But DRM is a slippery thing - try to grasp customers too tight and they pop right out of your fingers.
To me a game which is crippled and does not work on a plane, or a train, or on holiday is a game I don't want to own. I can understand multiplayer not working, but the entire game? Why the hell do I want to bother with that? If anything it wants me to seek out the pirate copy even more than I would have before.
So I think Ubisoft are being monumentally stupid here. It's not like there are many Ubisoft games worth owning to begin with and this sort of crap is hardly going to help their bottom line.
Treating your customers like shit by giving them a second rate experience compared to the same pirate game is not a success. It's a massive failure.
The reality is not everyone is connected to the internet 24/7 and not everyone wants spyware / DRM running all the time on their box, potentially destabilizing or interfering with the computer's normal operation. Even online services like Steam recognize that and allow you to play offline. Indeed I just spent 2 weeks doing just that.
The best way to make people buy the game is to actually value their custom and reward them for it with patches, extra content, game servers and so on. I'm sure a company Ubisoft's size could also find some ways to surreptitiously detect cracks and introduce glitches / flaws into that would act as a timesink and put a window between the game coming out in pirate form and it actually being playable.
More like a price correction. I think most people see what horrible value it is, especially with the PS Vita appearing at the same price point as the 3DS did but with vastly superior specs. Nintendo may finally have conceded that people aren't going to buy mutton dressed as lamb until its prices comes down by a significant chunk.
"If you are teaching a course based on what you know, and you've already put that into a book, using that book as course material saves a lot of repetition."
Not a very convincing argument unless we're talking about some highly esoteric subject, The reality is most undergraduate courses comprise fairly generic modules (e.g. for me databases, C programming, graphics, engineering mathematics, electronics etc.) and each has books which are widely regarded as the best ones around. Books which have ongoing value, either second hand as reference materials.
When lecturers choose to eschew a well regarded text for their own vanity project, they're doing their students a gross disservice. First they're bilking them of money (stuff students aren't exactly overflowing with), second they're using second rate teaching material, and third students are left with a book with practically zero resale value or use as a reference outside the course.
I'm glad that not all my lectures went down this path but a few most certainly did. The perverse part is the course rarely if ever even referred to their stupid books. I would recommend new students do not buy any book written by the person about to teach their course. Wait a few weeks and see if its even necessary. At worst you can buy it then.
I suspect in the age of ebooks that the danger of lecturers foisting vanity crap on their students is even greater. To "publish" these days all you need do is print your powerpoint slides through a PDF distiller or an ebook tool, slap an arbitrary price on it and then compel your students to buy it through Amazon or Apple.
Tablet manufacturers are far too greedy and I expect Samsung thinks it is competing with Apple on price at the moment. As does Asus. As does Acer. As does everyone else. The reality will sink in at some point that there are dozens of android tablets and they should be competing with each other and not Apple. I think the dam will break when Google stops playing silly buggers with the Android 3.x licensing and opens it up to all comers.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
