bodski

related Phoronix article: http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16135

[1] http://androidforums.com/samsung-galaxy-s2/313715-samsung-ga...

[2] http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/29/samsung-galaxy-s-ii-gps-i...

Apparently this is the first Android phone to ship with 100% open source kernel (drivers and all).

(sounds like a really promising game though) ref: http://frontier.co.uk/games/outsider/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_4

Most lagers on sale in the UK (outside of city 'mini-marts') are brewed in the UK and all seem to taste the same (terrible) and give me hangovers before I have even stopped drinking. We have no beer purity laws like there are in places like Germany either, sold out brands that are brewed in the UK like Carlsberg / Stella / Kronenburg etc are nothing like their native counterparts. The difference when drinking duty free (real) Stella is like night and day (but it does go flat very quickly). The EU just wouldn't put up with such terrible lager, us Brits seem to lap it up though. Another one is Fosters, we seem to love it, apparently Fosters is Australian for 'horse piss'.

In Belgian off-licences, even the 'real' Stella is relegated to the bargain bin alongside Juliper. They 'reassuringly expensive' advertising campaign is a total sham.

Imported Heineken, Becks, Budvar (the original Budweiser brand from Czech) etc. seem to be the only decent lagers you can still find in the shops here, rip off prices though.

Would you welcome typo corrections if people are making efforts to do sophisticated formatting?

If so here's one that seems worth correcting: (from item 2.)

"The most challenging is finding a project big enough to not be boring but small enough that-['s] it's +[not] too difficult to make good progress."

• investigate ways of limiting adverse consequences of patent thickets, including by working with international partners to establish a patent fee structure set by reference to innovation and growth goals rather than solely by reference to patent office running costs. The structure of patent renewal fees might be adjusted to encourage patentees to assess more carefully the value of maintaining lower value patents, so reducing the density of patent thickets."

Let's hope Vince Cable and the rest of the government take these recommendations seriously and are not looking across the atlantic through rose tinted spectacles (as many of the Conservatives seem to be doing w.r.t. some other areas of economic policy).

It reassures me because it feels at times that the people around me who are so 'great' at mathematics are born naturals and that I may as well give up. For me is a great 'leveller' to hear that even the greatest minds struggle with these things, albeit to differing degrees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2WurhYEQyY [Flash video!]

"Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." - Jon von Neuman

One of the most reassuring quotes I know!

Personally eggs and meat are things I will pay the extra for the animals to be free range and fed a natural diet, and I eat a lot less of them. With a diet such as the one in the post such things can become an occasional treat and their true value is appreciated.

A non-trivial part of the problems facing the human race is related to the growing expectation of a never ending, abundance of cheap meat.

If I write code to target a platform whose implementation infringes a patent somewhere deep 'beneath the hood' I am not liable to pay any damages for that, I did not ship infringing code and my code is agnostic to whether the platform infringes or not.

I cannot see the need (besides FUD) for Florian to have written that. He mixes cherry picked facts and analysis with wild speculation (commonly involving Android's 'bleak future') and hopes that people won't see the difference.

Edit: As another example, see how he conveniently forgot to mention the factor of the finding coming from an East Texas court when he extrapolates from this verdict to all Android related patent suits.

"Implications for Android: Concerning Android, I wouldn't rule out that maybe some of the hundreds of thousands of Android applications out there use the teachings of the infringed patent claims in one way or another."

Wow, developer FUD much? Let me propose a small fix for you Florian:

"...I wouldn't rule out that maybe some of the millions of software applications written since this patent was filed use the teachings of the infringed patent claims in one way or another."

Why single out Android on this? oh wait, I forgot, because it's Florian...

Incidentally, I'm with BeUnlimited and it seems uploading.com always thinks that my IP address has exceeded some download limit:

"Sorry, you have reached your daily download limit. Please try again tomorrow or acquire a premium membership."

This does not happen when browsing from a cheap Linux VPS box, looks like Be/O2 are proxying too, except from curl -I output it looks like it's a fully transparent proxy.

http://lwn.net/Articles/401923/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider

This 'Greening the Desert' projects shows a promising way forward using long term (5-8 years) permaculture techniques to render arid, salty and previously unproductive land into productive land able to capture and sustain the majority of the water it needs with minimal irrigation.

http://permaculture.org.au/2007/03/01/greening-the-desert-no...

I recommend watching the videos, truly inspiring stuff. The original greening the desert project transformed an arid, salt ridden area in Jordan into a fruit producing farm within a few years. The locals laughed initially at their efforts but then started queuing up to learn how it was done.

The other thing we need to do (in the West) is appreciate the value and privilege of eating meat and stop expecting to base a large part of our diets on it. A given amount of land can feed 7x the number of people when used to grow plant crops eaten directly as opposed to feeding it to livestock.

Jeez Florian, you have come a long way since your campaign against software patents.

A few days ago you blow up the Bionic GPL issue as if it was an unprecedented tactic used by Google (and were soundly rebutted on LWN by the way ;) and now this.

Have you received funding from Microsoft at any point, perchance?

A shame that its not likely to work with the wooden 'mirror' though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCSbk9JDwPY

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2288824

edit: changed link to relevant comment

More and more stuff can be carried down UTP like video (HDMI over Ethernet) and USB devices, it is also ideal for hooking up phones around the place too. You can never have too much UTP in your walls when considering possible future requirements IMO.

Oh and don't forget to run some up to your roof area to give you the option of participating in your local wireless mesh project!

As a father of two young children, I kept them away from computers and screens as much as possible until they were 3 years old.

Babies are wired to be learning about and interacting with their physical environment and the lifeforms around them. Exposing them to highly artificial and abstract phenomena before they have developed the abstract thought processes to assign relevance and meaning to them seems to be at best at waste of hard earned neural circuitry, at worst developmentally damaging.

We need to be gently nurturing our children's imaginations not flattening it and rendering it obsolete via technology. There's plenty of time for kids to discover computers, but once they do other all the other things they love doing will have some serious competition for their attention.

http://i.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-vs-htc-a-patent-break...

Unless you meant out of defence of the right to make more profit, in which case yes I totally agree, completely defensive.

As demand increases for wireless bandwidth, prices may rise to reflect the supply shortfall. At points this will hit an equilibrium level and demand will cease to rise. At other points new technology will increase supply etc. At some point in the future we will likely hit a fairly final equilibrium. As long as governments maintain a level of competition in the market (something they are generally not doing very well right now I admit) we could avoid price fixing cartels between the carriers.

We just have to face it, wireless RF spectrum is a shared finite resource nothing we do will ever overcome this fundamental truth. No amount of financial manipulation of the market business models by the carriers will ever change this.

If I want to get priority access over others I should pay for it! Allowing content providers to bid for priority reduces consumers freedom to choose what they are able to access. Problem is, a lot of people these days will take free over paying a premium even when their freedom is removed.

Imagine say Verizon et al get their way and say for simplicity's sake 10 big content providers manage to achieve the overall bandwidth priority between them on most networks. People accessing other content will likely become frustrated with smaller services and migrate their usage to the services offered by these 'big 10'. Eventually most people use these prioritised services and small sites/startups just don't get a look in. However nothing has changed with regard to bandwidth, there is now the same contention just that a small number of providers have managed to dominate the market. The carriers are making loads of extra money for doing effectively nothing, all they have done is played the content providers off against each other and against the consumers (and pocketed lots of money in the process). It seems to effectively amount to extortion.

Allowing prioritising of traffic based on provider will not likely reduce prices for data contracts for consumers. The same issues of bandwidth contention will arise, except that this time the carriers are able to effectively blackmail content providers. The big content providers may see themselves as able to profit from this scenario, the smaller ones won't stand a chance.

In the long, long term lets hope quantum entanglement based communication allows us to leave RF behind!

The problem is that there is a theoretical limit to how wireless infrastructure can be improved. Sure, new generations of wireless tech. are improving the bandwidth available every few years. But RF frequency bands are a limited resource and sooner or later Shannon-Hartley's theorem [1] will dictate that the only way to improve bandwidth will be to increase power levels received at user's antennae (either by increasing effective transmission power or clustering cells more densely). But doing this will deliver ever diminishing (logarithmic) gains and an increasing public health risk associated with increased RF levels.

Couple that with the fact that wireless is going to be the Internet in the coming decades (for many youngsters it already is) and you are faced with a problem of how to allocate things fairly.

Wired Internet resources on the other hand can be upgraded effectively forever. If the demand is there we can keep laying new fibre whilst maximising the existing lines with new modulation techniques etc. The same cannot be said of wireless technology.

It is precisely because of these major contention issues that wireless spectrum should be protected under net neutrality regulations, its need of regulation is in fact greater than that of wired Internet. When there is an approaching hard limit to bandwidth available why would we want to allow the parties with the biggest wallets dominate the traffic? It is precisely these sorts of situations that governments are for, without them monopolies will naturally form at the expense of the populace.

Imagine if governments around the world said, let's solve (or rather ignore) the problem of car traffic congestion by allowing employers to bid for priority access to the roads on behalf of their employees, and businesses to bid on behalf of their customers, even though everyone has already paid their own car tax, fuel etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem