This would be about 1995 or so that we got our 28.8 modem. We bought the computer in 1994 I think, and it had a 14.4 modem. So jpeg's were getting common by then, but yes you're right there were a lot of gif's around also. Jpeg's, being better at skin tones than gif's, were more common by this point in certain Usenet groups dedicated to the arts of Playboy.;)
Of course, decoding a jpeg or gif from Usenet at the time was a multi-step process of marking the parts to download in a newsreader program, downloading the parts using the newsreader program, then running a separate program to put together the UUencoded parts into the completed file. When newsreaders finally built in the ability to UUencode, it was like a whole new world.
Today it's even easier: search on a website, select your desired files, save an.nzb file to your desktop, and the newsreader does the rest, including checking for errors and correcting if necessary, and un-raring the files for you. (Newsbin Pro FTW!) Bittorrent or file download sites? Who needs them. Been using newsgroups for all my file download needs for almost 20 years.
Ha, I know exactly that sound, I had an Apple IIc as my first computer. Shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt....
Had a really gnarly sound when you formatted a disk though. I always imagined it was banging the write head against something, it would vibrate the whole computer.
Speaking of formatting: As an Apple II user in the 80s, like everyone else of course I copied a lot of floppy games. ("Don't copy that floppy!") One game in particular had interesting copy protection: every time it booted, it would attempt to format its own disk. First copy I made, it of course formatted my copy. Then I made another copy but taped over the 5.25" copy protection notch: bingo!
A nice fun article (annoyingly presented for maximum ad viewing as usual)
Which is why I refuse to RTFA. IT World is crap. I refuse to wade through twenty screens for ten paragraphs of ad-laden content. No way I can trust a site like that to serve up anything useful.
Oh give me a break. They're giving you free content, you paid nothing for it. If they want to make a few cents off of their ads, in exchange for my viewing it, then more power to them.
And in the summer if the air was dry, you could get a nice static charge from running your hand over the front of a CRT if it had been on for a while. Actually, I don't miss that at all, that's the main reason dust tended to stick to the front of a CRT I believe.
I did telephone end user tech support for an ISP for almost a year, and listening to the sounds the modem made when attempting to connect was the best and easiest diagnostic tool you could use.
A short quick series of tones or squeals followed by white noise then silence meant you probably had a pretty good connection. Repeated tones or squeals and attempts to connect (the sound would change on each attempt, meaning the modem was stepping down its speed before retrying each time) usually meant you had noise on the line and you'd connect at slow speeds, if you could connect at all. (Better ask the phone company to test your lines, ma'am - be sure to tell them that you're trying to use your fax machine, not a modem, because they're obligated to provide a good connection for a fax machine. They regard modems as competition for their expensive ISDN, and they hate people that keep their modems connected to local numbers all the time on their lines for "free".)
Listening to the sounds (I sometimes had them hold the phone up to the tower) was much simpler than attempting to direct the often-clueless users to the modem diagnostics control panel and read off a series of cryptic messages.
And the joyous change in sound (ba-dung-ba-dung-chhhhhhhhh replacing squeals and static) when my wife and I splurged to buy a "super fast" 28.8 modem to replace our original 14.4 modem that came with our first PC in 1993...knowing we could now surf the web with Netscape twice as fast and download jpgs in 10 seconds instead of 20...good times, good times.:)
I see CRT monitors all over the place at thrift shops, but they're usually way overpriced for their current value. Dial up modems too - I've seen prices on them at thrift shops of $15-20, when they really should price them what they're worth - $1 maybe. If you want a dial up modem, I've got 5 or 10 in my closet I'll give you for free. (I probably should get around to recycling those one of these days.) There's a surprising amount of people around the US that still use dial up though.
I still put a 3.5 floppy drive in my computers (I build my own), because even now some BIOS updates only come on floppy images, although that's starting to be much rarer. And it's good to have options in emergency situations. But store data on floppies? No way. Probably in the next computer I build I'll skip the floppy.
Want to know what I hate most about Samsung phones? Especially after buying a Gnex? The damn battery cover! Such a flimsy piece of plastic holding the battery in and threatening to break if you pop it on or off a bit too often. Sorry, but for a premium smartphone I demand something more than a flimsy piece of plastic cheaply clicked in.
I hear this complaint about the battery cover feeling like it's going to break in the Galaxy Nexus all the time, but I've never actually heard anyone say theirs broke. It seems like a perfectly durable, flexible piece of plastic to me, I swap my battery all the time and it's a piece of cake once you figure out how to do it.
Like you say, it's the only way to get a nice thin phone and still be able to swap the battery. Once the cover is on, it's a very solid and durable phone - I've lost count of the times I've dropped my Nexus and no damage whatsoever.
Of course they can't fight Hollywood, since they've been using stills from the movies in their advertising. Take a look at their website, that's obviously a photograph of Elijah Wood from the LOTR movies on their "One Card To Bind Them All" loyalty card:
They're not fighting Hollywood since they don't have a leg to stand on. If they would have used original artwork instead of copyrighted images from a movie, I'd be on their side.
A lot of news sites first started putting up comment systems in the year or two leading up to the US elections of 2006 and 2008, which is about the same time I started reading those same news article comments. At first it really made me despair for the intelligence of my fellow Americans, until I learned a couple things:
1) Don't take the comments in comment sections as an indication of the thoughts of the majority of the individuals in the country. The people that post the most on news articles are generally those who have an axe to grind - or who have a lot of free time to waste. It's the same situation where when you work in customer support for a product, you get the impression that the product must really suck because everyone calls to complain about it - until you realize that the people that are very happy with the product don't call customer support!
2) Learn to filter out information-free and talking-point-filled posts, and you'll generally find a couple very insightful comments sprinkled here and there - it's these comments that can make reading the comment section worthwhile. For example, any comment on a news story that starts off "Obama is the worst president ever!" can be safely ignored. If it starts off "I don't like Obama because of his policies on XYZ", on the other hand, it may just have some good information.
3) Also ignore posts that name-call (i.e. President Odumbo, Speaker Boner.) If you can't be mature enough to call your "enemy" by their real name, I have no interest in reading your viewpoint.
It's not a periodic random sample of users that get moderation points on Slashdot. People that comment on stories on Slashdot get moderation points - I've noticed times where I haven't posted any comments for a while, and I would never get moderation points. Then I'd post a couple comments, and boom I get moderation points. I think you also get points for just reading articles (if you log in first obviously.) And you get more moderation points the more you post - I used to only get 5 points at a time, now every time I get mod points I get 15.
Well then they've made a poor decision then, and they will have to save up some money to get a proper PC. How much does a used dual core computer with Windows 7 go for on Craigslist again? Around $100 you say? Yes I can see buying an iPad is a huge calamity.;)
If they find that an iPad fills all of their computing needs, then I don't see what the problem is. It's not like all the manufacturers who are not Apple are going to stop making desktops and laptops.
That's not true at all, the LTE is probably just not built out much in your area.
I regularly get 10% of that speed on my 4G LTE phone (Galaxy Nexus.) It's really just a matter of your LTE coverage in your area right now. I probably average about 7 Mbps down, but I often get 10-11 Mbps. And the highest I ever saw was 40 Mbps, but that was ideal circumstances: the heart of NW Portland (a very affluent area of Portland), on the 3rd floor of a building, next to a wall of windows, late morning, clear skies. I couldn't see the LTE tower, but I bet I had a direct line of sight to it. I repeated the test a few times just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and a couple weeks later in the same area I got similar speeds.
All above tests were using Ookla's Speetest app for Android.
Google, who provide an open source OS that anyone is free to use as the hardware manufacturers see fit, modify as they wish, but they can't use the official Google apps and Android branding unless they conform to certain basic requirements. (In other words, an awful lot like Linux works)
Or
The hardware manufacturers who come up with a non-standard implementation of Android, don't meet the basic Android specs, so therefore don't get access to the basic Google apps and the Android Market.
The manufacturers have an awful lot of freedom under this arrangement. They can do just about anything they want with the Android source code (limited to the open source licensing terms of course), but as we learned from Spider-man's uncle, with great power comes great responsibility. If you want to come up with your own custom look and feel for Android, like for example Amazon with their Kindle Fire, they can certainly do that. But don't expect for Google to officially support your non-standard implementation by allowing access to the Google apps and Market. Yes it's possible to hack the Market to work, but Google doesn't have to support it. And so far this arrangement has worked out pretty good for Amazon.
Thanks for the clarification. Those were just the first emulators I started using on my Motorola Droid, so I continued using them when I got my Transformer tablet.
How long until Google cease-and-desists the developer of ArcTools, the tool to "pirate" Android Market on Archos devices? And how long until Google cease-and-desists the provider of the Gapps package for CyanogenMod, just as Google cease-and-desisted Cyanogen himself when he used to provide it?
I have no idea, but frankly I don't blame Google for protecting access to its Google Market and Google stock apps. If Android tablets and smartphones don't meet certain fairly basic criteria, they don't get to use the Google Market and standard apps. In that case, they're free to use some alternate market, and there are plenty of them. Google has no obligation to support non-standard Android builds with the official Market app and official apps. It's not like it's very hard to use a different app market on Android, and there are plenty of alternatives to the stock Google apps.
2) Amazon App Store
3) SlideME marketplace
Are AppsLib and Soc.io Mall any good?
No idea, I've only ever used the app stores I mentioned above. But even if an Android app isn't in any app stores, you can still load apps from a direct web link.
I second SlideME, it's a great place to get apps that Google kicked off their Market for one reason or another. All the console emulators are available there.
IMO you can fill all your (legitimate) Android app needs by having the following three app markets:
1) Google Market
2) Amazon App Store
3) SlideME marketplace
My question would be: Did you give the Western manufacturers an opportunity to compete to be as flexible as the Chinese competition, or did you simply tell them "We're packing up and moving to China, see you later!"
So I guess your argument boils down to: These are backwards Chinese that aren't used to being treated like human beings, so therefore treating them slightly better than slaves is a good thing.
The number of suicides is irrelevant. The important part is the reason for their suicides: bad working conditions. When was the last time you heard of a US worker committing suicide because of their working conditions at work?
How about we work towards raising all countries' labor standards towards first world levels, instead of lowering first world labor standards to third world levels?
Apple, as an American company that grew from nothing to a huge multinational corporation, benefited directly or indirectly from the following:
public schools that trained its engineers and employees
public roads and ports for transporting its goods to consumers
public airwaves for advertising its goods to consumers
public fire and police for protecting its buildings from destruction and protecting its goods from being stolen
the internet, which was created and advanced by various government agencies and educational institutions
the US Armed Forces, which protects international shipping lanes so its products can get to their destination without fear of piracy
I guess what you're saying is that Apple could have easily risen into the company it is today if it had started in Somalia, a country that arguably has NO central government?
Slashdot Mirror
This would be about 1995 or so that we got our 28.8 modem. We bought the computer in 1994 I think, and it had a 14.4 modem. So jpeg's were getting common by then, but yes you're right there were a lot of gif's around also. Jpeg's, being better at skin tones than gif's, were more common by this point in certain Usenet groups dedicated to the arts of Playboy. ;)
.nzb file to your desktop, and the newsreader does the rest, including checking for errors and correcting if necessary, and un-raring the files for you. (Newsbin Pro FTW!) Bittorrent or file download sites? Who needs them. Been using newsgroups for all my file download needs for almost 20 years.
Of course, decoding a jpeg or gif from Usenet at the time was a multi-step process of marking the parts to download in a newsreader program, downloading the parts using the newsreader program, then running a separate program to put together the UUencoded parts into the completed file. When newsreaders finally built in the ability to UUencode, it was like a whole new world.
Today it's even easier: search on a website, select your desired files, save an
So you can easily tell if it's connecting correctly and at a decent speed...
Hey! You ruined my record man, I just bought it!
Ha, I know exactly that sound, I had an Apple IIc as my first computer. Shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt-shhhtt....
Had a really gnarly sound when you formatted a disk though. I always imagined it was banging the write head against something, it would vibrate the whole computer.
Speaking of formatting: As an Apple II user in the 80s, like everyone else of course I copied a lot of floppy games. ("Don't copy that floppy!") One game in particular had interesting copy protection: every time it booted, it would attempt to format its own disk. First copy I made, it of course formatted my copy. Then I made another copy but taped over the 5.25" copy protection notch: bingo!
Good times...
A nice fun article (annoyingly presented for maximum ad viewing as usual)
Which is why I refuse to RTFA. IT World is crap. I refuse to wade through twenty screens for ten paragraphs of ad-laden content. No way I can trust a site like that to serve up anything useful.
Oh give me a break. They're giving you free content, you paid nothing for it. If they want to make a few cents off of their ads, in exchange for my viewing it, then more power to them.
And in the summer if the air was dry, you could get a nice static charge from running your hand over the front of a CRT if it had been on for a while. Actually, I don't miss that at all, that's the main reason dust tended to stick to the front of a CRT I believe.
I did telephone end user tech support for an ISP for almost a year, and listening to the sounds the modem made when attempting to connect was the best and easiest diagnostic tool you could use.
:)
A short quick series of tones or squeals followed by white noise then silence meant you probably had a pretty good connection. Repeated tones or squeals and attempts to connect (the sound would change on each attempt, meaning the modem was stepping down its speed before retrying each time) usually meant you had noise on the line and you'd connect at slow speeds, if you could connect at all. (Better ask the phone company to test your lines, ma'am - be sure to tell them that you're trying to use your fax machine, not a modem, because they're obligated to provide a good connection for a fax machine. They regard modems as competition for their expensive ISDN, and they hate people that keep their modems connected to local numbers all the time on their lines for "free".)
Listening to the sounds (I sometimes had them hold the phone up to the tower) was much simpler than attempting to direct the often-clueless users to the modem diagnostics control panel and read off a series of cryptic messages.
And the joyous change in sound (ba-dung-ba-dung-chhhhhhhhh replacing squeals and static) when my wife and I splurged to buy a "super fast" 28.8 modem to replace our original 14.4 modem that came with our first PC in 1993...knowing we could now surf the web with Netscape twice as fast and download jpgs in 10 seconds instead of 20...good times, good times.
I see CRT monitors all over the place at thrift shops, but they're usually way overpriced for their current value. Dial up modems too - I've seen prices on them at thrift shops of $15-20, when they really should price them what they're worth - $1 maybe. If you want a dial up modem, I've got 5 or 10 in my closet I'll give you for free. (I probably should get around to recycling those one of these days.) There's a surprising amount of people around the US that still use dial up though.
I still put a 3.5 floppy drive in my computers (I build my own), because even now some BIOS updates only come on floppy images, although that's starting to be much rarer. And it's good to have options in emergency situations. But store data on floppies? No way. Probably in the next computer I build I'll skip the floppy.
Want to know what I hate most about Samsung phones? Especially after buying a Gnex? The damn battery cover! Such a flimsy piece of plastic holding the battery in and threatening to break if you pop it on or off a bit too often. Sorry, but for a premium smartphone I demand something more than a flimsy piece of plastic cheaply clicked in.
I hear this complaint about the battery cover feeling like it's going to break in the Galaxy Nexus all the time, but I've never actually heard anyone say theirs broke. It seems like a perfectly durable, flexible piece of plastic to me, I swap my battery all the time and it's a piece of cake once you figure out how to do it.
Like you say, it's the only way to get a nice thin phone and still be able to swap the battery. Once the cover is on, it's a very solid and durable phone - I've lost count of the times I've dropped my Nexus and no damage whatsoever.
Whoosh!
Of course they can't fight Hollywood, since they've been using stills from the movies in their advertising. Take a look at their website, that's obviously a photograph of Elijah Wood from the LOTR movies on their "One Card To Bind Them All" loyalty card:
http://www.hobbitpub.co.uk/drink-offers/
They're not fighting Hollywood since they don't have a leg to stand on. If they would have used original artwork instead of copyrighted images from a movie, I'd be on their side.
You can probably find the answer to that question on wikipedia.
A lot of news sites first started putting up comment systems in the year or two leading up to the US elections of 2006 and 2008, which is about the same time I started reading those same news article comments. At first it really made me despair for the intelligence of my fellow Americans, until I learned a couple things:
1) Don't take the comments in comment sections as an indication of the thoughts of the majority of the individuals in the country. The people that post the most on news articles are generally those who have an axe to grind - or who have a lot of free time to waste. It's the same situation where when you work in customer support for a product, you get the impression that the product must really suck because everyone calls to complain about it - until you realize that the people that are very happy with the product don't call customer support!
2) Learn to filter out information-free and talking-point-filled posts, and you'll generally find a couple very insightful comments sprinkled here and there - it's these comments that can make reading the comment section worthwhile. For example, any comment on a news story that starts off "Obama is the worst president ever!" can be safely ignored. If it starts off "I don't like Obama because of his policies on XYZ", on the other hand, it may just have some good information.
3) Also ignore posts that name-call (i.e. President Odumbo, Speaker Boner.) If you can't be mature enough to call your "enemy" by their real name, I have no interest in reading your viewpoint.
It's not a periodic random sample of users that get moderation points on Slashdot. People that comment on stories on Slashdot get moderation points - I've noticed times where I haven't posted any comments for a while, and I would never get moderation points. Then I'd post a couple comments, and boom I get moderation points. I think you also get points for just reading articles (if you log in first obviously.) And you get more moderation points the more you post - I used to only get 5 points at a time, now every time I get mod points I get 15.
Well then they've made a poor decision then, and they will have to save up some money to get a proper PC. How much does a used dual core computer with Windows 7 go for on Craigslist again? Around $100 you say? Yes I can see buying an iPad is a huge calamity. ;)
If they find that an iPad fills all of their computing needs, then I don't see what the problem is. It's not like all the manufacturers who are not Apple are going to stop making desktops and laptops.
That's not true at all, the LTE is probably just not built out much in your area.
I regularly get 10% of that speed on my 4G LTE phone (Galaxy Nexus.) It's really just a matter of your LTE coverage in your area right now. I probably average about 7 Mbps down, but I often get 10-11 Mbps. And the highest I ever saw was 40 Mbps, but that was ideal circumstances: the heart of NW Portland (a very affluent area of Portland), on the 3rd floor of a building, next to a wall of windows, late morning, clear skies. I couldn't see the LTE tower, but I bet I had a direct line of sight to it. I repeated the test a few times just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and a couple weeks later in the same area I got similar speeds.
All above tests were using Ookla's Speetest app for Android.
So whose fault is that?
Google, who provide an open source OS that anyone is free to use as the hardware manufacturers see fit, modify as they wish, but they can't use the official Google apps and Android branding unless they conform to certain basic requirements. (In other words, an awful lot like Linux works)
Or
The hardware manufacturers who come up with a non-standard implementation of Android, don't meet the basic Android specs, so therefore don't get access to the basic Google apps and the Android Market.
The manufacturers have an awful lot of freedom under this arrangement. They can do just about anything they want with the Android source code (limited to the open source licensing terms of course), but as we learned from Spider-man's uncle, with great power comes great responsibility. If you want to come up with your own custom look and feel for Android, like for example Amazon with their Kindle Fire, they can certainly do that. But don't expect for Google to officially support your non-standard implementation by allowing access to the Google apps and Market. Yes it's possible to hack the Market to work, but Google doesn't have to support it. And so far this arrangement has worked out pretty good for Amazon.
Thanks for the clarification. Those were just the first emulators I started using on my Motorola Droid, so I continued using them when I got my Transformer tablet.
1) Google Market
How long until Google cease-and-desists the developer of ArcTools, the tool to "pirate" Android Market on Archos devices? And how long until Google cease-and-desists the provider of the Gapps package for CyanogenMod, just as Google cease-and-desisted Cyanogen himself when he used to provide it?
I have no idea, but frankly I don't blame Google for protecting access to its Google Market and Google stock apps. If Android tablets and smartphones don't meet certain fairly basic criteria, they don't get to use the Google Market and standard apps. In that case, they're free to use some alternate market, and there are plenty of them. Google has no obligation to support non-standard Android builds with the official Market app and official apps. It's not like it's very hard to use a different app market on Android, and there are plenty of alternatives to the stock Google apps.
2) Amazon App Store 3) SlideME marketplace
Are AppsLib and Soc.io Mall any good?
No idea, I've only ever used the app stores I mentioned above. But even if an Android app isn't in any app stores, you can still load apps from a direct web link.
I second SlideME, it's a great place to get apps that Google kicked off their Market for one reason or another. All the console emulators are available there.
IMO you can fill all your (legitimate) Android app needs by having the following three app markets:
1) Google Market
2) Amazon App Store
3) SlideME marketplace
Also known as "right to work for less" states.
My question would be: Did you give the Western manufacturers an opportunity to compete to be as flexible as the Chinese competition, or did you simply tell them "We're packing up and moving to China, see you later!"
So I guess your argument boils down to: These are backwards Chinese that aren't used to being treated like human beings, so therefore treating them slightly better than slaves is a good thing.
The number of suicides is irrelevant. The important part is the reason for their suicides: bad working conditions. When was the last time you heard of a US worker committing suicide because of their working conditions at work?
How about we work towards raising all countries' labor standards towards first world levels, instead of lowering first world labor standards to third world levels?
Apple, as an American company that grew from nothing to a huge multinational corporation, benefited directly or indirectly from the following:
public schools that trained its engineers and employees
public roads and ports for transporting its goods to consumers
public airwaves for advertising its goods to consumers
public fire and police for protecting its buildings from destruction and protecting its goods from being stolen
the internet, which was created and advanced by various government agencies and educational institutions
the US Armed Forces, which protects international shipping lanes so its products can get to their destination without fear of piracy
I guess what you're saying is that Apple could have easily risen into the company it is today if it had started in Somalia, a country that arguably has NO central government?