Fair enough. The air is actually larger than the mini, it's just thinner and lighter than the older models. I do agree that the Nexus 7 is a nice form factor, I just wish it was easier to figure out which way up it was so I could turn the thing on without trying four times (somehow I get the wrong corner three times in a row before finding the little button).
If you're using tablets for hours at a time, you've got more patience than me:)
On both iOS and Android you can use something called Puffin browser. Five minutes using that thing, and you realise why no mobile OS has any interest in supporting Flash. But if you really need Flash, it's there.
I'm wondering, if you wanted a 7" tablet, why you didn't buy an iPad mini instead? Seems a bit unfair to criticise the iPad on size, when the mini is available and is pretty much the same size as a Nexus 7. Not to mention a bit cheaper than the full size iPad.
As a counter-datapoint, I took a couple of Nexus 7's home during the Christmas holidays. And the kids didn't like them at all, and instead fought over the one iPad. Now, this might just be because kids are dumb and like the bigger thing just because it's bigger, and also I'm beginning to suspect that they also quite like fighting just for the hell of it. But the Nexus' didn't charge their batteries while in use and plugged in, whereas the iPad did. Pretty annoying.
The problem I see with IDEs like VS is that the hide a lot of complexity to programmers.
I develop C++ using Visual Studio. What complexity is my IDE hiding from me? What stuff is 'going on inside', that I don't know about? I can break execution, examine a list of threads, the register contents, single-step over the assembly...It seems to me that all the complexity is right there, if I want to see it.
like those dudes who first started talking to themselves with hands-free kits for their phones,
Not so much, those guys looked like dicks then, and they look like dicks now.
I can't imagine a world where google glasses (no, I'm not going to call them 'glass') would be useful beyond very niche areas. Security personel might find them pretty helpful, maybe those guys who walk around airport runways waving juggling clubs around might appreciate knowing when the next plane is coming in so they can perform in front of them. But your regular guy on the street - I don't think so. Not ever.
That's a pretty good question, and the only answer that I can come up with is that the engineers thought it would be cool. Everything has a camera these days, but I completely agree that it would be a better device without it. It's probably a shit camera anyway.
Can we please not perpetuate the usage of this absurd term? Not that I think the thing is remotely socially acceptable, just that we don't need a special term for it.
I don't think that either pi or e contain infinite information. For instance, in the case of pi at least, there exists a recurrence relation that will compute the nth digit of pi. The formula isn't especially complicated, and I don't think that we can say that there's an infinite amount of information in it.
In any case, surely the fact that pi and e crop up endlessly in our mathematical models of the universe, there must be something to them. And if they aren't properties of the universe, then what are they properties of?
For instance. e can be defined as the number such that d/dx(e^x) = e^x
That's a pretty simple definition, and it so happens that the number that satisfies that definition has an infinite decimal expansion. Does that mean it contains infinite information?
My point was that if the math modeled reality more directly, PI would be a whole number.
Because I don't think that the point makes any sense. Our representation of numbers, as in how we write them down, has nothing to do with mathematics itself. Or are you saying that in the system of integers, wherein the counting numbers lie, and what are what we generally refer to as 'whole' numbers, we should also place PI. And presumably e and all those other irrational constants, like every non-rational root for instance.
I suppose my problem is that I simply don't understand your point at all.
Defining x/0 as always equalling 42 is going to lead to contradictions though, so although you can certainly make that definition the mathematics you end up with isn't going to be terribly useful except for making smug comments on slashdot.
Arguments around the definitiveness or otherwise of mathematics are as old as mathematics itself, or possible even older, and aren't going to be resolved on this forum.
I find myself being a kiddo that's wondering what your point might be.
But you can't, for instance, have both PI and e as 'whole numbers' in our generic number systems. And in any case, this is just an argument about the representation of numbers using decimal notation - which is pretty much an arbitrary thing. You could in fact argue that PI and e *are* whole numbers, and we write them as Pi and e respectively. Looks pretty 'whole' to me.
That's because not lighting up doesn't prevent the endgame. My partner's Father, a fit and healthy man who never smoked a day in his life, died of cancer. What can you do? You're going to go from something, and not smoking is no guarantee that what you go of won't be extremely unpleasant.
Those accelerations aren't 'extra' - they are really happening to the phone and so would have to be taken into account too.
The problem isn't that the phone is moved around in the car, the problem is that the accelerometers and gyros of the class that exist in phones are orders of magnitude too noisy and imprecise to be used to dead-reackon for more than a few hundred milliseconds.
There is absolutely no way on earth that any cellphone that exists today uses any of its inertial sensors as part of its GPS solution.
Well partly at least it's the fact that I wrote a long reply enumerating seven specific things that I thought were terrible about the new design, and the comment was eaten by the site.
1) The reply to comment has a pointless title box labelled 'Reply to Comment'. What's it for? I left it blank in this reply. 2) Once you scroll down in the comments, fully one third of my monitor's width is wasted. 3) Also once you scroll down the indentation of the nested comments occurs on both sides, so that the comments gradually get narrower and narrower. This happens on the old site too, but the incremental indentation is less, and the amount of width to begin with is much greater. I have seen this taken to such extremes on some sites that comments actually become a column of letters. 4) The main page, wherein the stories, are listed has lost its personality. Gone are the icons on the old site that added colour and humour. Gone are the "from the insert-witty-and-relevant-comment-here dept." bylines, which added to the personality of the site. The place is for geeks, so it's supposed to be a bit geeky. It's not supposed to look corporate and neutered. 5) The main page downloaded a total of 1.7Mb when I refreshed. The old page downloaded 1.1Mb - which is still completely insane but it's quite a bit less. 6) The main page gives the impression of wasting large amounts of vertical space - although this is actually an illusion because both the old and the new site fit the same number of stories in each page - it still looks sloppy. 7) When I tried to preview the comment it turned out that I have to put something in the "reply to comment" box. So let's try again. 8) Ah it turns out to be the title, which used to be filled in automatically and is irrelevant anyway if you're replying.
The same is true of the theory that the earth's landmasses were once coagulated into Pangea. The same is true of theories about how the earth was formed, about the nature of distant galaxies, about the origins of language. In fact, the same is true about nearly every theory of the past. Do you treat those with similar distain?
There were no scientists before the invention of science. Those Greeks were pretty interesting and pretty clever guys, but scientists they were not. Francis Bacon invented science, and he did it in the 1600's.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, fine that's all great. I get that.
But why, then, would this great experimentalist want us to worship him?
Throw in an hour for testing.
And that, ladies and gentleman, is the problem. An hour for testing, and its good, right?
Screen rotates, that's great. Buttons tend to stay in the same place though. It honestly does take me three goes to turn the thing on.
Fair enough. The air is actually larger than the mini, it's just thinner and lighter than the older models. I do agree that the Nexus 7 is a nice form factor, I just wish it was easier to figure out which way up it was so I could turn the thing on without trying four times (somehow I get the wrong corner three times in a row before finding the little button).
If you're using tablets for hours at a time, you've got more patience than me :)
On both iOS and Android you can use something called Puffin browser. Five minutes using that thing, and you realise why no mobile OS has any interest in supporting Flash. But if you really need Flash, it's there.
... because it's the form factor of a kindle
I'm wondering, if you wanted a 7" tablet, why you didn't buy an iPad mini instead? Seems a bit unfair to criticise the iPad on size, when the mini is available and is pretty much the same size as a Nexus 7. Not to mention a bit cheaper than the full size iPad.
As a counter-datapoint, I took a couple of Nexus 7's home during the Christmas holidays. And the kids didn't like them at all, and instead fought over the one iPad. Now, this might just be because kids are dumb and like the bigger thing just because it's bigger, and also I'm beginning to suspect that they also quite like fighting just for the hell of it. But the Nexus' didn't charge their batteries while in use and plugged in, whereas the iPad did. Pretty annoying.
Well, ok. But it sure looked like a general comment about IDEs.
In any case, isn't it surely the language and framework that's hiding stuff from you here, not the IDE? I don't know, I don't do any .NET.
The problem I see with IDEs like VS is that the hide a lot of complexity to programmers.
I develop C++ using Visual Studio. What complexity is my IDE hiding from me? What stuff is 'going on inside', that I don't know about? I can break execution, examine a list of threads, the register contents, single-step over the assembly...It seems to me that all the complexity is right there, if I want to see it.
I think they probably made it up, which is even more reason to refuse to use it normal conversation.
like those dudes who first started talking to themselves with hands-free kits for their phones,
Not so much, those guys looked like dicks then, and they look like dicks now.
I can't imagine a world where google glasses (no, I'm not going to call them 'glass') would be useful beyond very niche areas. Security personel might find them pretty helpful, maybe those guys who walk around airport runways waving juggling clubs around might appreciate knowing when the next plane is coming in so they can perform in front of them. But your regular guy on the street - I don't think so. Not ever.
Any technology that requires the user to wear stupid headgear is doomed to failure. There are no exceptions to this rule.
That's a pretty good question, and the only answer that I can come up with is that the engineers thought it would be cool. Everything has a camera these days, but I completely agree that it would be a better device without it. It's probably a shit camera anyway.
glassholes
Can we please not perpetuate the usage of this absurd term? Not that I think the thing is remotely socially acceptable, just that we don't need a special term for it.
Hmm - I wonder about that.
I don't think that either pi or e contain infinite information. For instance, in the case of pi at least, there exists a recurrence relation that will compute the nth digit of pi. The formula isn't especially complicated, and I don't think that we can say that there's an infinite amount of information in it.
In any case, surely the fact that pi and e crop up endlessly in our mathematical models of the universe, there must be something to them. And if they aren't properties of the universe, then what are they properties of?
For instance. e can be defined as the number such that
d/dx(e^x) = e^x
That's a pretty simple definition, and it so happens that the number that satisfies that definition has an infinite decimal expansion. Does that mean it contains infinite information?
I'm disagreeing with
My point was that if the math modeled reality more directly, PI would be a whole number.
Because I don't think that the point makes any sense. Our representation of numbers, as in how we write them down, has nothing to do with mathematics itself. Or are you saying that in the system of integers, wherein the counting numbers lie, and what are what we generally refer to as 'whole' numbers, we should also place PI. And presumably e and all those other irrational constants, like every non-rational root for instance.
I suppose my problem is that I simply don't understand your point at all.
Defining x/0 as always equalling 42 is going to lead to contradictions though, so although you can certainly make that definition the mathematics you end up with isn't going to be terribly useful except for making smug comments on slashdot.
Arguments around the definitiveness or otherwise of mathematics are as old as mathematics itself, or possible even older, and aren't going to be resolved on this forum.
I find myself being a kiddo that's wondering what your point might be.
But you can't, for instance, have both PI and e as 'whole numbers' in our generic number systems. And in any case, this is just an argument about the representation of numbers using decimal notation - which is pretty much an arbitrary thing. You could in fact argue that PI and e *are* whole numbers, and we write them as Pi and e respectively. Looks pretty 'whole' to me.
That's because not lighting up doesn't prevent the endgame. My partner's Father, a fit and healthy man who never smoked a day in his life, died of cancer. What can you do? You're going to go from something, and not smoking is no guarantee that what you go of won't be extremely unpleasant.
Those accelerations aren't 'extra' - they are really happening to the phone and so would have to be taken into account too.
The problem isn't that the phone is moved around in the car, the problem is that the accelerometers and gyros of the class that exist in phones are orders of magnitude too noisy and imprecise to be used to dead-reackon for more than a few hundred milliseconds.
There is absolutely no way on earth that any cellphone that exists today uses any of its inertial sensors as part of its GPS solution.
Well partly at least it's the fact that I wrote a long reply enumerating seven specific things that I thought were terrible about the new design, and the comment was eaten by the site.
I wrote a long comment about all this, but the beta site ate it.
1) The reply to comment has a pointless title box labelled 'Reply to Comment'. What's it for? I left it blank in this reply.
2) Once you scroll down in the comments, fully one third of my monitor's width is wasted.
3) Also once you scroll down the indentation of the nested comments occurs on both sides, so that the comments gradually get narrower and narrower. This happens on the old site too, but the incremental indentation is less, and the amount of width to begin with is much greater. I have seen this taken to such extremes on some sites that comments actually become a column of letters.
4) The main page, wherein the stories, are listed has lost its personality. Gone are the icons on the old site that added colour and humour. Gone are the "from the insert-witty-and-relevant-comment-here dept." bylines, which added to the personality of the site. The place is for geeks, so it's supposed to be a bit geeky. It's not supposed to look corporate and neutered.
5) The main page downloaded a total of 1.7Mb when I refreshed. The old page downloaded 1.1Mb - which is still completely insane but it's quite a bit less.
6) The main page gives the impression of wasting large amounts of vertical space - although this is actually an illusion because both the old and the new site fit the same number of stories in each page - it still looks sloppy.
7) When I tried to preview the comment it turned out that I have to put something in the "reply to comment" box. So let's try again.
8) Ah it turns out to be the title, which used to be filled in automatically and is irrelevant anyway if you're replying.
The same is true of the theory that the earth's landmasses were once coagulated into Pangea. The same is true of theories about how the earth was formed, about the nature of distant galaxies, about the origins of language. In fact, the same is true about nearly every theory of the past. Do you treat those with similar distain?
I personally never took the Genesis 1 as being to the letter literal.
Good for you, but they sure did back in Galileo's time.
There were no scientists before the invention of science. Those Greeks were pretty interesting and pretty clever guys, but scientists they were not. Francis Bacon invented science, and he did it in the 1600's.