No. Flash isn't necessarily ideal but I'd rather have the choice. There have been times when I've been out and wanting to view a specific video, listen to a radio station etc where there wouldn't be an iphone app. You have the choice to completely disable it, I think possibly even uninstall it, and easily set it to only on demand... Whereas with Apple, you have none...
That's a very limited, and to be honest immature, view of it, and neglects the reality of coalition politics. If you want to say that you're against coalition governments of any sort, fine, say so. But if no parties win an election outright, and some of those parties then form a coalition government, the coalition partners are going to have to compromise on some of the policies they started out with, and the smaller the party, the more they're going to have to compromise. They still get some of their policies implemented, as opposed to none if they didn't form a coalition, but a smaller coalition partner is simply not in a position to implement all the policies they may have had in their pre-coalition manifesto; deal with it.
There's nothing wrong with coalition governments, nor is there anything wrong with having to compromise in places. But they're not compromising, they're caving, on virtually every promise they made. Our government is one of MP's voting. The smaller the party in the coalition government, the less sway they have on the outcome due to the less votes they actually have. Promises were made, and immediately broken, when they could have at least stood up and fought for a reasonable compromise (It's politics I know, breaking promises is what they do). For example, no, taking 80% away from education funding and tripling fees is not a compromise, it's a fucking joke.
Just remember, Conservatives would be having a much harder time if the Lib Dems didn't form the coalition. Who else would they have joined up with? Would they be getting away with such activities if they were just a minority government?
Tmobile isn't the decent carrier... It's only notable because they are att compatible.
They certainly aren't decent, but seem to screw their customers less was what I meant, lesser of two evils style. And they're not really even AT&T compatible. Same technologies, but different frequencies, for 3G at least.
Sprint is the decent cell provider in the Us. With their prepaid services like boost mobile you can get unlimited voice text, and 3g data for 45$/mo. Virgin has some good deals too. And you can opt for a modest flat rate if your a lite user, and save tons. And everywhere I've tried, Sprint's network has been superior to Verizon, with far fewer dropped calls here in SoCal. Plus they've got nice cheap 4g service, and have much longer than the rest.
If nothing else, Sprint is forcing att & verizon to provide almost as reasonable prepaid plans.
They're sounding a bit more reasonable. Unfortunately for us international travellers it's useless. Most (if not all) of Europe uses GSM not CDMA, so no kit I own will work, and if I get some kit on Sprint it won't work back home. As much as I would like it, I can't really afford two smartphones..
Jesus I forget how much us carriers screw their customers. Mobile internet costs me £60 for the year (less than $100) here in the uk! Up to 5 GB per month with a gradually slower connection if you go over and no overage fees. We have real pay as you go options where you put credit on your phone and it only goes down if and when you use it. Or internet for only the days when you use it for £1/day (~$1.50). It's insane how much you guys are forced to pay. No charges for incoming calls or messages. The ability to switch between any network if you have an unlocked phone and at least 5 major carriers to choose from with many many resellers with their own deals. The legal requirement to be able to unlock your phone (for a fee) if you want. Seriously, how do you all let them get away with it? And now with the possibility (probability) that t-mobile and at&t will merge taking away the only large carrier that seemed to not completely screw over their customers.
but now manufacturers are discovering that simply making a good tablet does not guarantee that it will sell
I'm confused. Have we actually had a good tablet not made by Apple that has hit the market yet? The latest batch of Honeycomb tablets are looking promising but how many are actually available yet?
But in the future, music files may be sold with clauses addressing "cloud players".
In that case the music is not being sold. It is not yours to do with how you please so you do not actually own the music. You likely have a drm laden music file that's more hassle than it's worth, and their business model will fail, as it has done time and time again..
If you're rational enough to pull out an app and plot a route home that avoids all the checkpoints, you're probably sober enough to drive. The problem with drunk drivers is that they DON'T think straight.
I completely disagree. There are plenty of things I can do drunk, but many that I shouldn't. One of the prime reasons for not driving after having had too much to drink is that you will have slower responses. That is what causes accidents.
Note: The definition of too much here is not that you can barely walk, but that you've had enough to drink that it has a notable effect on your abilities. You may still be able to do lots, appear pretty darn sober, walk in a straight line, discuss any number of topics in great detail, but you will still be slower. Where the line of how much is too much varies from person to person but it is well before being unable to use an app on my phone.
It's remarkable how many people here are suddenly on the side of Time Warner Cable(!) and iPads(!!) as long as they're providing Teh Shiny New Modality.
I hardly think it's all that remarkable. People could generally care less about the profits and contracts a company enters into, if they are provided with the content they want in a format they want. Just because the other companies have got themselves into a hooey over contract details doesn't mean consumers are going to stop actually wanting what a company has finally provided.
So, did you read the patent claims, or just the typically misleading/. summary?
I agree I did, then read the actual patent claims:
A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page. For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the web page for predetermined or random amounts of time. For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the web page. The system may then receive a user selection of the special event logo and provide search results relating to the special event.
I agree with the grandparents conclusion. Ridiculous.
When something goes wrong you have to stop the reaction shutting down the generation. Or the something that goes wrong damages something else along the line similarly stopping the generation. Hey presto, no more power for cooling. You probably could for a lot of situations, but for that one time every goes very wrong, kinda like fukushima, you don't want to have to rely upon it.
Even though your phone is unlocked there's not really all that much you can do with it. AT&T use frequencies that are different from pretty much every other provider in the world so if you're with them you're still locked in, if you're not you can't switch to them (without a new phone). The only other large supplier are T-Mobile who use more sane frequencies. This allows you to switch to other providers around the world, but that's not much use unless you travel. An unlocked phone in the states only really gives you selection between T-Mobile and small providers, which also isn't much use if you want nationwide coverage..
Sprint and Verizon use different technologies completely so they're out of the question entirely.
The UK on the other hand (where I am although I visit the states frequently and use T-Mobile) all are forced to use the same frequencies. Meaning an unlocked phone actually gives you choice. I think this is the same in Europe.
There was a tweet from Motorola recently explaining that the lock on the bootloader for the XOOM could be turned on or off at will. Anyone know if this is an actual change in opinion over at MotoHQ, or just pressure from Google because it's the first Honeycomb tablet available? Also, does anyone know if this lockdown of the phones is due to pressure from the service providers?
It appears to be aimed at developers whilst keeping the nice safe consumer ecosystem secure. I don't know about you but if their new phones came out with this option they may suddenly start entering into my consideration again..
The fact that the French took the lead on this says volumes about how big of a pussy Obama really is.
I really don't think the states needs to flash the size of its dick again quite so soon. If it's going to be done, it should be done right, and welllll, America doesn't exactly have the best reputation for taking charge and doing it right at the moment.
Just to note, I'm in the UK and to be honest I'd say the same for our country right now. Also, I recommend you actually read the quick analysis on the bbc website. The most important phrases in the analysis I feel are this:
Crucially it excludes any "foreign occupation force" in sweeping terms. This is a message to the Arab world - this is not another Iraq.
and this:
[] a final settlement to the crisis in Libya must be political and reached by the parties to the conflict themselves
Using tech here might not be the best option but if you have a lot of items to vote over then it may be your only choice. However, if you do decide to use it for anything actually important then make sure it's secure. My university has been using clickers for years and they are so insecure it's not even funny. Twice now with different models (first ir then rf) myself and a friend have reverse engineered the protocol then created our own model that spits out as many votes by as many users as we wanted. We then *ahem* presented them to the lecturers as a proof of concept.
You can change the outcome to however you want, even subtly by distributing votes across all possible options with yours just in the lead. To make it more subtle you can listen in on other peoples votes as they are being made and then override them using the same id's. Heck, I know of some schools that use them for examinations allowing you can use groupthink to cheat (not 100% accurate for obvious reasons but not exactly a bad way to go..).
A better justification would be "why the hell not". People keep mentioning fire risk as a reason, but I think I'd trust a cardboard case designed for it, with actual airholes and everything than some of the bodges I've come up with in the past. (Although I am a little proud of my meccano server tower at the mo).
PC's come with a method of reinstalling the operating system it came with, phones don't (Although they easily (c|sh)ould). However, given the architecture and technology used in phone systems it is possible to actually brick your phone. Take the storage on most. They use flash memory with limited writes, often partitioned into sections. To get my G1 to run the latest and greatest, those partitions had to be rewritten, something which could have easily damaged the device beyond home repair with the current tools available. If I was allowed to do this without breaking the warranty the phone makers would get more warranty requests for people doing so, and they don't want to have to deal with that. Even if they could just say "You buggered your phone, not us. It's repairable but it'll cost you", it's a large amount of hassle.
The phone market is a market in transition. They're used to having complete control, and only now is the technology at a stage where doing more with your phone is becoming common. This transition takes time and until there are a majority of users doing it, with stable reliable tools and a better support industry who are expecting people to reinstall their phones, not having it void the warranty isn't really practical.
This will confuse people and make them wary of Sandy Bridge based machines for years. "Is this box tainted? I don't know, and the manufacturer won't tell me. I guess I'll buy something else." A nice clean break of recalling *all* defective machines and shipping only good silicon would have been better.
If the manufacturer isn't actually making use of that part of the chip, is it really taint? The consumer doesn't need to care if one of these chips is in there because all they should really care about is the specs of the board they're buying. If the specs are good enough, then what's the problem?
Processor designers have been doing similar things for years in a slightly different fashion, i.e Pentium vs Celeron, Athlon vs Duron. Also, these are chipsets so it's not as if the consumer will be able to use the chip in another machine, or really ever get at the faulty silicon. Whats more, the general consumer won't even realise. Only us techies who will most likely be more concerned with the specs will care.
Reading through the comments, I'm surprised that no one has even mentioned the maturity of android. It's designed for smartphones, period. Until Google come out with their updated version of Android with a customised ui and functionality, it's still going to flop. Did Apple release a tablet with the same os as on their phones? No, they customized it, added to it and made it suitable for tablets.
There have been some interesting additions to the os that make it slightly more appealing for a tablet, like the work for the notion ink adam, but even that seems like a hack that requires specialized versions of the apps. Until you get an os that is designed for it from the start, and have the developers writing programs for it that will work on every tablet, they're going be a let down every time. Fortunately, that time appears to be coming.
I'm a little confused. How does Tor work when they shut down the Internet?
From the summary:
Egyptians were turning to the Tor anonymiser to organise their protests online.
I presume they meant prior to their loss of connection. Of course a headline of "Egyptians Were Using Tor to Organise Dissent Online" would be much less dramatic.
Nice idea but has potential problems with it, I'm gonna wait until the implementation to pass judgement.. Maybe I'm just a pessimist but I have little faith they'll do it right.
I doubt it'll be a privacy or anti-cloud problem, but a locally backed up or drm problem.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Flash isn't necessarily ideal but I'd rather have the choice. There have been times when I've been out and wanting to view a specific video, listen to a radio station etc where there wouldn't be an iphone app. You have the choice to completely disable it, I think possibly even uninstall it, and easily set it to only on demand... Whereas with Apple, you have none...
Just set plugins to be disabled, or on request.. Job done...
For example, no, taking 80% away from education funding and tripling fees is not a compromise, it's a fucking joke.
Sorry, that should have been university education.
That's a very limited, and to be honest immature, view of it, and neglects the reality of coalition politics. If you want to say that you're against coalition governments of any sort, fine, say so. But if no parties win an election outright, and some of those parties then form a coalition government, the coalition partners are going to have to compromise on some of the policies they started out with, and the smaller the party, the more they're going to have to compromise. They still get some of their policies implemented, as opposed to none if they didn't form a coalition, but a smaller coalition partner is simply not in a position to implement all the policies they may have had in their pre-coalition manifesto; deal with it.
There's nothing wrong with coalition governments, nor is there anything wrong with having to compromise in places. But they're not compromising, they're caving, on virtually every promise they made. Our government is one of MP's voting. The smaller the party in the coalition government, the less sway they have on the outcome due to the less votes they actually have. Promises were made, and immediately broken, when they could have at least stood up and fought for a reasonable compromise (It's politics I know, breaking promises is what they do). For example, no, taking 80% away from education funding and tripling fees is not a compromise, it's a fucking joke.
Just remember, Conservatives would be having a much harder time if the Lib Dems didn't form the coalition. Who else would they have joined up with? Would they be getting away with such activities if they were just a minority government?
Sure there is: cable (internet, TV, telephone). They've been pulling similar crap for ages.
Has anyone else noticed that they are all actually the same industry. The cheap and easy transference of data...
Tmobile isn't the decent carrier... It's only notable because they are att compatible.
They certainly aren't decent, but seem to screw their customers less was what I meant, lesser of two evils style. And they're not really even AT&T compatible. Same technologies, but different frequencies, for 3G at least.
Sprint is the decent cell provider in the Us. With their prepaid services like boost mobile you can get unlimited voice text, and 3g data for 45$/mo. Virgin has some good deals too. And you can opt for a modest flat rate if your a lite user, and save tons. And everywhere I've tried, Sprint's network has been superior to Verizon, with far fewer dropped calls here in SoCal. Plus they've got nice cheap 4g service, and have much longer than the rest.
If nothing else, Sprint is forcing att & verizon to provide almost as reasonable prepaid plans.
They're sounding a bit more reasonable. Unfortunately for us international travellers it's useless. Most (if not all) of Europe uses GSM not CDMA, so no kit I own will work, and if I get some kit on Sprint it won't work back home. As much as I would like it, I can't really afford two smartphones..
They may go into a "shut down" state, but that doesn't mean they won't be drawing power. In reality a lot of the time all they are is clocked down.
Jesus I forget how much us carriers screw their customers. Mobile internet costs me £60 for the year (less than $100) here in the uk! Up to 5 GB per month with a gradually slower connection if you go over and no overage fees. We have real pay as you go options where you put credit on your phone and it only goes down if and when you use it. Or internet for only the days when you use it for £1/day (~$1.50). It's insane how much you guys are forced to pay. No charges for incoming calls or messages. The ability to switch between any network if you have an unlocked phone and at least 5 major carriers to choose from with many many resellers with their own deals. The legal requirement to be able to unlock your phone (for a fee) if you want. Seriously, how do you all let them get away with it? And now with the possibility (probability) that t-mobile and at&t will merge taking away the only large carrier that seemed to not completely screw over their customers.
but now manufacturers are discovering that simply making a good tablet does not guarantee that it will sell
I'm confused. Have we actually had a good tablet not made by Apple that has hit the market yet? The latest batch of Honeycomb tablets are looking promising but how many are actually available yet?
But in the future, music files may be sold with clauses addressing "cloud players".
In that case the music is not being sold. It is not yours to do with how you please so you do not actually own the music. You likely have a drm laden music file that's more hassle than it's worth, and their business model will fail, as it has done time and time again..
If you're rational enough to pull out an app and plot a route home that avoids all the checkpoints, you're probably sober enough to drive. The problem with drunk drivers is that they DON'T think straight.
I completely disagree. There are plenty of things I can do drunk, but many that I shouldn't. One of the prime reasons for not driving after having had too much to drink is that you will have slower responses. That is what causes accidents.
Note: The definition of too much here is not that you can barely walk, but that you've had enough to drink that it has a notable effect on your abilities. You may still be able to do lots, appear pretty darn sober, walk in a straight line, discuss any number of topics in great detail, but you will still be slower. Where the line of how much is too much varies from person to person but it is well before being unable to use an app on my phone.
It's remarkable how many people here are suddenly on the side of Time Warner Cable(!) and iPads(!!) as long as they're providing Teh Shiny New Modality.
I hardly think it's all that remarkable. People could generally care less about the profits and contracts a company enters into, if they are provided with the content they want in a format they want. Just because the other companies have got themselves into a hooey over contract details doesn't mean consumers are going to stop actually wanting what a company has finally provided.
So, did you read the patent claims, or just the typically misleading /. summary?
I agree I did, then read the actual patent claims:
A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page. For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the web page for predetermined or random amounts of time. For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the web page. The system may then receive a user selection of the special event logo and provide search results relating to the special event.
I agree with the grandparents conclusion. Ridiculous.
When something goes wrong you have to stop the reaction shutting down the generation. Or the something that goes wrong damages something else along the line similarly stopping the generation. Hey presto, no more power for cooling. You probably could for a lot of situations, but for that one time every goes very wrong, kinda like fukushima, you don't want to have to rely upon it.
Even though your phone is unlocked there's not really all that much you can do with it. AT&T use frequencies that are different from pretty much every other provider in the world so if you're with them you're still locked in, if you're not you can't switch to them (without a new phone). The only other large supplier are T-Mobile who use more sane frequencies. This allows you to switch to other providers around the world, but that's not much use unless you travel. An unlocked phone in the states only really gives you selection between T-Mobile and small providers, which also isn't much use if you want nationwide coverage..
Sprint and Verizon use different technologies completely so they're out of the question entirely.
The UK on the other hand (where I am although I visit the states frequently and use T-Mobile) all are forced to use the same frequencies. Meaning an unlocked phone actually gives you choice. I think this is the same in Europe.
There was a tweet from Motorola recently explaining that the lock on the bootloader for the XOOM could be turned on or off at will. Anyone know if this is an actual change in opinion over at MotoHQ, or just pressure from Google because it's the first Honeycomb tablet available? Also, does anyone know if this lockdown of the phones is due to pressure from the service providers?
It appears to be aimed at developers whilst keeping the nice safe consumer ecosystem secure. I don't know about you but if their new phones came out with this option they may suddenly start entering into my consideration again..
The fact that the French took the lead on this says volumes about how big of a pussy Obama really is.
I really don't think the states needs to flash the size of its dick again quite so soon. If it's going to be done, it should be done right, and welllll, America doesn't exactly have the best reputation for taking charge and doing it right at the moment.
Just to note, I'm in the UK and to be honest I'd say the same for our country right now. Also, I recommend you actually read the quick analysis on the bbc website. The most important phrases in the analysis I feel are this:
Crucially it excludes any "foreign occupation force" in sweeping terms. This is a message to the Arab world - this is not another Iraq.
and this:
[] a final settlement to the crisis in Libya must be political and reached by the parties to the conflict themselves
This is not the same as what Bush did. Libya UN Resolution 1973: Text analysed
Using tech here might not be the best option but if you have a lot of items to vote over then it may be your only choice. However, if you do decide to use it for anything actually important then make sure it's secure. My university has been using clickers for years and they are so insecure it's not even funny. Twice now with different models (first ir then rf) myself and a friend have reverse engineered the protocol then created our own model that spits out as many votes by as many users as we wanted. We then *ahem* presented them to the lecturers as a proof of concept.
You can change the outcome to however you want, even subtly by distributing votes across all possible options with yours just in the lead. To make it more subtle you can listen in on other peoples votes as they are being made and then override them using the same id's. Heck, I know of some schools that use them for examinations allowing you can use groupthink to cheat (not 100% accurate for obvious reasons but not exactly a bad way to go..).
A better justification would be "why the hell not". People keep mentioning fire risk as a reason, but I think I'd trust a cardboard case designed for it, with actual airholes and everything than some of the bodges I've come up with in the past. (Although I am a little proud of my meccano server tower at the mo).
I'd rather have hundreds of alternative malware infected stores than to let someone else tell me what I can or cannot install. That's the choice.
PC's come with a method of reinstalling the operating system it came with, phones don't (Although they easily (c|sh)ould). However, given the architecture and technology used in phone systems it is possible to actually brick your phone. Take the storage on most. They use flash memory with limited writes, often partitioned into sections. To get my G1 to run the latest and greatest, those partitions had to be rewritten, something which could have easily damaged the device beyond home repair with the current tools available. If I was allowed to do this without breaking the warranty the phone makers would get more warranty requests for people doing so, and they don't want to have to deal with that. Even if they could just say "You buggered your phone, not us. It's repairable but it'll cost you", it's a large amount of hassle.
The phone market is a market in transition. They're used to having complete control, and only now is the technology at a stage where doing more with your phone is becoming common. This transition takes time and until there are a majority of users doing it, with stable reliable tools and a better support industry who are expecting people to reinstall their phones, not having it void the warranty isn't really practical.
This will confuse people and make them wary of Sandy Bridge based machines for years. "Is this box tainted? I don't know, and the manufacturer won't tell me. I guess I'll buy something else." A nice clean break of recalling *all* defective machines and shipping only good silicon would have been better.
If the manufacturer isn't actually making use of that part of the chip, is it really taint? The consumer doesn't need to care if one of these chips is in there because all they should really care about is the specs of the board they're buying. If the specs are good enough, then what's the problem?
Processor designers have been doing similar things for years in a slightly different fashion, i.e Pentium vs Celeron, Athlon vs Duron. Also, these are chipsets so it's not as if the consumer will be able to use the chip in another machine, or really ever get at the faulty silicon. Whats more, the general consumer won't even realise. Only us techies who will most likely be more concerned with the specs will care.
Reading through the comments, I'm surprised that no one has even mentioned the maturity of android. It's designed for smartphones, period. Until Google come out with their updated version of Android with a customised ui and functionality, it's still going to flop. Did Apple release a tablet with the same os as on their phones? No, they customized it, added to it and made it suitable for tablets.
There have been some interesting additions to the os that make it slightly more appealing for a tablet, like the work for the notion ink adam, but even that seems like a hack that requires specialized versions of the apps. Until you get an os that is designed for it from the start, and have the developers writing programs for it that will work on every tablet, they're going be a let down every time. Fortunately, that time appears to be coming.
I'm a little confused. How does Tor work when they shut down the Internet?
From the summary:
Egyptians were turning to the Tor anonymiser to organise their protests online.
I presume they meant prior to their loss of connection. Of course a headline of "Egyptians Were Using Tor to Organise Dissent Online" would be much less dramatic.
Nice idea but has potential problems with it, I'm gonna wait until the implementation to pass judgement.. Maybe I'm just a pessimist but I have little faith they'll do it right.
I doubt it'll be a privacy or anti-cloud problem, but a locally backed up or drm problem.