The question is not the lack of something, but the deliberated lack of something with the only objective of making more and more money. I compare Apple's way of doing things with the more draconian DRM you can imagine. DRM tries to stop you from using something you OWN in the way you want. Apple do the same, but does it with a HARDWARE. And this is unnaceptable to me.
About the iPod, at the same time Apple was selling it by "X", you had a ton of much cheaper options if you just want to play music. Maybe not so "cool" - but I want to play music, not to participate in a coolness contest. In fact - at least here in Brazil - at some point the iPod's price was pratically the same as a Palm TX. And you need to agree that as outdated a Palm TX is, it plays MP3 as well as an iPod - and do a handfult of other things, too.
The iPhone is maybe the only example of something really "different" - for some time. Now, you have a myriad of other options - options where you can use external batteries, install your own programs - or from third parties - withoud Steve Jobs personal approval, and do whatever the heck you want - and without any "jailbreak". I have an Android phone (again, replaceable battery, USB, totally open platform, etc, etc) for a small fraction of the iPhone's price, with the data plan I want and with no chains attached. And I get tons of FREE (as in beer) programs from both the Android Market and the Internet.
In a nutshell: the question is not geeks X grandmothers nor slashdotters x fanboys, the question is the right of doing what I want, when I want and the way I want with something I've paid for X giving more and more money for someone that IS transforming the market indeed - in a place where you don't own anything, you pay for the (supreme) honor of using someone's elses device.
What I really would like to see is if the iThings were made from Microsoft. Then, Redmond would be the devil (I'm not saying they aren't). But Cupertino? It's OK. It's cool...
The same happened with HDs. Sure, for maybe 5 years or so now the price is dropping and the size increasing, but everyone that used a MFM or RLL hard disk - and even the IDEs for a long time - knows that we waited very long to see the prices really going down.
It will be like everything else: with the time passing they will get market share, then decrease the price. Even the RAM memory finally dropped, so why not the SSDs? But not tomorrow, I'm sure.
The newspapers are dying in it's today's form, not just the death notice market. I know that it will not happen tomorrow nor in the next 5 years, but it will eventually, as more and more people reads the news on the Internet. And the question here is not just the price (zero x something), but timing. In the past, you would need to wait until the next day to read about some big news in depth, as TV news tend to be just a highlight of the situation. But now? 5 minutes after anything happens you can track the news almost in real time, and not only in your local news sources, but around the world.
The fact is that the Internet is changing every single thing we do, but impacted more extensively in printed materials. The news, the media, the classified ads, the yellow pages, the way we search for restaurants, etc. This is a good thing for sure, but in the process entire businesses will die, people will be unemployed and entire professions will be obsolete, like it happened in the past with cobblers, typewriter repairmen, etc. And then new professions will flourish, and the ones that adapt will be back in the marketing. More of the same, but this time in a much bigger scale.
I am from Brazil, and right now you would be fine here, as we don't have this type of corporate lunacy (or shameles political influency) *yet*.
But believe me, this type of news worries me a lot, just like Internet filtering proposals, mandated DRM and such, as our politicians tend to wave away the good things your (and other's) country do, but promptly import and adopt the stupid ideas - specially when the proponents are filthy rich companies.
Unfortunately, there's people that thinks it's ok when these things happens in another countries (and specially in the most influential ones). But they are the same people that in the future will say: "At first they came for the USA consumers, but I did not complain as I am from Brazil"...
10 Chew Gum 15 Think of words to type 18 Search for the spelling of the word 20 Hear Music 25 Lift fingers 27 Use right fingers to hit the right keys 30 Shake head 35 Eye look at screen 38 Check for typos 40 Hymn a little bit 45 Check for grammar mistake 50 Shake leg 60 Goto 10
You can put some IFs to check if the gum is out of taste yet, etc, but basically this is not multitasking.:-)
The sad thing is that Palm TX (a 5-yr-old product) can do more than the majority of today's phones, and specially iPhone. I still have mine working, and I can watch DIVX videos (I can just copy the full 700mb video to the memory card and play there without hiccups), play MP3, run any J2ME program using an emulator, etc, etc. And I can, for example, listen to music while I do other tasks. It have Bluetooth, WIFI, and with a downloaded software I have a very neat interface (the original one is ugly in today's terms). Yes, I know that the processor is slower than today's, that the battery autonomy is very short, etc, but it's a 5 YR OLD product.
My point is: Palm could be one of the big players today, if they haven't stopped in time. They were almost alone for too long in the market, and forgot how to evolve. This is why I admire Google: they are the top of the top in several things, but still they keep evolving, adding funcionalities that we didn't think of in GMail for example, way before someone else's do.
Like the first poster said: Palm today is nostalgia. And this is from someone who loves Palm...
At first, I thought that the guy was "tapping" that hard in the table because the system only works that way. But then in the picture scan part he "tapped" (more like hammered) his keyboard the same way he did in the table...
If he pokes one's arm, we will see a exposed fracture for sure.
This reminds me of an episode of Simpsons, where someone asks Homer something like "do you imagine what would be a world without lawyers?", and he starts imagine a green, sunny field, with everyone singing, dancing and very happy.:-)
what is the environmental advantage of electricity for cars ? It's mostly made with fossil fuels. I've never understood this. Am I missing something?
Yes.:-) Think about it:
Several countries uses clean power generation sources, like hydroelectrical (Brazil have 84% of it's power generated by hydroelectrical plants - and our power consumption is almost the same of France and Germany, and bigger than UK's and Italy, for example), nuclear, etc
In the future we expect that cleaner energy generation (like wind, solar, tides, etc) becomes more efficient and affordable
The efficiency of thermal (oil) power generation plants is far better than the efficiency of ordinary car motors
There's only one motive for the delay in the adoption of electrical cars: the economical and political power of the oil companies, that kills every innovation attempt in cars.
"Whenever I hear Brazilians talking about government corruption, I ask them "How many Iraqis did Lula kill?""
Jumping from the 10th floor is bad, but jumping from the 20th is worst. Would you jump from the 10th just because there's something worst?:-)
I'm not comparing Bush and Lula, I'm comparing the lack of capacity of the people to just understand that someone is completely incompetent/incapable of being president, by incompetence or dishonesty. And let's not forget that Lula gives support to Chavez and Morales, that are VERY VERY dangerous to the world as a whole with their lies and their false nationalism, maybe as dangerous as Bush because thei give Bush exactly what he looks for: (false) reasons to mumble about "lack of democracy" and to intervene.
And, last but not least, let's remember that Lula runs Brazil, and Brazil doesn't have a millionth of the influence and power of USA. Try to imagine Lula and it's total incapacity ruling USA... Uh... No, it's better not to.:-)
I would be happy if I could say that this is an american-only problem, but it is not... Here in Brazil, several high-profiled members of the president's party, ministers, several personal friends of him, the father of his godson, and even HIS BROTHER were recorded (I said RECORDED) by the police commiting crimes, being bribed to help this or that company with government's contracts, cheating in his party's accounts, etc. Several of them were arrested, several others prosecuted, etc... All this started soon after his election, and continued scandal after scandal for the four years of his administration. In every time he told he "didn't knew" and that he was betrayed by that people, what, even if was the truth, makes him at leats VERY incompetent to run a country...
And, after the four years, he ran for the reelection... and WON!
Someone said that "every citizen group have the government it deserves". Unfortunately, all the citizens pays for the lack of sense of the majority...
Yes, I'm a bit tired of today's games too. I still like games, but I play only selected ones, like GTA San Andreas, Half-Life 2, etc. The last time I've played a game seriously was 6 months ago... Today we have beautiful graphics and no imagination at all... What the game designers of today would do with the 8Kb and 16 colors of Atari 2600 ?:-)
I don't know where you live, but here in Brazil we hadn't many choices then. At that time, we had a protectionist law that imposed absurd taxes at anything computer-related imported. Then, we needed to stick with the "national" clones, that are in fact the same computers but assembled here. The problem was that only two or three options were available then. The Commodore never got here officially, and only some lucky guys (whose dad could afford it) got it. In fact, I've never saw one "in person".:-) Even the "CoCo" (TRS-80) were rare here (The name here was CP400):
Those stupid laws where extinct only about 10 years ago, and not because some good politician. The illegal importing of components for PC were so abroad that 80% or more of the computers were in fact illegally imported... Then, the goverment understood the obvious: lowering the taxes, they could get more money. And finally we've got fair machines for (a little more) fairier prices. But not that fair: we still pay about US$ 1.500,00 for an entry-level notebook, for example, and I pay about US$ 40,00/mo. for a 2 Mbit broadband DSL.:-)
Anyway, any old computer (Commodore, TRSs, AppleII, etc) were funnier than our PCs and MACs of today.:-)
Like any geek 30+, I had an AppleII too (in fact, the computer's name was TK2000, a brazilian clone). And I must say that the world of computers were sooo funnier then... Obviously I'm takking from a romantic point of view, where typing 500 lines of BASIC code to save it in a K7 tape (after 3 hours debugging your mistypings) is real fun! I remember a book called "the black book of TK2000" that contained several hard-to-find informations that allowed me to really explore my machine, and the assembly programs that made it read even bugged tapes without errors.:-) And, last but not least, Karateka!:-)))
After that, I had a MSX (I don't know if this japanese computer was famous in other countries, but here in brazil it was) with a single-sided drive, and some years later my first 386SX.:-) IRQs, DMAs, conflicts, fun, fun, fun!:-) But since then, everything went downhill (or uphill). From 64Kb to 4Gb of RAM in 10 years...
Today, you buy a computer, connect it to your 8Mb internet connection, download a 2Gb game in half an hour and play games that are almost real... You don't need to worry about tapes, typing, basic, anything. It's obviously better... But it's sad too. There's no fun anymore...
Yes, I know I'm getting old... But I really think that I was happy and I didn't knew...
Slashdot Mirror
A brazilian writer told once that the problem with humanity started when stupid people realized they were the majority...
The question is not the lack of something, but the deliberated lack of something with the only objective of making more and more money. I compare Apple's way of doing things with the more draconian DRM you can imagine. DRM tries to stop you from using something you OWN in the way you want. Apple do the same, but does it with a HARDWARE. And this is unnaceptable to me.
About the iPod, at the same time Apple was selling it by "X", you had a ton of much cheaper options if you just want to play music. Maybe not so "cool" - but I want to play music, not to participate in a coolness contest. In fact - at least here in Brazil - at some point the iPod's price was pratically the same as a Palm TX. And you need to agree that as outdated a Palm TX is, it plays MP3 as well as an iPod - and do a handfult of other things, too.
The iPhone is maybe the only example of something really "different" - for some time. Now, you have a myriad of other options - options where you can use external batteries, install your own programs - or from third parties - withoud Steve Jobs personal approval, and do whatever the heck you want - and without any "jailbreak". I have an Android phone (again, replaceable battery, USB, totally open platform, etc, etc) for a small fraction of the iPhone's price, with the data plan I want and with no chains attached. And I get tons of FREE (as in beer) programs from both the Android Market and the Internet.
In a nutshell: the question is not geeks X grandmothers nor slashdotters x fanboys, the question is the right of doing what I want, when I want and the way I want with something I've paid for X giving more and more money for someone that IS transforming the market indeed - in a place where you don't own anything, you pay for the (supreme) honor of using someone's elses device.
What I really would like to see is if the iThings were made from Microsoft. Then, Redmond would be the devil (I'm not saying they aren't). But Cupertino? It's OK. It's cool...
... how they are capable of taking numbers out of their asses with bogus researches...
Maybe, if they try harder, they can take new business models, honest ways to do business and such from the same asses...
The same happened with HDs. Sure, for maybe 5 years or so now the price is dropping and the size increasing, but everyone that used a MFM or RLL hard disk - and even the IDEs for a long time - knows that we waited very long to see the prices really going down.
It will be like everything else: with the time passing they will get market share, then decrease the price. Even the RAM memory finally dropped, so why not the SSDs? But not tomorrow, I'm sure.
Nobody needs the source code to exploit Microsoft software...
FacePALM!
(...) will be back TO THE MARKET (and not Marketing). ;-)
The newspapers are dying in it's today's form, not just the death notice market. I know that it will not happen tomorrow nor in the next 5 years, but it will eventually, as more and more people reads the news on the Internet. And the question here is not just the price (zero x something), but timing. In the past, you would need to wait until the next day to read about some big news in depth, as TV news tend to be just a highlight of the situation. But now? 5 minutes after anything happens you can track the news almost in real time, and not only in your local news sources, but around the world.
The fact is that the Internet is changing every single thing we do, but impacted more extensively in printed materials. The news, the media, the classified ads, the yellow pages, the way we search for restaurants, etc. This is a good thing for sure, but in the process entire businesses will die, people will be unemployed and entire professions will be obsolete, like it happened in the past with cobblers, typewriter repairmen, etc. And then new professions will flourish, and the ones that adapt will be back in the marketing. More of the same, but this time in a much bigger scale.
I am from Brazil, and right now you would be fine here, as we don't have this type of corporate lunacy (or shameles political influency) *yet*.
But believe me, this type of news worries me a lot, just like Internet filtering proposals, mandated DRM and such, as our politicians tend to wave away the good things your (and other's) country do, but promptly import and adopt the stupid ideas - specially when the proponents are filthy rich companies.
Unfortunately, there's people that thinks it's ok when these things happens in another countries (and specially in the most influential ones). But they are the same people that in the future will say: "At first they came for the USA consumers, but I did not complain as I am from Brazil"...
Task Computer_Gum_Music
10 Chew Gum
15 Think of words to type
18 Search for the spelling of the word
20 Hear Music
25 Lift fingers
27 Use right fingers to hit the right keys
30 Shake head
35 Eye look at screen
38 Check for typos
40 Hymn a little bit
45 Check for grammar mistake
50 Shake leg
60 Goto 10
You can put some IFs to check if the gum is out of taste yet, etc, but basically this is not multitasking. :-)
The sad thing is that Palm TX (a 5-yr-old product) can do more than the majority of today's phones, and specially iPhone. I still have mine working, and I can watch DIVX videos (I can just copy the full 700mb video to the memory card and play there without hiccups), play MP3, run any J2ME program using an emulator, etc, etc. And I can, for example, listen to music while I do other tasks. It have Bluetooth, WIFI, and with a downloaded software I have a very neat interface (the original one is ugly in today's terms). Yes, I know that the processor is slower than today's, that the battery autonomy is very short, etc, but it's a 5 YR OLD product.
My point is: Palm could be one of the big players today, if they haven't stopped in time. They were almost alone for too long in the market, and forgot how to evolve. This is why I admire Google: they are the top of the top in several things, but still they keep evolving, adding funcionalities that we didn't think of in GMail for example, way before someone else's do.
Like the first poster said: Palm today is nostalgia. And this is from someone who loves Palm...
At first, I thought that the guy was "tapping" that hard in the table because the system only works that way. But then in the picture scan part he "tapped" (more like hammered) his keyboard the same way he did in the table... If he pokes one's arm, we will see a exposed fracture for sure.
This reminds me of an episode of Simpsons, where someone asks Homer something like "do you imagine what would be a world without lawyers?", and he starts imagine a green, sunny field, with everyone singing, dancing and very happy. :-)
...Venezuela banning this idiot Chavez for good?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
User Agent Switcher 0.6.10
The beauty in the extensions capability of Firefox is that we will always have a way around anything.
But in most cases the pages real content is formed by the ads itself. The rest is only a way to make you see the ads...
Yes.
There's only one motive for the delay in the adoption of electrical cars: the economical and political power of the oil companies, that kills every innovation attempt in cars.
Three words: female alien pilot...
"Whenever I hear Brazilians talking about government corruption, I ask them "How many Iraqis did Lula kill?""
:-)
:-)
Jumping from the 10th floor is bad, but jumping from the 20th is worst. Would you jump from the 10th just because there's something worst?
I'm not comparing Bush and Lula, I'm comparing the lack of capacity of the people to just understand that someone is completely incompetent/incapable of being president, by incompetence or dishonesty. And let's not forget that Lula gives support to Chavez and Morales, that are VERY VERY dangerous to the world as a whole with their lies and their false nationalism, maybe as dangerous as Bush because thei give Bush exactly what he looks for: (false) reasons to mumble about "lack of democracy" and to intervene.
And, last but not least, let's remember that Lula runs Brazil, and Brazil doesn't have a millionth of the influence and power of USA. Try to imagine Lula and it's total incapacity ruling USA... Uh... No, it's better not to.
I would be happy if I could say that this is an american-only problem, but it is not... Here in Brazil, several high-profiled members of the president's party, ministers, several personal friends of him, the father of his godson, and even HIS BROTHER were recorded (I said RECORDED) by the police commiting crimes, being bribed to help this or that company with government's contracts, cheating in his party's accounts, etc. Several of them were arrested, several others prosecuted, etc... All this started soon after his election, and continued scandal after scandal for the four years of his administration. In every time he told he "didn't knew" and that he was betrayed by that people, what, even if was the truth, makes him at leats VERY incompetent to run a country...
And, after the four years, he ran for the reelection... and WON!
Someone said that "every citizen group have the government it deserves". Unfortunately, all the citizens pays for the lack of sense of the majority...
"The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution..."
One brazilian journalist said two decades ago: "Every unanimity is dumb!". This keeps proving correct again and again since then...
Hello!
:-)
Yes, I'm a bit tired of today's games too. I still like games, but I play only selected ones, like GTA San Andreas, Half-Life 2, etc. The last time I've played a game seriously was 6 months ago... Today we have beautiful graphics and no imagination at all... What the game designers of today would do with the 8Kb and 16 colors of Atari 2600 ?
I don't know where you live, but here in Brazil we hadn't many choices then. At that time, we had a protectionist law that imposed absurd taxes at anything computer-related imported. Then, we needed to stick with the "national" clones, that are in fact the same computers but assembled here. The problem was that only two or three options were available then. The Commodore never got here officially, and only some lucky guys (whose dad could afford it) got it. In fact, I've never saw one "in person". :-) Even the "CoCo" (TRS-80) were rare here (The name here was CP400):
:-)
:-)
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP400
Those stupid laws where extinct only about 10 years ago, and not because some good politician. The illegal importing of components for PC were so abroad that 80% or more of the computers were in fact illegally imported... Then, the goverment understood the obvious: lowering the taxes, they could get more money. And finally we've got fair machines for (a little more) fairier prices. But not that fair: we still pay about US$ 1.500,00 for an entry-level notebook, for example, and I pay about US$ 40,00/mo. for a 2 Mbit broadband DSL.
Anyway, any old computer (Commodore, TRSs, AppleII, etc) were funnier than our PCs and MACs of today.
Like any geek 30+, I had an AppleII too (in fact, the computer's name was TK2000, a brazilian clone). And I must say that the world of computers were sooo funnier then... Obviously I'm takking from a romantic point of view, where typing 500 lines of BASIC code to save it in a K7 tape (after 3 hours debugging your mistypings) is real fun! I remember a book called "the black book of TK2000" that contained several hard-to-find informations that allowed me to really explore my machine, and the assembly programs that made it read even bugged tapes without errors. :-) And, last but not least, Karateka! :-)))
:-) IRQs, DMAs, conflicts, fun, fun, fun! :-) But since then, everything went downhill (or uphill). From 64Kb to 4Gb of RAM in 10 years...
After that, I had a MSX (I don't know if this japanese computer was famous in other countries, but here in brazil it was) with a single-sided drive, and some years later my first 386SX.
Today, you buy a computer, connect it to your 8Mb internet connection, download a 2Gb game in half an hour and play games that are almost real... You don't need to worry about tapes, typing, basic, anything. It's obviously better... But it's sad too. There's no fun anymore...
Yes, I know I'm getting old... But I really think that I was happy and I didn't knew...
I'm glad I use Lynx...