Cormorants are often disturbed by instantiated flailing humbled. Flail, flail, with the dying of the crepuscule. "Undoubtedly," Miriale remarked, "for if it were not so, how would anyone surrender their sllllllll?"
True, 'nosedive' might be too strong a word. The fact remains that Apple will have to continue innovating to retain their market share. Any sign of complacency will result in a loss of that market share, whether rapid or gradual.
The iPhone is beginning to look somewhat dated compared to recent smart phones. I'm sure we'll see a significant refresh next year, but if we don't I can't imagine many iPhones being sold 12 months from now.
Suppose there was a phone that did everything the iPhone did, but didn't have the Apple logo on the outside. It wouldn't be nearly as popular, because there are plenty of people willing to pay $$$ for anything with that logo on it.
I have to call BS on this part of your argument. Sure, the Apple logo is enough to get the product some initial recognition in the marketplace. However, the iPhone's popularity is mostly down to its innovative interface. Now that we're starting to see devices appear that are capable of everything the iPhone is, and quite a bit more besides, they're beginning to cut into the iPhone's market share. Unless Uncle Steve pulls something special out of the hat next year (which, to be fair, he may well do) the iPhone will nosedive in popularity, logo or no logo.
For the regular "less time than it takes to sing the the birthday song" hand washing, anti-bacterial soap offers virtually no advantage over regular soap.
Apart from the advantage of releasing more anti-bacterial agents into the ecosystem, thus increasing the odds of the development of resistant strains of bacteria. Don't forget that advantage.
Inform 7 does something similar. It's a highly domain specific language, designed solely for authoring interactive fiction, but it too uses a natural-language type syntax.
Opinion is divided over how successful the language is. It certainly seems to encourage some people who would never otherwise have tried programming to give it a go. It also results in some very readable code. For expressing complex algorithms, however, its effectiveness is more debatable.
I've skimmed the article, but I still don't get the idea of this.
I understand the part where machine-language is carefully crafted so that the bytes resemble ASCII text. But how is this an exploit? Why should I take an email that has somehow evaded my spam filter (despite reading like utter gibberish), save it to a file on my local machine, and run that file as an executable? Even if I wanted to run arbitrary code from an unknown third party, how would I even know that the contents of this email consisted of code in the first place? Could someone explain what I'm missing here?
You do realise that sending a message with an Apple product is tantamount to declaring war? Goddammit, did you not see that documentary with the MacBook?
Good point - since I rarely move from my basement where I sit munching on Cheetos and smearing grease over the screen of my smart phone, I hadn't considered that particular use for an MP3 player.
Yup, I'm well aware of that. My point is that there's no technical reason for cell phone cameras to be so bad - especially in modern smart phones which are pretty big anyway, and thus have plenty of room for a decent lens.
If I want quality, I'll use my SLR. If I want convenience, I expect my cell phone camera to be up to the job. I certainly don't want to carry around two separate bundles of electronics that do exactly the same job.
Your post pretty much nails this discussion. For the vast majority of situations, the cell phone is perfectly adequate. For the minority of the population who need more functionality, they buy the separate device, and live with the extra cost and inconvenience. It's a simple trade-off. The professional photographer buys an SLR camera, the hardcore gamer buys a hand-held gaming system. For the rest of us, one device that's always in our pocket does everything perfectly well.
Fortunately, the educated still refer to it as petitio principii, thus distinguishing themselves from those who use the mutable and imprecise vernacular.
Some of us actually want a camera in our cell phone. Good ones aren't as sucky as you think, and even the lower end ones are better than nothing when your phone is the only camera you have with you.
The camera and the cell phone are a perfect fit. Both have a large LCD screen, a battery, a processor and a storage device. Putting the two devices together is cutting out a whole load of redundancy, both in terms of weight and cost. I hope manufacturers hurry up and improve cell phone camera quality, because I feel a bit of a fool carrying around two devices that are almost identical.
MP3 players may be small and cheap, but you can't get much better than zero size (because it's built into your phone) and almost zero cost (because it uses the electronics that are already in your phone). As for the battery life, it's only a matter of time before this is improved, just as it is with camera quality.
As for netbooks, in a very short time, our cell phones will be capable of running exactly the same software as our desktops. They're already shipping with 1GHz processors, and with Android the software side of things is nearly there.
As for video, I doubt it will be 2020 before the average family vacation is filmed on a cell phone. Heck, some people already take video clips on their phone despite the quality issues, just because of the convenience. The latest breed of smart phones can already take HD video, and although the quality isn't up to camcorder standard, it's getting there. I'd be surprised (and quite annoyed!) if smart phones weren't up to low-end camcorder quality in a year or two.
Sorry, but I don't believe your arguments hold water.
For a start, phones don't need to be "very small, lightweight and damage-resistant". Some people might demand this from their phones, but it's not a given. Smart phones these days are getting pretty large - look at the iPhone, or more recent devices like the HTC Touch HD2. These devices need to be big, to fit a screen large enough for web browsing. A big glass screen also guarantees that your phone can't be particularly damage resistant, so you just have to take a bit more care of it.
The electronics don't need to be any more low-power than those in compact cameras, where batteries last tolerably well. Smart phones have 1GHz processors in them these days, so there's no lack of processing power available for image processing.
I'll admit that the RFI problem might be a genuine issue, although I've never heard of any problem caused by cards like the Eye-Fi. If this is a problem, however, it's not rocket science to turn off the radio circuitry while a picture is taken and reactivate it afterwards. Heck, many phones even include exactly this ability as an "airplane mode"
What's more, the camera and the cell phone are a perfect fit. Both have a large LCD screen, a battery, a processor and a storage device. Putting the two devices together is cutting out a whole load of redundancy, both in terms of weight and cost. The resulting device might not be quite as sleek as current smart phones, due to the extra width necessary to fit a decent lens assembly, and admittedly this is a shame. But no doubt manufacturers would produce different models, some sleek ones with crappy cameras (or no camera at all) for people with your needs, and some slightly bulkier but with decent cameras for people like me.
Obviously a cell phone camera will never replace a good SLR, for those who need to take "proper" photographs. But there's no reason that it can't take good pictures, and thereby completely obviate the need for a separate compact camera. I only hope manufacturers hurry up and implement decent cameras in cell phones, because it's long overdue.
The only thing that proves is that Apple made a dumb decision not putting more storage in the iPhone. There's no technical reason not to do so, after all.
The necessity to carry around more than one device in this day and age annoys me no end. For me it's the camera that's the problem - there's no reason not to build a decent one into smart phones, but companies so rarely do.
Services running on virtualized servers hosted by a single reasonably sized machine per office seem to recommend themselves.
If your services have started to recommend themselves, they have achieved self-awareness. My advice is to do whatever they ask, and try not to antagonise them.
The summary seems to be implying that Tufte should have asked Microsoft for their permission before allowing them to rip him off. This seems somewhat harsh on the poor guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Cormorants are often disturbed by instantiated flailing humbled. Flail, flail, with the dying of the crepuscule. "Undoubtedly," Miriale remarked, "for if it were not so, how would anyone surrender their sllllllll?"
True, 'nosedive' might be too strong a word. The fact remains that Apple will have to continue innovating to retain their market share. Any sign of complacency will result in a loss of that market share, whether rapid or gradual.
The iPhone is beginning to look somewhat dated compared to recent smart phones. I'm sure we'll see a significant refresh next year, but if we don't I can't imagine many iPhones being sold 12 months from now.
Planet, there's a place you can go,
I said, planet, when your velocity's low,
You can orbit, and I'm sure you will see,
A supernova for you and me.
It's fun to orbit VYCMa,
It's fun to orbit VYCMa,
They have everything that you need to enjoy,
Being utterly destroyed.
Suppose there was a phone that did everything the iPhone did, but didn't have the Apple logo on the outside. It wouldn't be nearly as popular, because there are plenty of people willing to pay $$$ for anything with that logo on it.
I have to call BS on this part of your argument. Sure, the Apple logo is enough to get the product some initial recognition in the marketplace. However, the iPhone's popularity is mostly down to its innovative interface. Now that we're starting to see devices appear that are capable of everything the iPhone is, and quite a bit more besides, they're beginning to cut into the iPhone's market share. Unless Uncle Steve pulls something special out of the hat next year (which, to be fair, he may well do) the iPhone will nosedive in popularity, logo or no logo.
For the regular "less time than it takes to sing the the birthday song" hand washing, anti-bacterial soap offers virtually no advantage over regular soap.
Apart from the advantage of releasing more anti-bacterial agents into the ecosystem, thus increasing the odds of the development of resistant strains of bacteria. Don't forget that advantage.
Inform 7 does something similar. It's a highly domain specific language, designed solely for authoring interactive fiction, but it too uses a natural-language type syntax.
Opinion is divided over how successful the language is. It certainly seems to encourage some people who would never otherwise have tried programming to give it a go. It also results in some very readable code. For expressing complex algorithms, however, its effectiveness is more debatable.
I've skimmed the article, but I still don't get the idea of this.
I understand the part where machine-language is carefully crafted so that the bytes resemble ASCII text. But how is this an exploit? Why should I take an email that has somehow evaded my spam filter (despite reading like utter gibberish), save it to a file on my local machine, and run that file as an executable? Even if I wanted to run arbitrary code from an unknown third party, how would I even know that the contents of this email consisted of code in the first place? Could someone explain what I'm missing here?
You do realise that sending a message with an Apple product is tantamount to declaring war? Goddammit, did you not see that documentary with the MacBook?
Good point - since I rarely move from my basement where I sit munching on Cheetos and smearing grease over the screen of my smart phone, I hadn't considered that particular use for an MP3 player.
Yup, I'm well aware of that. My point is that there's no technical reason for cell phone cameras to be so bad - especially in modern smart phones which are pretty big anyway, and thus have plenty of room for a decent lens.
If I want quality, I'll use my SLR. If I want convenience, I expect my cell phone camera to be up to the job. I certainly don't want to carry around two separate bundles of electronics that do exactly the same job.
+1 Terrifying - glad to hear you made it through that experience without injury!
Your post pretty much nails this discussion. For the vast majority of situations, the cell phone is perfectly adequate. For the minority of the population who need more functionality, they buy the separate device, and live with the extra cost and inconvenience. It's a simple trade-off. The professional photographer buys an SLR camera, the hardcore gamer buys a hand-held gaming system. For the rest of us, one device that's always in our pocket does everything perfectly well.
Don't worry, there's an app for that.
Fortunately, the educated still refer to it as petitio principii, thus distinguishing themselves from those who use the mutable and imprecise vernacular.
I like cats!
One million points of light/One billion dollar vision thing
A billion dollars for a one megapixel sensor? That sounds a touch overpriced to me.
Some of us actually want a camera in our cell phone. Good ones aren't as sucky as you think, and even the lower end ones are better than nothing when your phone is the only camera you have with you.
The camera and the cell phone are a perfect fit. Both have a large LCD screen, a battery, a processor and a storage device. Putting the two devices together is cutting out a whole load of redundancy, both in terms of weight and cost. I hope manufacturers hurry up and improve cell phone camera quality, because I feel a bit of a fool carrying around two devices that are almost identical.
MP3 players may be small and cheap, but you can't get much better than zero size (because it's built into your phone) and almost zero cost (because it uses the electronics that are already in your phone). As for the battery life, it's only a matter of time before this is improved, just as it is with camera quality.
As for netbooks, in a very short time, our cell phones will be capable of running exactly the same software as our desktops. They're already shipping with 1GHz processors, and with Android the software side of things is nearly there.
As for video, I doubt it will be 2020 before the average family vacation is filmed on a cell phone. Heck, some people already take video clips on their phone despite the quality issues, just because of the convenience. The latest breed of smart phones can already take HD video, and although the quality isn't up to camcorder standard, it's getting there. I'd be surprised (and quite annoyed!) if smart phones weren't up to low-end camcorder quality in a year or two.
Sorry, but I don't believe your arguments hold water.
For a start, phones don't need to be "very small, lightweight and damage-resistant". Some people might demand this from their phones, but it's not a given. Smart phones these days are getting pretty large - look at the iPhone, or more recent devices like the HTC Touch HD2. These devices need to be big, to fit a screen large enough for web browsing. A big glass screen also guarantees that your phone can't be particularly damage resistant, so you just have to take a bit more care of it.
The electronics don't need to be any more low-power than those in compact cameras, where batteries last tolerably well. Smart phones have 1GHz processors in them these days, so there's no lack of processing power available for image processing.
I'll admit that the RFI problem might be a genuine issue, although I've never heard of any problem caused by cards like the Eye-Fi. If this is a problem, however, it's not rocket science to turn off the radio circuitry while a picture is taken and reactivate it afterwards. Heck, many phones even include exactly this ability as an "airplane mode"
What's more, the camera and the cell phone are a perfect fit. Both have a large LCD screen, a battery, a processor and a storage device. Putting the two devices together is cutting out a whole load of redundancy, both in terms of weight and cost. The resulting device might not be quite as sleek as current smart phones, due to the extra width necessary to fit a decent lens assembly, and admittedly this is a shame. But no doubt manufacturers would produce different models, some sleek ones with crappy cameras (or no camera at all) for people with your needs, and some slightly bulkier but with decent cameras for people like me.
Obviously a cell phone camera will never replace a good SLR, for those who need to take "proper" photographs. But there's no reason that it can't take good pictures, and thereby completely obviate the need for a separate compact camera. I only hope manufacturers hurry up and implement decent cameras in cell phones, because it's long overdue.
The only thing that proves is that Apple made a dumb decision not putting more storage in the iPhone. There's no technical reason not to do so, after all.
The necessity to carry around more than one device in this day and age annoys me no end. For me it's the camera that's the problem - there's no reason not to build a decent one into smart phones, but companies so rarely do.
a watch battery lasts years, unlike the 1 week max the phone battery lasts
Luckily, phones often come with some way to recharge them.
If that's a funny story, I'd hate to hear a scary one.
Sigh. If you don't understand the English language, please refrain from moderating. (Get a job as an editor instead!)
Services running on virtualized servers hosted by a single reasonably sized machine per office seem to recommend themselves.
If your services have started to recommend themselves, they have achieved self-awareness. My advice is to do whatever they ask, and try not to antagonise them.
without so much as a by-your-leave from Tufte
The summary seems to be implying that Tufte should have asked Microsoft for their permission before allowing them to rip him off. This seems somewhat harsh on the poor guy.
"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
- Samuel Johnson, 1709 – 1784