I thought the CIA's policy was to netiher confirm nor deny. In light of this policy shift, in the future a failure to deny will be seen as a confirmation! Now all our enemies have to do is call up the CIA, claim to be local police, say they have a person who claims to be a CIA agent and wants out of a speeding ticket, and when they find someone the CIA does not deny, they'll know they've found a covert agent!
There's still quite a bit of room for increased computing power in the netbook segment of the market, if nowhere else. Apparently that's still one of the major reason for netbook returns is that people simply expect them to have desktop-level computing power and are disappointed when they struggle to, as a for instance, run Photoshop.
Faster chips can also be under-clocked so that they end up requiring less power (important for mobile devices) and generate less heat (ditto). In other words, the processing speed gains do not necessarily have to be "spent" on making the chip faster.
And then there's cost. If you get a good desktop system these days, one of the biggest costs is your graphics card. It wasn't realy that long ago that graphics processing was all done on the processor and nobody really had a graphics card -- but processors were slow and shifting that load to a separate processor was a great way to get a speed gain.
That trend exploded pretty fast, and even the integrated graphics on some mother boards are still separate graphics processors (just not very good ones for the most part). But if processing power becomes ample and excessive, we'll see that trend reverse as there will no longer really be a reason for graphic cards to exist. In fact, many components, integrated or otherwise, could become software based and dump their processing load to the CPU. Why not? There's only one reason they don't already and someday, when processors are fast enough, that reason will be gone.
I could go on, but I think you take my point. There's plenty of reason to continue to develop faster and faster chips that will have applications that will appeal to pretty much all consumers.
The hardware is lacking, thus far. The best part of android is that anyone can make a phone with their OS. The worst part is that ANYONE can make a phone with their OS.
Surprised this topic of discussion keeps coming up, but basically here's what we've learned the 20 other times this subject has come up.
The Japanese really do hate the iphone -- as a phone. However, they love it as a mobile web device. It's real competition in Japan is probably vs netbooks. Most iphone owners still own a Japanese phone in addition to their iphone and are not using the iphone as their primary "phone". Nevertheless, the iphone is very popular in Japan and many people are perfectly willing to pay for it and their regular phone service as well.
Perhaps you're not understanding what the "echo chamber" he's referring to here is. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, you have to admit that the left wing is simply not organized enough to have an "echo chamber". Perhaps there's a mini-sort of version of it in the meager media offerings of the left-wing, mostly blogs, but certainly nothing that reaches the public at large and definitely nothing on the scale of Fox News/Talk radio.
Yeah, but for long distance GV is nothing but an electronic phone card. Remember phone cards? They still sell them for international calls. You Dial a 1-800 number, put in your pin, an they connect you to your final destination from there.
Apple has an *exclusive* agreement with AT&T. Google Voice competes with AT&T, since lemme check..... YEP... Google Voice is VOIP right? It reduces billable minutes for AT&T right?
So if AT&T is pissed at VOIP (wow, no Telecom has *evaaaaah* been pissed at VOIP), would they... could they.... just possibly..... dial up their *exclusive* partner and subtly indicate, "Hey... would you mind suppressing our competition?".
This does not require any sort of investigation whatsoever. At no time is any wireless carrier going to simply accept competition, and exclusive agreements allow for the elimination of competition. Abuses are guaranteed by the very nature of the Apple/AT&T relationship.
The question is not whether or not the abuse exists, but are we going to disallow exclusive agreements between handset manufacturers or not?
Are there really any iPhone owners out there that honestly expect Apple to not act in their, and their business partners best interests?
Google voice is not VOIP. All calls made through google voice still use your AT&T minutes. There is no call data going over the 3g network -- at all.
Almost without exception, in the rush to give Apple the benefit of the doubt where they do not deserve it, people have been assuming that google voice = VOIP. That is an incorrect assumption.
Or how about we teach them typing. That's fine motor skill they can *use*. I can't believe how many High School aged kids are hunting and pecking at the keyboard -- oh but thank god they can still write a lengthy letter when the power's out thanks to cursive!
I'm 28. I learned cursive in the third grade and have not used it since -- unless you count signing my name. In my case, you probably shouldn't given that I sign my name with one initial + scribble and a second initial + scribble. My signature isn't even close to legible, but nobody cares.
It's not an easy skill to learn, but it was incredibly easy one to forget. We really probably shouldn't be wasting Kids time with this -- I don't see what the practical value is in teaching kids how to write cursive these days. Other than reading letters from my Great Grandmother, now dead, or the original copy of the Declaration of Independence or perhaps various signatures (in as much as they could be read) I can't really even see the value in learning to read cursive either.
And windows users don't have to do any of those things either. Every piece of anti-virus software under the sun updates itself, completely without any human intervention, at some god awful time of night so as to avoid doing it while you may be using your computer. Similarly, right out of the box windows runs a scheduled weekly disk degrag at something like 3 am every wednesday or some other silly time. These things happen and I do nothing to cause them, I didn't even set them up originally -- they were just pre-configured that way and if I don't like them I can change them.
Nor do I have to reinstall windows yearly -- Vista on this machine has been installed for 18 months and everything is as snappy as the day I brought it home.
Try to understand, when you buy a mac you're not choosing between OS 10.5 and Windows 95. There's really major selling point of Mac over Windows at this point other than simple preference.
If you PREFER MacOS, by all means by a Mac -- but don't kid yourself into thinking you're getting something the rest of us aren't getting. We're all getting the OS of our choice and more or less the same feature set. Your preference costs more, but if you prefer it, and are willing to pay the money, then go for it.
Very true, though one expects software updates at a more frequent pace than firmware updates so one would expect that until one side or the other throws in the towel, it'll probably work less often rather than more often -- unless people who want this feature just don't update iTunes.
I don't think there's any Flash involved. Google Wave leverages the new HTML5 standard (actually I'm not sure it is a *standard* yet) to do lots of neat new stuff natively within the browser. For instance, you no longer need to load flash to play a video as.flv, it can simply be done with the tag and the video can be played as if in a media player.
At any rate, when I simply read a description of Google wave I was unimpressed. Then, on a whim, I checked out the I/O keynote where it was announced. It's available on youtube, I highly recommend you check it out -- I bet you're going to be impressed. I could give you examples of what makes Wave neat, but unless you see it for yourself you might not really understand. Suffice to say that this is not your mothers webapp -- so much of this stuff is impossible without HTML5.
I think there is a software issue that causes something to start draining power at a crazy rate non-stop. I turned on the percentage battery indicator on my 3gs and one day I noticed it was running kind of hot and I looked at the indicator and saw the battery % had gotten crazy low really fast so I just set the phone down and watched.
I was losing like 1% every minute while running nothing other than the OS itself. WTF? That's like under 2 hour battery life while doing NOTHING but staring at the home screen -- you're supposed to be able to watch video for 6-7 hours, right?
So I powered my phone off completely, then let it reboot. Whatever it was, it went away. After that it ran smooth, no extra heat, battery indicator stayed at the same percent as I stared at homescreen for 5+ minutes and it was perfectly fine for the rest of the day. No clue what happened there, but something was draining power non-stop until I rebooted the thing. I assume it wasn't the processor, because it wasn't locked up -- so perhaps it was a modem issue.
It's quite possible that had I not noticed this issue and rebooted my phone I might have ended up with a pink one as well.
After all, it seems like they're truly on the losing end of the whole "exlusive handset" thing. In fact, when I hear people decrying iphone on AT&T, Verizon is one of the names I hear most frequently as the network they'd much rather have it on. I mean sure, Verizon had some decent phones -- but everyone these days wants a smart phone and verizon has almost nothing to offer in that department aside from a few "meh" Blackberries (which aren't all that exclusive). Sprint has the Instinct and Pre, T-Mobile has the G1, and AT&T, of course, has the Iphone. Verizon has . . . Nada for smart phones?
I don't know if this is just Verizon truly standing on principle (which seems unlikely), or simply the old guard of Verizon executives not realizing that the tide of exclusivity has actually turned against them in the last year or so and that they really no longer benefit from the idea of handset exclusivity since their rivals currently benefit far more it. Perhaps they're assuming that manufacturers of GSM devices wouldn't necessarily make CDMA versions if there was no exclusivity contracts. I can sorta see how their position might make financial sense if they only gained access to the Palm Pre and not the iphone due to lack of CDMA iphone.
I've got to imagine that if every Phone was available on every network tomorrow, Verizon would be in far stronger market position by being able to offer the Iphone than they would be by losing exclusivity on whatever junk they currently have. Their plans are cheaper, and their 3g coverage is superior to AT&T's (at least from my experience). I just can't imagine AT&T could compete with other providers for iphone contracts on a level playing field. Worse still, the cost of exclusivity just gets dumped on the customer. Iphone plans are about 20 bucks more per month than a similar plan for any other phone would run you . . .
There was an app for this posted to the app store several months ago. You hold the phone in your hand and just wave it around wildly and spell words out with the persistence of vision effect. While I imagine it might be a neat trick, I've got to wonder how many phones have met their untimely demise after being accidentally thrown this way. I like my phone too much to download this app.
The iphone already has a faster processor -- it's just underclocked to save on power consumption. I assume there are also heat dispersal considerations in effect there as well.
I'm so tired of the argument that "X" is just a hidden tax on the consumer whether it be piracy, corporate taxes, some sort of fee or whatever.
It just seems like a really weak argument that anyone who has taken any entry-level economics course ought to know doesn't make much sense. Sure it may figure into the bottom line of what a consumer pays in *some* way, its not going to be at a 1:1 correlation. If I charge you 29.99 for my product, and I'm a large corporation, you better believe I did a ton of market research to figure out that number.
I picked that number because it lets me squeeze the most bucks out of the most number of people and I know that if I increase that number, fewer people will buy my product and that won't necessarily result in a profit increase. Just because my costs go up a bit, doesn't mean I can simply pass those costs on to you because I know that will hurt my sales and might end up being less profitable for me than just eating the cost myself.
It changes the math, for sure, but once the math is done and a new number is found, that number isn't going to have increased by the same amount as my costs did. Hell, depending on the market it might not have increased at all.
They've been designing extremely power efficient computers for ages -- they're called Laptops. Sure, it wasn't for reasons of being "Green", but rather of Battery life. But the net effect is the same for a consumer interested in having a very power efficient box.
At any rate, these days there are some pretty decent gaming laptop configs that you could buy that I imagine could handle most gaming tasks you throw at them while being a heck of a lot more power effecient -- plus then you'd have the option of unplugging the monitor/keyboard/mouse and taking it with you and actually using it as a laptop.
Just make sure you don't throw it in the trash when you're done with it, both the batteries and LCD displays are fairly toxic . . .
Cause this is a pre-release leaked copy. I'm sure lots of people just really want to play this game since its been a highly anticipated title. I have no doubt that many of the people who downloaded it already have legitimate copies reserved and will still go out and buy the game when they can.
Am I the only one who thinks this is just some prank pulled by some kid with an inkjet printer and some label paper? It would take 2 minutes to make that sticker and just slap it on a few urinals for giggles.
Like, I realize some ridiculous crap has happened in the past few years, but are we all so jaded we just automatically assume that this sort of thing is real?
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I thought the CIA's policy was to netiher confirm nor deny. In light of this policy shift, in the future a failure to deny will be seen as a confirmation! Now all our enemies have to do is call up the CIA, claim to be local police, say they have a person who claims to be a CIA agent and wants out of a speeding ticket, and when they find someone the CIA does not deny, they'll know they've found a covert agent!
There's still quite a bit of room for increased computing power in the netbook segment of the market, if nowhere else. Apparently that's still one of the major reason for netbook returns is that people simply expect them to have desktop-level computing power and are disappointed when they struggle to, as a for instance, run Photoshop.
Faster chips can also be under-clocked so that they end up requiring less power (important for mobile devices) and generate less heat (ditto). In other words, the processing speed gains do not necessarily have to be "spent" on making the chip faster.
And then there's cost. If you get a good desktop system these days, one of the biggest costs is your graphics card. It wasn't realy that long ago that graphics processing was all done on the processor and nobody really had a graphics card -- but processors were slow and shifting that load to a separate processor was a great way to get a speed gain.
That trend exploded pretty fast, and even the integrated graphics on some mother boards are still separate graphics processors (just not very good ones for the most part). But if processing power becomes ample and excessive, we'll see that trend reverse as there will no longer really be a reason for graphic cards to exist. In fact, many components, integrated or otherwise, could become software based and dump their processing load to the CPU. Why not? There's only one reason they don't already and someday, when processors are fast enough, that reason will be gone.
I could go on, but I think you take my point. There's plenty of reason to continue to develop faster and faster chips that will have applications that will appeal to pretty much all consumers.
The hardware is lacking, thus far. The best part of android is that anyone can make a phone with their OS. The worst part is that ANYONE can make a phone with their OS.
Surprised this topic of discussion keeps coming up, but basically here's what we've learned the 20 other times this subject has come up.
The Japanese really do hate the iphone -- as a phone. However, they love it as a mobile web device. It's real competition in Japan is probably vs netbooks. Most iphone owners still own a Japanese phone in addition to their iphone and are not using the iphone as their primary "phone". Nevertheless, the iphone is very popular in Japan and many people are perfectly willing to pay for it and their regular phone service as well.
Perhaps you're not understanding what the "echo chamber" he's referring to here is. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, you have to admit that the left wing is simply not organized enough to have an "echo chamber". Perhaps there's a mini-sort of version of it in the meager media offerings of the left-wing, mostly blogs, but certainly nothing that reaches the public at large and definitely nothing on the scale of Fox News/Talk radio.
Yeah, but for long distance GV is nothing but an electronic phone card. Remember phone cards? They still sell them for international calls. You Dial a 1-800 number, put in your pin, an they connect you to your final destination from there.
Does AT&T forbid phone cards?
Apple has an *exclusive* agreement with AT&T. Google Voice competes with AT&T, since lemme check..... YEP ... Google Voice is VOIP right? It reduces billable minutes for AT&T right?
So if AT&T is pissed at VOIP (wow, no Telecom has *evaaaaah* been pissed at VOIP), would they... could they.... just possibly..... dial up their *exclusive* partner and subtly indicate, "Hey... would you mind suppressing our competition?".
This does not require any sort of investigation whatsoever. At no time is any wireless carrier going to simply accept competition, and exclusive agreements allow for the elimination of competition. Abuses are guaranteed by the very nature of the Apple/AT&T relationship.
The question is not whether or not the abuse exists, but are we going to disallow exclusive agreements between handset manufacturers or not?
Are there really any iPhone owners out there that honestly expect Apple to not act in their, and their business partners best interests?
Google voice is not VOIP. All calls made through google voice still use your AT&T minutes. There is no call data going over the 3g network -- at all.
Almost without exception, in the rush to give Apple the benefit of the doubt where they do not deserve it, people have been assuming that google voice = VOIP. That is an incorrect assumption.
Don't confuse Google Voice with Google Talk.
There are already apps that have push notifications/free SMS. They aren't being removed.
Or how about we teach them typing. That's fine motor skill they can *use*. I can't believe how many High School aged kids are hunting and pecking at the keyboard -- oh but thank god they can still write a lengthy letter when the power's out thanks to cursive!
I'm 28. I learned cursive in the third grade and have not used it since -- unless you count signing my name. In my case, you probably shouldn't given that I sign my name with one initial + scribble and a second initial + scribble. My signature isn't even close to legible, but nobody cares.
It's not an easy skill to learn, but it was incredibly easy one to forget. We really probably shouldn't be wasting Kids time with this -- I don't see what the practical value is in teaching kids how to write cursive these days. Other than reading letters from my Great Grandmother, now dead, or the original copy of the Declaration of Independence or perhaps various signatures (in as much as they could be read) I can't really even see the value in learning to read cursive either.
And windows users don't have to do any of those things either. Every piece of anti-virus software under the sun updates itself, completely without any human intervention, at some god awful time of night so as to avoid doing it while you may be using your computer. Similarly, right out of the box windows runs a scheduled weekly disk degrag at something like 3 am every wednesday or some other silly time. These things happen and I do nothing to cause them, I didn't even set them up originally -- they were just pre-configured that way and if I don't like them I can change them.
Nor do I have to reinstall windows yearly -- Vista on this machine has been installed for 18 months and everything is as snappy as the day I brought it home.
Try to understand, when you buy a mac you're not choosing between OS 10.5 and Windows 95. There's really major selling point of Mac over Windows at this point other than simple preference.
If you PREFER MacOS, by all means by a Mac -- but don't kid yourself into thinking you're getting something the rest of us aren't getting. We're all getting the OS of our choice and more or less the same feature set. Your preference costs more, but if you prefer it, and are willing to pay the money, then go for it.
Very true, though one expects software updates at a more frequent pace than firmware updates so one would expect that until one side or the other throws in the towel, it'll probably work less often rather than more often -- unless people who want this feature just don't update iTunes.
I don't think there's any Flash involved. Google Wave leverages the new HTML5 standard (actually I'm not sure it is a *standard* yet) to do lots of neat new stuff natively within the browser. For instance, you no longer need to load flash to play a video as .flv, it can simply be done with the tag and the video can be played as if in a media player.
At any rate, when I simply read a description of Google wave I was unimpressed. Then, on a whim, I checked out the I/O keynote where it was announced. It's available on youtube, I highly recommend you check it out -- I bet you're going to be impressed. I could give you examples of what makes Wave neat, but unless you see it for yourself you might not really understand. Suffice to say that this is not your mothers webapp -- so much of this stuff is impossible without HTML5.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
I think there is a software issue that causes something to start draining power at a crazy rate non-stop. I turned on the percentage battery indicator on my 3gs and one day I noticed it was running kind of hot and I looked at the indicator and saw the battery % had gotten crazy low really fast so I just set the phone down and watched.
I was losing like 1% every minute while running nothing other than the OS itself. WTF? That's like under 2 hour battery life while doing NOTHING but staring at the home screen -- you're supposed to be able to watch video for 6-7 hours, right?
So I powered my phone off completely, then let it reboot. Whatever it was, it went away. After that it ran smooth, no extra heat, battery indicator stayed at the same percent as I stared at homescreen for 5+ minutes and it was perfectly fine for the rest of the day. No clue what happened there, but something was draining power non-stop until I rebooted the thing. I assume it wasn't the processor, because it wasn't locked up -- so perhaps it was a modem issue.
It's quite possible that had I not noticed this issue and rebooted my phone I might have ended up with a pink one as well.
After all, it seems like they're truly on the losing end of the whole "exlusive handset" thing. In fact, when I hear people decrying iphone on AT&T, Verizon is one of the names I hear most frequently as the network they'd much rather have it on. I mean sure, Verizon had some decent phones -- but everyone these days wants a smart phone and verizon has almost nothing to offer in that department aside from a few "meh" Blackberries (which aren't all that exclusive). Sprint has the Instinct and Pre, T-Mobile has the G1, and AT&T, of course, has the Iphone. Verizon has . . . Nada for smart phones?
I don't know if this is just Verizon truly standing on principle (which seems unlikely), or simply the old guard of Verizon executives not realizing that the tide of exclusivity has actually turned against them in the last year or so and that they really no longer benefit from the idea of handset exclusivity since their rivals currently benefit far more it. Perhaps they're assuming that manufacturers of GSM devices wouldn't necessarily make CDMA versions if there was no exclusivity contracts. I can sorta see how their position might make financial sense if they only gained access to the Palm Pre and not the iphone due to lack of CDMA iphone.
I've got to imagine that if every Phone was available on every network tomorrow, Verizon would be in far stronger market position by being able to offer the Iphone than they would be by losing exclusivity on whatever junk they currently have. Their plans are cheaper, and their 3g coverage is superior to AT&T's (at least from my experience). I just can't imagine AT&T could compete with other providers for iphone contracts on a level playing field. Worse still, the cost of exclusivity just gets dumped on the customer. Iphone plans are about 20 bucks more per month than a similar plan for any other phone would run you . . .
There was an app for this posted to the app store several months ago. You hold the phone in your hand and just wave it around wildly and spell words out with the persistence of vision effect. While I imagine it might be a neat trick, I've got to wonder how many phones have met their untimely demise after being accidentally thrown this way. I like my phone too much to download this app.
Not really that original, there as an iphone app for this on the App store about a week after the app store opened. That was, what, almost a year ago?
The iphone already has a faster processor -- it's just underclocked to save on power consumption. I assume there are also heat dispersal considerations in effect there as well.
I'm so tired of the argument that "X" is just a hidden tax on the consumer whether it be piracy, corporate taxes, some sort of fee or whatever.
It just seems like a really weak argument that anyone who has taken any entry-level economics course ought to know doesn't make much sense. Sure it may figure into the bottom line of what a consumer pays in *some* way, its not going to be at a 1:1 correlation. If I charge you 29.99 for my product, and I'm a large corporation, you better believe I did a ton of market research to figure out that number.
I picked that number because it lets me squeeze the most bucks out of the most number of people and I know that if I increase that number, fewer people will buy my product and that won't necessarily result in a profit increase. Just because my costs go up a bit, doesn't mean I can simply pass those costs on to you because I know that will hurt my sales and might end up being less profitable for me than just eating the cost myself.
It changes the math, for sure, but once the math is done and a new number is found, that number isn't going to have increased by the same amount as my costs did. Hell, depending on the market it might not have increased at all.
They've been designing extremely power efficient computers for ages -- they're called Laptops. Sure, it wasn't for reasons of being "Green", but rather of Battery life. But the net effect is the same for a consumer interested in having a very power efficient box.
At any rate, these days there are some pretty decent gaming laptop configs that you could buy that I imagine could handle most gaming tasks you throw at them while being a heck of a lot more power effecient -- plus then you'd have the option of unplugging the monitor/keyboard/mouse and taking it with you and actually using it as a laptop.
Just make sure you don't throw it in the trash when you're done with it, both the batteries and LCD displays are fairly toxic . . .
It would still be in beta.
Cause this is a pre-release leaked copy. I'm sure lots of people just really want to play this game since its been a highly anticipated title. I have no doubt that many of the people who downloaded it already have legitimate copies reserved and will still go out and buy the game when they can.
Wow, what a bitch!
I'm pretty sure that's a common side-effect from taking Modafinil.
Am I the only one who thinks this is just some prank pulled by some kid with an inkjet printer and some label paper? It would take 2 minutes to make that sticker and just slap it on a few urinals for giggles.
Like, I realize some ridiculous crap has happened in the past few years, but are we all so jaded we just automatically assume that this sort of thing is real?