And how do you know that the people you shoot are those ominous "you and yours"? You seem to adhere to the "kill them all, let God sort them out" school of warfare.
To be perfectly honest (and despite my above posting about LEOs):
In a war, the only things that should be "illegal" are those things that cause lasting environmental damage, such as nukes and biological weapons. I mean, seriously... if we're at war, then we're at the point where we are KILLING PEOPLE to make our point.
With that in mind, when we declared war on any of the countries we have recently been at war with, (in my opinion) we should have:
Gone over there with a few thousand bombers with fighter escorts and bombed the living hell out of them.
Followed that with marching a couple million troops through the country, starting at the edges and moving inwards.
Kill any and all humans we encounter, leaving none whatsoever, regardless of diplomacy, press credentials, education, etc. If not for the fact that we should be killing EVERYONE, I would recommend targeting military and political targets with a higher priority.
I don't believe in God, so I'm not adhering to the "let God sort 'em out" mentality. I'm simply suggesting that if we care enough about the subject of our discontent and/or cultural differences to GO TO WAR, then that war should be brutal, swift, and merciless in an effort to minimize the necessary pain and suffering. If we don't feel strongly enough about it to commit genocide, then we should consider our other options.
War is horrible, war is terrible, war is abhorrent. Get it over and done with as quickly and effectively as possible, if it is necessary to begin in the first place. There is no such thing as "kicking a man when he is down", if you are killing his friends and neighbors. Similarly, there is no "surrender" in such a war. Take no prisoners, leave no witnesses. CNN can either take its chances, or leave the media blackout alone. I've got your story: "We're killing all of them as quickly as possible, while minimizing our own casualties." Atrocities and war crimes be damned.
If we're mad enough to fight, let's take the Ender Wiggin approach. If we feel strongly enough to commit genocide, then let's do it, get it over with, and move on. None of this "we're fighting for peace" bullshit, no "convert them to democracy" anthem, no "they hate us for our freedoms". I don't care why they hate us. If I don't hate them, I won't be voting to kill them all. If I personally hate them enough to kill all of them, then I don't mind toting a gun and getting shipped over there to help with the slaughter.
Personal Accountability, people. Learn it, live it, love it.
Dead cops and dead marines is your preference, coward?
Honestly? I think there's more than enough cops. Way too many, if you ask me.
Think about it for a minute. How many "law enforcement" agencies have jurisdiction over you where you sit right now? "Just a few", you might think... Let's count, then, shall we?
We'll assume, for the sake of argument, that you live inside a major city. We will also only count the offices that can legally break into your house with "probable cause", and maintain staff trained and equipped for exactly that.
1: City Police 2: County Police (Sheriff) 3: State Police 4: Federal Marshals 5: FBI
Nothing surprising so far, right?
6: Border Patrol (in a surprising large number of places that aren't actually near a "border") 7: Department of Homeland Security 8: Drug Enforcement Agency 9: Internal Revenue Service (yes, they maintain personnel for "active" law enforcement duties) 10: Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives 11: Public School District Police Department ("Resource" Officers - yes, they are real police, and yes, they can break into your house to arrest you) 12: Local College Police Department (see above) 13: Highway Patrol (admittedly a bit of a stretch, but there are several circumstances where it is perfectly legal and within their jurisdiction to "assist" in a raid or otherwise break into your home)
So in this list, there are twelve agencies (thirteen if you want to count "edge cases") that, without a doubt, are capable of breaking into your home to arrest you. These are just the ones that have jurisdiction and authority to break into your private residence, regardless of its location within the United States, to "detain" you. There are also plenty of localized "special task forces" that can be granted "the duties and privileges of rank pertaining to" law enforcement officers, if they don't already have them, for the special purpose of terrorizing^W protecting citizens. Shiny badges and guns seem to make lots and lots of people more than a little power-mad.
To make it worse, there are agencies such as the New London, Connecticut Police Department, who require their officers to be unintelligent in order to make them more likely to follow orders without thinking, and "less likely to get bored".
Youtube is full of normal, law-abiding folks who have been killed or seriously injured by those charged to protect and serve, with little or no provocation. One of my favorite clips is a Boston Area Rapid Transit Officer shooting a man in the back while he is face down on the ground in handcuffs. A favorite headline of mine is the man who died falling from a second story ledge after being tazed by law enforcement officers. Another of my favorite stories is the school resource officer who tazed a fourteen-year-old girl who wasn't even being threatening, she just wasn't doing exactly what she was told quite quickly enough.
There's plenty of reason for ordinary, average, law-abiding citizens to hate and fear law enforcement officers. We get new ones every day. How much fear, uncertainty, and doubt can this institution resist?
I, for one, applaud "dead cops and dead marines" when they overstep their bounds while applying deadly force. Enforcing the law does not place one above it.
Also, I wonder how long it will be before the surveillance society we live in is "good enough" that an audio/video record of any given subject will be available for anything and everything that person has done in the past [24 hours|7 days|30 days|ever in their life]... more importantly, is that a bad thing? Could we do away with [some|most|all] of the law enforcement [officers|agencies] at that point?
As for being a coward... well, say it to my face. (Yes, the irony is implicit, and the internet is full of tough guys).
-- I may sound paranoid, but is it paranoia if they really are out to get you?
Anyone who thinks the courts in the USA are as crooked as any third world country is wrong. They're heavily stacked in favor of the wealthy as a consequence of allowing people to select their own representation, combined with a respect for status among members of the bar. But they are, for the most part, not bribed by the rich every time the rich get a parking ticket, for example. When you call a law firm in the United States, chances are the law firm is not paying off the judge. That's not true in a lot of places.
Although there are also underdeveloped places that have some remarkable judiciaries, or that have some very reputable members.
How do you figure? I saw a woman come into court for a (second) DUI, pay a monstrous fine, and then schedule what day she would like to go to jail.
Anecdotal evidence aside, it's getting a bit out of hand.
More or less, the legal system in the US has gotten to the point where you really need to be a lawyer in order to understand when you're breaking the law.
Nah... we're all breaking the law, more or less. The trick is to have enough money (or know enough of the right people) to get away with it.
Especially since actions taking place in public do not have participants with a reasonable expectation of privacy.
It is one of the meanings of the word "public".
It's not a question of being in public... the questionable law having light shined upon it makes it illegal to covertly record a person. Unfortunately for the police, this guy was filming them "performing their duties" with the recording device in plain sight.
As an aside, most jurisdictions (at least as far as I'm aware) have no law against photographing a public official in the performance of his/her duties, and some of them even have laws specifically legalizing it.
Of course, if you're "in the way" of them performing their duties, they can always charge you with obstruction of justice... and those bruises on your face came from you resisting arrest, right?
Say the person who benefits from the city fire department, police department, highway department, health department that enforces sanitation and public health regulations, the water and sewer, departments that provide safe water and take away sewage, the diverse Federal departments that ensure clean safe food, safe medicines, keep aircraft from colliding in mid air, will carry a letter from coast to coast for you in a few days for less than half a dollar, etc etc etc.
Don't bother to quote Ayn Rand or any other libertarian bullshitter at me. The ONLY quotation that matters is this:
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: 'I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.'
My phone came with a task manager and I never use it. I get maybe 20 hours battery. I feel like people who spend all day fiddling around with task managers for Android must have bad batteries or really poorly designed phones.
... or maybe you have a well-designed task manager, with a good default list of apps to kill (or maybe a whitelist of apps *not* to kill, if it came with the phone). I don't "spend all day fiddling around" with my task manager, I tell it which apps to kill if I'm not using my phone, and it sits quietly in the background and does its job. The only time I interact with it is when I install new apps, and go in to make sure they're not going to run when I'm not using them.
As for having a bad battery or poorly designed phone... well, before I got my task manager, I got maybe 6 hours of battery life on a good day. I now get over 11 hours on an average day.
Out of curiosity, where's the optical drive in that system you built? Do you have an analog to the android market, or the App Store(tm)? How, exactly, do you intend to install an OS on that rig? Oh, and I'll assume you have some sort of onboard graphics solution in that $50 motherboard, just to be nice.
I'll also assume that you're not considering gaming on that thing, nor are you considering portability...
I think it's probably also safe to assume that you missed my point, which was that a PC is not necessarily the best solution to a given user's "problem".
Desktop PCs are the majority of users' solution, at this point, but a lot of users are waking up to the fact that you can surf the net and read email on something a hell of a lot smaller and cheaper than a desktop. I feel quite safe in predicting a dramatic decline in PC sales and a huge increase in tablet ownership over the next few years.
If I understand it correctly, the iDevices actually close the apps when they leave the screen, whereas Android "caches" the apps to improve performance when you go back to an app that you only closed temporarily (if you receive a call, for example). Then again, when it comes to iDevices, I'm spewing info without actually doing any research... so take it with a tumbler of salt (in case a pinch isn't enough).
wow. tweak a presentation, 'read a recipe in the KITCHEN'. yes. i see that i was wrong. this is great computing. i could do none of these with a more functional, similar form factor netbook. damn. how naive i was.
Actually, I'd love to see the gymnastics you perform attempting to tweak a presentation while in motion... whether that be standing in a moving elevator, or walking towards the meeting where you're about to give that presentation.
As for the recipe thing, the tablet has a huge advantage over the netbook, in that it doesn't have a keyboard, so a spill is much more likely to be able to be wiped off, rather than ruining your machine. Also, you completely glossed over the voice commands I mentioned - the tablet could be in a document reader, or even mounted on the wall.
Besides, netbooks really are dead, whereas tablets are still ramping up.
Ya know, I just realized I'm feeding a troll. You can't possibly actually be this stubborn and unintelligent. Go back to telling that wonderful xbox360 joke you do, about the spinning around. We're done here.
The no phone rule is meant to protect the privacy of the court (avoiding annoying ringtones is just a pleasant side effect). It's the same reason you're not allowed a video camera in court. A tablet might not have a phone connection but it could certainly be used as a recording device, I would have thought that sufficient to ban them. Oh, unless I guess you're in the US, in which case there is no privacy or sanctity in your televised courtrooms - in which case it's just a dick move, a rule that says all phones must be set to silent would be just as effective as one that said no phones allowed.
It doesn't say they're not allowed, it says they must be off.
It is in your best interest to insure yourself on a purchase as cheap as a laptop, especially a $300 one.
Agreed, wholeheartedly. This was not a $300 laptop, unless you want to count the practically complete replacement of my 3-year-old $1200 laptop which was covered by the $300 protection plan I purchased almost 3 years ago.
Were it the $350 laptop my neighbor purchased last week, Best Buy's Black Tie Protection Plan would cost $280 for the 3-year package... cheaper, in that case, to simply buy a new one when it breaks (if you account for inflation).
As an aside, my laptop is not as fast as the one my neighbor just purchased, but it has an nvidia graphics card and a 19" screen, compared to the "Intel HD" video card and 13.6" screen on my neigbor's new machine.
Not sure what it would cost for a new laptop with a 1080p screen, but I'm more than willing to have spent the $300 3 years ago for the new(ish) machine I have now:)
What did the "refurbishing" do for you that you couldn't do yourself? I imagine it involved taking it apart, blowing out the dust, and reformatting, but that is all simply done at home for most people reading this site.
And personally, I decided it was worth saving $300 to just double-check to make sure my backpack is zipped every time I get on my Nighthawk. Some people are less careful and/or clumsier than others and are actually justified in buying accidental protection plans, but some of us are OCD and are anally protective of our belongings (I had a g/f who went through phones about every six months, losing them, dropping them in the toilet, driving over them, etc.). In twelve years, I'm on my third cell-phone and third laptop, and that's only due to not enough power, not because of any damage. Hell, I just bought a new battery for my seven year old original Nintendo DS, because it still works just fine, excepting the 2 hours of gameplay per charge.
Actually, the things it did for me that I couldn't do for myself included:
a new battery to replace the one that had started failing after nearly 3 years' hard use
a new (ok, factory refurbished) DVD-RW drive to replace the one that had started failing after nearly 3 years' hard use
a new (ok, factory refurbished) motherboard to replace the one that had cooked itself after clogging up with dirt, hair, etc.
a new (ok, factory refurbished) video card to replace that one that suddenly developed heat issues after the motherboard cooked
All of which cost me the princely sum of a $300 accidental damage protection plan nearly 3 years ago, which translates as not a dime spent during this transaction.
I could have replaced all the hardware myself, although I would probably have just purchased a new machine for the annoyance factor. I couldn't have made the stock, HP-specific parts materialize for free, though, and that's pretty much the point I was trying to make in the first place.
I don't think there is any comparison between the 9 and 10 inch tablets and a smart phone, the screen area is much greater.
... and that's the only comparison that needs to be made. One fits in your jeans pocket, the other is a bit too large for most pockets. Other than that, they're practically identical.
Of course smartphones are a threat to the tablet market. Then again, smartphones are a threat to PCs, at this point. Bluetooth peripherals and HDMI output for the win.
I can imagine a WiFi-enabled (or perhaps Bluetooth) "virtual kiosk", with a web interface, accessible via smartphone/tablet/whatever... imagine something like a RedBox, but without any physical user interface at all. You walk up, whip out your phone (NFC sounds wonderfully suited for this purpose, by the way), browse through the movies, pick one, pay for it by authenticating against your account, reach out and collect the movie that the kiosk just spit out, and walk away... without ever touching your credit card, wallet, or (for the most part) the machine itself.
Of course, this needn't be restricted to movie rentals... food dispensers, or anything at all where a picture and a brief description will suffice as your interaction with a product before purchasing it... could be at the mall, or in a fast-food parking lot, or outside the grocery store, or any number of highly-accessible locations with reasonable security.
It is not an easy thing to fix as they do it wrong at fundamental level. They would need to move to retained graphics model (instead of immediate) and that would mean rewriting ALL the apps. In retained model app describes what's on screen and GPU is responsible for updating the screen - no garbage collector can interrupt that. Currently android developers have said that they wait for faster processors but it's just a demonstration of their ignorance.
Actually, what I've read android developers saying about graphic rendering and garbage collection is that if you don't want to take a chance on the garbage collector "stopping the world" for 100-500ms while it collects garbage, simply don't allocate/deallocate during the rendering cycle.
As a a matter of fact, that point is hammered home in nearly every tutorial, forum discussion, or other online medium discussing how to do graphics-intensive applications on android.
As for moving to a different graphics model... is something wrong with OpenGL? Because OpenGL ES is the defacto standard for graphics, if you want better performance than Canvas (to a Windows coder, this would be called "Paint", and refers to the UI's drawing method, as opposed to rendering via an actual high-performance graphics engine).
Touchscreens are an inefficient way to interact with a device.
Depends on the application, really. Check out the youtube videos of people playing StarCraft on a touchscreen, and it looks like it's almost easier to use that than it is to use a keyboard and mouse.
The amount of motion required is greater than using a keyboard and mouse.
Ok, I'll grant that.
They deliver no tactile feedback, and you can't develop muscle memory as effectively, so they require more attention, creating a greater sense of separation between man and tool.
Uhm... you don't own a smartphone, do you? Haptic feedback (vibration on "keypress") is very much tactile. Muscle memory develops based on hand position relative to edge of screen, instead of where on the mousepad your hand is resting. There is a learning curve with a new (to you) device. Cry me a river.
When you try to interact with them, you block your view of the device with your hand.
Yep, that's why the UI needs to work around that. Gingerbread was a huge improvement over FroYo for exactly that reason.
You get fingerprints on them, and you need to shut them off to clean the screen.
Yeah, I get finger prints on mine all the time... wait, turn it off? What's wrong with just wiping it on your shirt? Or maybe you could, oh, I dunno, wash your hands?
I could go on, but, really... why?
Because we haven't experienced enough of your ignorance yet?
I agree. I'm pissed that I can't run all my viruses on the iPad. What a piece of shit.
Why would you need to run a virus, when you can root the phone with a webpage? Seriously, just think about that for a moment. The OS is so insecure that there are multiple ways to "jailbreak" (ie, gain root-level access to) the system that are so simple they can be done via a browser, accomplished by someone who doesn't even know what HTML is.
Lends a little credence to the "it's not that it's secure, it's just none of the virus writers care about something with such a small market share" line of thought, don't it?
On the bright side, Apple is much more of the market, now... I look forward to my own future howls of glee as the Apple fanbois whom I know suddenly discover that they are not immune to virus activity, they were just an under-noticed minority.
I use a tablet for reading books/PDFs/newspapers, playing games and as a souped up todo list.
For 600 fucking bucks, plus data plan?! Guess I'm an idiot, because I don't get it. That seems like paint-eating level of stupid to me.
Try more like "less than 150 bucks"; here's one. Admittedly, you'll need to root it (and perhaps flash it) to unlock all the features you might desire in a full-on tablet, but it's also a quarter what you stated as a price.
So an iPad can't access the local network via WiFi? Bummer. My android phone has no issues pulling gigs and gigs of data over my WiFi at home... how curious.
No, really. I swap out a half-dozen movies every couple days, depending on my mood. Sometimes I'm into zombie flicks, and some days I wanna see Star Wars. I also have TV shows. All stored on my home machine, all ripped from my own media (even transferred from video tape, in the case of several "oldie but goodies" and my original "V for Visitors" collection (broadcast back in the 80's)). I had to grab an app to allow me to do file manager stuff (and access the LAN from my phone), but I think I've watched more of my old movies since I got my new phone (about 6 months, now) than I've watched in the preceding year.
Slashdot Mirror
Those magic bullets are everywhere.
http://www.thedissidentfrogman.com/blog/link/like-a-suppository-only-stronger/
Watch the video for a laugh.
/giggle.
Thanks for the laugh.
And how do you know that the people you shoot are those ominous "you and yours"? You seem to adhere to the "kill them all, let God sort them out" school of warfare.
To be perfectly honest (and despite my above posting about LEOs):
In a war, the only things that should be "illegal" are those things that cause lasting environmental damage, such as nukes and biological weapons.
I mean, seriously... if we're at war, then we're at the point where we are KILLING PEOPLE to make our point.
With that in mind, when we declared war on any of the countries we have recently been at war with, (in my opinion) we should have:
I don't believe in God, so I'm not adhering to the "let God sort 'em out" mentality. I'm simply suggesting that if we care enough about the subject of our discontent and/or cultural differences to GO TO WAR, then that war should be brutal, swift, and merciless in an effort to minimize the necessary pain and suffering. If we don't feel strongly enough about it to commit genocide, then we should consider our other options.
War is horrible, war is terrible, war is abhorrent. Get it over and done with as quickly and effectively as possible, if it is necessary to begin in the first place. There is no such thing as "kicking a man when he is down", if you are killing his friends and neighbors. Similarly, there is no "surrender" in such a war. Take no prisoners, leave no witnesses. CNN can either take its chances, or leave the media blackout alone. I've got your story: "We're killing all of them as quickly as possible, while minimizing our own casualties." Atrocities and war crimes be damned.
If we're mad enough to fight, let's take the Ender Wiggin approach. If we feel strongly enough to commit genocide, then let's do it, get it over with, and move on. None of this "we're fighting for peace" bullshit, no "convert them to democracy" anthem, no "they hate us for our freedoms". I don't care why they hate us. If I don't hate them, I won't be voting to kill them all. If I personally hate them enough to kill all of them, then I don't mind toting a gun and getting shipped over there to help with the slaughter.
Personal Accountability, people. Learn it, live it, love it.
Dead cops and dead marines is your preference, coward?
Honestly? I think there's more than enough cops. Way too many, if you ask me.
Think about it for a minute. How many "law enforcement" agencies have jurisdiction over you where you sit right now? "Just a few", you might think... Let's count, then, shall we?
We'll assume, for the sake of argument, that you live inside a major city. We will also only count the offices that can legally break into your house with "probable cause", and maintain staff trained and equipped for exactly that.
1: City Police
2: County Police (Sheriff)
3: State Police
4: Federal Marshals
5: FBI
Nothing surprising so far, right?
6: Border Patrol (in a surprising large number of places that aren't actually near a "border")
7: Department of Homeland Security
8: Drug Enforcement Agency
9: Internal Revenue Service (yes, they maintain personnel for "active" law enforcement duties)
10: Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
11: Public School District Police Department ("Resource" Officers - yes, they are real police, and yes, they can break into your house to arrest you)
12: Local College Police Department (see above)
13: Highway Patrol (admittedly a bit of a stretch, but there are several circumstances where it is perfectly legal and within their jurisdiction to "assist" in a raid or otherwise break into your home)
So in this list, there are twelve agencies (thirteen if you want to count "edge cases") that, without a doubt, are capable of breaking into your home to arrest you. These are just the ones that have jurisdiction and authority to break into your private residence, regardless of its location within the United States, to "detain" you. There are also plenty of localized "special task forces" that can be granted "the duties and privileges of rank pertaining to" law enforcement officers, if they don't already have them, for the special purpose of terrorizing^W protecting citizens. Shiny badges and guns seem to make lots and lots of people more than a little power-mad.
To make it worse, there are agencies such as the New London, Connecticut Police Department, who require their officers to be unintelligent in order to make them more likely to follow orders without thinking, and "less likely to get bored".
Youtube is full of normal, law-abiding folks who have been killed or seriously injured by those charged to protect and serve, with little or no provocation. One of my favorite clips is a Boston Area Rapid Transit Officer shooting a man in the back while he is face down on the ground in handcuffs. A favorite headline of mine is the man who died falling from a second story ledge after being tazed by law enforcement officers. Another of my favorite stories is the school resource officer who tazed a fourteen-year-old girl who wasn't even being threatening, she just wasn't doing exactly what she was told quite quickly enough.
There's plenty of reason for ordinary, average, law-abiding citizens to hate and fear law enforcement officers. We get new ones every day. How much fear, uncertainty, and doubt can this institution resist?
I, for one, applaud "dead cops and dead marines" when they overstep their bounds while applying deadly force. Enforcing the law does not place one above it.
Also, I wonder how long it will be before the surveillance society we live in is "good enough" that an audio/video record of any given subject will be available for anything and everything that person has done in the past [24 hours|7 days|30 days|ever in their life]... more importantly, is that a bad thing? Could we do away with [some|most|all] of the law enforcement [officers|agencies] at that point?
As for being a coward... well, say it to my face.
(Yes, the irony is implicit, and the internet is full of tough guys).
--
I may sound paranoid, but is it paranoia if they really are out to get you?
"My girlfriend was a 'tard. Now she's a pilot."
Satire, warning, or prophecy?
Ask me again in 100 years.
Anyone who thinks the courts in the USA are as crooked as any third world country is wrong. They're heavily stacked in favor of the wealthy as a consequence of allowing people to select their own representation, combined with a respect for status among members of the bar. But they are, for the most part, not bribed by the rich every time the rich get a parking ticket, for example. When you call a law firm in the United States, chances are the law firm is not paying off the judge. That's not true in a lot of places.
Although there are also underdeveloped places that have some remarkable judiciaries, or that have some very reputable members.
How do you figure? I saw a woman come into court for a (second) DUI, pay a monstrous fine, and then schedule what day she would like to go to jail.
Anecdotal evidence aside, it's getting a bit out of hand.
That's what we get for electing so many lawyers to write the laws.
And then meekly accepting as legitimate the notion that ignorance of incomprehensible body of law is no excuse.
Precisely.
More or less, the legal system in the US has gotten to the point where you really need to be a lawyer in order to understand when you're breaking the law.
Nah... we're all breaking the law, more or less. The trick is to have enough money (or know enough of the right people) to get away with it.
Especially since actions taking place in public do not have participants with a reasonable expectation of privacy.
It is one of the meanings of the word "public".
It's not a question of being in public... the questionable law having light shined upon it makes it illegal to covertly record a person. Unfortunately for the police, this guy was filming them "performing their duties" with the recording device in plain sight.
As an aside, most jurisdictions (at least as far as I'm aware) have no law against photographing a public official in the performance of his/her duties, and some of them even have laws specifically legalizing it.
Of course, if you're "in the way" of them performing their duties, they can always charge you with obstruction of justice... and those bruises on your face came from you resisting arrest, right?
"Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less."
Say the person who benefits from the city fire department, police department, highway department, health department that enforces sanitation and public health regulations, the water and sewer, departments that provide safe water and take away sewage, the diverse Federal departments that ensure clean safe food, safe medicines, keep aircraft from colliding in mid air, will carry a letter from coast to coast for you in a few days for less than half a dollar, etc etc etc.
Don't bother to quote Ayn Rand or any other libertarian bullshitter at me. The ONLY quotation that matters is this:
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: 'I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.'
No quotes, huh? How about a headline?
Firefighters watch as home burns to the ground
You can keep your civilization.
My phone came with a task manager and I never use it. I get maybe 20 hours battery. I feel like people who spend all day fiddling around with task managers for Android must have bad batteries or really poorly designed phones.
... or maybe you have a well-designed task manager, with a good default list of apps to kill (or maybe a whitelist of apps *not* to kill, if it came with the phone). I don't "spend all day fiddling around" with my task manager, I tell it which apps to kill if I'm not using my phone, and it sits quietly in the background and does its job. The only time I interact with it is when I install new apps, and go in to make sure they're not going to run when I'm not using them.
As for having a bad battery or poorly designed phone... well, before I got my task manager, I got maybe 6 hours of battery life on a good day. I now get over 11 hours on an average day.
Out of curiosity, where's the optical drive in that system you built? Do you have an analog to the android market, or the App Store(tm)? How, exactly, do you intend to install an OS on that rig? Oh, and I'll assume you have some sort of onboard graphics solution in that $50 motherboard, just to be nice.
I'll also assume that you're not considering gaming on that thing, nor are you considering portability...
I think it's probably also safe to assume that you missed my point, which was that a PC is not necessarily the best solution to a given user's "problem".
Desktop PCs are the majority of users' solution, at this point, but a lot of users are waking up to the fact that you can surf the net and read email on something a hell of a lot smaller and cheaper than a desktop. I feel quite safe in predicting a dramatic decline in PC sales and a huge increase in tablet ownership over the next few years.
If I understand it correctly, the iDevices actually close the apps when they leave the screen, whereas Android "caches" the apps to improve performance when you go back to an app that you only closed temporarily (if you receive a call, for example). Then again, when it comes to iDevices, I'm spewing info without actually doing any research... so take it with a tumbler of salt (in case a pinch isn't enough).
wow. tweak a presentation, 'read a recipe in the KITCHEN'. yes. i see that i was wrong. this is great computing. i could do none of these with a more functional, similar form factor netbook. damn. how naive i was.
Actually, I'd love to see the gymnastics you perform attempting to tweak a presentation while in motion... whether that be standing in a moving elevator, or walking towards the meeting where you're about to give that presentation.
As for the recipe thing, the tablet has a huge advantage over the netbook, in that it doesn't have a keyboard, so a spill is much more likely to be able to be wiped off, rather than ruining your machine. Also, you completely glossed over the voice commands I mentioned - the tablet could be in a document reader, or even mounted on the wall.
Besides, netbooks really are dead, whereas tablets are still ramping up.
Ya know, I just realized I'm feeding a troll. You can't possibly actually be this stubborn and unintelligent. Go back to telling that wonderful xbox360 joke you do, about the spinning around. We're done here.
The no phone rule is meant to protect the privacy of the court (avoiding annoying ringtones is just a pleasant side effect). It's the same reason you're not allowed a video camera in court. A tablet might not have a phone connection but it could certainly be used as a recording device, I would have thought that sufficient to ban them. Oh, unless I guess you're in the US, in which case there is no privacy or sanctity in your televised courtrooms - in which case it's just a dick move, a rule that says all phones must be set to silent would be just as effective as one that said no phones allowed.
It doesn't say they're not allowed, it says they must be off.
It is in your best interest to insure yourself on a purchase as cheap as a laptop, especially a $300 one.
Agreed, wholeheartedly. This was not a $300 laptop, unless you want to count the practically complete replacement of my 3-year-old $1200 laptop which was covered by the $300 protection plan I purchased almost 3 years ago.
Were it the $350 laptop my neighbor purchased last week, Best Buy's Black Tie Protection Plan would cost $280 for the 3-year package... cheaper, in that case, to simply buy a new one when it breaks (if you account for inflation).
As an aside, my laptop is not as fast as the one my neighbor just purchased, but it has an nvidia graphics card and a 19" screen, compared to the "Intel HD" video card and 13.6" screen on my neigbor's new machine.
Not sure what it would cost for a new laptop with a 1080p screen, but I'm more than willing to have spent the $300 3 years ago for the new(ish) machine I have now :)
What did the "refurbishing" do for you that you couldn't do yourself? I imagine it involved taking it apart, blowing out the dust, and reformatting, but that is all simply done at home for most people reading this site.
And personally, I decided it was worth saving $300 to just double-check to make sure my backpack is zipped every time I get on my Nighthawk. Some people are less careful and/or clumsier than others and are actually justified in buying accidental protection plans, but some of us are OCD and are anally protective of our belongings (I had a g/f who went through phones about every six months, losing them, dropping them in the toilet, driving over them, etc.). In twelve years, I'm on my third cell-phone and third laptop, and that's only due to not enough power, not because of any damage. Hell, I just bought a new battery for my seven year old original Nintendo DS, because it still works just fine, excepting the 2 hours of gameplay per charge.
Actually, the things it did for me that I couldn't do for myself included:
All of which cost me the princely sum of a $300 accidental damage protection plan nearly 3 years ago, which translates as not a dime spent during this transaction.
I could have replaced all the hardware myself, although I would probably have just purchased a new machine for the annoyance factor. I couldn't have made the stock, HP-specific parts materialize for free, though, and that's pretty much the point I was trying to make in the first place.
Not too long ago, the pundits were declaring the netbook moribund because sales had flattened.
The difference being that tablet sales have not flattened.
I don't think there is any comparison between the 9 and 10 inch tablets and a smart phone, the screen area is much greater.
... and that's the only comparison that needs to be made. One fits in your jeans pocket, the other is a bit too large for most pockets. Other than that, they're practically identical.
Of course smartphones are a threat to the tablet market. Then again, smartphones are a threat to PCs, at this point.
Bluetooth peripherals and HDMI output for the win.
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My phone does 1080p.
Speaking of kiosks...
I can imagine a WiFi-enabled (or perhaps Bluetooth) "virtual kiosk", with a web interface, accessible via smartphone/tablet/whatever... imagine something like a RedBox, but without any physical user interface at all. You walk up, whip out your phone (NFC sounds wonderfully suited for this purpose, by the way), browse through the movies, pick one, pay for it by authenticating against your account, reach out and collect the movie that the kiosk just spit out, and walk away... without ever touching your credit card, wallet, or (for the most part) the machine itself.
Of course, this needn't be restricted to movie rentals... food dispensers, or anything at all where a picture and a brief description will suffice as your interaction with a product before purchasing it... could be at the mall, or in a fast-food parking lot, or outside the grocery store, or any number of highly-accessible locations with reasonable security.
It is not an easy thing to fix as they do it wrong at fundamental level. They would need to move to retained graphics model (instead of immediate) and that would mean rewriting ALL the apps. In retained model app describes what's on screen and GPU is responsible for updating the screen - no garbage collector can interrupt that. Currently android developers have said that they wait for faster processors but it's just a demonstration of their ignorance.
Actually, what I've read android developers saying about graphic rendering and garbage collection is that if you don't want to take a chance on the garbage collector "stopping the world" for 100-500ms while it collects garbage, simply don't allocate/deallocate during the rendering cycle.
As a a matter of fact, that point is hammered home in nearly every tutorial, forum discussion, or other online medium discussing how to do graphics-intensive applications on android.
As for moving to a different graphics model... is something wrong with OpenGL? Because OpenGL ES is the defacto standard for graphics, if you want better performance than Canvas (to a Windows coder, this would be called "Paint", and refers to the UI's drawing method, as opposed to rendering via an actual high-performance graphics engine).
Bummer, I was really hoping to see a Google-pushed Motorola-chipped Android-powered device.
Ah, well, I'm still willing to bet that there's gonna be some *really* nice Moto phones next year...
Touchscreens are an inefficient way to interact with a device.
Depends on the application, really. Check out the youtube videos of people playing StarCraft on a touchscreen, and it looks like it's almost easier to use that than it is to use a keyboard and mouse.
The amount of motion required is greater than using a keyboard and mouse.
Ok, I'll grant that.
They deliver no tactile feedback, and you can't develop muscle memory as effectively, so they require more attention, creating a greater sense of separation between man and tool.
Uhm... you don't own a smartphone, do you? Haptic feedback (vibration on "keypress") is very much tactile. Muscle memory develops based on hand position relative to edge of screen, instead of where on the mousepad your hand is resting. There is a learning curve with a new (to you) device. Cry me a river.
When you try to interact with them, you block your view of the device with your hand.
Yep, that's why the UI needs to work around that. Gingerbread was a huge improvement over FroYo for exactly that reason.
You get fingerprints on them, and you need to shut them off to clean the screen.
Yeah, I get finger prints on mine all the time... wait, turn it off? What's wrong with just wiping it on your shirt? Or maybe you could, oh, I dunno, wash your hands?
I could go on, but, really... why?
Because we haven't experienced enough of your ignorance yet?
I'm going to assume your statement was sarcastic.
I agree. I'm pissed that I can't run all my viruses on the iPad. What a piece of shit.
Why would you need to run a virus, when you can root the phone with a webpage? Seriously, just think about that for a moment. The OS is so insecure that there are multiple ways to "jailbreak" (ie, gain root-level access to) the system that are so simple they can be done via a browser, accomplished by someone who doesn't even know what HTML is.
Lends a little credence to the "it's not that it's secure, it's just none of the virus writers care about something with such a small market share" line of thought, don't it?
On the bright side, Apple is much more of the market, now... I look forward to my own future howls of glee as the Apple fanbois whom I know suddenly discover that they are not immune to virus activity, they were just an under-noticed minority.
I use a tablet for reading books/PDFs/newspapers, playing games and as a souped up todo list.
For 600 fucking bucks, plus data plan?! Guess I'm an idiot, because I don't get it. That seems like paint-eating level of stupid to me.
Try more like "less than 150 bucks"; here's one. Admittedly, you'll need to root it (and perhaps flash it) to unlock all the features you might desire in a full-on tablet, but it's also a quarter what you stated as a price.
What was that about eating paint?
So an iPad can't access the local network via WiFi? Bummer. My android phone has no issues pulling gigs and gigs of data over my WiFi at home... how curious.
No, really. I swap out a half-dozen movies every couple days, depending on my mood. Sometimes I'm into zombie flicks, and some days I wanna see Star Wars. I also have TV shows. All stored on my home machine, all ripped from my own media (even transferred from video tape, in the case of several "oldie but goodies" and my original "V for Visitors" collection (broadcast back in the 80's)). I had to grab an app to allow me to do file manager stuff (and access the LAN from my phone), but I think I've watched more of my old movies since I got my new phone (about 6 months, now) than I've watched in the preceding year.