I actually went to school in a lot of different places - New Zealand (grades 1, 2 and half of 3), Texas (3-6), Sri Lanka (7-9, at a Britsh-ish international school) and Thailand (10-12, German & Swiss school system)... other than the decimal point vs. comma, pretty much everything was the same. OK, things like long division were written differently, or PQ vs. ABC for solving quadratic equations, but other than that, Math was pretty much the only language that followed me consistently from elementary to high school... including things like X,Y,Z axes following the alphabet;)
Of course you got the question wrong - the question itself is wrong (should be asking about the X axis for the supposedly correct answer to apply). None of the other answers applied to mirroring over an axis (only over the origin) though, so the quiz-creator having swapped X for Y seemed plausible...
I'm already using a prepaid card in a non-carrier-branded smartphone, but I'm sure that prepaid card still gives my provider some level of access to my phone.
Has anyone else considered using an unbranded MiFi-type mobile broadband router in conjunction with VPN via the smartphone, and all communications (IM, E-Mail, VoIP) routed through that VPN? Shouldn't be a lot of snooping possible there, right? With no SIM-Card in the phone (or WiFi-only smartphone-sized device), the carriers shouldn't be able to track anything at all... hopefully...
I have an "expensive netbook" (=subnotebook), and I still sometimes find myself wishing it had a few more iPad traits.
1. True instant-on. When I wake my laptop from standby, it takes half a second to wake, and then often 10 seconds (sometimes 5, but it's spotty - unreliable => use near worst case statistic) to connect to WiFi or WWAN... for tasks that take less than a minute, adds at least 15-20% of overhead-time. If I'm reading something on my phone and decide I'd like to reply, I send the link to my laptop ("Send To Computer" Android app, probably one of many though), open my laptop, and replay from there. If it's just a sentence or two, this process takes roughly 5 seconds to take the laptop out of the bag, 5 seconds for the typing process, and 10 seconds waiting for the connection. 50% spent waiting isn't exactly great...
2. Better power efficiency. The most efficient x86 laptops/netbooks/subnotebooks have a power consumption of 4-5W idle - loading web pages (with Flash, god forbid), opening and closing programs, or playing back video or music shoots that up to 10-20W. Even with the biggest available normal batteries (think along the lines of Dell/Thinkpad/HP 9-cells) max out at about 100Wh, so if you're hammering the battery, you'll get about 6 hours of usable life.
The iPad on the other hand weighs about as much as the laptop battery alone and gets 10 hours if you use it heavily including media and so on... Sure, there are laptops out there that'll last 10 hours, but the ones that last 10 hours with the screen brightness up past halfway and the user actively doing something other than reading or simply typing the whole time are quite rare. Off the top of my head I can't think of many other than the Thinkpad X220 with the 9-cell... (not counting slice batteries here, that would be an even more unfair comparison).
And then there are all the power consumption related software problems - take Flash for instance: Not only is it a battery hog when in use, but it also requires CPU time when it isn't even active. For instance, on my Core2Duo machine:
Firefox open, ~6W idle. Activate a Flash element (doesn't matter what kind - could be a video or a banner or anything really) and then close the tab. Even though the content is gone and the tab is closed, Flash has been run/activated and won't leave the CPU alone - now idling at 8-9W because the CPU can no longer return to C4 sleep state. Exiting Firefox completely is the only way to resolve this.
Chrome is even worse - that idles at 8 or 9W if I just open it to a blank page - presumably because Flash is baked right in.
The first decent episode of "The Walking Dead" was the last one... where the psycho dude goes psycho and opens up the barn full of walkers. The others were cliche-filled popcorn-flicky background noise type shows...
Now shows like The Big Bang Theory on the other hand, and a few other comedies (airing and long gone) are very much worth watching.:)
All phones get hot in certain situations, so where do you draw the line between normal use and taking out the battery? Do you remove the battery every time the phone gets warm from use as a navigation device? Because most of them get plenty hot that way...
I'd kill for a decent hybrid drive for my laptop right now. I'm currently running Samsung's 1TB 2.5" drive, and that's about halfway full... pretty much the only SSD I'd be able to use is Intel's 320 (or 310?) with 600gigs, which costs about as much as I paid for my Thinkpad. And even with that, I'd be uncomfortably limited due to the lack of room for expansion... not to mention leaving room for wear leveling and such.
Looks like I'll be upgrading to a Thinkpad with two hard drive bays, or one with an mSATA slot, sometime soon.
I hate non-removable batteries as much as the next guy (typing this on a Thinkpad with a 94Wh 9-cell... Mmmmm...), but are you REALLY saying that if your phone starts smoking because the battery's overheating (which you probably wouldn't know, because it's hard to tell from the outside), you're going to take off the back cover and take out the battery instead of just chucking the whole thing?
I wonder what burning Lithium Ion battery gunk does to human skin...
Amazon's DRM isn't too bad, IMO - they provide a Kindle app for pretty much every relevant platform. Hell, there's even a Windows (as in x86) app... in a theoretical sense, of course, it's horrible, as is all DRM, but in practice, it works.
"There are some narrow scenarios where physical keyboards are better, as you said if you are switching languages every minute, it would be useful, or for touch typing."
Well, I'm constantly switching languages and the only time I *don't* touch type is when it's impossible due to the keyboard... it's just faster and more efficient.
As for D-Pads: I actually have an HTC Desire, and the optical joypad isn't a great alternative (the trackball on the N1 is nice though). Furthermore, these are two of the last phones to come with something like this. Check out all the following phones... with the exception of the Desire Z, they're pretty much all entirely missing any cursor/D-Pad function:(
"You haven't used a recent version of Swype or other similar keyboard apps, maybe you tried an early beta."
Correct - however, the concept had big problems back then, and it still has big problems now.. However, if you have a link to a (working) APK, I'd be happy to try it again.
"Swype automatically adds words to the dictionary, you only have to tap non dictionary words the first time. It remembers words you enter. Including acronyms."
That's just it - a user dictionary exists, and in order to input new words, I need to switch from swyping to tapping. So every time you swype out a word that turns out to not be in the dictionary, you need to take an additional 5 seconds to tap it out manually...
"Where exactly do you look while you are typing on a laptop? At the ceiling?"
Most definitely not at the keyboard. And I wasn't referring to laptops - I was referring to phones with physical QWERTY keyboards, their main benefit being that you can type while walking without constantly running into things because you need to constantly stare at the screen.
"How exactly do you position your cursor without using a finger? some kind of telepathic method only found in phones with physical keyboards?"
Never heard of a D-Pad? Nearly all Android QWERTY phones have some kind of a D-Pad or a set of cursor keys... the touchscreen phones - not so much.
"Swype has an excellent view for editing with cursor keys etc."
So every time I need to go back a few letters for a correction/change/insertion, I need to switch to the "cursor view", move the cursor, switch back to the regular view an THEN type? Ball-hair removal with an electric drill sounds more pleasant...
"Use Swype, either the latest beta or even better on a phone that comes with it preinstalled (all samsung phones for example) with an open mind if oyu actually want to make a fair comment instead of posting lies like "enter a new word into the dictionary every time I use it"."
That sentence came out wrong - obviously I don't mean that you need to enter the word manually every time you use it... just once. What I meant is that you need to do it for every new word...
So the same as, well, every other halfway modern soft keyboard, huh? Language switch button, gesture, sliding across the space bar... it's all been done, and it all still requires you to switch languages manually depending on who you're talking to. If you use a lot of IM and talk to people who each speak different languages, it'll piss you off pretty quickly...
That said, I'd gladly try Swype again to see if it's improved enough to be useful, as I currently don't have a phone with a physical keyboard (which was, to reiterate, pretty much the biggest mistake I've ever made, tech-wise)... if only I didn't have to jump through hoops to do so.
As for Samsung devices... I'm not really that into featherweight plastic, oversaturated colors and fuzzy text. Here's to a 720p IPS display with the smallest possible diagonal and a slide-out keyboard!
Tap based or "slide-around"-based, it's still a keyboard without tactile feedback, based on a user dictionary to compensate for the inherent lack of accuracy. And still more or less impossible to use without constantly looking at the damned thing.:(
I tested Swype quite thoroughly back when it was new. It's still a dictionary based input method that requires the user to enter new words manually in order to compensate for the inherent lack of accuracy...
I don't want to enter a new word into the dictionary every time I use it - this includes acronyms.
I don't want to switch languages on the keyboard every time I talk to a different person.
I don't want to have to look at the screen while I'm typing.
I don't want to lose screen real estate while typing.
I don't want to have to position the cursor with my finger in the touchscreen.
And yes, I'm using a touchscreen-only device right now, and yes, it's driving me bat-shit-insane.
Absolutely disagree. Two thumbs on a keyboard with tactile feedback are better than 10 fingers on a glass touchscreen any day... and if you're unly using two fingers to hunt and peck (or two thumbs, in the case of split keyboards), that gap gets even bigger.
And until that tablet fits in my front pants pocket without causing me pain, it's useless for mobile computing anyway...
I'll take a phone with a built in QWERTY keyboard over a tablet for use on public transport any day - ESPECIALLY for getting work done, IF that work involves typing up a lot of natural language. To type decently on the tablet, you need to put it down somewhere, and the typing really isn't that much faster than with a decent QWERTY phone keyboard (too many mistakes without tactile feedback when trying to use all 10 fingers)... and those split thumb boards for tablets are far inferior to a hardware QWERTY phone keyboard.
So how do you use that bluetooth keyboard while standing in line, or when using public transportation? The whole point of typing on a phone is that you don't need a flat surface to put down something the size of a small laptop...
I've done the folding Bluetooth Keyboard thing, and it sucked. Sure, it worked well enough at a desk, but out and about? Pfffff... flipping open a physical phone keyboard is much easier.
As for the little mini-keyboards the size of the phones themselves: How do you hold it and the phone at the same time while typing? You're going to need to put down the phone somewhere in order to type on that little keyboard with both hands (thumbs), and if you're at a desk or have room on your lap for that, you've got room for a laptop.
"Qwerty keyboards are useless. Swype or similar input methods are faster and more intuitive than mashing tiny hard keys that add bulk and extra mechanical components that can fail."
Bullshit. If I can't type without looking, it isn't a decent input method... touchscreen devices cause me pain and possibly injury in the future, because I constantly need to look at the freakin screen while I'm typing. So it's either walk or type, unless I want to run into telephone poles or get run over by Granny in her motorized wheelchair...
It's the RAM. Overclock that CPU to 800 or 1000MHz and it flies, but the 256MB of RAM is a huge bottleneck. I'm currently running a Desire which is an order of magnitude faster in daily use (used to have a Milestone) because it has 512MB of RAM, but even that's still a pretty big bottleneck. Here's to hoping that the standard 1GB on current models will be enough to keep Android running smoothly for the next two years or so...
I wonder when the first Android devices with upgradeable RAM will start to appear;)
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LOL, that long division thing happened to me too when I went to summer school in Germany right after 4th grade in Texas :D
I actually went to school in a lot of different places - New Zealand (grades 1, 2 and half of 3), Texas (3-6), Sri Lanka (7-9, at a Britsh-ish international school) and Thailand (10-12, German & Swiss school system)... other than the decimal point vs. comma, pretty much everything was the same. OK, things like long division were written differently, or PQ vs. ABC for solving quadratic equations, but other than that, Math was pretty much the only language that followed me consistently from elementary to high school... including things like X,Y,Z axes following the alphabet ;)
What's it like not understanding what you read?
Interesting point - I've always thought that (x,y,z) was pretty much standard everywhere...?
Of course you got the question wrong - the question itself is wrong (should be asking about the X axis for the supposedly correct answer to apply). None of the other answers applied to mirroring over an axis (only over the origin) though, so the quiz-creator having swapped X for Y seemed plausible...
Magic!
Must be an iPhone ;)
Adding "ill-rational" to the dictionary is not something you can blame on autocorrect :p
Since when does autocorrect create non-existent words?
And the L and - keys are pretty far from R... o.O
So how do you get around something like this?
I'm already using a prepaid card in a non-carrier-branded smartphone, but I'm sure that prepaid card still gives my provider some level of access to my phone.
Has anyone else considered using an unbranded MiFi-type mobile broadband router in conjunction with VPN via the smartphone, and all communications (IM, E-Mail, VoIP) routed through that VPN? Shouldn't be a lot of snooping possible there, right? With no SIM-Card in the phone (or WiFi-only smartphone-sized device), the carriers shouldn't be able to track anything at all... hopefully...
I have an "expensive netbook" (=subnotebook), and I still sometimes find myself wishing it had a few more iPad traits.
1. True instant-on. When I wake my laptop from standby, it takes half a second to wake, and then often 10 seconds (sometimes 5, but it's spotty - unreliable => use near worst case statistic) to connect to WiFi or WWAN... for tasks that take less than a minute, adds at least 15-20% of overhead-time. If I'm reading something on my phone and decide I'd like to reply, I send the link to my laptop ("Send To Computer" Android app, probably one of many though), open my laptop, and replay from there. If it's just a sentence or two, this process takes roughly 5 seconds to take the laptop out of the bag, 5 seconds for the typing process, and 10 seconds waiting for the connection. 50% spent waiting isn't exactly great...
2. Better power efficiency. The most efficient x86 laptops/netbooks/subnotebooks have a power consumption of 4-5W idle - loading web pages (with Flash, god forbid), opening and closing programs, or playing back video or music shoots that up to 10-20W. Even with the biggest available normal batteries (think along the lines of Dell/Thinkpad/HP 9-cells) max out at about 100Wh, so if you're hammering the battery, you'll get about 6 hours of usable life.
The iPad on the other hand weighs about as much as the laptop battery alone and gets 10 hours if you use it heavily including media and so on... Sure, there are laptops out there that'll last 10 hours, but the ones that last 10 hours with the screen brightness up past halfway and the user actively doing something other than reading or simply typing the whole time are quite rare. Off the top of my head I can't think of many other than the Thinkpad X220 with the 9-cell... (not counting slice batteries here, that would be an even more unfair comparison).
And then there are all the power consumption related software problems - take Flash for instance: Not only is it a battery hog when in use, but it also requires CPU time when it isn't even active. For instance, on my Core2Duo machine:
Firefox open, ~6W idle. Activate a Flash element (doesn't matter what kind - could be a video or a banner or anything really) and then close the tab. Even though the content is gone and the tab is closed, Flash has been run/activated and won't leave the CPU alone - now idling at 8-9W because the CPU can no longer return to C4 sleep state. Exiting Firefox completely is the only way to resolve this.
Chrome is even worse - that idles at 8 or 9W if I just open it to a blank page - presumably because Flash is baked right in.
The first decent episode of "The Walking Dead" was the last one... where the psycho dude goes psycho and opens up the barn full of walkers. The others were cliche-filled popcorn-flicky background noise type shows...
Now shows like The Big Bang Theory on the other hand, and a few other comedies (airing and long gone) are very much worth watching. :)
All phones get hot in certain situations, so where do you draw the line between normal use and taking out the battery? Do you remove the battery every time the phone gets warm from use as a navigation device? Because most of them get plenty hot that way...
I'd kill for a decent hybrid drive for my laptop right now. I'm currently running Samsung's 1TB 2.5" drive, and that's about halfway full... pretty much the only SSD I'd be able to use is Intel's 320 (or 310?) with 600gigs, which costs about as much as I paid for my Thinkpad. And even with that, I'd be uncomfortably limited due to the lack of room for expansion... not to mention leaving room for wear leveling and such.
Looks like I'll be upgrading to a Thinkpad with two hard drive bays, or one with an mSATA slot, sometime soon.
I hate non-removable batteries as much as the next guy (typing this on a Thinkpad with a 94Wh 9-cell... Mmmmm...), but are you REALLY saying that if your phone starts smoking because the battery's overheating (which you probably wouldn't know, because it's hard to tell from the outside), you're going to take off the back cover and take out the battery instead of just chucking the whole thing?
I wonder what burning Lithium Ion battery gunk does to human skin...
Amazon's DRM isn't too bad, IMO - they provide a Kindle app for pretty much every relevant platform. Hell, there's even a Windows (as in x86) app... in a theoretical sense, of course, it's horrible, as is all DRM, but in practice, it works.
"There are some narrow scenarios where physical keyboards are better, as you said if you are switching languages every minute, it would be useful, or for touch typing."
Well, I'm constantly switching languages and the only time I *don't* touch type is when it's impossible due to the keyboard... it's just faster and more efficient.
As for D-Pads: I actually have an HTC Desire, and the optical joypad isn't a great alternative (the trackball on the N1 is nice though). Furthermore, these are two of the last phones to come with something like this. Check out all the following phones... with the exception of the Desire Z, they're pretty much all entirely missing any cursor/D-Pad function :(
"You haven't used a recent version of Swype or other similar keyboard apps, maybe you tried an early beta."
Correct - however, the concept had big problems back then, and it still has big problems now.. However, if you have a link to a (working) APK, I'd be happy to try it again.
"Swype automatically adds words to the dictionary, you only have to tap non dictionary words the first time. It remembers words you enter. Including acronyms."
That's just it - a user dictionary exists, and in order to input new words, I need to switch from swyping to tapping. So every time you swype out a word that turns out to not be in the dictionary, you need to take an additional 5 seconds to tap it out manually...
"Where exactly do you look while you are typing on a laptop? At the ceiling?"
Most definitely not at the keyboard. And I wasn't referring to laptops - I was referring to phones with physical QWERTY keyboards, their main benefit being that you can type while walking without constantly running into things because you need to constantly stare at the screen.
"How exactly do you position your cursor without using a finger? some kind of telepathic method only found in phones with physical keyboards?"
Never heard of a D-Pad? Nearly all Android QWERTY phones have some kind of a D-Pad or a set of cursor keys... the touchscreen phones - not so much.
"Swype has an excellent view for editing with cursor keys etc."
So every time I need to go back a few letters for a correction/change/insertion, I need to switch to the "cursor view", move the cursor, switch back to the regular view an THEN type? Ball-hair removal with an electric drill sounds more pleasant...
"Use Swype, either the latest beta or even better on a phone that comes with it preinstalled (all samsung phones for example) with an open mind if oyu actually want to make a fair comment instead of posting lies like "enter a new word into the dictionary every time I use it"."
That sentence came out wrong - obviously I don't mean that you need to enter the word manually every time you use it... just once. What I meant is that you need to do it for every new word...
"Switching languages on the fly is also very easy on Swype: http://beta.swype.com/#implang [swype.com]"
So the same as, well, every other halfway modern soft keyboard, huh? Language switch button, gesture, sliding across the space bar... it's all been done, and it all still requires you to switch languages manually depending on who you're talking to. If you use a lot of IM and talk to people who each speak different languages, it'll piss you off pretty quickly...
That said, I'd gladly try Swype again to see if it's improved enough to be useful, as I currently don't have a phone with a physical keyboard (which was, to reiterate, pretty much the biggest mistake I've ever made, tech-wise)... if only I didn't have to jump through hoops to do so.
As for Samsung devices... I'm not really that into featherweight plastic, oversaturated colors and fuzzy text. Here's to a 720p IPS display with the smallest possible diagonal and a slide-out keyboard!
Tap based or "slide-around"-based, it's still a keyboard without tactile feedback, based on a user dictionary to compensate for the inherent lack of accuracy. And still more or less impossible to use without constantly looking at the damned thing. :(
I tested Swype quite thoroughly back when it was new. It's still a dictionary based input method that requires the user to enter new words manually in order to compensate for the inherent lack of accuracy...
I don't want to enter a new word into the dictionary every time I use it - this includes acronyms.
I don't want to switch languages on the keyboard every time I talk to a different person.
I don't want to have to look at the screen while I'm typing.
I don't want to lose screen real estate while typing.
I don't want to have to position the cursor with my finger in the touchscreen.
And yes, I'm using a touchscreen-only device right now, and yes, it's driving me bat-shit-insane.
Absolutely disagree. Two thumbs on a keyboard with tactile feedback are better than 10 fingers on a glass touchscreen any day... and if you're unly using two fingers to hunt and peck (or two thumbs, in the case of split keyboards), that gap gets even bigger.
And until that tablet fits in my front pants pocket without causing me pain, it's useless for mobile computing anyway...
I'll take a phone with a built in QWERTY keyboard over a tablet for use on public transport any day - ESPECIALLY for getting work done, IF that work involves typing up a lot of natural language. To type decently on the tablet, you need to put it down somewhere, and the typing really isn't that much faster than with a decent QWERTY phone keyboard (too many mistakes without tactile feedback when trying to use all 10 fingers)... and those split thumb boards for tablets are far inferior to a hardware QWERTY phone keyboard.
So how do you use that bluetooth keyboard while standing in line, or when using public transportation? The whole point of typing on a phone is that you don't need a flat surface to put down something the size of a small laptop...
I've done the folding Bluetooth Keyboard thing, and it sucked. Sure, it worked well enough at a desk, but out and about? Pfffff... flipping open a physical phone keyboard is much easier.
As for the little mini-keyboards the size of the phones themselves: How do you hold it and the phone at the same time while typing? You're going to need to put down the phone somewhere in order to type on that little keyboard with both hands (thumbs), and if you're at a desk or have room on your lap for that, you've got room for a laptop.
"Qwerty keyboards are useless. Swype or similar input methods are faster and more intuitive than mashing tiny hard keys that add bulk and extra mechanical components that can fail."
Bullshit. If I can't type without looking, it isn't a decent input method... touchscreen devices cause me pain and possibly injury in the future, because I constantly need to look at the freakin screen while I'm typing. So it's either walk or type, unless I want to run into telephone poles or get run over by Granny in her motorized wheelchair...
It's the RAM. Overclock that CPU to 800 or 1000MHz and it flies, but the 256MB of RAM is a huge bottleneck. I'm currently running a Desire which is an order of magnitude faster in daily use (used to have a Milestone) because it has 512MB of RAM, but even that's still a pretty big bottleneck. Here's to hoping that the standard 1GB on current models will be enough to keep Android running smoothly for the next two years or so...
I wonder when the first Android devices with upgradeable RAM will start to appear ;)
Get a sense of humor.