$5 per month would be perfect, IMHO. Worth getting rid of the ads...
10€ on the other hand (there's no half-price student package here in Germany) is too much - I have a huge music collection that I'm still actively adding to, so theoretically I don't actually *need* Spotify, especially at home. Sure, I could afford 10€ a month, but I'd prefer to spend that on extra beer...
Tablets that run full-blown desktop Windows or Linux? At that price point, I'm assuming Android x86 tablets... prove me wrong with a link (please? If the damned things have at least 2gigs of RAM and run full Win8.1 I'll probably buy one right away, because my Win8.1 tablet is stupid huge at 11.6" - people look at me funny when I take it to the bathroom:p).
Also: this stick is ideal for people who don't want a full-blown HTPC in their living room, but also don't want to fuck around with "app-y" shit a la Chromecast or Fire TV Stick. Full Windows or Linux desktop with a keyboard and a mouse is great for living room usage... no limitations other than processing power, and with full hardware decode support (I'm assuming) for HD video, you're not likely to run into issues there.
"And in winter, how should a child cope with the neighbor who runs a gasoline-powered snow thrower up and down the whole block for free out of 1. altruism and 2. wanting to walk to the bus stop without having to dodge cars in the street? (I am said neighbor.)"
Just pawn that off on a kid and get the neighbors to chip in a little pocket money for him/her. Unless you truly enjoy running up and down the street with that snowblower.
That's incorrect. I can no longer sell dropped items on the marketplace and I've spent ~$100 on my account over its lifetime. It's something like spend $x in the last y days... The last thing I bought was CS:GO, so I can no longer use the marketplace (I just sell the stuff that drops in CSGO, I'm up to like $50 in Steam credit and I only played like an hour a week for about a year or so) until I buy a new game via Steam.
I think it's a step in the right direction though... towards the end I was also getting a lot of invites purely for trading's sake and it was starting to piss me off.
So... separate solar cell? I'm sure the actual picture taking part of the sensor would be more efficient if it was optimized for power saving than in this spliced abomination.
Oh sorry, I just meant that I spent a lot of time in forums and on Slashdot arguing with other neckbeards who, even back then, considered 1080p superfluous:D
Of course font size is different from pixel size - what I'm saying is that when there are enough pixels to smoothly render a font at a size that's unreadable for someone with perfect vision, it's highly unlikely you'll gain anything by upping the pixel density even further.
And why would you want to "upscale" visual elements from older designs intended for lower resolution screens? Unless they're vector graphics you'll need to interpolate and it'll look like shite. If you mean Retina-style rendering, well, meh... a lot of (GPU) work for very little gain.
I was one of the biggest advocates for FullHD displays on smartphones. I could and can easily tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 4-5" smartphone screen, and the legibility of small text is greatly improvied on 1080p screens of that size. However, at 1080p, it's most definitely good enough, even for my picky eyes.
There comes a point when text simply becomes too small to read, even if the pixel denisty is still high enough to read it.
As for video/images... I'd happily stick with 720p on a phone for that.
Loading apps drains the battery more and wears out memory faster in mobile devices than just leaving them running. Even on an Android device, everything you do is kept running until you manually kill it, and some things just immediately restart. So, there's a sound technical reason for it.
The problem is, this leaves us feeling like we don't have control of our devices, and consumers with intermediate technical skills (read: almost the entire market for Microsoft's shiny new OS) are very uncomfortable with that feeling. Experts disagree, and will point out that it depends upon what exactly is running. Personally, I would have thought that taking control of the machine away from the user was proven bad when Gateway tanked. Also, isn't that why people hated that damned paperclip?.
The problem here is that the OS simply can't know what applications I *want* to have running in the background. Common scenario during multitasking on an Android device, for instance, is having music and navigation apps running in the background. On devices with =1GB of RAM, Android will often decide to kill the navigation app when you switch to the music app to change a track, or kill the music app when you're trying to edit a route in the navigation app. This drives me nuts on a daily basis, and devices with 1GB of RAM are STILL being sold! Sure, all the other crap I don't need right now is kept on RAM running in the background, but for some reason Android chooses to kill the exact apps I DO want to run in the background on a regular basis.
Compare that to desktop Windows - if I run a program and leave it open for three months, minimized to my taskbar,I can be pretty damned sure it'll still be up and running when I open it again.
Personally, I hate fumbling with MicroUSB cables and my phone. I don't exactly have sausage fingers, but trying to put in that cable when I'm half asleep, the light on my nightstand is off (and I've been reading an eBook) and the end of the cable is loose *somewhere* on the nightstand is really annoying,
With wireless charging, I place the phone on the rather large/hard-to-miss charger pad, get immediate visual confirmation that the phone is in fact charging and therefore properly on the pad, and can go to sleep.
At the work desk, it's similarly practical: Incoming call, grab phone from charger pad, talk, hang up, put phone back on charger pad. Same thing for texts etc... with a cable or docking station, I find myself unplugging and re-plugging about 50x per day (seriously).
Yeah OCZ had a string of shitty SSDs. Pretty much a thing of the past starting with the Intel G2 Postville, Samsung 470/830 and Crucial M4. Since then it's been smooth sailing if you stuck to the "premium" brands, as well as most cheapo brands. It's about time to give it another shot - go for something like a Samsung 850 Evo or 850 Pro and you'll be fine. Or, if you want to be extra careful, an 840 Pro, as it's been on the market for a while now.
for hd video, wifi is NO SUBSTITUTE for wired enet.
Agree with the latter part, kinda disagree with the former. Wired will always be better than WiFi, which is why I have both, but I don't think I've had an issue streaming HD video (mostly 1080p MKVs) over WiFi since 5GHz 802.11n came out. Sure, it gets spotty out on the balcony or in the back yard, but inside, close to the APs?
Are you running 2.4GHz WiFi in a densely populated area, by any chance?
Not when it compromises the size, battery-life and/or weight it's not. Especially for people that don't need any of those things.
Correct. However, at which point do you decide a port is compromising weight/battery life/size enough to be let go? I can understand leaving off bulky ports like VGA or Ethernet, but not having a single regular USB port is cutting it kinda close. "Normal consumers" may seldom use external hard drives, audio interfaces, wired printers, USB headphone amps, USB gamepads, wired mice or USB card readers (I'm assuming there's also no SD card reader?)... but what about when their buddy says, "Hey, I brought you the photos from last night on a USB stick - you want 'em?"
That's a scenario I see regularly...
And Ethernet is virtually extinct for laptops these days. The ports are nearly all unused. When you see an old wired office usually the ethernet sockets aren't connected to anything any more, obsoleted by fast wifi.
You're living in the past.
I suppose you don't work anywhere that does serious work on the network. Try running SVN or Git with 300 devs on a WiFi network in a single building... dozens of build servers and test machines over constantly running RDP connections... and what about file transfers? Just the other day I had to pull a 200 gig VHD off a test machine. Had wireless been the only choice, my one large data transfer probably would have destroyed transfer rates for the entire office over a period of hours.
If all your office needs the network for is e-mail and Slashdot, then yeah... wireless is fine.
It's funnier. Imagine the first time someone asks you for a file, you hand them a USB stick and they realize what they spent their $1000 on - a glorified iPad with a built-in keyboard. Bhahaha...
I'm not sure I follow - how is that scenario different from using a checksum to verify you've downloaded the correct piece of software? Some copies will be bad, and some people will be able to tell. Others could be indistinguishable from the original.
Wow, so Finland rocks, apparently. The largest packages you can get here in Germany are 15-20€ per month for 5 gigs, and they limit you to GPRS speeds (64kbps!) when you hit that limit. And you usually can't pay for additional data, you really have to wait until the next month (unless you're on an expensive carrier such as Vodafone, but there you'll usually be paying more than 20€).
Slashdot Mirror
$5 per month would be perfect, IMHO. Worth getting rid of the ads...
10€ on the other hand (there's no half-price student package here in Germany) is too much - I have a huge music collection that I'm still actively adding to, so theoretically I don't actually *need* Spotify, especially at home. Sure, I could afford 10€ a month, but I'd prefer to spend that on extra beer...
Okay that price is fucking impressive.
Tablets that run full-blown desktop Windows or Linux? At that price point, I'm assuming Android x86 tablets... prove me wrong with a link (please? If the damned things have at least 2gigs of RAM and run full Win8.1 I'll probably buy one right away, because my Win8.1 tablet is stupid huge at 11.6" - people look at me funny when I take it to the bathroom :p).
Also: this stick is ideal for people who don't want a full-blown HTPC in their living room, but also don't want to fuck around with "app-y" shit a la Chromecast or Fire TV Stick. Full Windows or Linux desktop with a keyboard and a mouse is great for living room usage... no limitations other than processing power, and with full hardware decode support (I'm assuming) for HD video, you're not likely to run into issues there.
"And in winter, how should a child cope with the neighbor who runs a gasoline-powered snow thrower up and down the whole block for free out of 1. altruism and 2. wanting to walk to the bus stop without having to dodge cars in the street? (I am said neighbor.)"
Just pawn that off on a kid and get the neighbors to chip in a little pocket money for him/her. Unless you truly enjoy running up and down the street with that snowblower.
That's incorrect. I can no longer sell dropped items on the marketplace and I've spent ~$100 on my account over its lifetime. It's something like spend $x in the last y days... The last thing I bought was CS:GO, so I can no longer use the marketplace (I just sell the stuff that drops in CSGO, I'm up to like $50 in Steam credit and I only played like an hour a week for about a year or so) until I buy a new game via Steam.
I think it's a step in the right direction though... towards the end I was also getting a lot of invites purely for trading's sake and it was starting to piss me off.
So... separate solar cell? I'm sure the actual picture taking part of the sensor would be more efficient if it was optimized for power saving than in this spliced abomination.
Is there a specific reason you're usuing a RAID controller with mSATA sockets instead of plain old SATA drives? Is this a uSFF system or something?
Oh sorry, I just meant that I spent a lot of time in forums and on Slashdot arguing with other neckbeards who, even back then, considered 1080p superfluous :D
Of course font size is different from pixel size - what I'm saying is that when there are enough pixels to smoothly render a font at a size that's unreadable for someone with perfect vision, it's highly unlikely you'll gain anything by upping the pixel density even further.
And why would you want to "upscale" visual elements from older designs intended for lower resolution screens? Unless they're vector graphics you'll need to interpolate and it'll look like shite. If you mean Retina-style rendering, well, meh... a lot of (GPU) work for very little gain.
I was one of the biggest advocates for FullHD displays on smartphones. I could and can easily tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 4-5" smartphone screen, and the legibility of small text is greatly improvied on 1080p screens of that size. However, at 1080p, it's most definitely good enough, even for my picky eyes.
There comes a point when text simply becomes too small to read, even if the pixel denisty is still high enough to read it.
As for video/images... I'd happily stick with 720p on a phone for that.
If only that stupid binary could be toggled, right?
What, like "Autokill on/off"? Oh I would love that on Android... that would be fantastic.
For now though, it looks like I might be in the market for a phone with 3+GB of RAM - how fucking stupid is that?
Loading apps drains the battery more and wears out memory faster in mobile devices than just leaving them running. Even on an Android device, everything you do is kept running until you manually kill it, and some things just immediately restart. So, there's a sound technical reason for it.
The problem is, this leaves us feeling like we don't have control of our devices, and consumers with intermediate technical skills (read: almost the entire market for Microsoft's shiny new OS) are very uncomfortable with that feeling. Experts disagree, and will point out that it depends upon what exactly is running. Personally, I would have thought that taking control of the machine away from the user was proven bad when Gateway tanked. Also, isn't that why people hated that damned paperclip?.
The problem here is that the OS simply can't know what applications I *want* to have running in the background. Common scenario during multitasking on an Android device, for instance, is having music and navigation apps running in the background. On devices with =1GB of RAM, Android will often decide to kill the navigation app when you switch to the music app to change a track, or kill the music app when you're trying to edit a route in the navigation app. This drives me nuts on a daily basis, and devices with 1GB of RAM are STILL being sold! Sure, all the other crap I don't need right now is kept on RAM running in the background, but for some reason Android chooses to kill the exact apps I DO want to run in the background on a regular basis.
Compare that to desktop Windows - if I run a program and leave it open for three months, minimized to my taskbar,I can be pretty damned sure it'll still be up and running when I open it again.
Fuck automatic application lifetime management.
Swipe down from the top edge of the screen. That's your "close button".
Does swiping down drom the top of the screen no longer work? That's the way to do it in Win8.x...
Personally, I hate fumbling with MicroUSB cables and my phone. I don't exactly have sausage fingers, but trying to put in that cable when I'm half asleep, the light on my nightstand is off (and I've been reading an eBook) and the end of the cable is loose *somewhere* on the nightstand is really annoying,
With wireless charging, I place the phone on the rather large/hard-to-miss charger pad, get immediate visual confirmation that the phone is in fact charging and therefore properly on the pad, and can go to sleep.
At the work desk, it's similarly practical: Incoming call, grab phone from charger pad, talk, hang up, put phone back on charger pad. Same thing for texts etc... with a cable or docking station, I find myself unplugging and re-plugging about 50x per day (seriously).
Don't the Youtubers who upload popular videos get a cut of the ad revenue generated by views of their videos?
Yeah OCZ had a string of shitty SSDs. Pretty much a thing of the past starting with the Intel G2 Postville, Samsung 470/830 and Crucial M4. Since then it's been smooth sailing if you stuck to the "premium" brands, as well as most cheapo brands. It's about time to give it another shot - go for something like a Samsung 850 Evo or 850 Pro and you'll be fine. Or, if you want to be extra careful, an 840 Pro, as it's been on the market for a while now.
for hd video, wifi is NO SUBSTITUTE for wired enet.
Agree with the latter part, kinda disagree with the former. Wired will always be better than WiFi, which is why I have both, but I don't think I've had an issue streaming HD video (mostly 1080p MKVs) over WiFi since 5GHz 802.11n came out. Sure, it gets spotty out on the balcony or in the back yard, but inside, close to the APs?
Are you running 2.4GHz WiFi in a densely populated area, by any chance?
Not when it compromises the size, battery-life and/or weight it's not. Especially for people that don't need any of those things.
Correct. However, at which point do you decide a port is compromising weight/battery life/size enough to be let go? I can understand leaving off bulky ports like VGA or Ethernet, but not having a single regular USB port is cutting it kinda close. "Normal consumers" may seldom use external hard drives, audio interfaces, wired printers, USB headphone amps, USB gamepads, wired mice or USB card readers (I'm assuming there's also no SD card reader?)... but what about when their buddy says, "Hey, I brought you the photos from last night on a USB stick - you want 'em?"
That's a scenario I see regularly...
And Ethernet is virtually extinct for laptops these days. The ports are nearly all unused. When you see an old wired office usually the ethernet sockets aren't connected to anything any more, obsoleted by fast wifi.
You're living in the past.
I suppose you don't work anywhere that does serious work on the network. Try running SVN or Git with 300 devs on a WiFi network in a single building... dozens of build servers and test machines over constantly running RDP connections... and what about file transfers? Just the other day I had to pull a 200 gig VHD off a test machine. Had wireless been the only choice, my one large data transfer probably would have destroyed transfer rates for the entire office over a period of hours.
If all your office needs the network for is e-mail and Slashdot, then yeah... wireless is fine.
It's funnier. Imagine the first time someone asks you for a file, you hand them a USB stick and they realize what they spent their $1000 on - a glorified iPad with a built-in keyboard. Bhahaha...
If you bought a MacBook *pro*, why the fuck do you care about the new Retina netbook/tablet-with-a-screen they just released?
1. Low-power fanless device
2. No ports
3. Keyboard with basically 0 travel
Looks like a great device for surfing the web and Skyping, but that MBP you bought is an actual laptop - you can't compare 'em.
I'm not sure I follow - how is that scenario different from using a checksum to verify you've downloaded the correct piece of software? Some copies will be bad, and some people will be able to tell. Others could be indistinguishable from the original.
Bit of a contradictrion here:
For software, generally speaking the copy is exactly the same as the original. No one collects software (only their medium), and its unlimited.
So being able to tell the originals from the copies apart kind of matters this time around.
If you can't tell the originals from the copies, wouldn't we be in the same situation as with software?
Wow, so Finland rocks, apparently. The largest packages you can get here in Germany are 15-20€ per month for 5 gigs, and they limit you to GPRS speeds (64kbps!) when you hit that limit. And you usually can't pay for additional data, you really have to wait until the next month (unless you're on an expensive carrier such as Vodafone, but there you'll usually be paying more than 20€).
Is Garfield the one in the Amazing Spiderman? Then yeah, agree wholeheartedly. The Tobey Maguire films were pretty awful :S
Isn't HWA off by default?