Many young people abandoned email for MySpace, then within a couple short years, abandoned MySpace for FaceBook, both times because spam made the previous system essentially unusable for them, and they didn't want to take the time to learn how to filter spam (not even to switch their email provider from, say, Yahoo, to GMail). They don't differentiate between "The Internet" and a service. To them, FaceBook is the internet.
Well, for most of the past three years, I've been using iPhones quite a bit (months at a time) in two areas where AT&T has "shitty" service. One of those was in downtown Washington D.C., where the dropped call rates in certain locations are maddening, yet 50 feet away, service is fine (a common cell phone problem on all networks in concrete jungles). However, I noticed a curious thing. Over the past three years, a number of folk previously using Blackberry on Verizon became so dissatisfied with the performance of the Verizon 3G network in D.C. that they... wait for it... switched to iPhone, and love it. This surprised me. The first time I noticed this had been a person who was openly mocking iPhone during the first year of iPhone. She bought a 3GS last year and wonders why she waited so long.
Let's say you had no phone service one day out of 100. Would that be acceptable to you?
Well, that's not what happens. Most people who experience a dropped call don't throw up their hands and yell to the sky, "Yaweh! Why has thou forsaken me? Your sign of the dropped call has been received! I shall obey, and attempt no further phone access for the remainder of the day!"
Rather, they re-dial the call, get service and move one. (With the footnote that dropped calls happen more often when one's in a zone of weak signal, and the subsequent calls in those areas are more likely to drop, as well.)
Even more interesting statistics would concern the numbers of dropped calls at a given signal strength. I know one iPhone 4 user who's getting better reception (much better) in a area that he's highly familiar with (his house). It seems likely that, for any given phone, most of the dropped calls take place at the edge of the reception area, with low signal strength. If I were inside Apple or AT&T looking at this problem, I'd want to see logging data for "dropped calls by signal strength", and even "dropped calls by signal strength events". In five bar zones there shouldn't be any dropped calls under normal (non congested) conditions, without an associated event, such as "signal strength dropped from 100% to Zero Percent, phone was in motion".
Let's ask where the FUD comes from. Anonymous Cowards, disproportionately. Do you, by chance, work for Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, or some other competitor? What's your anonymous agenda, eh?
The user jo_ham doesn't seem like an apologist, just somebody else who is annoyed at this phenomenon. See this discussion: jo_ham on Slashdot moderation of non-negative Apple comments. So, the score appears to be zero to zero, which means they're both untested, and you're wrong.
Rachel Maddow exposed this as an easy to tell but not really true story told not only by Fox News, but the general media, too. America Loves Incumbents. No, Really.
"Black civil rights had nothing to do with religion, just racism."
The relationship between religion and the civil rights movement was more complex than you seem to think. Christianity supported not merely discrimination, but slavery throughout most of its history. As ideas from outside the Bible (notably from the Enlightenment) came to compete more effectively in the meme pool of western civilization, Christianity adapted, and some Christians led the struggle against slavery in the United States, and later for civil rights. But there was a big struggle within Christianity over both of those issues, and the struggle over the role of discrimination and hatred within the religion continues even today. Christianity seems to need an "other" to fear and despise, and since it's no longer socially acceptable for that fear and loathing to be based on skin color, it is now directed at gay people.
In most elections where a whack job gets nominated to run in a primary for a major office like Senator, it's because the will of the majority is split amongst several moderate candidates. In most elections, Ranked Choice Voting would have prevented the ascendancy of the whacko, by letting voters express their preferences more clearly, voting their preference for a non-whacko candidate. In the Nevada GOP primary for Senator in 2010, however, it appears that two whacko candidates were highly favored over the other candidates (election results show them getting collectively a total of 66% of the GOP primary vote), of which there were several.
Were all the other candidates even bigger whackos? Between scientology and chickens for health care level stupidity, you would think there would have been at least one better choice, but most of the other candidates received tiny shares of the vote. The "will of the GOP primary voters" in Nevada in 2010, seems to be "give us a whacko, please."
Anonymous Coward wrote: "iPhone offers more bars overall than Android to obviously it is going to report more bars at a given signal strength. "
I didn't think that sounded quite right, so I thought about it a bit. It turns out that your claim is partly true, iPhone OS will report a greater absolute number of "bars" about 1/2 the time, given a common baseline (both scales measure from the same zero, to the same peak "full" strength (which certainly isn't guaranteed).
Consider a scale from zero to twenty (chosen for the ability to represent this concept in ascii, as 5 x 4 = 20, conveniently giving us both multipliers 5 bars, and 4 bars, on the same scale, 0 to 20). Mapping between them shows that half the time they agree, the other half the time, iOS reports at most 1 more bar.
11111222223333344444 Google Android OS (four bar scale)
1111_222__33___4____ (numbers where they agree, _ where they differ)
11112222333344445555 Apple iOS (five bar scale)
Not surprisingly the scales agree most often where they start, and least often at the top of the scale. Of course, this comparison ignores the fact that each bar represents 20% of the scale on iOS, and 25% of the scale on Android. Your bars may (and do) vary.
There's a lot more at the anandtech.com article on this subject, and it's quite interesting. The iPhone 4 antenna design is, like many other designs, a question of trade-offs. It's not clear that a novice, or an idiot, designed this antenna system. In fact, actual testing seems to have indicated that it's an improvement in most ways over the previous iPhone.
You need to take the same advice. You don't know enough about this to speak intelligently. Contrast your passionate, but not particularly insightful analysis, with this dispassionate analysis, informed by education, experience, and oh, dear, actual testing
"With my bumper case on, I made it further into dead zones than ever before, and into marginal areas that would always drop calls without any problems at all. It's amazing really to experience the difference in sensitivity the iPhone 4 brings compared to the 3GS, and issues from holding the phone aside, reception is absolutely definitely improved. I felt like I was going places no iPhone had ever gone before. There's no doubt in my mind this iPhone gets the best cellular reception yet, even though measured signal is lower than the 3GS."
One possible solution to this issue would be to have Troll and Flamebait mods be named (e.g. not anonymous). Right in the metadata should be the name of the person who assigned that mod point. I'd happily fess up to any such mods that I post.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it's more useful to file bug reports like this at https://bugreport.apple.com, rather than slashdot.
Nah. You want the takes with the tears.
Many young people abandoned email for MySpace, then within a couple short years, abandoned MySpace for FaceBook, both times because spam made the previous system essentially unusable for them, and they didn't want to take the time to learn how to filter spam (not even to switch their email provider from, say, Yahoo, to GMail). They don't differentiate between "The Internet" and a service. To them, FaceBook is the internet.
Mods, mods, mods. No sense of humor?
their bias monkeys.
Well, for most of the past three years, I've been using iPhones quite a bit (months at a time) in two areas where AT&T has "shitty" service. One of those was in downtown Washington D.C., where the dropped call rates in certain locations are maddening, yet 50 feet away, service is fine (a common cell phone problem on all networks in concrete jungles). However, I noticed a curious thing. Over the past three years, a number of folk previously using Blackberry on Verizon became so dissatisfied with the performance of the Verizon 3G network in D.C. that they... wait for it... switched to iPhone, and love it. This surprised me. The first time I noticed this had been a person who was openly mocking iPhone during the first year of iPhone. She bought a 3GS last year and wonders why she waited so long.
Well, that's not what happens. Most people who experience a dropped call don't throw up their hands and yell to the sky, "Yaweh! Why has thou forsaken me? Your sign of the dropped call has been received! I shall obey, and attempt no further phone access for the remainder of the day!"
Rather, they re-dial the call, get service and move one. (With the footnote that dropped calls happen more often when one's in a zone of weak signal, and the subsequent calls in those areas are more likely to drop, as well.)
You're not doing it right.
Even more interesting statistics would concern the numbers of dropped calls at a given signal strength. I know one iPhone 4 user who's getting better reception (much better) in a area that he's highly familiar with (his house). It seems likely that, for any given phone, most of the dropped calls take place at the edge of the reception area, with low signal strength. If I were inside Apple or AT&T looking at this problem, I'd want to see logging data for "dropped calls by signal strength", and even "dropped calls by signal strength events". In five bar zones there shouldn't be any dropped calls under normal (non congested) conditions, without an associated event, such as "signal strength dropped from 100% to Zero Percent, phone was in motion".
Let's ask where the FUD comes from. Anonymous Cowards, disproportionately. Do you, by chance, work for Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, or some other competitor? What's your anonymous agenda, eh?
The user jo_ham doesn't seem like an apologist, just somebody else who is annoyed at this phenomenon. See this discussion: jo_ham on Slashdot moderation of non-negative Apple comments. So, the score appears to be zero to zero, which means they're both untested, and you're wrong.
No, because I expect hypocrisy from her ilk.
I care!
Rachel Maddow exposed this as an easy to tell but not really true story told not only by Fox News, but the general media, too. America Loves Incumbents. No, Really.
The relationship between religion and the civil rights movement was more complex than you seem to think. Christianity supported not merely discrimination, but slavery throughout most of its history. As ideas from outside the Bible (notably from the Enlightenment) came to compete more effectively in the meme pool of western civilization, Christianity adapted, and some Christians led the struggle against slavery in the United States, and later for civil rights. But there was a big struggle within Christianity over both of those issues, and the struggle over the role of discrimination and hatred within the religion continues even today. Christianity seems to need an "other" to fear and despise, and since it's no longer socially acceptable for that fear and loathing to be based on skin color, it is now directed at gay people.
In most elections where a whack job gets nominated to run in a primary for a major office like Senator, it's because the will of the majority is split amongst several moderate candidates. In most elections, Ranked Choice Voting would have prevented the ascendancy of the whacko, by letting voters express their preferences more clearly, voting their preference for a non-whacko candidate. In the Nevada GOP primary for Senator in 2010, however, it appears that two whacko candidates were highly favored over the other candidates (election results show them getting collectively a total of 66% of the GOP primary vote), of which there were several.
Were all the other candidates even bigger whackos? Between scientology and chickens for health care level stupidity, you would think there would have been at least one better choice, but most of the other candidates received tiny shares of the vote. The "will of the GOP primary voters" in Nevada in 2010, seems to be "give us a whacko, please."
Remind me never to hire you.
I didn't think that sounded quite right, so I thought about it a bit. It turns out that your claim is partly true, iPhone OS will report a greater absolute number of "bars" about 1/2 the time, given a common baseline (both scales measure from the same zero, to the same peak "full" strength (which certainly isn't guaranteed).
Consider a scale from zero to twenty (chosen for the ability to represent this concept in ascii, as 5 x 4 = 20, conveniently giving us both multipliers 5 bars, and 4 bars, on the same scale, 0 to 20). Mapping between them shows that half the time they agree, the other half the time, iOS reports at most 1 more bar.
11111222223333344444 Google Android OS (four bar scale)
1111_222__33___4____ (numbers where they agree, _ where they differ)
11112222333344445555 Apple iOS (five bar scale)
Not surprisingly the scales agree most often where they start, and least often at the top of the scale. Of course, this comparison ignores the fact that each bar represents 20% of the scale on iOS, and 25% of the scale on Android. Your bars may (and do) vary.
Don't let facts get in the way of a good argument.
There's a lot more at the anandtech.com article on this subject, and it's quite interesting. The iPhone 4 antenna design is, like many other designs, a question of trade-offs. It's not clear that a novice, or an idiot, designed this antenna system. In fact, actual testing seems to have indicated that it's an improvement in most ways over the previous iPhone.
Brian Klug and Anand Lal Shimpi on iPhone 4 antenna
No, the GP was lazy. This is a common Slashdot problem.
Thanks for providing evidence that there is intelligent life, on Earth. I appreciate it.
To begin learning why the statement you just got up-modded for is total bullshit, start here:
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)
One possible solution to this issue would be to have Troll and Flamebait mods be named (e.g. not anonymous). Right in the metadata should be the name of the person who assigned that mod point. I'd happily fess up to any such mods that I post.