It has not been my experience that the useful lifetime of a laptop is 5 years, 2-3 for a laptop that is regularly moved day-in-day out seems to be more realistic. Not saying that the machine drops dead after 36 months, just that the life cycle is usually shorter than 5, certainly for college 4 would be a better comparison, you get a computer right before you start school and keep it to the end.
The Cr-48, however, can't match the performance (or come close to the available software library) of the 5-7 year old Thinkpads described in your parent post, however, so I think the comparison is valid. The main thing it brings to the table is 3g "connectivity," which is nice if it means a 3g data plan included in the $20 a month price and not very impressive if it simply means it has a 3g modem but no plan.
No one thinks its a bad for a start up company with limited resources to put all its eggs in the Microsoft Windows basket.
Apple has the 80%+ market share with tablets. They have no choice but to rely on Apple for them to remain profitable. Other platforms aren't bringing in enough revenue at the moment to justify the investment.
One difference is that there are more than a billion Windows users and something like 10-20 million tablet users. Your argument is akin to saying that making clothes targeting only men between 5' and 6' tall works so why not make clothes targeting only men between 5'6.4" and 5'6.5"?
I know I'm selling Portal2 this weekend due to the PSN outage, it's a shame as Valve promised the PS3 experience to be the best out of all the versions and now I'll never know what it could have been!
I think the claim that the PS3 version would be best was entirely based on it coming with a free copy of the PC version of the game, which is certainly the best playing option.
I have a real issue wondering how Comcast can legally say, "we wont place the cap on our own stuff" but all the other non-comcast content we will apply the cap. Comcast has every right to build their own video streaming services but why do they have the right to place preferential treatment on that service for the sheer motivation of trying to force people or make people feel forced to use their own video streaming services?
You've just described the case that motivates the interest in net neutrality laws.
Spend a little more and get this. Note the higher review scores. It seemed totally superfluous to me until I had one, but I've found it's surprisingly convenient to drop my cell phone in its charger when I get home and have handsets all over the house, each of which has much better speaker quality than my cell.
The/. headline is wrong - the iPod is on the list.
To you and all the other commenters complaining that great things like iPods and Etch-a-Sketches are on the list: you clicked the wrong link. Actually RTFS and you'll see that the links go to two separate lists, one of failures and one of successes. It would have taken you less time to read the relevant 3 word description of each link than it took you to click the wrong link, come back here and post a complaint, you know.
That's the trouble, of course. We may love good (and sometimes even bad) sci-fi, but we're a teeny tiny niche market in the modern world of corporations who aim for bragging rights about "billions served".
Remember though that TNG had 20 million viewers a week (on average, and as a syndicated show, that's astonishing) and was often the #1 viewed show in a given week. It was the Dancing with the Stars / American Idol ratings juggernaut of its day. I think that it shows we do have the capacity to watch good sci fi in large numbers if we're presented with the right show and it's properly made available.
On the other hand, maybe we really have made a shift in the last twenty years, leaving modern society with a real preference for garbage like DwtS and AI instead of thoughtful and imaginative fiction.
More and more I see the attempt to design and operate Nuke plant as a very dangerous game of Whack-a-mole. Operator error, Wham, Design error, Wham, Maintenance failure, Wham. Earthquakes. Wham. Tsunamis, Wham. Terrorism, Wham,
and, what do we do with the waste for the next 20,000 years? Wham, Wham, Wham, Wham........
Miss one time, game over.
Kurt
And operating a coal plant is akin to all the moles poked out of their holes and looking at you while you shrug and say "working as intended."
Second, YOU ADMITTED THE JUDGE WAS RIGHT about the car rental liability case. You explicitly said that there are circumstances where the rental agency may be a legitimate potential defendant, yet you just cast that aside and ignored it for the rest of your argument. THIS is a logical error: You have certain premises, and you ignore them to the effect that your conclusion does not necessarily follow from your premises.
I haven't even finished reading the article yet, but that was the first thing that struck me.
Same here, but I won't be going on to read the rest of the textwall. The page or so I did read was littered with errors or sloppy, illogical argumentation. I don't think I've ever seen so few valid points per word in a Slashdot post.
No, but it can't be discredited either. Are you saying we should just take Anonymous at their word simply because they deny it? I'm not saying Sony's response or initial security wasn't pathetic, because it was, fact still remains it was *probably* Anonymous, especially when looking at the timeline of events.
Lysander7, despite showing no evidence to prove it, you and I both agree that we should assume there's a good chance you broke into my house. Sure, there's no proof, but we can't discredit that I claim I found your name on a piece of paper in my house.
People need to research more before assuming anything. Sony explicitly stated they found verifiable evidence it was Anonymous, as the files the hacker had left behind said "We are Anonymous. We are legion." How that can be confused for anything else is beyond me.
I just searched my trash can and found a piece of paper proving you broke into my house. It said, "I am Lysander7. Derp." I'm not going to produce the paper, but I think I'll point it out in a press release and accuse you of breaking into my house.
So unless we are going to somehow use androids or robots to repair and build roads, we probably should consider taxing by the mile.
Basically there is a deficit, it has to be cut and the national debt has to be reduced. Social security has to be saved as well. This means only one option, we must raise taxes or die.
Raise the gas tax, which accomplishes the same thing but 1) taxes more proportionally to road damage and 2) encourages good mileage. As mileage improves, raise the gas tax rate to keep paying for repairs. Make sure that all the collected funds are taken into account when drafting road infrastructure spending bills.
This is not a rhetorical question, elucido, please answer: How can you or anyone possibly believe that a miles driven tax is a good idea, considering that it encourages a shift back to low mileage vehicles by reducing the proportional savings associated with driving efficiently and that it will have a hugely expensive, complicated overhead that will eat up a huge portion of its proceeds?
I was thinking a multitouch screen. I have five fingers one one hand, so assuming a "palette" of "things to do"/basic operations (piping, flow control) on a panel at the edge of the screen I could put five things together at a time. Making simple array/list-like objects would also be intuitive using drag-and-drop. You could perhaps also pipe output to different widget-like objects (meters, graphs) for visualization.
You'd need/want to write shellscripts/wrappers for personalization though, but since that's something that I'd imagine most *nix users already do it wouldn't be that much of an inconvenience.
A mouse will, of course, be much faster and less fatiguing. Why move your hand a foot across a screen when you can achieve the same thing without raising your entire arm (or if you keep your touchscreen in your lap, unhealthily lowering your neck) with a 1 cm mouse movement?
I think the only thing keeping me at/. is the comment section. I think I may be doing it wrong....
That's always been the point of/., so I think you're doing it right. The news blurbs have never been particularly interesting on their own; it's the well moderated, often interesting (I'm not being sarcastic) comments that have been the draw. I posted as an AC since 2000 and read/. on most days since then, and I don't think anything has changed other than the interface getting sort of clunky.
My dad likes to file FOIA requests when the police in his home town (of 1 million people) do something illegal. They frequently quote absurd fees, after which he leaves and comes back with an officer of the court who makes them do it for free. He should have been a lawyer. Or maybe the world is better off with one fewer lawyer and one more electrical engineer.
where I live prices have definitely not gone down.
It has made the cost of individual songs drop. How much did a CD single cost before iTunes Store started selling downloads of single songs for a buck each?
$9.99 at Fry's in the 90s for something brand new and from a AAA band, like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. Now new releases are generally a bit more, but when we adjust for inflation the price seems shockingly flat.
I understand the symbolism, but are any wedding rings really interlocking?
Graphite is essentially a series of interlocked benzene rings, btw, so if we want to run with this concept we certainly can find much smaller examples than in TFA.
Or are these wedding rings because they're made of DNA?
We all win when the Harvard, Yale, and Stanford alums get replaced by MIT and Berkeley alums. ( I omit CalTech because CalTech people are just plain weird, GA & VA Tech people are cool of course, but probably not rich enough for politics )
What about those of us who graduated from a school in each list?
Group A isn't so uniformly bad and Group B isn't so uniformly good, you know.
Not to mention that 60FPS is overkill - the human eye can't see any faster than 50FPS. Making 60FPS a complete waste of data.
48FPS is an unfortunate choice because it isn't a smooth 50FPS, meaning that it'll have weird pulldown issues on all TVs, but at least it's not throwing away frames the human eye is flat-out unable to see.
50 fps is noticeably jerky - you're just used to it. The idea that the human eye can't even see something faster than 50 fps is preposterous. Take a look here for some solid debunking of this silly myth: http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
(you can't read an eBook from any vendor other than Amazon on a Kindle),
And where exactly did you come up with this? The main problem is that it can't read ePubs, but you can load anything in a format it supports (txt, mobi, html, pdf if you are masochistic, etc....) via USB, and with some (txt, mobi I think are the only two), you can even download them using the experimental web browser from any store or website.
Calibre converts every format, including pdf and ePub, to mobi. It's a must-have (and free) program for any Kindle owner.
Kindle offers orientation changing (though not automatically like the iPad and not with a single button press). The page buttons aren't as nice as what you're describing, though.
The last two generations of Kindle had automatic orientation changing, though of the five people I know with Kindles, none have left the feature enabled because it's annoying when reading while lying on one's side.
In science, the select few who have done the research and do understand and have to "dumb it down" for the rest of us, they aren't relying on faith. So, although they are a minority, those few have done the research and invested the time and study.
In religion, even those select few who may know the passages and scriptures the best, have no study behind them other than relying on the accounts of ancient text. So even the most "informed" in the religious minded folk are purely running on faith.
We don't even need to talk about the select few. A large chunk of the population sees vaccines working, understands the basics of Newton's laws, and uses electric power. TFA is a really low quality attempt to use vaguely defined terms to troll the internet. Look at the computer in front of you. It depends on electricity, which you probably understand pretty well. The fact that it's working is a demonstration of the reality and efficacy of a scientific viewpoint. That's why science isn't equivalent to religion.
Actually, those jokes date back to WW2. We didn't make any jokes after WW1 out of gratitude for the revolutionary help. The second time we had to come back and bail you guys out, we started making jokes.
American forces were embarrassingly ineffective in WW1. The French themselves were much more important. The most impressive international forces were the Canadians and Australians.
Slashdot Mirror
It has not been my experience that the useful lifetime of a laptop is 5 years, 2-3 for a laptop that is regularly moved day-in-day out seems to be more realistic. Not saying that the machine drops dead after 36 months, just that the life cycle is usually shorter than 5, certainly for college 4 would be a better comparison, you get a computer right before you start school and keep it to the end.
The Cr-48, however, can't match the performance (or come close to the available software library) of the 5-7 year old Thinkpads described in your parent post, however, so I think the comparison is valid. The main thing it brings to the table is 3g "connectivity," which is nice if it means a 3g data plan included in the $20 a month price and not very impressive if it simply means it has a 3g modem but no plan.
No one thinks its a bad for a start up company with limited resources to put all its eggs in the Microsoft Windows basket.
Apple has the 80%+ market share with tablets. They have no choice but to rely on Apple for them to remain profitable. Other platforms aren't bringing in enough revenue at the moment to justify the investment.
One difference is that there are more than a billion Windows users and something like 10-20 million tablet users. Your argument is akin to saying that making clothes targeting only men between 5' and 6' tall works so why not make clothes targeting only men between 5'6.4" and 5'6.5"?
I know I'm selling Portal2 this weekend due to the PSN outage, it's a shame as Valve promised the PS3 experience to be the best out of all the versions and now I'll never know what it could have been!
I think the claim that the PS3 version would be best was entirely based on it coming with a free copy of the PC version of the game, which is certainly the best playing option.
I have a real issue wondering how Comcast can legally say, "we wont place the cap on our own stuff" but all the other non-comcast content we will apply the cap. Comcast has every right to build their own video streaming services but why do they have the right to place preferential treatment on that service for the sheer motivation of trying to force people or make people feel forced to use their own video streaming services?
You've just described the case that motivates the interest in net neutrality laws.
Spend a little more and get this. Note the higher review scores. It seemed totally superfluous to me until I had one, but I've found it's surprisingly convenient to drop my cell phone in its charger when I get home and have handsets all over the house, each of which has much better speaker quality than my cell.
The /. headline is wrong - the iPod is on the list.
To you and all the other commenters complaining that great things like iPods and Etch-a-Sketches are on the list: you clicked the wrong link. Actually RTFS and you'll see that the links go to two separate lists, one of failures and one of successes. It would have taken you less time to read the relevant 3 word description of each link than it took you to click the wrong link, come back here and post a complaint, you know.
That's the trouble, of course. We may love good (and sometimes even bad) sci-fi, but we're a teeny tiny niche market in the modern world of corporations who aim for bragging rights about "billions served".
Remember though that TNG had 20 million viewers a week (on average, and as a syndicated show, that's astonishing) and was often the #1 viewed show in a given week. It was the Dancing with the Stars / American Idol ratings juggernaut of its day. I think that it shows we do have the capacity to watch good sci fi in large numbers if we're presented with the right show and it's properly made available.
On the other hand, maybe we really have made a shift in the last twenty years, leaving modern society with a real preference for garbage like DwtS and AI instead of thoughtful and imaginative fiction.
More and more I see the attempt to design and operate Nuke plant as a very dangerous game of Whack-a-mole. Operator error, Wham, Design error, Wham, Maintenance failure, Wham. Earthquakes. Wham. Tsunamis, Wham. Terrorism, Wham,
and, what do we do with the waste for the next 20,000 years? Wham, Wham, Wham, Wham........
Miss one time, game over.
Kurt
And operating a coal plant is akin to all the moles poked out of their holes and looking at you while you shrug and say "working as intended."
Second, YOU ADMITTED THE JUDGE WAS RIGHT about the car rental liability case. You explicitly said that there are circumstances where the rental agency may be a legitimate potential defendant, yet you just cast that aside and ignored it for the rest of your argument. THIS is a logical error: You have certain premises, and you ignore them to the effect that your conclusion does not necessarily follow from your premises.
I haven't even finished reading the article yet, but that was the first thing that struck me.
Same here, but I won't be going on to read the rest of the textwall. The page or so I did read was littered with errors or sloppy, illogical argumentation. I don't think I've ever seen so few valid points per word in a Slashdot post.
No, but it can't be discredited either. Are you saying we should just take Anonymous at their word simply because they deny it? I'm not saying Sony's response or initial security wasn't pathetic, because it was, fact still remains it was *probably* Anonymous, especially when looking at the timeline of events.
Lysander7, despite showing no evidence to prove it, you and I both agree that we should assume there's a good chance you broke into my house. Sure, there's no proof, but we can't discredit that I claim I found your name on a piece of paper in my house.
People need to research more before assuming anything. Sony explicitly stated they found verifiable evidence it was Anonymous, as the files the hacker had left behind said "We are Anonymous. We are legion." How that can be confused for anything else is beyond me.
I just searched my trash can and found a piece of paper proving you broke into my house. It said, "I am Lysander7. Derp." I'm not going to produce the paper, but I think I'll point it out in a press release and accuse you of breaking into my house.
So unless we are going to somehow use androids or robots to repair and build roads, we probably should consider taxing by the mile.
Basically there is a deficit, it has to be cut and the national debt has to be reduced. Social security has to be saved as well. This means only one option, we must raise taxes or die.
Raise the gas tax, which accomplishes the same thing but 1) taxes more proportionally to road damage and 2) encourages good mileage. As mileage improves, raise the gas tax rate to keep paying for repairs. Make sure that all the collected funds are taken into account when drafting road infrastructure spending bills.
This is not a rhetorical question, elucido, please answer: How can you or anyone possibly believe that a miles driven tax is a good idea, considering that it encourages a shift back to low mileage vehicles by reducing the proportional savings associated with driving efficiently and that it will have a hugely expensive, complicated overhead that will eat up a huge portion of its proceeds?
I was thinking a multitouch screen. I have five fingers one one hand, so assuming a "palette" of "things to do"/basic operations (piping, flow control) on a panel at the edge of the screen I could put five things together at a time. Making simple array/list-like objects would also be intuitive using drag-and-drop. You could perhaps also pipe output to different widget-like objects (meters, graphs) for visualization.
You'd need/want to write shellscripts/wrappers for personalization though, but since that's something that I'd imagine most *nix users already do it wouldn't be that much of an inconvenience.
A mouse will, of course, be much faster and less fatiguing. Why move your hand a foot across a screen when you can achieve the same thing without raising your entire arm (or if you keep your touchscreen in your lap, unhealthily lowering your neck) with a 1 cm mouse movement?
I think the only thing keeping me at /. is the comment section. I think I may be doing it wrong....
That's always been the point of /., so I think you're doing it right. The news blurbs have never been particularly interesting on their own; it's the well moderated, often interesting (I'm not being sarcastic) comments that have been the draw. I posted as an AC since 2000 and read /. on most days since then, and I don't think anything has changed other than the interface getting sort of clunky.
My dad likes to file FOIA requests when the police in his home town (of 1 million people) do something illegal. They frequently quote absurd fees, after which he leaves and comes back with an officer of the court who makes them do it for free. He should have been a lawyer. Or maybe the world is better off with one fewer lawyer and one more electrical engineer.
where I live prices have definitely not gone down.
It has made the cost of individual songs drop. How much did a CD single cost before iTunes Store started selling downloads of single songs for a buck each?
$9.99 at Fry's in the 90s for something brand new and from a AAA band, like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. Now new releases are generally a bit more, but when we adjust for inflation the price seems shockingly flat.
I understand the symbolism, but are any wedding rings really interlocking?
Graphite is essentially a series of interlocked benzene rings, btw, so if we want to run with this concept we certainly can find much smaller examples than in TFA.
Or are these wedding rings because they're made of DNA?
We all win when the Harvard, Yale, and Stanford alums get replaced by MIT and Berkeley alums.
( I omit CalTech because CalTech people are just plain weird, GA & VA Tech people are cool of course, but probably not rich enough for politics )
What about those of us who graduated from a school in each list?
Group A isn't so uniformly bad and Group B isn't so uniformly good, you know.
Not to mention that 60FPS is overkill - the human eye can't see any faster than 50FPS. Making 60FPS a complete waste of data.
48FPS is an unfortunate choice because it isn't a smooth 50FPS, meaning that it'll have weird pulldown issues on all TVs, but at least it's not throwing away frames the human eye is flat-out unable to see.
50 fps is noticeably jerky - you're just used to it. The idea that the human eye can't even see something faster than 50 fps is preposterous. Take a look here for some solid debunking of this silly myth: http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
(you can't read an eBook from any vendor other than Amazon on a Kindle),
And where exactly did you come up with this? The main problem is that it can't read ePubs, but you can load anything in a format it supports (txt, mobi, html, pdf if you are masochistic, etc....) via USB, and with some (txt, mobi I think are the only two), you can even download them using the experimental web browser from any store or website.
Calibre converts every format, including pdf and ePub, to mobi. It's a must-have (and free) program for any Kindle owner.
Kindle offers orientation changing (though not automatically like the iPad and not with a single button press). The page buttons aren't as nice as what you're describing, though.
The last two generations of Kindle had automatic orientation changing, though of the five people I know with Kindles, none have left the feature enabled because it's annoying when reading while lying on one's side.
...no, no, no. it's:
Yo dawg, we herd you like calling so we put a phone if yo phone so you can call while you call.
orrrr...
Sup dawg, we herd you like apps, so we a put a[sic] app in yo app, so you can use it while you use it.
Dumbest meme OF ALL TIME!
"Don't be evil" could not have been the motto with that douChEO in charge
Youtube wouldn't be using Flash right now, though.
And Google Apps would be a joy to use instead of the total mess it is.
Only for those who would drink the koolaid, and then only on Mac.
...between science "faith" and religious "faith":
In science, the select few who have done the research and do understand and have to "dumb it down" for the rest of us, they aren't relying on faith. So, although they are a minority, those few have done the research and invested the time and study.
In religion, even those select few who may know the passages and scriptures the best, have no study behind them other than relying on the accounts of ancient text. So even the most "informed" in the religious minded folk are purely running on faith.
We don't even need to talk about the select few. A large chunk of the population sees vaccines working, understands the basics of Newton's laws, and uses electric power. TFA is a really low quality attempt to use vaguely defined terms to troll the internet. Look at the computer in front of you. It depends on electricity, which you probably understand pretty well. The fact that it's working is a demonstration of the reality and efficacy of a scientific viewpoint. That's why science isn't equivalent to religion.
Actually, those jokes date back to WW2. We didn't make any jokes after WW1 out of gratitude for the revolutionary help. The second time we had to come back and bail you guys out, we started making jokes.
American forces were embarrassingly ineffective in WW1. The French themselves were much more important. The most impressive international forces were the Canadians and Australians.