A computer is about the most open ended learning station you can get. Give a reasonably intelligent first or second grader a computer and so long as he has no fear of "breaking" it using software, chances are he will be able to use the computer fairly well, perhaps even better than an adult with low computer skills.
Exactly. Things like this show exactly whats wrong with education: there is no thinking involved. If we want to use education to help people become more than just physical laborers, they need to really learn. They need to learn reading using books they -want- to read. When I was in early elementary school, my parents tell me that I wouldn't ever read any fiction books because I thought they were stupid. Looking today at most early fiction books, I can see that my younger me was exactly right. Now thats not to say I didn't read, far from it, I think I checked out every single non-fiction book that interested me at least twice in my old elementary school library, but fiction until about 5th grade simply didn't interest me. Everything worked out in the end, the plots generally sucked and there was not anything... interesting in them. Thankfully, children s literature has improved some with the success of Harry Potter, but in the days before that, nothing but happy stories, half-baked "mystery" novels and the like thrived.
I fail to see how this will motivate kids to learn more than giving them -real- things to do and having them doing it. Give them an RPG, that will teach them how to read, let them play war games, they will learn geography and history, etc.
Ok, what in the world does the NEA (either National Endowment of the Arts or National Educators Association) have to do with this story, or the thing you just posted?
Its been the same for all 3 jobs I've worked (retail, working on campus repairing computers and now working with a consulting firm) perhaps it could be my age (new-ish college graduate) but it was the exact same way in both high school and university. And the only time I've said I was "sick" when I really wasn't was in high school I stayed home a day after a concert because I was tired and wanted to sleep in.
but because they are heckled by patients who want a prescription to justify their trip to the doctor's office
Well of course they are. When was the last time you actually had an enjoyable doctors visit? The service is terrible, the people either dumb it down to first-grade language (you are sick and are coughing) or speak in a language that no one who has had less than 2 years of pre-med can understand, you spend over half the time going over basic things like height, weight, etc. spend less than 3 minutes with a real doctor who diagnoses you in 10 seconds, and then you are stuck with a bill, which, even with insurance, the copay can be $30 or more. So of course people want results, if I have to leave work early, get told I can't work (yeah, like your employer is going to believe that...), I'd better be getting at least something to make you feel better.
In short, people are idiots and everyone should really be following the example the Norwegians have set here.
Which will lead to more people getting sick. Look, have you ever had to tell your employer you are sick? Even when you are really sick it takes a lot of convincing, most of the time they will still want you in for half a day or so. And its not like in this job market people can easily quit and find a different job.....
Sure, but good luck getting that done for work/school. Yeah, even the most strict of workplaces will let people take a sick day every now and then if you look and sound sick, but if you get sick more than twice in a month generally they want to see a doctors note. Its honestly pointless to go to the doctor, pay money and not do anything about it to make you feel better. Schools are usually worse, especially at the university level, because not only are you sick and not getting the classes you pay for, professors usually are unsympathetic to your cause even with a doctors note.
You mean something like the Westboro Baptist Church, the group that goes to soldiers funerals with big signs that say that the soldier's death was punishment from God because the US tolerates homosexuality? Oddly enough they have never caused a real riot, yeah, some people tried to beat them up and some guy tried to set fire to one of their garages but that was it. No riots, no nothing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church for more info
What makes you think the citizens will act on their knowledge and fight censorship?
People don't want to be oppressed. Look at what happened to countries in the iron curtain. Their economy fell apart, people wanted civil rights, they protested and an oppressive government fell.
In many countries the majority of the population wants certain topics censored.
Eventually though, an enlightenment happens. In most of the western world it happened during the 18th century enlightenment period lead by people such as Voltaire. In the aftermath of World War I, people, indoctrinated with mass media threw aside enlightenment for nationalism which eventually lead to World War II and the Cold War. Now we are in another age of enlightenment for the western world. Perhaps the eastern world will have a similar enlightenment.
If the USA didn't have the 1st Amendment, I doubt we'd have such free speech.
Of course not, and if it wasn't for the bill of rights chances are we'd have no rights.
I mean, the religious types managed to get alcohol banned for 13 years.
...Which was also banned in some parts of Europe, Canada, and Russia for during the same times. Alcohol was the pot of today, it was blamed for everything. Eventually reason prevailed and they unbanned it. Chances are, once governments start looking at the scientific evidence, we will look at a number of substances and wonder what in the world we were thinking when we banned them.
True, but I knew that some militant atheist Slashdotter would probably post something to that effect if I didn't at least put something negative in about Christianity. Because we all know all religion is the root of all evil
I do not think that Hinduism is at fault here. I have read quite a bit of books on Hinduism, and I dont remember seeing anywhere clauses that other religions should not exist or that people should fight if somebody blasphemes. It is mostly people with vested interests that ferment trouble. For example, right wing political parties trying to increase xenophobia for getting more votes for the next election, or not so nice religious leaders trying to increase their clout etc has very good motivation in inciting riots.
Yes, I didn't think that Hinduism would be that violent either, but the quote in the summary from India's ministry of technology did make it seem that it was a typical occurrence. Of course, subtleties in the phrase may have been lost during translation.
, I quite disagree with your point. India, even though growing, has quite a bit of people with a lot of discontent. I have seen that Indians do care quite a bit for freedom - in both speech and action. In such a country, there will be many who will incite people, and riots do happen. If it was more like China, then freedom of speech is a little more curtailed, and rabble rousers wont have such a free rein. So, Indian government does not have any other option to block communication channels to avoid these speeches becoming more widespread and cause more deaths.
However, was it not the United State's government's job to increase tolerance of black people after the American Civil War? It is the Indian government's responsibility to control its population without resorting to censorship. Especially not censorship of this type. There is a difference between not letting someone go on a government owned radio station saying this and allowing access to information to what Indian people have searched for. Theres a difference between a discussion group and a giant neon sign in the middle of a road.
Until the 1980s, government stepped in many times, repeatedly, over the years, to limit the power of the monopolies in the United States. But after about 1981 or so, we simply stopped caring.
But the problem wasn't that we stopped enforcing anti-trust acts, it was that we deliberately -helped- the monopolies and harmed the general public with such rulings as software patents, the DMCA, etc.
And the result has decimated our marketplace! In becoming more "free", we've simply become more monopolistic, where Wal-Mart now delivers some 30% to 50% of the consumed goods in the USA.
...And in all honesty theres nothing wrong with Wal-Mart delivering most of the goods because Wal-Mart is a monopoly not because of government intervention or lack of the ability to compete, Wal-Mart is simply willing to take risks and deliver what the masses want.
Wal-Mart has competition with a lot of other stores: Target aims to be a more aesthetically pleasing form of Wal-Mart with more specialty goods and generally a more "upscale" atmosphere at the price of a slight bit of higher prices. Costco aims to save consumers more money by allowing them to buy in bulk. And there are many other smaller competitors.
The reason why Wal-Mart has thrived is because it provides a large variety of cheap (in both meanings of the word) goods and is willing to expand into smaller areas. Its a lot more convenient for someone to go to Wal-Mart that has most everything in stock then to go to a specialty store only to find that it would take 2-3 weeks to get in a product that provides little to no price savings. Now, thats not to say that specialty stores are bad or don't provide what customers need, not at all, but they are specialty stores, the things that Wal-Mart isn't going to carry you can pick up there.
In a similar vein, I'm finding that "free speech" never existed. For over a century, there were strict controls on news organizations and reporting agencies - strict policies on libel and a general expectation of truth. This was easily enforced, because there were so few news agencies with the ability to reach a significant percentage of the population. And the result was filtered news and information of generally high-quality.
The information was high quality if you wanted one group's opinion, yes. The thing is, today we try to cover news stories from all possible angles. Back during WWII no effort was made to try to tell the war from Germany's or Japan's point of view, today every conflict even recent ones such as Iraq and Afghanistan have reporters trying to find out both sides of the story. No longer is it ok to just blindly accept the government's viewpoint.
But the Internet has changed all that. Even if strict news reporting standards were still in effect, the news organizations would have to compete with the deafening roar of blogs and other "almost news" sites (Slashdot being one of them!) and so the standards would lose all their teeth anyway
That is because that is what people want to hear. They don't care about the big picture which is what journalism used to be about, they care about individuals and their viewpoints. They want to hear history as told from the diaries of the people who lived through it, not from the history book.
But the end result is that any whining idiot with an opinion that sounds nice gets lots of play, and real information gets lost in the din of noise and misinformation. Without any expectation of accountability, idiots like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly are free to spread their bile and intellectual filth to unwashed masses who haven't developed the means to filter them out, partly due to the falling standards and expectations from our public school system, which has gotten so bad that no schooling at all is often an improvement.
Yes, but the problem is it is India's fault for letting this crap happen and its also Hinduism's fault for not tolerating any criticism of their religion. No matter what you blame modern-day Christianity for, generally you can do whatever you want to Christianity and get nothing more than a boycott. About the only time you can incite modern day Christianity to (religiously-backed) violence is what they perceive as violence towards others such as in abortion clinic bombings. But those too are rare. Compare the reaction between a (most would consider pretty blasphemous) piece of art (Piss Christ) and a comic about Muhammad. How many more comics are there referencing Jesus out there that have zero reaction?
Governments need to explain to various religions about free speech and tolerance. No matter where you stand religiously, there is no need to get offended that someone -gasp- might not want to believe the same way you do.
While I can't speak for the iPhone, on my iPod touch core Apple things such as the music "app" have crashed on me, and three times I've had to do a hard reset from doing nothing more complex on the iPod other than changing songs.
And while I do agree that wallpaper changing should be simple, in reality on most Android phones they work on the core first and move outward to the UI, OS X development works first on the UI then works on the core.
Such as....? Most of the alternative search engines simply use a Google scraper to remove the privacy issues and deny Google any revenue from you using it. Lets see, I'd hardly say MSN/Live/Bing are non-evil being owned by Microsoft who has done more harm than good to the tech world, Yahoo! censors just as much if not more than Google, and I'm not entirely sure if Ask does or not but even assuming it doesn't I can never find any relevant results using it. Most other smaller search engines are either too small to give you a decent web search or owned by a large company (like how Yahoo owns AltaVista)
But you also need to look at it that it exposes the evil in censorship. without these incidents Indian censorship might not have been widely reported so citizens wouldn't act on it, the more the individual knows that censorship is taking place the more they will fight it. It is only when censorship is not noticed that it becomes so much more harmful.
If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots.
Sounds like more of a culture problem than a Google problem there. I mean, is the west the only place where people can say "offensive" things without riots? And even then Islamic idiots try to kill them (look at the Danish cartoonist issue) when free speech is protected by law.
India needs to address this problem themselves by increasing free speech, not by trying to shut it down.
...But that is assuming your wireless carrier doesn't mess with VoIP. While I don't think T-Mobile would (heck, they even supported unlocked iPhones for free!) other carriers might not be so forgiving AT&T, Verizon
The thing about the iPhone is... it crashes... often (I don't have one but the majority of my family members do, as do a few of my friends). Sometimes it fails to pick up calls, applications crash, SMS messages are sometimes delayed hours, while I would be quick to blame it on AT&T, my current "dumb" phone doesn't have these problems (well, not that theres any applications to crash on the stupid thing...) while running on AT&T. On my iPod touch, applications will occasionally simply refuse to load, Facebook will randomly crash when loading, there are a few websites Safari doesn't like and crashes, etc. While for a lot of people these may be simple annoyances, for some a lost call may be lost money.
The N900 is good, but I think eventually Android development is going to catch up to the iPhone and have good commercial games. The N900 probably never will (well, aside from emulators and Quake). Its like the difference between buying a PSP and a GP2x, the GP2x is more hacker friendly, both have similar feature-sets, but you are going to get better quality games on the PSP at the expense of not being able to run a few nifty apps (assuming a non-hacked PSP). Community driven projects are great at making emulators, ports of old UNIX games (look at the 100,000 versions of nethack out there) but for new, full featured games that are more than a tech demo, you usually have to go with a commercial OS. Android is good in that it will allow unofficial "shady" development (emulators) while still enticing commercial studios.
...Because compared to T-Mobile AT&T's coverage is huge? Really, I'd much rather support T-Mobile rather than AT&T (not going to support Verizon and Sprint has no coverage either where I travel) but some places I go T-Mobile has no coverage and AT&T does (yeah, they are places in the middle of nowhere but that doesn't diminish the fact I still need cell service). I'd really like to have an unlocked Android handset to use on AT&T that has all the features I want, I'd really like a Droid but that is CDMA only I believe and I'm not switching over to Verizion until they stop screwing with people's phones.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
Um, what hardware monopolies are you talking about? Yeah, just about everything is x86 now, but I wouldn't call either AMD or Intel a monopoly in CPU terms. Same with graphics cards, its about 50% nVidia and 50% ATI though most everyone who isn't a gamer uses integrated graphics.
And if you want things to work really well on -your- hardware then try running Gentoo and compiling everything with high levels of optimization.
One of the main reasons why everything isn't hardware centric is because people upgrade at different points. For example, not everyone is running a Core i7 at the moment, someone might be reading/. on a low-end Intel Atom, A Pentium 4, an older Athlon, or any number of different CPUs. Its bad enough that a Pentium 4 is now considered sluggish for most modern games and OSes, but think of how worse upgrading would be if it would simply refuse to run on a Pentium 4 because it didn't support some of the features.
Sure, I know that the PPC CPU is going to run a lot better than an x86 one running at 533 Mhz and 512 MB still might be enough memory, but for the price they have for an assembled system ($975) I can buy a system with a Core i7 CPU and still have $200 or more left over to get a good monitor.
Keep in mind that a PS3 has even lower numbers, at least if you want to run Linux,
Well, yeah. And as anyone who has used Linux on PS3 will tell you, its nothing great.
but still provides outstanding floating point performance and is still suitable for many tasks.
Yeah, the tasks of doing obscure math calculations which is what the Cell was made for, but for general purpose use it sucks. Games are similar to what the Cell was designed to do so it does that pretty well.
Wow, the Amiga system makes Mac systems look cheap by comparison, almost $600 for the motherboard alone that only gives you 512 MB of RAM and a 533 Mhz CPU! You can get twice that with a Mac mini. While I do realize that this is a niche product, its still -very- expensive.
How in the world is any of this news? While I can see it being a story if there was really a story, this post is nothing more than information that most Amiga fans already know, and tells us what we already know about dead OSes: A) Projects attempt to emulate the OS and B) Projects attempt to emulate the OS, modernize it and change some things. I fail to see how this made it to the front page.
Slashdot Mirror
A computer is about the most open ended learning station you can get. Give a reasonably intelligent first or second grader a computer and so long as he has no fear of "breaking" it using software, chances are he will be able to use the computer fairly well, perhaps even better than an adult with low computer skills.
Exactly. Things like this show exactly whats wrong with education: there is no thinking involved. If we want to use education to help people become more than just physical laborers, they need to really learn. They need to learn reading using books they -want- to read. When I was in early elementary school, my parents tell me that I wouldn't ever read any fiction books because I thought they were stupid. Looking today at most early fiction books, I can see that my younger me was exactly right. Now thats not to say I didn't read, far from it, I think I checked out every single non-fiction book that interested me at least twice in my old elementary school library, but fiction until about 5th grade simply didn't interest me. Everything worked out in the end, the plots generally sucked and there was not anything... interesting in them. Thankfully, children s literature has improved some with the success of Harry Potter, but in the days before that, nothing but happy stories, half-baked "mystery" novels and the like thrived.
I fail to see how this will motivate kids to learn more than giving them -real- things to do and having them doing it. Give them an RPG, that will teach them how to read, let them play war games, they will learn geography and history, etc.
Ok, what in the world does the NEA (either National Endowment of the Arts or National Educators Association) have to do with this story, or the thing you just posted?
You work for idiots. That's not at all typical.
Its been the same for all 3 jobs I've worked (retail, working on campus repairing computers and now working with a consulting firm) perhaps it could be my age (new-ish college graduate) but it was the exact same way in both high school and university. And the only time I've said I was "sick" when I really wasn't was in high school I stayed home a day after a concert because I was tired and wanted to sleep in.
but because they are heckled by patients who want a prescription to justify their trip to the doctor's office
Well of course they are. When was the last time you actually had an enjoyable doctors visit? The service is terrible, the people either dumb it down to first-grade language (you are sick and are coughing) or speak in a language that no one who has had less than 2 years of pre-med can understand, you spend over half the time going over basic things like height, weight, etc. spend less than 3 minutes with a real doctor who diagnoses you in 10 seconds, and then you are stuck with a bill, which, even with insurance, the copay can be $30 or more. So of course people want results, if I have to leave work early, get told I can't work (yeah, like your employer is going to believe that...), I'd better be getting at least something to make you feel better.
In short, people are idiots and everyone should really be following the example the Norwegians have set here.
Which will lead to more people getting sick. Look, have you ever had to tell your employer you are sick? Even when you are really sick it takes a lot of convincing, most of the time they will still want you in for half a day or so. And its not like in this job market people can easily quit and find a different job.....
Sure, but good luck getting that done for work/school. Yeah, even the most strict of workplaces will let people take a sick day every now and then if you look and sound sick, but if you get sick more than twice in a month generally they want to see a doctors note. Its honestly pointless to go to the doctor, pay money and not do anything about it to make you feel better. Schools are usually worse, especially at the university level, because not only are you sick and not getting the classes you pay for, professors usually are unsympathetic to your cause even with a doctors note.
You mean something like the Westboro Baptist Church, the group that goes to soldiers funerals with big signs that say that the soldier's death was punishment from God because the US tolerates homosexuality? Oddly enough they have never caused a real riot, yeah, some people tried to beat them up and some guy tried to set fire to one of their garages but that was it. No riots, no nothing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church for more info
What makes you think the citizens will act on their knowledge and fight censorship?
People don't want to be oppressed. Look at what happened to countries in the iron curtain. Their economy fell apart, people wanted civil rights, they protested and an oppressive government fell.
In many countries the majority of the population wants certain topics censored.
Eventually though, an enlightenment happens. In most of the western world it happened during the 18th century enlightenment period lead by people such as Voltaire. In the aftermath of World War I, people, indoctrinated with mass media threw aside enlightenment for nationalism which eventually lead to World War II and the Cold War. Now we are in another age of enlightenment for the western world. Perhaps the eastern world will have a similar enlightenment.
If the USA didn't have the 1st Amendment, I doubt we'd have such free speech.
Of course not, and if it wasn't for the bill of rights chances are we'd have no rights.
I mean, the religious types managed to get alcohol banned for 13 years.
True, but I knew that some militant atheist Slashdotter would probably post something to that effect if I didn't at least put something negative in about Christianity. Because we all know all religion is the root of all evil
I do not think that Hinduism is at fault here. I have read quite a bit of books on Hinduism, and I dont remember seeing anywhere clauses that other religions should not exist or that people should fight if somebody blasphemes. It is mostly people with vested interests that ferment trouble. For example, right wing political parties trying to increase xenophobia for getting more votes for the next election, or not so nice religious leaders trying to increase their clout etc has very good motivation in inciting riots.
Yes, I didn't think that Hinduism would be that violent either, but the quote in the summary from India's ministry of technology did make it seem that it was a typical occurrence. Of course, subtleties in the phrase may have been lost during translation.
, I quite disagree with your point. India, even though growing, has quite a bit of people with a lot of discontent. I have seen that Indians do care quite a bit for freedom - in both speech and action. In such a country, there will be many who will incite people, and riots do happen. If it was more like China, then freedom of speech is a little more curtailed, and rabble rousers wont have such a free rein. So, Indian government does not have any other option to block communication channels to avoid these speeches becoming more widespread and cause more deaths.
However, was it not the United State's government's job to increase tolerance of black people after the American Civil War? It is the Indian government's responsibility to control its population without resorting to censorship. Especially not censorship of this type. There is a difference between not letting someone go on a government owned radio station saying this and allowing access to information to what Indian people have searched for. Theres a difference between a discussion group and a giant neon sign in the middle of a road.
Until the 1980s, government stepped in many times, repeatedly, over the years, to limit the power of the monopolies in the United States. But after about 1981 or so, we simply stopped caring.
But the problem wasn't that we stopped enforcing anti-trust acts, it was that we deliberately -helped- the monopolies and harmed the general public with such rulings as software patents, the DMCA, etc.
And the result has decimated our marketplace! In becoming more "free", we've simply become more monopolistic, where Wal-Mart now delivers some 30% to 50% of the consumed goods in the USA.
Wal-Mart has competition with a lot of other stores: Target aims to be a more aesthetically pleasing form of Wal-Mart with more specialty goods and generally a more "upscale" atmosphere at the price of a slight bit of higher prices. Costco aims to save consumers more money by allowing them to buy in bulk. And there are many other smaller competitors.
The reason why Wal-Mart has thrived is because it provides a large variety of cheap (in both meanings of the word) goods and is willing to expand into smaller areas. Its a lot more convenient for someone to go to Wal-Mart that has most everything in stock then to go to a specialty store only to find that it would take 2-3 weeks to get in a product that provides little to no price savings. Now, thats not to say that specialty stores are bad or don't provide what customers need, not at all, but they are specialty stores, the things that Wal-Mart isn't going to carry you can pick up there.
In a similar vein, I'm finding that "free speech" never existed. For over a century, there were strict controls on news organizations and reporting agencies - strict policies on libel and a general expectation of truth. This was easily enforced, because there were so few news agencies with the ability to reach a significant percentage of the population. And the result was filtered news and information of generally high-quality.
The information was high quality if you wanted one group's opinion, yes. The thing is, today we try to cover news stories from all possible angles. Back during WWII no effort was made to try to tell the war from Germany's or Japan's point of view, today every conflict even recent ones such as Iraq and Afghanistan have reporters trying to find out both sides of the story. No longer is it ok to just blindly accept the government's viewpoint.
But the Internet has changed all that. Even if strict news reporting standards were still in effect, the news organizations would have to compete with the deafening roar of blogs and other "almost news" sites (Slashdot being one of them!) and so the standards would lose all their teeth anyway
That is because that is what people want to hear. They don't care about the big picture which is what journalism used to be about, they care about individuals and their viewpoints. They want to hear history as told from the diaries of the people who lived through it, not from the history book.
But the end result is that any whining idiot with an opinion that sounds nice gets lots of play, and real information gets lost in the din of noise and misinformation. Without any expectation of accountability, idiots like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly are free to spread their bile and intellectual filth to unwashed masses who haven't developed the means to filter them out, partly due to the falling standards and expectations from our public school system, which has gotten so bad that no schooling at all is often an improvement.
And that is the way it always has been, we jus
Yes, but the problem is it is India's fault for letting this crap happen and its also Hinduism's fault for not tolerating any criticism of their religion. No matter what you blame modern-day Christianity for, generally you can do whatever you want to Christianity and get nothing more than a boycott. About the only time you can incite modern day Christianity to (religiously-backed) violence is what they perceive as violence towards others such as in abortion clinic bombings. But those too are rare. Compare the reaction between a (most would consider pretty blasphemous) piece of art (Piss Christ) and a comic about Muhammad. How many more comics are there referencing Jesus out there that have zero reaction?
Governments need to explain to various religions about free speech and tolerance. No matter where you stand religiously, there is no need to get offended that someone -gasp- might not want to believe the same way you do.
While I can't speak for the iPhone, on my iPod touch core Apple things such as the music "app" have crashed on me, and three times I've had to do a hard reset from doing nothing more complex on the iPod other than changing songs.
And while I do agree that wallpaper changing should be simple, in reality on most Android phones they work on the core first and move outward to the UI, OS X development works first on the UI then works on the core.
Such as....? Most of the alternative search engines simply use a Google scraper to remove the privacy issues and deny Google any revenue from you using it. Lets see, I'd hardly say MSN/Live/Bing are non-evil being owned by Microsoft who has done more harm than good to the tech world, Yahoo! censors just as much if not more than Google, and I'm not entirely sure if Ask does or not but even assuming it doesn't I can never find any relevant results using it. Most other smaller search engines are either too small to give you a decent web search or owned by a large company (like how Yahoo owns AltaVista)
But you also need to look at it that it exposes the evil in censorship. without these incidents Indian censorship might not have been widely reported so citizens wouldn't act on it, the more the individual knows that censorship is taking place the more they will fight it. It is only when censorship is not noticed that it becomes so much more harmful.
If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots.
Sounds like more of a culture problem than a Google problem there. I mean, is the west the only place where people can say "offensive" things without riots? And even then Islamic idiots try to kill them (look at the Danish cartoonist issue) when free speech is protected by law.
India needs to address this problem themselves by increasing free speech, not by trying to shut it down.
...But that is assuming your wireless carrier doesn't mess with VoIP. While I don't think T-Mobile would (heck, they even supported unlocked iPhones for free!) other carriers might not be so forgiving AT&T, Verizon
The thing about the iPhone is... it crashes... often (I don't have one but the majority of my family members do, as do a few of my friends). Sometimes it fails to pick up calls, applications crash, SMS messages are sometimes delayed hours, while I would be quick to blame it on AT&T, my current "dumb" phone doesn't have these problems (well, not that theres any applications to crash on the stupid thing...) while running on AT&T. On my iPod touch, applications will occasionally simply refuse to load, Facebook will randomly crash when loading, there are a few websites Safari doesn't like and crashes, etc. While for a lot of people these may be simple annoyances, for some a lost call may be lost money.
The N900 is good, but I think eventually Android development is going to catch up to the iPhone and have good commercial games. The N900 probably never will (well, aside from emulators and Quake). Its like the difference between buying a PSP and a GP2x, the GP2x is more hacker friendly, both have similar feature-sets, but you are going to get better quality games on the PSP at the expense of not being able to run a few nifty apps (assuming a non-hacked PSP). Community driven projects are great at making emulators, ports of old UNIX games (look at the 100,000 versions of nethack out there) but for new, full featured games that are more than a tech demo, you usually have to go with a commercial OS. Android is good in that it will allow unofficial "shady" development (emulators) while still enticing commercial studios.
...Because compared to T-Mobile AT&T's coverage is huge? Really, I'd much rather support T-Mobile rather than AT&T (not going to support Verizon and Sprint has no coverage either where I travel) but some places I go T-Mobile has no coverage and AT&T does (yeah, they are places in the middle of nowhere but that doesn't diminish the fact I still need cell service). I'd really like to have an unlocked Android handset to use on AT&T that has all the features I want, I'd really like a Droid but that is CDMA only I believe and I'm not switching over to Verizion until they stop screwing with people's phones.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
Um, what hardware monopolies are you talking about? Yeah, just about everything is x86 now, but I wouldn't call either AMD or Intel a monopoly in CPU terms. Same with graphics cards, its about 50% nVidia and 50% ATI though most everyone who isn't a gamer uses integrated graphics.
/. on a low-end Intel Atom, A Pentium 4, an older Athlon, or any number of different CPUs. Its bad enough that a Pentium 4 is now considered sluggish for most modern games and OSes, but think of how worse upgrading would be if it would simply refuse to run on a Pentium 4 because it didn't support some of the features.
And if you want things to work really well on -your- hardware then try running Gentoo and compiling everything with high levels of optimization.
One of the main reasons why everything isn't hardware centric is because people upgrade at different points. For example, not everyone is running a Core i7 at the moment, someone might be reading
Keep in mind that a PS3 has even lower numbers, at least if you want to run Linux,
Well, yeah. And as anyone who has used Linux on PS3 will tell you, its nothing great.
but still provides outstanding floating point performance and is still suitable for many tasks.
Yeah, the tasks of doing obscure math calculations which is what the Cell was made for, but for general purpose use it sucks. Games are similar to what the Cell was designed to do so it does that pretty well.
Oddly enough, the link wasn't a rickroll. But a tribute video to the Amiga set to "still alive"
Wow, the Amiga system makes Mac systems look cheap by comparison, almost $600 for the motherboard alone that only gives you 512 MB of RAM and a 533 Mhz CPU! You can get twice that with a Mac mini. While I do realize that this is a niche product, its still -very- expensive.
How in the world is any of this news? While I can see it being a story if there was really a story, this post is nothing more than information that most Amiga fans already know, and tells us what we already know about dead OSes: A) Projects attempt to emulate the OS and B) Projects attempt to emulate the OS, modernize it and change some things. I fail to see how this made it to the front page.