Having used both the regular site and the mobile site on my G1, I can say that the key advantage of the mobile site is that it's optimized for the small screen size. When the screen is only 2 inches wide, you don't want to clutter it up with sidebars and floated images. Sure, you can get around it a bit with a zoom interface and 2D panning, but it's much simpler if you only need to scroll in one direction: down.
assist parents in keeping these harmful video games out of the hands of children
Wait, so parents can't refuse to buy violent video games for their kids already? They can't confiscate them if the child (or, more likely, teenager) saves up their allowance and goes and buys it themselves?
Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's reasonable, or a good idea.
It's legal for me to take a sledgehammer to my PC. Doesn't mean it's a good idea if I want to keep using it.
It's legal (AFAIK) for a bookstore to sell only one author's books. That doesn't mean it's a good idea if they want to make money outside a niche market. It's also legal (again, AFAIK) for them to enforce a dress code. If that dress code requires top hats, though, it's not terribly reasonable.
FWIW, I have 57 apps on my G1. Of those, I've downloaded and installed at least 35 of them. And there are plenty more apps in the market that I haven't tried.
What uses does it have other than letting people know where Shaq is at or that Ashton beat CNN on subs.
* Running commentary on an event. * Random thoughts. * Announcements (news sites, software updates, blogs, etc.) * Sharing interesting links * Conversations * Fiction told one line at a time. * Tips of the Day
I'm sure if you think about it instead of dismiss it you can come up with other uses.
All of it tied into a single feed that can be access via the web, via a multitude of desktop applications, via smartphone apps, or even via SMS on mobile phones, making it ubiquitous.
Sure, many of these things can be done via email, or RSS, or instant messaging, but Twitter -- or rather, a system like it -- provides a simple way to combine them all into one easily-accessed stream.
Or to put it another way, twitter is the sound of millions of people collectively discovering they have nothing important to say.
The trick is to only post when you have something important (or at least interesting) to say, and to only follow other users who observe the same guideline.
The most famous, of course, is "Never start a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well-known is this: "Just because you can't think of a use for it doesn't mean that no one can."
Depends on the kind of mission. If you're sending people, yeah, it'll be hideously expensive. But the original 90-day Spirit and Opportunity mission cost around $800 million. That's $400 each, or two big-budget movies per rover.
There are lots of H1N1 strains, including those involved in the regular seasonal flu among humans. I've seen people get it in their heads that this is not a new flu virus, because "H1N1" has been around for a while already.
The original Trek only rarely dealt with the Klingons. It was more about the crew exploring the unknown.
That was my first thought as well. Klingons were in, what, 7 or 8 episodes? Out of around 70 episodes total? And the spoken Klingon language wasn't introduced until the movies.
So there's no Klingons -- or at least no spoken Klingon -- in the story. Big deal.
And I say that as someone who's in the middle of rewatching TOS.
Does whether a particular reader is cross-platform really matter? Most people only seem to use the zoom in/out, scroll up/down and preview pane functions anyway. Not a lot to figure out on a different system...
Good point. Now that I think about it, I've been using Evince on Linux, Preview on Mac OS, and Adobe on Windows for quite a while.
Doesn't Apple have their own non-adobe pdf reader built into OS X?
Yes, Preview can read PDFs (among many other formats) well enough that I didn't even install Adobe Reader when I bought a new MacBook a few months ago. Admittedly I'm not sure how well it handles forms, but it has no problems with static PDF files.
Of course, I doubt it's open source/free software, so it wouldn't be on this list anyway.
It's interesting that of the 8 alternatives mentioned, only Okular is listed as being available across the board on Windows, Mac OS X, and (as they put it), "Free Operating Systems." (Linux, BSD, etc.) Even so, it involves installing KDE on top of Windows or Mac OS X, but at least it can be done.
The only two-platform reader, Yap, appears to be based on GNUStep, and I don't actually see a Windows download on the web page.
The FSF's centerpiece, the GPL, depends wholly on copyright for enforcement.
So saying that the FSF has an "open and virulent bias against copyrights" clearly demonstrates either a lack of research, a lack of understanding, or a lack of honesty on the part of the RIAA's lawyers.
This makes me wonder what would happen with my G1 if for some reason I lost access to my Google account. (You basically can't do anything on the phone without being signed in, though you can create a new account from the phone itself.)
I suspect I could just link it to another account and re-sync contacts, calendar, etc. But then there's the question of purchased apps. Are they linked to the phone, to the cellular plan, or to the Google account? It's something I hadn't thought about before.
Remember, they're talking about a release of an app in the year 2010, and whether they'll support it on Windows 2000. Windows XP and Windows Vista have both been out for years already, and Windows 7 should be current by the time this move gets made.
So that's a 10-year-old operating system, four major releases behind, for which Microsoft won't even be providing security updates after July 2010 (unless they've changed their minds).
XP is another story, mainly due to the fact that Vista not only took forever, but has failed to catch on with the market. Fortunately they're only talking about dropping support for systems running on older XP service packs, not for a fully-updated system.
Slashdot Mirror
I should probably clarify that I'm talking about the mobile version of Wikipedia, and not that other site mentioned in the previous post.
Having used both the regular site and the mobile site on my G1, I can say that the key advantage of the mobile site is that it's optimized for the small screen size. When the screen is only 2 inches wide, you don't want to clutter it up with sidebars and floated images. Sure, you can get around it a bit with a zoom interface and 2D panning, but it's much simpler if you only need to scroll in one direction: down.
assist parents in keeping these harmful video games out of the hands of children
Wait, so parents can't refuse to buy violent video games for their kids already? They can't confiscate them if the child (or, more likely, teenager) saves up their allowance and goes and buys it themselves?
Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's reasonable, or a good idea.
It's legal for me to take a sledgehammer to my PC. Doesn't mean it's a good idea if I want to keep using it.
It's legal (AFAIK) for a bookstore to sell only one author's books. That doesn't mean it's a good idea if they want to make money outside a niche market. It's also legal (again, AFAIK) for them to enforce a dress code. If that dress code requires top hats, though, it's not terribly reasonable.
FWIW, I have 57 apps on my G1. Of those, I've downloaded and installed at least 35 of them. And there are plenty more apps in the market that I haven't tried.
Who really needed Twitter anyway. E-mail, voice mail, IM, what's next -- five second audio sound bites (sound-bytes) to all your loser followers?
Obviously, the next stage in the trend is Slashdot comments.
What uses does it have other than letting people know where Shaq is at or that Ashton beat CNN on subs.
* Running commentary on an event.
* Random thoughts.
* Announcements (news sites, software updates, blogs, etc.)
* Sharing interesting links
* Conversations
* Fiction told one line at a time.
* Tips of the Day
I'm sure if you think about it instead of dismiss it you can come up with other uses.
All of it tied into a single feed that can be access via the web, via a multitude of desktop applications, via smartphone apps, or even via SMS on mobile phones, making it ubiquitous.
Sure, many of these things can be done via email, or RSS, or instant messaging, but Twitter -- or rather, a system like it -- provides a simple way to combine them all into one easily-accessed stream.
Or to put it another way, twitter is the sound of millions of people collectively discovering they have nothing important to say.
The trick is to only post when you have something important (or at least interesting) to say, and to only follow other users who observe the same guideline.
IIRC that's 70% of new users, which is still a net gain of 30%/month
The most famous, of course, is "Never start a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well-known is this: "Just because you can't think of a use for it doesn't mean that no one can."
I was going to say after the first paragraph, "Sounds like BIOS." Glad to see someone else has read it.
Depends on the kind of mission. If you're sending people, yeah, it'll be hideously expensive. But the original 90-day Spirit and Opportunity mission cost around $800 million. That's $400 each, or two big-budget movies per rover.
At $200 million, they're approaching the ability to fund a mission to Mars.
There are lots of H1N1 strains, including those involved in the regular seasonal flu among humans. I've seen people get it in their heads that this is not a new flu virus, because "H1N1" has been around for a while already.
Looks like this story was right!
Except my computer hasn't started to freeze and jitter. What's up with that?
The original Trek only rarely dealt with the Klingons. It was more about the crew exploring the unknown.
That was my first thought as well. Klingons were in, what, 7 or 8 episodes? Out of around 70 episodes total? And the spoken Klingon language wasn't introduced until the movies.
So there's no Klingons -- or at least no spoken Klingon -- in the story. Big deal.
And I say that as someone who's in the middle of rewatching TOS.
We don't have all the info yet.
Pshaw! This is the Internet! Why should that stop us from passing judgment!
Apparently it's the Industry Standard term...
Ah, but is Foxit Free Software, or merely free software?
Does whether a particular reader is cross-platform really matter? Most people only seem to use the zoom in/out, scroll up/down and preview pane functions anyway. Not a lot to figure out on a different system...
Good point. Now that I think about it, I've been using Evince on Linux, Preview on Mac OS, and Adobe on Windows for quite a while.
Doesn't Apple have their own non-adobe pdf reader built into OS X?
Yes, Preview can read PDFs (among many other formats) well enough that I didn't even install Adobe Reader when I bought a new MacBook a few months ago. Admittedly I'm not sure how well it handles forms, but it has no problems with static PDF files.
Of course, I doubt it's open source/free software, so it wouldn't be on this list anyway.
It's interesting that of the 8 alternatives mentioned, only Okular is listed as being available across the board on Windows, Mac OS X, and (as they put it), "Free Operating Systems." (Linux, BSD, etc.) Even so, it involves installing KDE on top of Windows or Mac OS X, but at least it can be done.
The only two-platform reader, Yap, appears to be based on GNUStep, and I don't actually see a Windows download on the web page.
The FSF's centerpiece, the GPL, depends wholly on copyright for enforcement.
So saying that the FSF has an "open and virulent bias against copyrights" clearly demonstrates either a lack of research, a lack of understanding, or a lack of honesty on the part of the RIAA's lawyers.
This makes me wonder what would happen with my G1 if for some reason I lost access to my Google account. (You basically can't do anything on the phone without being signed in, though you can create a new account from the phone itself.)
I suspect I could just link it to another account and re-sync contacts, calendar, etc. But then there's the question of purchased apps. Are they linked to the phone, to the cellular plan, or to the Google account? It's something I hadn't thought about before.
Remember, they're talking about a release of an app in the year 2010, and whether they'll support it on Windows 2000. Windows XP and Windows Vista have both been out for years already, and Windows 7 should be current by the time this move gets made.
So that's a 10-year-old operating system, four major releases behind, for which Microsoft won't even be providing security updates after July 2010 (unless they've changed their minds).
XP is another story, mainly due to the fact that Vista not only took forever, but has failed to catch on with the market. Fortunately they're only talking about dropping support for systems running on older XP service packs, not for a fully-updated system.