Like many other people have said, I personally use tabs as a sort of website queuing mechanism.
As I read a page, I open a new tab for every link I find interesting. Once I've finished reading the initial page (which might be an article or similar which I'd prefer to read straight through without interruptions) I can work my way through the tabs that are waiting for me. With something like Wikipedia, you can imagine how quickly the queue grows.
That kind of behaviour was never practical in the pre-tabbed world. Before tabs, I used to read a whole page before skimming backwards to try to relocate any links I thought were interesting, before navigating my browser to each one in turn. The thought of having 7 or 8 browser windows open at the same time makes me feel grubby.
There are plenty of very hot celebrities out there. Angelina Jolie is not one of them.
Seriously, what is with the communal brain fart when it comes to that woman? Did everybody go through some sort of intense POW-style mental conditioning to which I wasn't invited?
Dogs do quite a lot of things that humans might find repugnant. Rape, for example. Or theft. Eating cow turds, for another.
I like to think that some of the difference between us and animals might actually be a good thing.
The fact that our less intelligent and more primitive ancestors might have done something unpleasantly animalistic shouldn't be a big surprise. Behaviour changing over time is all part and partial of evolution.
If you first thought in response to this question is "only one of them can play Pac-Man", you should probably turn off the computer for a few hours and have a quick walk outside.
If I remember rightly, all Ubuntu ever promised to do was be a user-friendly application of Debian technologies (tasty as they are) with a proper release schedule and corporate support.
For that, they've been eminently successful. That's exactly what we have.
We should all know well enough by now- claiming the Year of the Linux Desktop is a popular hobby among Linux enthusiasts, and should never be taken seriously. That may or may not one day happen, and Ubuntu is a gigantic step in the right direction- but miracle worker it aint.
I definitely agree with you on points C & D. These are both huge problems for Linux, and may count as killer problems. It is worth pointing out, however, that both problems apply equally to Apple Mac, and that seems to compete readily enough.
B I may or may not be willing to cede. XP does have immensely better driver support, but this is in many ways due to its long life. Vista had terrible driver support at launch, and may or may not now be better than Linux depending who you ask. There's also a fair bet that future versions of Windows may have similar driver issues- something that doesn't seem to happen to Linux come upgrade time. Apple, of course, has THE WORST driver support, although this is by design. The fact that you can use Mac only on pre-approved hardware can be compared to needing to hand-pick Linux or Vista compatible hardware, only taken to an extreme. Obviously, this doesn't stand in the way of Mac's popularity on the desktop.
Point A, however, is completely nonsensical balderdash. The basic installation procedure for Ubuntu is far easier than the procedure for XP; something that certainly didn't hold back XP's deserved success on the desktop (I can't speak for Vista- but then, Vista wasn't successful on the desktop, making the point moot).
The post-installation set-up for Ubuntu is also pretty favourable in comparison to XP- the hours of cycling through Windows Update and installing third party security software and drivers is no less painful in XP than it is getting Ubuntu ready for use.
Linux isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But anyone who imagines that Windows IS perfect is living on a cloud.
I find it eternally interesting that, while the struggles between religious fundamentalists and secularists in countries like Turkey, Iran & Pakistan are front-page-fodder day in and day out, the self same struggle in the US is barely reported.
In the case of Turkey, proving that they aren't a bunch of religious fundamentalists is one of the key factors to them joining the EU. The fact that Turkey must pass a test that the US might well fail is amusing, to say the least.
I see this as a good thing, mind. The Old Guard of media companies represents something akin to a cartel- for the last 100 years, it's been nearly impossible for any newcomer to break into the market, without having GIGANTIC cash reserves, and a huge dose of luck.
Their terrible handling of the internet age has, as you say, opened them up to being broadsided by new competitors. You now have the bizarre spectacle of a search-engine host owning the internet's best known video site (Google & YouTube), a popular internet-alternative to TV being established by a complete startup (Hulu), and an OS software engineer operating the world's most popular digital music retailer (Apple & iTunes). Why aren't these crowns being proudly worn by established video and music distributors?
Without the old corporations' failures, these market might never have been seized by new rivals. Said incompetence has allowed real competition to enter a previously locked-down market.
The fact it doesn't work outside of the US is moot for this discussion- the GP claims that it is a solution to a problem, not that it's the best thing to be using for 100% of everyone at this exact moment. Antibiotics are the best technical way to treat an infection, even if you're unlucky enough not to have any available when you need it.
It's GUI isn't really the point either. Any site showing embedded video is going to look, to a greater or lesser extent, like YouTube. The "solution" in question is in finding a way of distributing content that is acceptable to both consumers and the content owners.
In Hulu's advertising-driven embedded video we may have that solution. It makes money for the content owner while keeping the content relatively locked down, and that makes them happy. And it gives consumers an opportunity to watch their content for free, on demand, which makes them happy too.
So you're of the opinion that it isn't possible to live in a place, like a place, and yet still find fault with the way said place does things?
I live in the UK. I enjoy living in the UK. Given an opportunity to live anywhere in the world, there's a decent chance I'd choose the UK. But I know sure as hell that there is A LOT wrong with the place, and that I'd be remiss (read: a complete tool) not to my best as a citizen to right these wrongs- or at the very least acknowledge that they exist.
Japan (full disclaimer: never been there) may be the best place to live in the world, but still have god awful labour laws and working practices. It is the duty of everyone there (including people with a different skin colour) to attempt to make their country a better place.
Anyone who dares hold the opinion that "everyone should just shut up and live with it or fuck off to another country" should be beaten to death with their own sizeable idiocy.
People fear cancer, perhaps more than any other disease. Plenty of things will kill you, but cancer is cancer...
Telling someone that a terrorist can give you cancer by setting off a bomb from which you are completely safe, blast-wise, is a terrifying thought. The reality is obviously far less interesting (as other posters point out), but the concept is no less terrifying for that.
I was pretty scared by Event Horizon, even though I don't plan on teleporting through hyperspace...
While I agree with you about Excel (I use Excel at work, Calc at home), the difference doesn't tend to be significant. I find life a little smoother with Excel, but there's nothing I fundamentally can't do in Calc relatively easily. Excel has handy features which make day to day jobs easier, but they're all features that exist in a lesser form in Calc. I could live with Calc no problem.
I've never used Vizio, and I prefer OO.o Writer to MS Word. Powerpoint and Impress are near as dammit for what I need, and I rarely have call to use the rest.
Bearing in mind that OpenOffice is free (beer, speech, etc.), I find the comparison very favourable.
To put it another way- heat is full of microwaves (the same as are in your kitchen appliance) which heats up everything in space to a certain point (2.7 Kelvin, if it's a black something). If you simply rely on "the coldness of space" to cool you down, that's as cool as you're going to get.
That's still EXTREMELY cold, but for this particular mission it's not cold enough. This mission is to measure said background radiation, meaning that in order to do it's job it must be colder than that extremely low temperature that is "the coldness of space".
I didn't realise the universal measure of success was whether you had heard of it.
Seriously though, success is relative. We're not talking about a DS beater here. They're a comparatively tiny company and their target is the very niche market of home-brewers and enthusiasts. From the stand point of the size of their company and their stated aims, they've been pretty successful so far.
You may well be right that most companies, if not all, would be prepared to play dirty to achieve success.
But that's the point of governments. Just because companies want to misbehave, doesn't mean they should be allowed to. Companies competing to make better, cheaper or more efficient products keep the markets ticking over, and make the world a better place. If companies resort to sleazy tactics, all they're competing on is developing the most effective forms of sleaze.
It is an elected government's responsibility to keep the companies in check, for the benefit of the humble consumers. Governments do this by making laws and establishing regulators. When companies break the laws, the governments need to enforce it. Big fines usually do the trick nicely.
Whether it's surprising or not that Intel were playing dirty is beside the point. They broke the rules, and the EU did the right thing by punishing them.
If all the other major governments were doing their part like they should be, the world's technology and economy might be in a lot better place than it is today.
As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.
They know. That is expected. It is, in fact, the point.
The EU have rules that Intel's anti-competitive practices are making it tricky for (in theory) straight-and-narrow manufacturers like AMD, VIA and such to compete.
If Intel are fined, they inevitably pass the cost of the fine onto the cost of their products to keep the books balanced. That makes the price of Intel products less attractive to a consumer. That makes the consumer more likely to purchase off of a rival, like AMD.
And that solves the anti-competitive issue. Bingo.
While all that may be true, most voice mails I get are nothing like as poetic.
99% are "Hi, it's John calling from BigCorp, I need to talk to you about [something], ring me back on [phone number]". Except usually it's mumbled and crackly, or said extremely fast, to the extent that I have to listen 3 times to catch what the number was.
If that couldn't be achieved with a text message or email, I don't know what could.
They could open-source everything except the Unreal engine. Exactly what that would entail is impossible to know without actually knowing what they'd managed to finish. Even textures, models and maps might make a passably diverting mod project.
Like you say though, there isn't much to get excited about in terms of "open-sourcing" a project where the key aspects are licensed proprietary code. Even if you do get some interesting tidbits, we're not exactly talking about another Freespace 2 here.
That's just a folk etymology, and has no basis. For one, no-one called Crapper invented the toilet- the closes is Thomas Crapper, who was a plumber and is who usually does duty in this myth.
The word comes, by various routes, from the Latin word "crapinum", for "chaff" (the stuff in agriculture that is thrown away as waste, such as when harvesting grain).
When you publish a book, you are loosing it upon the world. Back in the days when a printing press and paper was the only way of distributing a book, it made perfect sense for "the publisher" (the owner of the printing press) to sell copies of the physical items he was making. Seeing as the publisher needed manuscripts to print, it made sense that they'd pay authors to buy a licence to their work.
That business model makes no sense in a world of e-books. There is little reason why a publisher should be taking a majority of an inflated price for a download of an item which (torrents allowing) doesn't cost a thing.
The ideal is that a person writes something (which is set loose, and allowed to roam the intellectual world), and is rewarded an appropriate amount to make it worth their while. There's little reason why a person providing a free torrent of their work and asking to be paid whatever people wish to give them (Radiohead style) couldn't make vast amounts of money if they were a good writer.
Trying to apply a paper-based business model to an electronic business is an awful idea, and always has been. Other companies learned that lesson the hard way, but the creative industries are unwilling to make the logical leap.If the publishing giants want to stay relevant, they'll need to learn the new ways of the world, the same way as every other company in the world has or is.
Why is there no major Linux vendor, anyways? Aside from repackaging Windows machines with Linux? Why can't somebody do for Linux what Apple does for OSX?
It's a fair point. Most complaints over Linux netbooks are that they can't do everything an XP netbook can. Seeing as they're always marketed as just a cheaper version of a Windows netbook, it's easy to understand why people might think that. And it's also easy to foresee people making the permanent association between Linux>Cheap>Can't Do As Much>Worse and Windows>Expensive>Does more>Better.
No one makes that assumption or connection with Apple, despite the fact it suffers most of the same problems as Linux does, for a Windows emigrant.
For one, the ultra-miniaturised smartphones are far more expensive than the cheaper netbooks. What you pay for in a little extra bulk, you more than make up for in a lot less price. Why pay £300 for a smartphone when I can get a non-smartphone for £30 and a netbook for £150?
For two, I find the small-form physical keyboard and trackpad of a netbook far more comfortable to use than the tiny touchscreen keyboards or microscopic physical keyboards you get on smartphones. They're fine for checking the odd web site or sending emails/SMS, but thoroughly unpleasant for proper use. Same goes for the tiny screens on smartphones, versus a 7+" netbook screen; the former are fine for occasional use, but no good for anything like sensible computing. If I want to type up a word document while on the train, or spew slashdot comments on the bus, I want a decent interface; but not necessarily a full-size, full-power laptop.
For three, I prefer to keep my mobile phone and my laptop separate, on separate battery packs. I need my phone to last potentially for days between charges; it's my main line of communication with family, friends and colleagues, and literally an emergency lifeline if ever I need to contact or be contacted urgently. If I knew that dicking about on the internet was eating into the battery life of my phone, I would ration my internet usage a lot more stringently. With internet usage on a different device, I can dick about as much as I like.
And for final fours, they're awesome. Who wouldn't want a proper, laptop-style laptop that they can carry around everywhere they go and barely notice it? Surely that's one of the definitions of "it's the future when:"...
Why shouldn't you compare Wikipedia and Google? Your comparison might find that they are very different, but that's the point of a comparison. Making the comparison is especially relevant if people are using them for the same task. And they do function very similarly, from an end-user point of view- you type some keywords in a box and hit enter, and then some results come up with all sorts of information including facts, figures, definitions and links to external sites.
You might as well be saying "You can't compare Win7 to OSX as one is based on UNIX and runs on Apple hardware, and the other isn't and doesn't". While all true, the fact people use them for the same task makes a comparison relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
"the framjabulator snonked on the whooziwhats, so pay us money
Dr Seuss meets Debbie Does Dallas?
Like many other people have said, I personally use tabs as a sort of website queuing mechanism.
As I read a page, I open a new tab for every link I find interesting. Once I've finished reading the initial page (which might be an article or similar which I'd prefer to read straight through without interruptions) I can work my way through the tabs that are waiting for me. With something like Wikipedia, you can imagine how quickly the queue grows.
That kind of behaviour was never practical in the pre-tabbed world. Before tabs, I used to read a whole page before skimming backwards to try to relocate any links I thought were interesting, before navigating my browser to each one in turn. The thought of having 7 or 8 browser windows open at the same time makes me feel grubby.
There are plenty of very hot celebrities out there. Angelina Jolie is not one of them.
Seriously, what is with the communal brain fart when it comes to that woman? Did everybody go through some sort of intense POW-style mental conditioning to which I wasn't invited?
Dogs do quite a lot of things that humans might find repugnant. Rape, for example. Or theft. Eating cow turds, for another.
I like to think that some of the difference between us and animals might actually be a good thing.
The fact that our less intelligent and more primitive ancestors might have done something unpleasantly animalistic shouldn't be a big surprise. Behaviour changing over time is all part and partial of evolution.
If you first thought in response to this question is "only one of them can play Pac-Man", you should probably turn off the computer for a few hours and have a quick walk outside.
If I remember rightly, all Ubuntu ever promised to do was be a user-friendly application of Debian technologies (tasty as they are) with a proper release schedule and corporate support.
For that, they've been eminently successful. That's exactly what we have.
We should all know well enough by now- claiming the Year of the Linux Desktop is a popular hobby among Linux enthusiasts, and should never be taken seriously. That may or may not one day happen, and Ubuntu is a gigantic step in the right direction- but miracle worker it aint.
I definitely agree with you on points C & D. These are both huge problems for Linux, and may count as killer problems. It is worth pointing out, however, that both problems apply equally to Apple Mac, and that seems to compete readily enough.
B I may or may not be willing to cede. XP does have immensely better driver support, but this is in many ways due to its long life. Vista had terrible driver support at launch, and may or may not now be better than Linux depending who you ask. There's also a fair bet that future versions of Windows may have similar driver issues- something that doesn't seem to happen to Linux come upgrade time. Apple, of course, has THE WORST driver support, although this is by design. The fact that you can use Mac only on pre-approved hardware can be compared to needing to hand-pick Linux or Vista compatible hardware, only taken to an extreme. Obviously, this doesn't stand in the way of Mac's popularity on the desktop.
Point A, however, is completely nonsensical balderdash. The basic installation procedure for Ubuntu is far easier than the procedure for XP; something that certainly didn't hold back XP's deserved success on the desktop (I can't speak for Vista- but then, Vista wasn't successful on the desktop, making the point moot).
The post-installation set-up for Ubuntu is also pretty favourable in comparison to XP- the hours of cycling through Windows Update and installing third party security software and drivers is no less painful in XP than it is getting Ubuntu ready for use.
Linux isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But anyone who imagines that Windows IS perfect is living on a cloud.
I find it eternally interesting that, while the struggles between religious fundamentalists and secularists in countries like Turkey, Iran & Pakistan are front-page-fodder day in and day out, the self same struggle in the US is barely reported.
In the case of Turkey, proving that they aren't a bunch of religious fundamentalists is one of the key factors to them joining the EU. The fact that Turkey must pass a test that the US might well fail is amusing, to say the least.
I see this as a good thing, mind. The Old Guard of media companies represents something akin to a cartel- for the last 100 years, it's been nearly impossible for any newcomer to break into the market, without having GIGANTIC cash reserves, and a huge dose of luck.
Their terrible handling of the internet age has, as you say, opened them up to being broadsided by new competitors. You now have the bizarre spectacle of a search-engine host owning the internet's best known video site (Google & YouTube), a popular internet-alternative to TV being established by a complete startup (Hulu), and an OS software engineer operating the world's most popular digital music retailer (Apple & iTunes). Why aren't these crowns being proudly worn by established video and music distributors?
Without the old corporations' failures, these market might never have been seized by new rivals. Said incompetence has allowed real competition to enter a previously locked-down market.
For this we should be thankful.
The fact it doesn't work outside of the US is moot for this discussion- the GP claims that it is a solution to a problem, not that it's the best thing to be using for 100% of everyone at this exact moment. Antibiotics are the best technical way to treat an infection, even if you're unlucky enough not to have any available when you need it.
It's GUI isn't really the point either. Any site showing embedded video is going to look, to a greater or lesser extent, like YouTube. The "solution" in question is in finding a way of distributing content that is acceptable to both consumers and the content owners.
In Hulu's advertising-driven embedded video we may have that solution. It makes money for the content owner while keeping the content relatively locked down, and that makes them happy. And it gives consumers an opportunity to watch their content for free, on demand, which makes them happy too.
So you're of the opinion that it isn't possible to live in a place, like a place, and yet still find fault with the way said place does things?
I live in the UK. I enjoy living in the UK. Given an opportunity to live anywhere in the world, there's a decent chance I'd choose the UK. But I know sure as hell that there is A LOT wrong with the place, and that I'd be remiss (read: a complete tool) not to my best as a citizen to right these wrongs- or at the very least acknowledge that they exist.
Japan (full disclaimer: never been there) may be the best place to live in the world, but still have god awful labour laws and working practices. It is the duty of everyone there (including people with a different skin colour) to attempt to make their country a better place.
Anyone who dares hold the opinion that "everyone should just shut up and live with it or fuck off to another country" should be beaten to death with their own sizeable idiocy.
People fear cancer, perhaps more than any other disease. Plenty of things will kill you, but cancer is cancer...
Telling someone that a terrorist can give you cancer by setting off a bomb from which you are completely safe, blast-wise, is a terrifying thought. The reality is obviously far less interesting (as other posters point out), but the concept is no less terrifying for that.
I was pretty scared by Event Horizon, even though I don't plan on teleporting through hyperspace...
While I agree with you about Excel (I use Excel at work, Calc at home), the difference doesn't tend to be significant. I find life a little smoother with Excel, but there's nothing I fundamentally can't do in Calc relatively easily. Excel has handy features which make day to day jobs easier, but they're all features that exist in a lesser form in Calc. I could live with Calc no problem.
I've never used Vizio, and I prefer OO.o Writer to MS Word. Powerpoint and Impress are near as dammit for what I need, and I rarely have call to use the rest.
Bearing in mind that OpenOffice is free (beer, speech, etc.), I find the comparison very favourable.
To put it another way- heat is full of microwaves (the same as are in your kitchen appliance) which heats up everything in space to a certain point (2.7 Kelvin, if it's a black something). If you simply rely on "the coldness of space" to cool you down, that's as cool as you're going to get.
That's still EXTREMELY cold, but for this particular mission it's not cold enough. This mission is to measure said background radiation, meaning that in order to do it's job it must be colder than that extremely low temperature that is "the coldness of space".
I didn't realise the universal measure of success was whether you had heard of it.
Seriously though, success is relative. We're not talking about a DS beater here. They're a comparatively tiny company and their target is the very niche market of home-brewers and enthusiasts. From the stand point of the size of their company and their stated aims, they've been pretty successful so far.
You may well be right that most companies, if not all, would be prepared to play dirty to achieve success.
But that's the point of governments. Just because companies want to misbehave, doesn't mean they should be allowed to. Companies competing to make better, cheaper or more efficient products keep the markets ticking over, and make the world a better place. If companies resort to sleazy tactics, all they're competing on is developing the most effective forms of sleaze.
It is an elected government's responsibility to keep the companies in check, for the benefit of the humble consumers. Governments do this by making laws and establishing regulators. When companies break the laws, the governments need to enforce it. Big fines usually do the trick nicely.
Whether it's surprising or not that Intel were playing dirty is beside the point. They broke the rules, and the EU did the right thing by punishing them.
If all the other major governments were doing their part like they should be, the world's technology and economy might be in a lot better place than it is today.
As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.
They know. That is expected. It is, in fact, the point.
The EU have rules that Intel's anti-competitive practices are making it tricky for (in theory) straight-and-narrow manufacturers like AMD, VIA and such to compete.
If Intel are fined, they inevitably pass the cost of the fine onto the cost of their products to keep the books balanced. That makes the price of Intel products less attractive to a consumer. That makes the consumer more likely to purchase off of a rival, like AMD.
And that solves the anti-competitive issue. Bingo.
That the theory, anyhow.
While all that may be true, most voice mails I get are nothing like as poetic.
99% are "Hi, it's John calling from BigCorp, I need to talk to you about [something], ring me back on [phone number]". Except usually it's mumbled and crackly, or said extremely fast, to the extent that I have to listen 3 times to catch what the number was.
If that couldn't be achieved with a text message or email, I don't know what could.
They could open-source everything except the Unreal engine. Exactly what that would entail is impossible to know without actually knowing what they'd managed to finish. Even textures, models and maps might make a passably diverting mod project.
Like you say though, there isn't much to get excited about in terms of "open-sourcing" a project where the key aspects are licensed proprietary code. Even if you do get some interesting tidbits, we're not exactly talking about another Freespace 2 here.
That's just a folk etymology, and has no basis. For one, no-one called Crapper invented the toilet- the closes is Thomas Crapper, who was a plumber and is who usually does duty in this myth.
The word comes, by various routes, from the Latin word "crapinum", for "chaff" (the stuff in agriculture that is thrown away as waste, such as when harvesting grain).
I disagree.
When you publish a book, you are loosing it upon the world. Back in the days when a printing press and paper was the only way of distributing a book, it made perfect sense for "the publisher" (the owner of the printing press) to sell copies of the physical items he was making. Seeing as the publisher needed manuscripts to print, it made sense that they'd pay authors to buy a licence to their work.
That business model makes no sense in a world of e-books. There is little reason why a publisher should be taking a majority of an inflated price for a download of an item which (torrents allowing) doesn't cost a thing.
The ideal is that a person writes something (which is set loose, and allowed to roam the intellectual world), and is rewarded an appropriate amount to make it worth their while. There's little reason why a person providing a free torrent of their work and asking to be paid whatever people wish to give them (Radiohead style) couldn't make vast amounts of money if they were a good writer.
Trying to apply a paper-based business model to an electronic business is an awful idea, and always has been. Other companies learned that lesson the hard way, but the creative industries are unwilling to make the logical leap.If the publishing giants want to stay relevant, they'll need to learn the new ways of the world, the same way as every other company in the world has or is.
Why is there no major Linux vendor, anyways? Aside from repackaging Windows machines with Linux? Why can't somebody do for Linux what Apple does for OSX?
It's a fair point. Most complaints over Linux netbooks are that they can't do everything an XP netbook can. Seeing as they're always marketed as just a cheaper version of a Windows netbook, it's easy to understand why people might think that. And it's also easy to foresee people making the permanent association between Linux>Cheap>Can't Do As Much>Worse and Windows>Expensive>Does more>Better.
No one makes that assumption or connection with Apple, despite the fact it suffers most of the same problems as Linux does, for a Windows emigrant.
For one, the ultra-miniaturised smartphones are far more expensive than the cheaper netbooks. What you pay for in a little extra bulk, you more than make up for in a lot less price. Why pay £300 for a smartphone when I can get a non-smartphone for £30 and a netbook for £150?
For two, I find the small-form physical keyboard and trackpad of a netbook far more comfortable to use than the tiny touchscreen keyboards or microscopic physical keyboards you get on smartphones. They're fine for checking the odd web site or sending emails/SMS, but thoroughly unpleasant for proper use. Same goes for the tiny screens on smartphones, versus a 7+" netbook screen; the former are fine for occasional use, but no good for anything like sensible computing. If I want to type up a word document while on the train, or spew slashdot comments on the bus, I want a decent interface; but not necessarily a full-size, full-power laptop.
For three, I prefer to keep my mobile phone and my laptop separate, on separate battery packs. I need my phone to last potentially for days between charges; it's my main line of communication with family, friends and colleagues, and literally an emergency lifeline if ever I need to contact or be contacted urgently. If I knew that dicking about on the internet was eating into the battery life of my phone, I would ration my internet usage a lot more stringently. With internet usage on a different device, I can dick about as much as I like.
And for final fours, they're awesome. Who wouldn't want a proper, laptop-style laptop that they can carry around everywhere they go and barely notice it? Surely that's one of the definitions of "it's the future when:"...
I didn't realise the UK was a developing country.
Oh well, the recession makes fools of us all I guess...
Why shouldn't you compare Wikipedia and Google? Your comparison might find that they are very different, but that's the point of a comparison. Making the comparison is especially relevant if people are using them for the same task. And they do function very similarly, from an end-user point of view- you type some keywords in a box and hit enter, and then some results come up with all sorts of information including facts, figures, definitions and links to external sites.
You might as well be saying "You can't compare Win7 to OSX as one is based on UNIX and runs on Apple hardware, and the other isn't and doesn't". While all true, the fact people use them for the same task makes a comparison relevant.