Every optical mouse has both a light source and a digital camera, yet they cost $20. A 3-D fingerprint scanner requires probably one extra camera. If they build 100 per year, they'll cost thousands of dollars. If they build a million, they'll be under $100.
I started a company doing EDA and ASIC IP, but at the time, my favorite second alternative (back in 1999), was building a 3-D scanner out of 2 digital cameras and some software. I wanted to scan women so they could load a fairly accurate body shape onto an online avatar, and preview how clothing would look on them. Now, for best results, the ladies would need to spin naked in front of the device. I was really looking forward to debugging that technology:-)
All it would take is one damn good phone running Android to topple Apple off its perch.
This is absolutely key, and for some reason, stupid cell-phone marketing guys don't get it. Motorola should recall how the RAZR happened. In short, a brilliant marketing guy at Motorola with the clout to ignore everyone else forced Motorola to build the RAZR. It turns out that every time a marketing department is allowed to design the next product, they do user forums and talk to the sales team. The one thing that comes back loud and clear is "Make it cheaper!". Thus, we get crap like the new Motorola CLIQ. It takes a genius like Steve Jobs to understand why we actually want products that are over-priced and beautiful, even when they offer no new functionality: we're stupid and vain. When asked, we all say, "all I care about is functionality... I'm not vain!" Then, at the store, our true nature takes over and we fork over $$ for the pretty objects. Why can't marketing guys figure this out? And... I am vain. I've owned an iPhone and currently own a T-Mobile G1. My G1 has some real problems - the camera sucks, the battery is wimpy, it has no built-in flash, it's bigger than an iPhone but has a smaller screen... however, what really pisses me off about it is that it's ugly and clunky! Make a beautiful Android phone, and I will switch carriers, fork over $400, and sign a two year contract! Marketing morons: I'm your typical user!
Actually, I have it on pretty good authority that Obama was born in Hawaii, is a practising Christian, prefers women to men, wrote a couple of insightful books, and got elected democratically to lead the world's leading democracy, rather than a communist nation. I also heard he won some prize recently, but I could be mistaken about that.
However, many people prefer to believe fiction rather than the truth. Feel free to dig for your own particular flavor of fiction if you are looking to blind yourself. It's amazing how many of us prefer such fiction to real news, which is one of the many reasons news providers are in trouble.
Agreed. Modern Internet-based advertising will become more effective than printed adds ever could, and that should be the salvation for news providers. The pie should get larger, not smaller.
Unfortunately, three things are working against news providers. First, Google gets a disproportionate share of the advertising dollars, without providing content at all, and Craigslist.com eliminates the classified section revenue. That's what's got Murdoch pissed. Second, now that anyone can become a content provider with a blog of their own, news outlets have far more competition. Many of us prefer to get their news spoon-fed through a filter of our choice, rather than digging for it. My insane step-brother calls his ditto-head insane conservative blog authors "analysts", but that particular filter has "proved" Obama is a non-citizen Muslim gay communist murderer, who never wrote a book. I tend to find out about the world through slashdot.org (which is worse?). Third, corporations are thick-headed and backwards (including News corp). This whole Internet fad has yet to register strongly on our collective corporate conscience. It will take them at least another decade to realise that Internet advertising is a good deal, and until then, they'll stupidly ignore the medium. They also need to figure out some new business models.
But in the end, the pie will be bigger, not smaller.
Good move. Perhaps this is one solution to the Fermi Paradox: In every advanced civilisation, some smart-ass kid builds a coke-bottle rocket capable of reaching escape velocity, and uses it to nudge some huge asteroid onto a collision course with the planet full of dorks who hate smart kids.
Perhaps instead, the specifics of Network Neutrality enforcement should be amended to make more sense. As you suggest, unrestricted free VoIP over 3G might cause your web and e-mail mobile experience to suffer. However, AT&T is free to charge customers using more bandwidth more money, if this becomes a problem. Even if the FCC decides to allow AT&T to perform traffic shaping to help average users have more responsive network access, the FCC should still require AT&T to practice non-discrimination against packets based on source or destination. AT&T should never be allowed to extort fees from content providers for access by AT&T's customers, regardless of what physical form the network takes.
Way too many people here on Slashdot bash apple for pathetic reasons. Why all the Apple hate?
Apple is just trying to be a good corporate citizen. They have absolutely no hidden agenda, like placating the FCC, or responding to competitors... all they really want is your love. Steve Jobs is your friend. Love him, and trust his judgement. He really only cares about you, and Apple's profits are simply a blessing from Heaven that comes along as a side benefit while Steve looks out for your best interests. He limits the programs you can run, so you wont run anything dangerous to yourself. He protects you through Apple's wonderful EULA, and through limiting your choices to only gold-standard Apple blessed applications.
Agreed. As other posters point out, they'll probably traffic-shape VoIP into a useless protocol over 3G. What I care more about is VoIP over my phone's WIFI. It's my freaking phone, and my WIFI and internet connection, and AT&T doesn't even work inside my house. Yet AT&T and Apple wont let me run software that already exists for the iPhone to solve this problem.
There is some sort of new software freedom needed here. If an iPhone were a closed system, like the iPod Nano, it would be unreasonable for the government to force Apple to support developers. However, the iPhone is programmable. What's new here is how Apple regulates software that can run on the computers their customer's buy (an iPhone is a computer). I think companies should be barred from limiting what programs I run on any generic programmable computer I own. Any computer where programmers are encouraged to create 3rd-party software should have the ability to run such software without interference from evil companies. This freedom could be stated as:
Freedom to run applications of my choosing on computers I own, so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others.
Such a right should be guaranteed, right along with other fundamental network neutrality rules, like non-discrimination based on source or destination of packets.
Dude, you simply have zero clue about what blind people are good at. I had lunch yesterday with a blind Ph.D. candidate who probably codes circles around you. Programming is one of the best occupations for the blind. There's JAWs in Windows that does the job beautifully, allowing bind programmers to read the screen at 850 words per minute, probably 3X your reading speed. There are blind and deaf programmers who use Braille displays to code like you wouldn't believe. JPEGs are inherently 'visual' mediums, but text is the vast majority of everything on the web, and virtually 100% of programming.
Anyway, we probably agree that there are too many dumb government regulations, like the one that recovery.org fails. I used the Orca screen reader to test it out, and while the site could be improved, it was fine. I had no trouble listening to the data at high speed.
No surprise at all. The right-wing anti-Obama crowd once again shows how petty they are... Poor accessibility on a web site? $10M for it? Well, here's an idea... we could give billions and billions to companies with strong ties to the Obama administration, and hide everything behind a vale of secrecy. It worked so well for the last administration.
I'm losing my central vision and ability to read, so accessibility is a hot-button topic for me. Gmail is terrible, and that effects me - Google should do something about it. Recovery.gov is far easier to navigate with a screen reader. The first item on their web site is a graphic which does nothing for the blind, but the first link under it is to a text version. It's not perfect, but at least average. Anyway, almost no sites pay attention to accessibility guidelines. It's up to programmers behind programs like JAWs to make them accessible anyway, and frankly, they do a pretty good job.
Recovery.org is a huge success. Even for the blind.
Great, just great. I WAS planning on hiding out at the MALL, rather than my farm house, but since you've alerted every zombie who reads slashdot (and ALL zombies read slashdot), I'll be hiding out in my farmhouse.
Good insights... I certainly hope your predictions are more accurate than mine! Maybe we can just let Iran get nukes, and Israel will actually not attack Iran, and eventually we'll move towards peace in the Middle East.
I mostly agree with you. What scares me is that Israel's conservative government is very likely convinced that Iran will in fact use their nukes against Israel. If you agree that they probably do feel that way, wouldn't you expect Israel to nuke Iran in a preemptive strike?
So, there's only one way to get Iran to not work on nukes - you have to actually convince them using, wait for it, rational arguments.
I have two rational arguments:
- Israel will very likely nuke every major Iranian city if they feel Iran is nearing completion of a nuke. - Even if Israel is convinced to hold off any attack against Iran, any nuclear power could simply give Hezbollah a nuke and blame Iran. Consider Pakistan, for example. If Tel Aviv is attacked, Israel will naturally respond by nuking Tehran.
In short, because of Iran's connections with terrorists, and because Israel is half-crazy and already has nukes, the equation for Iran is: nukes == death. Only insane leadership in Iran would pursue this option.... D'oh!
From the inception of Hezbollah to the present, the elimination of the State of Israel has been one of Hezbollah's primary goals.
They site many references. Feel free to look them up. Hezbollah gets it's way == every Jew in Israel dies. Not that the Jews feel much more friendly towards Hezbollah.
Jeeze... you guys do realize that it's bad to have nukes in the Middle East... right?
I agree! Iran also looks to the North Korean example where Bush was all bluster and doom until Korean set off their first nuke. Then, Bush was back to the bargaining table with free food, and energy.
However, that doesn't change the nukes == death equation for Iran. As I said, be afraid.
I think Obama should extend our "nuclear shield" to our allies in the Middle East. We should have a policy that if any unclaimed nuke goes off against any ally who wants such protection, then we nuke Iran. That kind of policy might be enough to keep Israel from launching a preemptive nuclear attack. Very very dangerous, but possibly effective.
I didn't make myself clear. I don't mind people having e-readers without decent speech output. That's fine. What Amazon is doing that's evil is DRM-ing all the e-books, making it impossible for me to buy their products and listen to them with high quality speech synthesis.
Amazon is quickly tying up distribution rights, and leaving the blind/visually impaired in the lurch. We need to be able to translate electronic media into other forms: Braille, high speed speech, or even plain old huge fonts with magnifiers on a PC.
For some reason, people seemed to care about the disabled at one point, and provided wheel-chair access everywhere, at great expense to business. Why is there no outcry for the blind and visually impaired? If Amazon wins this, and they wind up as the only source for many books, many people will be hurt. Fuck them.
The Kindle isn't working well? Good. Let it burn in Hell.
As a reader who is losing vision and the ability to read, the Kindle and US copyright bullshit seriously pisses me off. I no longer "read" books, but instead convert them to audio-books which I play at around 500 words per minute, using the totally awesome Eloquence TTS (the old ViaVoice speech synthesiser). I don't mind paying for the e-books, but Amazon and friends are leaving me high and dry. Their built-in voice in Kindle is completely useless, because it wont play fast and wouldn't be understandable even if it were, and it's not even enabled for many books. It's torture having to listen to it.
Fortunately, the Microsoft Reader format has been broken, with converlit program. I buy all my e-books from ebooks.com, and then convert them with some Linux utilities, and enjoy listening to them on my phone. However, I'm a big slashdot sort of geek, and this sort of hacking is natural for me. The vast majority of visually impaired individuals are stuck with no good solutions.
Every freaking building in the US that serves the public has to put a ramp to its door for the disabled. Why does Amazon get to slam the door in our face? FUCK AMAZON.
Well... since you welcomed constructive criticism! Actually, I mostly agree. In short, you're point is we wont get sanctions against Iran, and even if we did, it'd make things worse, not better. Very insightful.
Here's my analysis. Iran is clearly building nukes, and will succeed unless stopped. They clearly arm Hezbollah in their efforts to destroy Israel. Israel has nukes now. What do you think Israel will do about it?
My guess is Israel will attack Iran. If it were possible to just blow up a plant or two and destroy Iran's nuclear efforts, I think they would, but apparently, that wont work. So, I think there is a very strong possibility Israel will nuke Iran preemptively. My guess is the only reason they haven't already is they're hoping diplomacy might work, and because they really don't want to piss off the whole freaking world worse than they already have. Even if Israel has the self-restraint to hold off on nuking Iran, other countries will having incentives for giving Hezbollah nukes and then blaming Iran, so Iran gets nuked in any case.
If you were an intelligent Iranian, you'd have to be able to figure this out. Nukes == death. Therefore, the Iranian leadership is crazy, and Israel would be crazy to not nuke Iran.
Anyway, I'm no Israel fan-boy. For a culture victimised by genocide, Israelis sure don't mind brutally oppressing whole populations for decades. Go figure. And, I kind of see how crazy people came to power in Iran: look at a map - we have our armies on their two longest borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries we just invaded! They have very reasonable cause to fear the US right now.
Good point. And USB has shown that power over the cable is a good thing, but needs to be in the initial spec. Power over Ethernet (PoE) is still sucking wind.
I'll throw in that Open Solaris has the best accessibility software for the blind, in Sun's Orca project. It works in Linux, but not as well as where it's developed... in Solaris. This is a key indicator of just how ready an OS is for the desktop, IMO.
Anyway, the whole Windows vs Linux flame war is pointless. Linux is the best OS ever developed for hackers, period. I couldn't be happier with it (unless it ran cool software like Orca stably). Windows is for Joe Sixpack who needs games and porn. Joe will always outnumber the hackers. It's ok. Just learn to live with it.
Actually, I hope the myTouch is a big improvement over the G1. I've never played with a myTouch (there have to be jokes to make over that sentence). The bigger screen and lack of a keyboard are features I want. Also, the battery is slightly bigger, but still only a pathetic portion of the total volume compared to an iPhone. I would consider upgrading, but when I found it didn't have a freaking headphone jack, I just couldn't. I'll never again make the mistake of buying a phone without one.
Anyway, since you asked, I had one of the earliest G1s. Before that, I had an iPhone. So, in comparison to the iPhone (which isn't really fair, it's like comparing to a Ferrari) here's what sucks:
- No headphone jack. Are you kidding me? How incredibly stupid do the HTC people have to be to keep this super-important feature off the new myTouch? - The speaker is too quiet. I had this problem with my original iPhone, too. Crud gets in that speaker slot, and you can't hear a conversation in any noisy environment. - While the phone is as big as an iPhone, the battery is about 1/3 the size. - While the phone is as big as an iPhone, the screen is only 2.5", compared to 3.5" for the iPhone. Size matters. - I prefer a slim design without a slide-out keyboard. I know this is a religious war, but it's fixed for me in the myTouch. - The whole phone is built out of plastic. I pay too much for this phone to get a cheap feeling PoS. - The camera in my phone sucks big-time. Even in the small screen, images appear clear in the middle, but faded on the edges, and the colour sucks, and I'm colour blind! - My 1st generation iPhone had 8 gig of flash. My G1 had 0. I had to pay $$ for the micro-sd card. Micro-sd is both expensive, and lacks high-capacity cards. - The iPhone has all kinds of cool peripherals, like the stereo we bought for our iPods, and my car, which has an iPhone plug. This isn't really a problem with the G1, but let's face it... Apple is leveraginig their lead.
All and all, the G1 is the third best phone I've owned, given the technology at the time. My old razr was awesome, but I wanted to kill people at Verison for charging me to use my own camera. My iPhone was just awesome, until freaking Apple borked it. All in all, though I'm whining a lot, I've had more satisfaction from my lame G1 than any other phone.
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Every optical mouse has both a light source and a digital camera, yet they cost $20. A 3-D fingerprint scanner requires probably one extra camera. If they build 100 per year, they'll cost thousands of dollars. If they build a million, they'll be under $100.
I started a company doing EDA and ASIC IP, but at the time, my favorite second alternative (back in 1999), was building a 3-D scanner out of 2 digital cameras and some software. I wanted to scan women so they could load a fairly accurate body shape onto an online avatar, and preview how clothing would look on them. Now, for best results, the ladies would need to spin naked in front of the device. I was really looking forward to debugging that technology :-)
This is absolutely key, and for some reason, stupid cell-phone marketing guys don't get it. Motorola should recall how the RAZR happened. In short, a brilliant marketing guy at Motorola with the clout to ignore everyone else forced Motorola to build the RAZR.
It turns out that every time a marketing department is allowed to design the next product, they do user forums and talk to the sales team. The one thing that comes back loud and clear is "Make it cheaper!". Thus, we get crap like the new Motorola CLIQ.
It takes a genius like Steve Jobs to understand why we actually want products that are over-priced and beautiful, even when they offer no new functionality: we're stupid and vain. When asked, we all say, "all I care about is functionality... I'm not vain!" Then, at the store, our true nature takes over and we fork over $$ for the pretty objects.
Why can't marketing guys figure this out?
And... I am vain. I've owned an iPhone and currently own a T-Mobile G1. My G1 has some real problems - the camera sucks, the battery is wimpy, it has no built-in flash, it's bigger than an iPhone but has a smaller screen... however, what really pisses me off about it is that it's ugly and clunky! Make a beautiful Android phone, and I will switch carriers, fork over $400, and sign a two year contract!
Marketing morons: I'm your typical user!
Actually, I have it on pretty good authority that Obama was born in Hawaii, is a practising Christian, prefers women to men, wrote a couple of insightful books, and got elected democratically to lead the world's leading democracy, rather than a communist nation. I also heard he won some prize recently, but I could be mistaken about that.
However, many people prefer to believe fiction rather than the truth. Feel free to dig for your own particular flavor of fiction if you are looking to blind yourself. It's amazing how many of us prefer such fiction to real news, which is one of the many reasons news providers are in trouble.
Agreed. Modern Internet-based advertising will become more effective than printed adds ever could, and that should be the salvation for news providers. The pie should get larger, not smaller.
Unfortunately, three things are working against news providers. First, Google gets a disproportionate share of the advertising dollars, without providing content at all, and Craigslist.com eliminates the classified section revenue. That's what's got Murdoch pissed. Second, now that anyone can become a content provider with a blog of their own, news outlets have far more competition. Many of us prefer to get their news spoon-fed through a filter of our choice, rather than digging for it. My insane step-brother calls his ditto-head insane conservative blog authors "analysts", but that particular filter has "proved" Obama is a non-citizen Muslim gay communist murderer, who never wrote a book. I tend to find out about the world through slashdot.org (which is worse?). Third, corporations are thick-headed and backwards (including News corp). This whole Internet fad has yet to register strongly on our collective corporate conscience. It will take them at least another decade to realise that Internet advertising is a good deal, and until then, they'll stupidly ignore the medium. They also need to figure out some new business models.
But in the end, the pie will be bigger, not smaller.
Good move. Perhaps this is one solution to the Fermi Paradox: In every advanced civilisation, some smart-ass kid builds a coke-bottle rocket capable of reaching escape velocity, and uses it to nudge some huge asteroid onto a collision course with the planet full of dorks who hate smart kids.
Perhaps instead, the specifics of Network Neutrality enforcement should be amended to make more sense. As you suggest, unrestricted free VoIP over 3G might cause your web and e-mail mobile experience to suffer. However, AT&T is free to charge customers using more bandwidth more money, if this becomes a problem. Even if the FCC decides to allow AT&T to perform traffic shaping to help average users have more responsive network access, the FCC should still require AT&T to practice non-discrimination against packets based on source or destination. AT&T should never be allowed to extort fees from content providers for access by AT&T's customers, regardless of what physical form the network takes.
Way too many people here on Slashdot bash apple for pathetic reasons. Why all the Apple hate?
Apple is just trying to be a good corporate citizen. They have absolutely no hidden agenda, like placating the FCC, or responding to competitors... all they really want is your love. Steve Jobs is your friend. Love him, and trust his judgement. He really only cares about you, and Apple's profits are simply a blessing from Heaven that comes along as a side benefit while Steve looks out for your best interests. He limits the programs you can run, so you wont run anything dangerous to yourself. He protects you through Apple's wonderful EULA, and through limiting your choices to only gold-standard Apple blessed applications.
Agreed. As other posters point out, they'll probably traffic-shape VoIP into a useless protocol over 3G. What I care more about is VoIP over my phone's WIFI. It's my freaking phone, and my WIFI and internet connection, and AT&T doesn't even work inside my house. Yet AT&T and Apple wont let me run software that already exists for the iPhone to solve this problem.
There is some sort of new software freedom needed here. If an iPhone were a closed system, like the iPod Nano, it would be unreasonable for the government to force Apple to support developers. However, the iPhone is programmable. What's new here is how Apple regulates software that can run on the computers their customer's buy (an iPhone is a computer). I think companies should be barred from limiting what programs I run on any generic programmable computer I own. Any computer where programmers are encouraged to create 3rd-party software should have the ability to run such software without interference from evil companies. This freedom could be stated as:
Freedom to run applications of my choosing on computers I own, so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others.
Such a right should be guaranteed, right along with other fundamental network neutrality rules, like non-discrimination based on source or destination of packets.
Dude, you simply have zero clue about what blind people are good at. I had lunch yesterday with a blind Ph.D. candidate who probably codes circles around you. Programming is one of the best occupations for the blind. There's JAWs in Windows that does the job beautifully, allowing bind programmers to read the screen at 850 words per minute, probably 3X your reading speed. There are blind and deaf programmers who use Braille displays to code like you wouldn't believe. JPEGs are inherently 'visual' mediums, but text is the vast majority of everything on the web, and virtually 100% of programming.
Anyway, we probably agree that there are too many dumb government regulations, like the one that recovery.org fails. I used the Orca screen reader to test it out, and while the site could be improved, it was fine. I had no trouble listening to the data at high speed.
No surprise at all. The right-wing anti-Obama crowd once again shows how petty they are... Poor accessibility on a web site? $10M for it? Well, here's an idea... we could give billions and billions to companies with strong ties to the Obama administration, and hide everything behind a vale of secrecy. It worked so well for the last administration.
I'm losing my central vision and ability to read, so accessibility is a hot-button topic for me. Gmail is terrible, and that effects me - Google should do something about it. Recovery.gov is far easier to navigate with a screen reader. The first item on their web site is a graphic which does nothing for the blind, but the first link under it is to a text version. It's not perfect, but at least average. Anyway, almost no sites pay attention to accessibility guidelines. It's up to programmers behind programs like JAWs to make them accessible anyway, and frankly, they do a pretty good job.
Recovery.org is a huge success. Even for the blind.
Great, just great. I WAS planning on hiding out at the MALL, rather than my farm house, but since you've alerted every zombie who reads slashdot (and ALL zombies read slashdot), I'll be hiding out in my farmhouse.
Good insights... I certainly hope your predictions are more accurate than mine! Maybe we can just let Iran get nukes, and Israel will actually not attack Iran, and eventually we'll move towards peace in the Middle East.
I mostly agree with you. What scares me is that Israel's conservative government is very likely convinced that Iran will in fact use their nukes against Israel. If you agree that they probably do feel that way, wouldn't you expect Israel to nuke Iran in a preemptive strike?
Why did you stop reading the article there? Sure, Hezbollah does some positive things, and has a broader scope than just the destruction of Israel.
However, Hezbollah is devoted to destroying Israel. Here are some links, in case you didn't bother to find them.
I have two rational arguments:
- Israel will very likely nuke every major Iranian city if they feel Iran is nearing completion of a nuke.
- Even if Israel is convinced to hold off any attack against Iran, any nuclear power could simply give Hezbollah a nuke and blame Iran. Consider Pakistan, for example. If Tel Aviv is attacked, Israel will naturally respond by nuking Tehran.
In short, because of Iran's connections with terrorists, and because Israel is half-crazy and already has nukes, the equation for Iran is: nukes == death. Only insane leadership in Iran would pursue this option.... D'oh!
You're kidding, right? How about the Wikipedia entry?
They site many references. Feel free to look them up. Hezbollah gets it's way == every Jew in Israel dies. Not that the Jews feel much more friendly towards Hezbollah.
Jeeze... you guys do realize that it's bad to have nukes in the Middle East... right?
I agree! Iran also looks to the North Korean example where Bush was all bluster and doom until Korean set off their first nuke. Then, Bush was back to the bargaining table with free food, and energy.
However, that doesn't change the nukes == death equation for Iran. As I said, be afraid.
I think Obama should extend our "nuclear shield" to our allies in the Middle East. We should have a policy that if any unclaimed nuke goes off against any ally who wants such protection, then we nuke Iran. That kind of policy might be enough to keep Israel from launching a preemptive nuclear attack. Very very dangerous, but possibly effective.
I didn't make myself clear. I don't mind people having e-readers without decent speech output. That's fine. What Amazon is doing that's evil is DRM-ing all the e-books, making it impossible for me to buy their products and listen to them with high quality speech synthesis.
Amazon is quickly tying up distribution rights, and leaving the blind/visually impaired in the lurch. We need to be able to translate electronic media into other forms: Braille, high speed speech, or even plain old huge fonts with magnifiers on a PC.
For some reason, people seemed to care about the disabled at one point, and provided wheel-chair access everywhere, at great expense to business. Why is there no outcry for the blind and visually impaired? If Amazon wins this, and they wind up as the only source for many books, many people will be hurt. Fuck them.
The Kindle isn't working well? Good. Let it burn in Hell.
As a reader who is losing vision and the ability to read, the Kindle and US copyright bullshit seriously pisses me off. I no longer "read" books, but instead convert them to audio-books which I play at around 500 words per minute, using the totally awesome Eloquence TTS (the old ViaVoice speech synthesiser). I don't mind paying for the e-books, but Amazon and friends are leaving me high and dry. Their built-in voice in Kindle is completely useless, because it wont play fast and wouldn't be understandable even if it were, and it's not even enabled for many books. It's torture having to listen to it.
Fortunately, the Microsoft Reader format has been broken, with converlit program. I buy all my e-books from ebooks.com, and then convert them with some Linux utilities, and enjoy listening to them on my phone. However, I'm a big slashdot sort of geek, and this sort of hacking is natural for me. The vast majority of visually impaired individuals are stuck with no good solutions.
Every freaking building in the US that serves the public has to put a ramp to its door for the disabled. Why does Amazon get to slam the door in our face? FUCK AMAZON.
Well... since you welcomed constructive criticism! Actually, I mostly agree. In short, you're point is we wont get sanctions against Iran, and even if we did, it'd make things worse, not better. Very insightful.
Here's my analysis. Iran is clearly building nukes, and will succeed unless stopped. They clearly arm Hezbollah in their efforts to destroy Israel. Israel has nukes now. What do you think Israel will do about it?
My guess is Israel will attack Iran. If it were possible to just blow up a plant or two and destroy Iran's nuclear efforts, I think they would, but apparently, that wont work. So, I think there is a very strong possibility Israel will nuke Iran preemptively. My guess is the only reason they haven't already is they're hoping diplomacy might work, and because they really don't want to piss off the whole freaking world worse than they already have. Even if Israel has the self-restraint to hold off on nuking Iran, other countries will having incentives for giving Hezbollah nukes and then blaming Iran, so Iran gets nuked in any case.
If you were an intelligent Iranian, you'd have to be able to figure this out. Nukes == death. Therefore, the Iranian leadership is crazy, and Israel would be crazy to not nuke Iran.
Anyway, I'm no Israel fan-boy. For a culture victimised by genocide, Israelis sure don't mind brutally oppressing whole populations for decades. Go figure. And, I kind of see how crazy people came to power in Iran: look at a map - we have our armies on their two longest borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries we just invaded! They have very reasonable cause to fear the US right now.
In summary.. Be afraid. Be very very afraid.
Good point. And USB has shown that power over the cable is a good thing, but needs to be in the initial spec. Power over Ethernet (PoE) is still sucking wind.
One Linux to rule them all, One Linux to find them, One Linux to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Where, exactly, doesn't Linux threaten every other OS?
I'll throw in that Open Solaris has the best accessibility software for the blind, in Sun's Orca project. It works in Linux, but not as well as where it's developed... in Solaris. This is a key indicator of just how ready an OS is for the desktop, IMO.
Anyway, the whole Windows vs Linux flame war is pointless. Linux is the best OS ever developed for hackers, period. I couldn't be happier with it (unless it ran cool software like Orca stably). Windows is for Joe Sixpack who needs games and porn. Joe will always outnumber the hackers. It's ok. Just learn to live with it.
Actually, I hope the myTouch is a big improvement over the G1. I've never played with a myTouch (there have to be jokes to make over that sentence). The bigger screen and lack of a keyboard are features I want. Also, the battery is slightly bigger, but still only a pathetic portion of the total volume compared to an iPhone. I would consider upgrading, but when I found it didn't have a freaking headphone jack, I just couldn't. I'll never again make the mistake of buying a phone without one.
Anyway, since you asked, I had one of the earliest G1s. Before that, I had an iPhone. So, in comparison to the iPhone (which isn't really fair, it's like comparing to a Ferrari) here's what sucks:
- No headphone jack. Are you kidding me? How incredibly stupid do the HTC people have to be to keep this super-important feature off the new myTouch?
- The speaker is too quiet. I had this problem with my original iPhone, too. Crud gets in that speaker slot, and you can't hear a conversation in any noisy environment.
- While the phone is as big as an iPhone, the battery is about 1/3 the size.
- While the phone is as big as an iPhone, the screen is only 2.5", compared to 3.5" for the iPhone. Size matters.
- I prefer a slim design without a slide-out keyboard. I know this is a religious war, but it's fixed for me in the myTouch.
- The whole phone is built out of plastic. I pay too much for this phone to get a cheap feeling PoS.
- The camera in my phone sucks big-time. Even in the small screen, images appear clear in the middle, but faded on the edges, and the colour sucks, and I'm colour blind!
- My 1st generation iPhone had 8 gig of flash. My G1 had 0. I had to pay $$ for the micro-sd card. Micro-sd is both expensive, and lacks high-capacity cards.
- The iPhone has all kinds of cool peripherals, like the stereo we bought for our iPods, and my car, which has an iPhone plug. This isn't really a problem with the G1, but let's face it... Apple is leveraginig their lead.
All and all, the G1 is the third best phone I've owned, given the technology at the time. My old razr was awesome, but I wanted to kill people at Verison for charging me to use my own camera. My iPhone was just awesome, until freaking Apple borked it. All in all, though I'm whining a lot, I've had more satisfaction from my lame G1 than any other phone.
Steve Jobs is an a-hole. The one thing the real Steve Jobs could never do, is admit this.