> There are many obvious ways Microsoft could > misstep and lose its chance to participate in > another generation of phones...
Or, they could do everything right, and it still won't matter. Beating an entrenched winner is HARD. How many times does it have to be said? Being "as good as" IS NOT ENOUGH. You have to be SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER in SEVERAL WAYS that will appeal to MANY PEOPLE to make any headway at all.
And it doesn't help that MS has made MAJOR recent blunders, like "oops, no Windows Phone 7 phone will EVER be upgradeable past 7.x." Not a great start, guys.
It's hard being an uncool kid and watching the cool kids have all the fun, but MS should accept its fate and focus on being the best enterprise company possible that also happens to make a consumer OS and a game system. Instead, they're pissing EVERYONE off by borking their OS one release after the other and slowly giving up the future to Apple.
Ballmer, accept the fact that MS will be the next IBM. It ain't so bad. If you don't, you won't even get that far.
Maybe. Almost. I had one and after a few weeks, I realized "huh, it seems like I hardly ever charge this." So I started keeping a log. (Yes, really.) I typically got 5-6 days on a charge. And I did use it. Not super-heavily, but in a typical day I'd make a few calls, send 10 or 20 texts (back in 2007; I'm around 40-50 now), look up random things online while at lunch or in line at a store, and take some pictures. (I started using its camera as "visual memory enhancement" almost immediately) If I would have charged it and not used it, I very well might have gotten 200 hours out of it.
Immediately after switching to a 3G I noticed that the exact same usage yielded 2-3 days on a charge. I did try the "turn off 3G" trick but it never seemed to make a noticeable difference. Same charge intervals on my 3GS, 4, and 4S. (Yes, I took advantage of AT&T's "upgrade every year or so!" policies, which they have since discontinued. No, I won't get a 5 (or 5S or 6 or whatever) until late 2013.)
> Practicing law is fun BECAUSE it is > complicated and too big a field of > knowledge for any one person to > know everything...
Yes, FUN! And it's not like anything important is at stake. Not like anyone's life ever got ruined because of cases like you described. No one ever went to jail, lost their job, their business, their family, all their savings, etc., because no one playing was aware of the law that could have freed them. FUN, I tell you!
And it's not like the deck is stacked against the little guy in the first place, or that big companies with big war chests win solely because they have more money to throw at a problem. Or win by attrition. Or that they bought unjust laws in the first place. Yes, it's just LOADS and LOADS of FUN!
It varies, of course, but the most common current practice is "memory" (RAM) and "storage" (disk or solid-state -- the main thing is "long term" or non-volatile.). From the Wikipedia page on computer memory (which the GP did not quote):
The term "storage" is often (but not always) used in separate computers of traditional secondary memory such as tape, magnetic disks and optical discs (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM). The term "memory" is often (but not always) associated with addressable semiconductor memory, i.e. integrated circuits consisting of silicon-based transistors, used for example as primary memory but also other purposes in computers and other digital electronic devices.
The only thing worse than books about child abuse are books that encourage it, right? Like this horrible tome:
If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
(I'm not saying it's Linux's fault, but it is undeniably a problem with Linux. If some guy drives into you while you're stopped at a red light, the result is still that you have a broken car.)
It's field-specific. If it doesn't forget everything after power cycling, we in the computer business call that "storage."
In drag racing, quick and fast are different. In metallurgy, hardness and toughness are different. In typography, readability and legibility are different. In astronomy, revolve and rotate are different. Etc etc etc. Every field has terms like this and yes, it matters, and they should be used correctly when within that field. (Which we currently are: on a tech site, talking about technology.)
> The future of computing is $79.95 tablets in > blister packs at the convenience store.
Yeah, the same way that cheap MP3 players from drugstores totally own the portable music player market. Oh, wait...
There is room in the world for good products. Not coincidentally, Apple is the most valuable company in the world right now because of that.
Furthermore: the dream of ubiquitous computers, so cheap they're practically disposable, goes back quite a ways. 20 years ago, the dream was for something you could carry that was powerful enough to run WordPerfect on. Oh my God, wouldn't that be amazing?!?!?
But the state-of-the-art has advanced. Look at what we expect out of devices today: they should know where we are to within 10 meters with the help of dozens of satellites, what direction we're facing, where we're going, how fast we're moving, show us 360-degree 3D maps derived from satellite imagery, do real-time voice, text, and video communication (at 30fps, naturally) anywhere that we have a wireless network signal, and record and play back high-definition video. (Also, it needs to render Facebook quickly and accurately. Bill Moggridge, God rest his soul, wouldn't've seen that one coming early on.)
By the time today's high-end devices are hanging by a cash register, the new ones--the ones that everyone wants--will have 3D scanners and printers, heart and lung monitors, and God knows what else included. We've already got communicators; next are tricorders and replicators. Possibly transporters.:-)
Hundreds of years ago, people dreamed of indoor plumbing everywhere. And HVAC. And horseless carriages. And motors and power supplies so cheap and plentiful they could be squandered in toys for infants. And food that can be stored for months. And so on. Now we literally walk around with supercomputers in our pockets. 20 years from now there will be a story here about a new computer that's small enough to install in one of your front teeth, not just a molar.
Long story short, Moore's Law will continue to apply, and Apple, Intel, and Microsoft will continue to do just fine.
> Why do you thinks these products fail. Is because > they are trying to kill the competition vs. Find their > own niche where the competition fails to thrive.
The company is, in fact, trying to do exactly what you describe: finding a niche that the competition isn't fully addressing. It's the writers who are throwing around the *-killer meme.
Rich text editor for comments? The ability to edit comments for a brief period of time after posting? Better usage of JavaScript? Linking to original sources and not crappy blogs? Quit using question marks in headlines? Fact-check submissions when it's trivial to do so? (Bonus: Fact-check submissions when it's not trivial to do so?*)
For one day! In October!
The more I think about it, the more I realize the logo is the last thing that needs changing here.
I have a 16 GB phone that lacks expandable storage and I bump up against the limit often enough. I have no films and only a couple GB worth of songs. Not even that many apps. What fills it are 8 MP photos and 1080p recorded video. If a phone has good "data creation" hardware (i.e., a good camera) it really needs a lot of, or expandable, storage.
Rocketing up to +5 with an anti-Apple post, I see, but this kind of stupidity in patent-land has been going on a long time. I mean, come on--Slashdot has had a knife-fork-spoon icon for "patents" for quite some time, and for a reason. 1-click purchasing, anyone?
And they're AWESOME for packing a few small images into a CSS file to save round-trips to the server and make life MUCH better on mobile devices with high latency.
It turns out, an "exciting flamewar between Free Software heavyweights" is as stupid and boring as any other flamewar! Right down to the typos. (Alan Cox: "It's changee a lot").
Linus goes on about Miguel and Gnome, then Miguel says "My involvement with Gnome stopped about five years ago" and the whole thing is about as interesting as watching fourth-graders fight in a schoolyard. Yes, there's the occasional bit of interesting history or backstory there, but it's mostly just a bunch of smart people saying dumb things, blaming each other for everything, and putting words in each others' mouths. It's like a big circle-jerk but without the payoff.
Using various tools, I got a listing of all files and a checksum for each. (Checksumming obviously takes some time.) Then, sort by checksum. Any time you have two matching rows, you probably have dupes. If the filesize is the same (down to the byte) then they are almost certainly dupes. (Further things to compare: date modified and filename. If all four match, you can be pretty sure, unless you have Google's amount of data, that you have a dupe.) If you want, write a script to delete all but the first instance of each file.
BUT--the problem is logic. Deleting files only gains you space. It does NOTHING to help you organize things. In fact, it'll probably make things worse. For one thing, you'll wind up with lots of empty folders. For another, there are many scenarios you'll run into.
Folder A has File1 and File2, and Folder B has File1, File2, and File3. A dumb system might leave behind FolderA/File1, FolderA/File2, and FolderB/File3.
Or, maybe you have FolderA/File1, FolderA/File2, and FolderA/File3, along with FolderB/File2, FolderB/File3, and FolderB/File4. Ideally, you'd want to end up with Folder/File1, Folder/File2, Folder/File3, and Folder/File4. Again, that's beyond the scope of a typical dumb tool.
Even tools that search for dupes and replace all but one with a link will still leave you with, at best, twice as many folders as you need. You might have some space but you still have a big mess too.
So, all you can do is decide what's most important: your time, your money, or your sense of neatness. Probably the best solution is to search for big files (ISO, MPG, etc.) and delete any obvious dupes. Then, get another big disk and start migrating one type of file at a time. Get to the point where you can say "Every single ISO I have exists one time on this disk over here. Any others I find can be deleted." You want to aim for the low-hanging fruit. You can spend 2 minutes and delete 5 movies and reclaim a few GB, or you can spend hours pruning little web files and get back just a few MB.
You almost certainly have enough files that cleaning them would literally take weeks or months. Try to do a little at a time. Don't think you can lock yourself in a room and emerge 2 days later with a perfectly clean filesystem. Trying to reach the theoretical perfection of "There are no dupes anywhere among all my disks" will take a lifetime, drive you mad, or both.
I've been meaning to clean up about 5 TB of disk myself for about 4 years, judging by folders with names like "Master_2008_All_Organized_No_Dupes". The most effective method I've found for dealing with it is accepting the fact that I never will.:-) Disks just keep getting cheaper. Just keep buying them. Every so often, take some time, do a nice migration, and clean up what you can, but if you're employed in a technical field, you can buy another 1 TB drive for just a few hours' pay. No reason to spend 40 hours of your life trying to save that.
Huh? From TFA: "Great collaboration continues on the Community Edition with the release of LunaCE. The webOS-Ports team have combined the community efforts into one package and made it simple to install on to TouchPad devices through their Preware software."
> it's more likely it's something to do with start of school year though.
Yeah. I mean, have there ever been ups-and-downs in Samsung sales? I'm sure there has. Maybe it's just coincidental timing. I'd need to see a lot more numbers, more than just six days' worth, to draw any conclusions. If you want to see a "surge" in sales, look at iPhone numbers in about 2-3 weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
> There are many obvious ways Microsoft could
> misstep and lose its chance to participate in
> another generation of phones...
Or, they could do everything right, and it still won't matter. Beating an entrenched winner is HARD. How many times does it have to be said? Being "as good as" IS NOT ENOUGH. You have to be SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER in SEVERAL WAYS that will appeal to MANY PEOPLE to make any headway at all.
And it doesn't help that MS has made MAJOR recent blunders, like "oops, no Windows Phone 7 phone will EVER be upgradeable past 7.x." Not a great start, guys.
It's hard being an uncool kid and watching the cool kids have all the fun, but MS should accept its fate and focus on being the best enterprise company possible that also happens to make a consumer OS and a game system. Instead, they're pissing EVERYONE off by borking their OS one release after the other and slowly giving up the future to Apple.
Ballmer, accept the fact that MS will be the next IBM. It ain't so bad. If you don't, you won't even get that far.
> Did the original iPhone have 225 hours standby?
Maybe. Almost. I had one and after a few weeks, I realized "huh, it seems like I hardly ever charge this." So I started keeping a log. (Yes, really.) I typically got 5-6 days on a charge. And I did use it. Not super-heavily, but in a typical day I'd make a few calls, send 10 or 20 texts (back in 2007; I'm around 40-50 now), look up random things online while at lunch or in line at a store, and take some pictures. (I started using its camera as "visual memory enhancement" almost immediately) If I would have charged it and not used it, I very well might have gotten 200 hours out of it.
Immediately after switching to a 3G I noticed that the exact same usage yielded 2-3 days on a charge. I did try the "turn off 3G" trick but it never seemed to make a noticeable difference. Same charge intervals on my 3GS, 4, and 4S. (Yes, I took advantage of AT&T's "upgrade every year or so!" policies, which they have since discontinued. No, I won't get a 5 (or 5S or 6 or whatever) until late 2013.)
> Practicing law is fun BECAUSE it is
> complicated and too big a field of
> knowledge for any one person to
> know everything...
Yes, FUN! And it's not like anything important is at stake. Not like anyone's life ever got ruined because of cases like you described. No one ever went to jail, lost their job, their business, their family, all their savings, etc., because no one playing was aware of the law that could have freed them. FUN, I tell you!
And it's not like the deck is stacked against the little guy in the first place, or that big companies with big war chests win solely because they have more money to throw at a problem. Or win by attrition. Or that they bought unjust laws in the first place. Yes, it's just LOADS and LOADS of FUN!
It varies, of course, but the most common current practice is "memory" (RAM) and "storage" (disk or solid-state -- the main thing is "long term" or non-volatile.). From the Wikipedia page on computer memory (which the GP did not quote):
The term "storage" is often (but not always) used in separate computers of traditional secondary memory such as tape, magnetic disks and optical discs (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM). The term "memory" is often (but not always) associated with addressable semiconductor memory, i.e. integrated circuits consisting of silicon-based transistors, used for example as primary memory but also other purposes in computers and other digital electronic devices.
The only thing worse than books about child abuse are books that encourage it, right? Like this horrible tome:
If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
--Deuteronomy 21:18-21 (KJV)
Yeah, they should have done a logo like the OGC, which encourages good, healthy wanking instead of disgusting, sinful pedophilia.
... about problems with Linux on the desktop? Yeah. Here you go.
(I'm not saying it's Linux's fault, but it is undeniably a problem with Linux. If some guy drives into you while you're stopped at a red light, the result is still that you have a broken car.)
It's field-specific. If it doesn't forget everything after power cycling, we in the computer business call that "storage."
In drag racing, quick and fast are different. In metallurgy, hardness and toughness are different. In typography, readability and legibility are different. In astronomy, revolve and rotate are different. Etc etc etc. Every field has terms like this and yes, it matters, and they should be used correctly when within that field. (Which we currently are: on a tech site, talking about technology.)
> The future of computing is $79.95 tablets in
> blister packs at the convenience store.
Yeah, the same way that cheap MP3 players from drugstores totally own the portable music player market. Oh, wait...
There is room in the world for good products. Not coincidentally, Apple is the most valuable company in the world right now because of that.
Furthermore: the dream of ubiquitous computers, so cheap they're practically disposable, goes back quite a ways. 20 years ago, the dream was for something you could carry that was powerful enough to run WordPerfect on. Oh my God, wouldn't that be amazing?!?!?
But the state-of-the-art has advanced. Look at what we expect out of devices today: they should know where we are to within 10 meters with the help of dozens of satellites, what direction we're facing, where we're going, how fast we're moving, show us 360-degree 3D maps derived from satellite imagery, do real-time voice, text, and video communication (at 30fps, naturally) anywhere that we have a wireless network signal, and record and play back high-definition video. (Also, it needs to render Facebook quickly and accurately. Bill Moggridge, God rest his soul, wouldn't've seen that one coming early on.)
By the time today's high-end devices are hanging by a cash register, the new ones--the ones that everyone wants--will have 3D scanners and printers, heart and lung monitors, and God knows what else included. We've already got communicators; next are tricorders and replicators. Possibly transporters. :-)
Hundreds of years ago, people dreamed of indoor plumbing everywhere. And HVAC. And horseless carriages. And motors and power supplies so cheap and plentiful they could be squandered in toys for infants. And food that can be stored for months. And so on. Now we literally walk around with supercomputers in our pockets. 20 years from now there will be a story here about a new computer that's small enough to install in one of your front teeth, not just a molar.
Long story short, Moore's Law will continue to apply, and Apple, Intel, and Microsoft will continue to do just fine.
> Why do you thinks these products fail. Is because
> they are trying to kill the competition vs. Find their
> own niche where the competition fails to thrive.
The company is, in fact, trying to do exactly what you describe: finding a niche that the competition isn't fully addressing. It's the writers who are throwing around the *-killer meme.
Rich text editor for comments? The ability to edit comments for a brief period of time after posting? Better usage of JavaScript? Linking to original sources and not crappy blogs? Quit using question marks in headlines? Fact-check submissions when it's trivial to do so? (Bonus: Fact-check submissions when it's not trivial to do so?*)
For one day! In October!
The more I think about it, the more I realize the logo is the last thing that needs changing here.
* Note: It's almost always trivial.
"... the LAPD adopted 15 of the DOJ's ridiculous lists regarding 'Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities.' "
Yeah, because nothing ever goes wrong in L.A. that citizens would need to be prepared for.
Except for riots. And earthquakes. And the whole place burning down every year. But other than that, it's just like you see on TV.
Please run the queries
and
and let us know the earliest mention.
... and then I erased it, because I don't feel like having this same discussion that I've been having since 1998 again.
Short version: make refinements--not drastic changes--every year. But that's boring, so no one will do it.
I have a 16 GB phone that lacks expandable storage and I bump up against the limit often enough. I have no films and only a couple GB worth of songs. Not even that many apps. What fills it are 8 MP photos and 1080p recorded video. If a phone has good "data creation" hardware (i.e., a good camera) it really needs a lot of, or expandable, storage.
Note: "the cloud" is not the answer.
Rocketing up to +5 with an anti-Apple post, I see, but this kind of stupidity in patent-land has been going on a long time. I mean, come on--Slashdot has had a knife-fork-spoon icon for "patents" for quite some time, and for a reason. 1-click purchasing, anyone?
October 1999: Amazon.com Receives Patent for 1-Click Shopping
May 2006: Amazon One-Click Patent to be Re-Examined
October 2007: USPTO Rejects Amazon's One-Click Patent
November 2007: Amazon Sneaks One-Click Past the Patent System
March 2010: Amazon 1-Click Patent Survives Almost Unscathed ... to trot out just one example.
And they're AWESOME for packing a few small images into a CSS file to save round-trips to the server and make life MUCH better on mobile devices with high latency.
"A piece at SlashCloud points out...."
Jeez. You mean "Us, standing over there." Why pretend it's an unrelated entity?
Coming up next: will Slashdot ever quit posting headlines with question marks?
Everyone should be signing up for this new service.
It turns out, an "exciting flamewar between Free Software heavyweights" is as stupid and boring as any other flamewar! Right down to the typos. (Alan Cox: "It's changee a lot").
Linus goes on about Miguel and Gnome, then Miguel says "My involvement with Gnome stopped about five years ago" and the whole thing is about as interesting as watching fourth-graders fight in a schoolyard. Yes, there's the occasional bit of interesting history or backstory there, but it's mostly just a bunch of smart people saying dumb things, blaming each other for everything, and putting words in each others' mouths. It's like a big circle-jerk but without the payoff.
... but the other half is a bitch.
Using various tools, I got a listing of all files and a checksum for each. (Checksumming obviously takes some time.) Then, sort by checksum. Any time you have two matching rows, you probably have dupes. If the filesize is the same (down to the byte) then they are almost certainly dupes. (Further things to compare: date modified and filename. If all four match, you can be pretty sure, unless you have Google's amount of data, that you have a dupe.) If you want, write a script to delete all but the first instance of each file.
BUT--the problem is logic. Deleting files only gains you space. It does NOTHING to help you organize things. In fact, it'll probably make things worse. For one thing, you'll wind up with lots of empty folders. For another, there are many scenarios you'll run into.
Folder A has File1 and File2, and Folder B has File1, File2, and File3. A dumb system might leave behind FolderA/File1, FolderA/File2, and FolderB/File3.
Or, maybe you have FolderA/File1, FolderA/File2, and FolderA/File3, along with FolderB/File2, FolderB/File3, and FolderB/File4. Ideally, you'd want to end up with Folder/File1, Folder/File2, Folder/File3, and Folder/File4. Again, that's beyond the scope of a typical dumb tool.
Even tools that search for dupes and replace all but one with a link will still leave you with, at best, twice as many folders as you need. You might have some space but you still have a big mess too.
So, all you can do is decide what's most important: your time, your money, or your sense of neatness. Probably the best solution is to search for big files (ISO, MPG, etc.) and delete any obvious dupes. Then, get another big disk and start migrating one type of file at a time. Get to the point where you can say "Every single ISO I have exists one time on this disk over here. Any others I find can be deleted." You want to aim for the low-hanging fruit. You can spend 2 minutes and delete 5 movies and reclaim a few GB, or you can spend hours pruning little web files and get back just a few MB.
You almost certainly have enough files that cleaning them would literally take weeks or months. Try to do a little at a time. Don't think you can lock yourself in a room and emerge 2 days later with a perfectly clean filesystem. Trying to reach the theoretical perfection of "There are no dupes anywhere among all my disks" will take a lifetime, drive you mad, or both.
I've been meaning to clean up about 5 TB of disk myself for about 4 years, judging by folders with names like "Master_2008_All_Organized_No_Dupes". The most effective method I've found for dealing with it is accepting the fact that I never will. :-) Disks just keep getting cheaper. Just keep buying them. Every so often, take some time, do a nice migration, and clean up what you can, but if you're employed in a technical field, you can buy another 1 TB drive for just a few hours' pay. No reason to spend 40 hours of your life trying to save that.
Huh? From TFA: "Great collaboration continues on the Community Edition with the release of LunaCE. The webOS-Ports team have combined the community efforts into one package and made it simple to install on to TouchPad devices through their Preware software."
So, what is LunaCE? ("Lunacy" -- cute.)
"Also covered on Slashcloud." -- LOL. Heck of a site you got over there. One comment, and amazingly enough it doesn't say "first post".
> it's more likely it's something to do with start of school year though.
Yeah. I mean, have there ever been ups-and-downs in Samsung sales? I'm sure there has. Maybe it's just coincidental timing. I'd need to see a lot more numbers, more than just six days' worth, to draw any conclusions. If you want to see a "surge" in sales, look at iPhone numbers in about 2-3 weeks.