The new release, which began shipping last week, allows users who snap a picture with a Dell Streak or other Dell mobile device to automatically upload it to a pool of free, shared cloud storage.
Wow, Dell, way to innovate.
Seriously, what's the point of this? Dell doesn't make anything that runs custom software--their PCs run Windows, like millions of others, and their phones run Android, like millions of others. So why do I need a Dell device to connect to some random cloud service? At least Apple has the excuse of tying things in at a very low level with the software that they, and only they, make. Plus, being the market leader makes things like this a little more compelling, like how you can find a million cases and accessories for iPhones and iPods but not so much for any random Android phone.
Has Dell even announced how may Streaks they've sold? Have they broken the big 1-0-0 yet? Or will they just give up on this, too, and let it go the way of the their MP3 players?
With the world of difference between the iPad and the TouchPad, do you REALLY think $50 off will make a huge difference in sales?
Furthermore, Apple doesn't "discount" things in the traditional sense, but they are (contrary to conventional wisdom) being EXTREMELY price-competitive on their iDevices. Have you noticed that there are very few ten-inch tablets selling for the same price as the iPad, and nearly none selling for less? That many seven-inch tablets sell for about the same? There are tablets on the market that are faster than the iPad, and thinner, and cheaper, and lighter, and possibly even with better battery life, but no tablet is more than 2 or 3 of those things. The iPad is, objectively, better than all of the competition overall. (And here's why.) And don't forget that Apple started working on their tablet in mid-2004; the rest of the industry started making touch-sensitive tablets after the iPhone came out.
The price will eventually come down and the specs will increase. And Apple will sell the old models and/or refurbished. Other than the camera, the TouchPad doesn't have much on the original iPad, let alone the iPad 2. The day the iPad 2 came out, Steve Jobs announced that the iPad 1 would be available for $399. You can get an iPad 1 (refurbished) for $349. And look at the iPhone: when the iPhone 4 came out, Apple kept selling the 3GS for $99 and later, $49. So there's your "discount."
The very first iPods were a bit expensive in terms of price-per-GB, but that was because a) it was a new product (Apple does like their fat margins, at least at first) and b) it used 1.8" drives instead of 2.5" drives. (Which led to a smaller, lighter, and eventually more popular device.) Then they added space for the same price, then they dropped the price, then they did both of those things repeatedly.
Actually, 10.2 was totally usable (a few glitches, but miles better than 10.0 or 10.1) and by the time it was out, Adobe and MS had their major apps running natively. In addition to cleaning up a lot of crap from the early versions of OS X, 10.2 added Quartz Extreme, which really helped performance (if you had the right hardware which, sadly, we didn't--10.2 ran better on my 800 MHz G3 iBook with a QE-supported video card than it did on my dual-533 G4 without.)
10.3, 10.4, etc., were nicer and nicer and nicer but 10.2 was fine, and I say that as someone who used it full-time in a large enterprise. We had OS X 10.2, Adobe Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10, MS Office X, and *shudder* Lotus Notes, all running natively.
But that's just me being nitpicky. I agree with your main point(s).:-) (Though I'm not sure about webOS in the embedded space.)
If your app doesn't require too much work (and if it's the kind of thing with broad commercial appeal) I'd say "go for it!" I've heard from a couple different places that good, well-polished apps can really stand out in the existing marketplace.
@foxnewspolitics (the account in question) only has 33k followers but other prominent accounts have many more. A quick check shows @foxnews has 3/7 million and CNN has over 2 million. The ability to spread news to millions of people NEEDS to have more than just a single password.
Re:It's those pesky humans
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
Seriously? Did you read my whole post? One more time for the cheap seats:
Measuring diameter is easy. You stretch a measuring device across a circle from one side to another. You hold the "zero" end in place and wiggle the other end a bit until the observed measurement is as large as possible--i.e., the widest part; a.k.a. "the diameter." No guesswork is involved and the precision is very high.
If the circle is good, using my patented "measure the widest part of the circle" (c) (R) (TM) method will ensure a measure that goes through the center of the circle.
Speaking of crappy, needless redesigns...
on
Google's New Design
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Re:It's those pesky humans
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
I said measure the diameter, not guess the diameter. The only "guessing" I mentioned is the requirement of guessing where the center is if you want to measure the radius.
Here are a couple examples of what I had in mind when I said that measuring a diameter is easy: - you see a circle painted on the wall. Pull out a ruler or a tape measure. Done. - you come across a poured concrete circular fire pit on the ground. You and a friend stand on opposite sides of it and stretch across a tape measure. Done.
> You have to make a geometric construct to find the > center so your diameter measurement is correct. > You might as well measure the radius at that point.
LOL. You've got it exactly backwards. Measuring diameter is easy. You stretch a measuring device across a circle from one side to another. You hold the "zero" end in place and wiggle the other end a bit until the observed measurement is as large as possible--i.e., the widest part; a.k.a. "the diameter." No guesswork is involved and the precision is very high. Compare that to having your friend hold the end of the tape measure in what he thinks is the exact center of the circle...
Sure, you can accurately find a circle's center point. How do you do that? By drawing two intersecting diameters! "Two diameters" IS the "geometric construct" you use to find a circle's center point. (Sure, you could also do two chords, each with a perpendicular line at the midpoint, but outside of a geometry class, playing with a compass and straightedge, how likely are you to do that? And again--how many steps is that?) Saying "Using two diameters to find the center to find the radius is easier than finding one diameter" is literally nonsense. Give me an unmarked circle to measure and a measuring device long enough to span it (and, if needed, an assistant) and I will find the diameter faster and more accurately than you will find the radius every time.
Bonus: you get a more accurate number by measuring a diameter and cutting it in half than by measuring the radius itself.
It's those pesky humans
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
Yes, math works better with relation to radius than diameter, but for a human, walking up to an already-drawn circle, you can either a) measure the diameter (100% effective and accurate) or b) estimate where the center is and measure to it (and get a result that is only as good as your estimation--half as good, actually, since doubling the number would double the error.) Thus "diameter" took off as "the main way we humans measure circles." Yes, you can very easily half the diameter, but what's the point if you're going to multiply by a constant to find the circumference? If you want to find out how much rope you need to tie around a well, would you 1) measure the diameter, 2) divide that number by 2, and then 3) multiply by tau, or would you 1) measure the diameter and 2) multiply by pi?
Same thing with Imperial vs. Metric measurements: yes, Metric makes the math easier, and we do indeed have ten fingers, but if you have something you want to divide, it's a lot easier to cut it in half, and half again, and half again, and anyone can do so easily--even on irregularly-shaped things like "a pile of cooking flour"--as opposed to trying to cut something into ten equally-sized pieces.
I'm not saying any of the above are absolutely better or worse than the others, but humans have certain natural tendencies, and that's where this stuff comes from, and why it's hard to change.
I've read about 10 or 15 Star Wars books and enjoyed them to varying degrees.
The first one I read was Allegiance by Timothy Zahn. It was about the "Emperor's Hand" and "Hand of Justice" and I liked it. It takes place just after Episode 4. Some other books I've read that happen around the time of the original trilogy I didn't like as much. For example, Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry (not the lead singer of Journey) takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and it was decent. There was no suspense if you know what happens in Jedi--Luke, Vader, and Leia will be alive, their attempt to rescue Han won't work, etc. However, it was neat to see how Luke grew as a Jedi.
For some reason, I can't get into books that happen after Jedi, like Heir to the Empire. There's just too much of the same stuff: someone on the light side goes to the dark side, someone on the dark side goes to the light side, over and over again.
I absolutely loved the first two Darth Bane books (Path of Destruction and Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn) and the third was OK. I also totally loved Death Star (by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry) which takes place during the construction of the original Death Star (i.e., just before Episode 4.) It had surprising depth.
Death Troopers and The Force Unleashed both read like video games (run, fight, run, fight) and for good reason--they were both based on/in support of games. Unleashed was OK, Troopers right out sucked. It's a Stephen King-ish horror novel that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe--no Force, no Sith, nothing, just some familiar settings and characters.
What's really funny is that the first page for the Mac mini showed a bunch of them in a stack next to a PC (animated.gif that grows and shrinks) but the instructions that came with the Mini said "do not put things on top of the Mini" so they quickly took down that graphic.
See here. The page (the article only shows a bit of it in the screenshot) said "iPod shuffle: Smaller than a pack of gum and much more fun.* ". The "warning" was a joke.
* actually, it was a [2] footnote, but Slashdot doesn't allow <sup> tags.
> Maybe instead of filtering stories on editors, we > need the ability to filter stories on submitters.
Or, maybe the editors could, you know, act like editors. Slashdot is overall pretty good but it could really use a good dose of proper, old-fashined journalism: proofread things, do your own verification of facts before publishing what someone submits, check a couple sources, make sure you didn't already publish the same thing yesterday (or last year), etc.
... but it requires iTunes (same as iCloud) AND it's slower (you've got to upload all your music) AND it costs about twice as much ($47.88/year vs. $25) AND it comes from a (I'll be kind here) not especially well-regarded company, as opposed to one that scores very highly in just about every customer satisfaction rating there is?
what the holy fuck?
Seriously, I can't say anything else but "what are they thinking?!?" This is obviously nothing more than a blind money grab and I can't see it possibly working out for them. Or lasting very long. In the meantime, I'd recommend not buying any computers at Best Buy--I think they'll wire a car battery to your nuts with alligator clamps until you sign up for this.
I'm not a huge, serious reader. I mainly enjoy mass-market fiction. I plan to get a few books in the near future and they are the same price ($6.99) for physical and electronic editions. The electronic copies have advantages (searchability, easy to keep forever) that are not important to me in this case. If I bought the electronic copies, I'd read them once, and that would be it. I like the fact that there's no physical waste involved with electronic copies but on the other hand I can pass along the physical ones when I'm done--either put them on the "free" table at work or give them to the library. Whether electronic or physical, I'll only ever read them once myself, but with physical copies, someone else (hope fully *many* someones else) can read them too. And that's how it will be for me until digital copies reach 1/2 the price of a paperback.
You know how a lot of people go to physical stores to check out items and then purchase them online? I do the opposite--I download sample chapters of books and then buy the real thing.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The new release, which began shipping last week, allows users who snap a picture with a Dell Streak or other Dell mobile device to automatically upload it to a pool of free, shared cloud storage.
Wow, Dell, way to innovate.
Seriously, what's the point of this? Dell doesn't make anything that runs custom software--their PCs run Windows, like millions of others, and their phones run Android, like millions of others. So why do I need a Dell device to connect to some random cloud service? At least Apple has the excuse of tying things in at a very low level with the software that they, and only they, make. Plus, being the market leader makes things like this a little more compelling, like how you can find a million cases and accessories for iPhones and iPods but not so much for any random Android phone.
Has Dell even announced how may Streaks they've sold? Have they broken the big 1-0-0 yet? Or will they just give up on this, too, and let it go the way of the their MP3 players?
You realize that "Shooting Womprats in Beggar's Canyon" is just a euphamism, right?
With the world of difference between the iPad and the TouchPad, do you REALLY think $50 off will make a huge difference in sales?
Furthermore, Apple doesn't "discount" things in the traditional sense, but they are (contrary to conventional wisdom) being EXTREMELY price-competitive on their iDevices. Have you noticed that there are very few ten-inch tablets selling for the same price as the iPad, and nearly none selling for less? That many seven-inch tablets sell for about the same? There are tablets on the market that are faster than the iPad, and thinner, and cheaper, and lighter, and possibly even with better battery life, but no tablet is more than 2 or 3 of those things. The iPad is, objectively, better than all of the competition overall. (And here's why.) And don't forget that Apple started working on their tablet in mid-2004; the rest of the industry started making touch-sensitive tablets after the iPhone came out.
The price will eventually come down and the specs will increase. And Apple will sell the old models and/or refurbished. Other than the camera, the TouchPad doesn't have much on the original iPad, let alone the iPad 2. The day the iPad 2 came out, Steve Jobs announced that the iPad 1 would be available for $399. You can get an iPad 1 (refurbished) for $349. And look at the iPhone: when the iPhone 4 came out, Apple kept selling the 3GS for $99 and later, $49. So there's your "discount."
The very first iPods were a bit expensive in terms of price-per-GB, but that was because a) it was a new product (Apple does like their fat margins, at least at first) and b) it used 1.8" drives instead of 2.5" drives. (Which led to a smaller, lighter, and eventually more popular device.) Then they added space for the same price, then they dropped the price, then they did both of those things repeatedly.
Actually, 10.2 was totally usable (a few glitches, but miles better than 10.0 or 10.1) and by the time it was out, Adobe and MS had their major apps running natively. In addition to cleaning up a lot of crap from the early versions of OS X, 10.2 added Quartz Extreme, which really helped performance (if you had the right hardware which, sadly, we didn't--10.2 ran better on my 800 MHz G3 iBook with a QE-supported video card than it did on my dual-533 G4 without.)
10.3, 10.4, etc., were nicer and nicer and nicer but 10.2 was fine, and I say that as someone who used it full-time in a large enterprise. We had OS X 10.2, Adobe Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10, MS Office X, and *shudder* Lotus Notes, all running natively.
But that's just me being nitpicky. I agree with your main point(s). :-) (Though I'm not sure about webOS in the embedded space.)
... but this is just funny: "... an SD card interface from which games can be loaded from."
This is the sort of English up with which I will not put up with!
News flash: nothing in the world is perfect. Film at 11.
Yes, he is serious. Your assignment for the day is to grab a dictionary and learn the difference between the words "many" and "all."
If your app doesn't require too much work (and if it's the kind of thing with broad commercial appeal) I'd say "go for it!" I've heard from a couple different places that good, well-polished apps can really stand out in the existing marketplace.
Sorry for the typo. @foxnews has 3/4 million followers, not 3/7. :-)
... is optional 2-factor authentication.
@foxnewspolitics (the account in question) only has 33k followers but other prominent accounts have many more. A quick check shows @foxnews has 3/7 million and CNN has over 2 million. The ability to spread news to millions of people NEEDS to have more than just a single password.
Seriously? Did you read my whole post? One more time for the cheap seats:
Measuring diameter is easy. You stretch a measuring device across a circle from one side to another. You hold the "zero" end in place and wiggle the other end a bit until the observed measurement is as large as possible--i.e., the widest part; a.k.a. "the diameter." No guesswork is involved and the precision is very high.
If the circle is good, using my patented "measure the widest part of the circle" (c) (R) (TM) method will ensure a measure that goes through the center of the circle.
... check out what this techy news blog did to their story pages.
I wouldn't have said 1/3 km, I would have said "about 350 meters or 1100 feet." Sounds a lot closer.
Microsoft already makes more from Android than from Windows Phone 7.
I said measure the diameter, not guess the diameter. The only "guessing" I mentioned is the requirement of guessing where the center is if you want to measure the radius.
Here are a couple examples of what I had in mind when I said that measuring a diameter is easy:
- you see a circle painted on the wall. Pull out a ruler or a tape measure. Done.
- you come across a poured concrete circular fire pit on the ground. You and a friend stand on opposite sides of it and stretch across a tape measure. Done.
> You have to make a geometric construct to find the
> center so your diameter measurement is correct.
> You might as well measure the radius at that point.
LOL. You've got it exactly backwards. Measuring diameter is easy. You stretch a measuring device across a circle from one side to another. You hold the "zero" end in place and wiggle the other end a bit until the observed measurement is as large as possible--i.e., the widest part; a.k.a. "the diameter." No guesswork is involved and the precision is very high. Compare that to having your friend hold the end of the tape measure in what he thinks is the exact center of the circle...
Sure, you can accurately find a circle's center point. How do you do that? By drawing two intersecting diameters! "Two diameters" IS the "geometric construct" you use to find a circle's center point. (Sure, you could also do two chords, each with a perpendicular line at the midpoint, but outside of a geometry class, playing with a compass and straightedge, how likely are you to do that? And again--how many steps is that?) Saying "Using two diameters to find the center to find the radius is easier than finding one diameter" is literally nonsense. Give me an unmarked circle to measure and a measuring device long enough to span it (and, if needed, an assistant) and I will find the diameter faster and more accurately than you will find the radius every time.
Bonus: you get a more accurate number by measuring a diameter and cutting it in half than by measuring the radius itself.
Yes, math works better with relation to radius than diameter, but for a human, walking up to an already-drawn circle, you can either a) measure the diameter (100% effective and accurate) or b) estimate where the center is and measure to it (and get a result that is only as good as your estimation--half as good, actually, since doubling the number would double the error.) Thus "diameter" took off as "the main way we humans measure circles." Yes, you can very easily half the diameter, but what's the point if you're going to multiply by a constant to find the circumference? If you want to find out how much rope you need to tie around a well, would you 1) measure the diameter, 2) divide that number by 2, and then 3) multiply by tau, or would you 1) measure the diameter and 2) multiply by pi?
Same thing with Imperial vs. Metric measurements: yes, Metric makes the math easier, and we do indeed have ten fingers, but if you have something you want to divide, it's a lot easier to cut it in half, and half again, and half again, and anyone can do so easily--even on irregularly-shaped things like "a pile of cooking flour"--as opposed to trying to cut something into ten equally-sized pieces.
I'm not saying any of the above are absolutely better or worse than the others, but humans have certain natural tendencies, and that's where this stuff comes from, and why it's hard to change.
I've read about 10 or 15 Star Wars books and enjoyed them to varying degrees.
The first one I read was Allegiance by Timothy Zahn. It was about the "Emperor's Hand" and "Hand of Justice" and I liked it. It takes place just after Episode 4. Some other books I've read that happen around the time of the original trilogy I didn't like as much. For example, Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry (not the lead singer of Journey) takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and it was decent. There was no suspense if you know what happens in Jedi--Luke, Vader, and Leia will be alive, their attempt to rescue Han won't work, etc. However, it was neat to see how Luke grew as a Jedi.
For some reason, I can't get into books that happen after Jedi, like Heir to the Empire. There's just too much of the same stuff: someone on the light side goes to the dark side, someone on the dark side goes to the light side, over and over again.
I absolutely loved the first two Darth Bane books (Path of Destruction and Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn) and the third was OK. I also totally loved Death Star (by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry) which takes place during the construction of the original Death Star (i.e., just before Episode 4.) It had surprising depth.
Death Troopers and The Force Unleashed both read like video games (run, fight, run, fight) and for good reason--they were both based on/in support of games. Unleashed was OK, Troopers right out sucked. It's a Stephen King-ish horror novel that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe--no Force, no Sith, nothing, just some familiar settings and characters.
What does everyone else like?
What's really funny is that the first page for the Mac mini showed a bunch of them in a stack next to a PC (animated .gif that grows and shrinks) but the instructions that came with the Mini said "do not put things on top of the Mini" so they quickly took down that graphic.
See here. The page (the article only shows a bit of it in the screenshot) said "iPod shuffle: Smaller than a pack of gum and much more fun.* ". The "warning" was a joke.
* actually, it was a [2] footnote, but Slashdot doesn't allow <sup> tags.
> Maybe instead of filtering stories on editors, we
> need the ability to filter stories on submitters.
Or, maybe the editors could, you know, act like editors. Slashdot is overall pretty good but it could really use a good dose of proper, old-fashined journalism: proofread things, do your own verification of facts before publishing what someone submits, check a couple sources, make sure you didn't already publish the same thing yesterday (or last year), etc.
The naked wrong number in Demolition Man.
slashdot.org/s/todayilearned
Please kill the ridiculous data pricing plans, and for fuck's sake, don't charge me extra for tethering if I'm already paying for each bit!
... but it requires iTunes (same as iCloud) AND it's slower (you've got to upload all your music) AND it costs about twice as much ($47.88/year vs. $25) AND it comes from a (I'll be kind here) not especially well-regarded company, as opposed to one that scores very highly in just about every customer satisfaction rating there is?
what
the
holy
fuck?
Seriously, I can't say anything else but "what are they thinking?!?" This is obviously nothing more than a blind money grab and I can't see it possibly working out for them. Or lasting very long. In the meantime, I'd recommend not buying any computers at Best Buy--I think they'll wire a car battery to your nuts with alligator clamps until you sign up for this.
I'm not a huge, serious reader. I mainly enjoy mass-market fiction. I plan to get a few books in the near future and they are the same price ($6.99) for physical and electronic editions. The electronic copies have advantages (searchability, easy to keep forever) that are not important to me in this case. If I bought the electronic copies, I'd read them once, and that would be it. I like the fact that there's no physical waste involved with electronic copies but on the other hand I can pass along the physical ones when I'm done--either put them on the "free" table at work or give them to the library. Whether electronic or physical, I'll only ever read them once myself, but with physical copies, someone else (hope fully *many* someones else) can read them too. And that's how it will be for me until digital copies reach 1/2 the price of a paperback.
You know how a lot of people go to physical stores to check out items and then purchase them online? I do the opposite--I download sample chapters of books and then buy the real thing. :-)