I'd like to be able to tether my laptop and do what I normally do on a broadband connection. Stream last.fm, watch youtube videos, update my offsite backup, buy and download games on Steam, grab the occasional new linux distro, and just generally use the internet as it's meant to be used. I just don't want to have to worry about counting bytes.
I'm not looking for an unlimited plan. I'm looking for a reasonable price per gigabyte so that I can stop having to pay for broadband just as I've stopped paying for cable TV and a landline phone. I'm also coming at this from the perspective of a Canadian who has even less choice and even higher prices for mobile data than in the US. Rogers, Bell and Telus have a cozy little cartel going on up here.
What good does ever-increasing speed do if I just end up blowing through my data cap that much faster? I can live with lower speeds, I just want reasonable prices per GB.
CBC broadcast radio has no ads, but on occasion they'll have a short preroll ad on podcasts. Shoppers Drug Mart and Ford have both paid for these kinds of ads in the recent past.
What about those of us without houses? A lot of people rent apartments. We don't have the physical room for a full-scale home theatre, and cranking up a surround-sound system is a sure-fire way to get the neighbors to call both your landlord and the police.
Absolutely right. Canada's army, navy and air force are useless wastes of money. To the south is the US, who would never invade us for a few trillion economic reasons. To the north we've got a giant frozen tundra followed by a giant frozen ocean bordered by Russia's own giant frozen tundra north - and we get along well with Russia anyway. To the east is an ocean bordered by economic allies and dominated by the US navy, and to the west is the biggest ocean on the planet - also bordered by economic allies and also dominated by the US navy.
CSIS can do the traditional spy stuff. Let the RCMP and local police handle counter-terrorism. The coast guard can do the smuggling interdiction and search-and-rescue. There isn't a single issue that Canada faces that can be handled best by the military. Shut it all down, save the cash, and we'd all be better off.
I'm a very satisfied openSUSE user. I cut my teeth on Slackware back in the day (and still run it wherever stability is really important), and was never really happy with any of the auto-everything distros until I discovered openSUSE a year ago. It has the same balance of reasonably-stable and reasonably-up-to-date that I like about Slackware, combined with a sane out-of-the-box configuration. My MSI Wind U100 netbook is currently running 11.3 right now, and I've had zero problems. If it stays that way for a few days, I'll switch my desktop machine from 11.2 to 11.3.
Picasa's face-recognition problems aren't limited to identical twins; my brother is constantly mis-tagged as his twin sister. She and I find it utterly hilarious, he doesn't.
It's had some serious setbacks so far. Computers - with their inherent tendency to accurate process information - seem to have difficulty processing the normal levels of cronyism, petty gossip, office politics, nepotism. and "yes-man" traits required to to advance within normal corporate power structures. It's also been a major challenge to properly implement the Peter Principle. We're using a sort of inverted genetic algorithm in which the worst possible candidate is chosen to fill a vacant position. It's promising, but it seems to result in competent upper management too often to be accurate in the real world.
Fortunately, the Bullshit Buzzword component is complete; we outsourced that to this gentleman. He's got an excellent grasp of modern business communications, and beta testers were unable to distinguish his algorithm-generated press releases from actual real-world examples.
Nikon's marketing decision to restrict manual-lens light metering and in-body autofocus to their expensive bodies is the main reason why I will never buy from them again. Pentax manages to fit both of those features on even their cheapest DSLRs. Pentax, Canon and Olympus bodies can meter with any piece of glass in front of the sensor. Hell, you could stick a coke bottle against the lens mount and the light meter will work fine on even the cheapest bodies from those companies.
Nikon just wants potential D90 owners to cough up the extra cash for a D300S, or for owners of AF-D lenses to have to re-buy the AF-S versions of everything all over again. I ain't playing that game again.
Frankly, you're going to get screwed over by all mobile carriers currently operating in Nova Scotia. Bell, Telus and Rogers all charge an arm and a leg. Combining a skype unlimited US/Canada plan (make sure you pick a local number as your skype-on-the-go number) with a local DID that can forward to skype (virtufon or les.net or others) can save you a boatload on voice costs, but there is no way to get cheap data. Ditch the data plan and stick with wifi when you can get it.
Bibble 5 allows for selective area editing and multiple layers, all of which is non-destructive. It's nowhere near full-scale Photoshop, but there is much more than in version 4. There's a fully-functional trial version available. It's worth trying out for oneself.
That said, I agree about Gimp. The 8-bit-channel problem renders it almost useless for any kind of professional or advanced amateur work. GEGL is to Gimp what WinG was to Windows 3.1: a deeply ugly and flawed attempt to shoehorn much-needed features into something old and obsolete, instead of doing the needed total rewrite. I've considered Gimp a lost cause for years. KDE's Krita may lack some features right now, but is a far more modern design.
Have you looked at Bibble 5? It was just released in december, and the new interface and featureset is a drastic improvement over version 4. It's now pretty comparable to Lightroom and Aperture, and it runs natively on Linux as well as OSX and Windows. The developers focused heavily on workflow and speed issues, with an eye towards sensible keyboard shortcuts.
I'm not an employee, just a happy customer, even if I do get the evil eye from fellow nerds whenever I fire up a $200 closed-source app on my Slackware machine.:)
Actual translation: Another Slashdot user is unhappy with everything Apple makes or does, so he claims to have all the facts on a device that's not even released yet.
Or I could be extrapolating from current Apple products that have replaced old Apple products. As for being unhappy with Apple's products as of late, you're absolutely right.
First of all, the rumors I've heard from people in the industry like Kevin Rose were saying the new tablet is going to come in at a "surprisingly low price". I'd say that means definitely in the under $1000 range -- since most of the rumor sites were guesstimating it at a price point around $899 or so, before that.
Wow, rumours say it'll be only $900! I was way off in my estimate! Why, that's nowhere near $1000! I shall immediately fall upon my sword out of shame.
It only makes sense that this tablet would support 3G cellular, so it's possible it will be sold with contracts by a carrier of choice, meaning its cost will be further subsidized. If that happens, you may well be able to buy one of these with only $200-300 down.
Only $200-$300, if you sign up for a 2-3 year service contract with a mobile provider.
I don't get your worry about the "battery sucking screen" either? There are possibilities like LED backlighting that runs the perimeter of the screen, casting light in towards the center. This gives the low power consumption advantages found with OLED backlit displays, coupled with a major cost-savings over the expense of doing a full OLED display with a grid of LEDs across the whole back of the panel.
In any case, a 9" or 10" tablet would have FAR more room for a battery than an iPhone or iPod Touch does, and both of those devices run for 4-5 hours on a charge.
A 9" or 10" screen also has FAR more surface area, and hence far more of a power draw, than a 3" or 4" LCD. Unless Apple has some magic pixie dust patent that miraculously improves battery life, or they pack a massive battery into it, I would expect normal netbook-class battery life. 2 to 3 hours, tops. They cannae change the laws o' physics.
Apple has tried to build a tablet device for many years now, and has aborted at least 2 previous attempts when Jobs decided one piece or another of the technology needed to make it successful wasn't ready or available.... I don't doubt it may "only have one button" on the front, but that's a good thing, for a device that claims to be a tablet. How many buttons are there on your *real* tablets or pads of paper?
Pads of paper generally don't have web browsers either. I see no good reason to artificially cripple a new technology simply to resemble an old technology.
I'm pretty excited to see what Apple releases, because I know this has been thought out by Apple for a long time. If it was just a "big iPod touch" and little more, they would have released it at least a year ago already - and it wouldn't have been a really big deal.
Of course it'll be just a big ipod touch. What else could it be? The only alternatives are a full-scale OSX computer, or an e-ink ebook reader. The former is possible, but I wouldn't bet on it, and $900 for an e-reader is utterly ridiculous.
It came out last summer that Jobs was intimately involved with every detail of bringing the tablet to market. It seems that the device has finally gotten Jobs's seal of approval: when asked if the tablet rumors were true, a senior Apple executive gave The New York Times a rather coy reply. "I can't really say anything," he said, "but, let's just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet."
Translation: the only button is a power button, it has a battery-sucking colour screen as opposed to an e-ink display, it requires itunes on a mac or PC to use, the only Apple-approved way to run programs is via an app store, it has a non-user-replaceable battery, and it will cost upwards of $1000.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to be able to tether my laptop and do what I normally do on a broadband connection. Stream last.fm, watch youtube videos, update my offsite backup, buy and download games on Steam, grab the occasional new linux distro, and just generally use the internet as it's meant to be used. I just don't want to have to worry about counting bytes.
I'm not looking for an unlimited plan. I'm looking for a reasonable price per gigabyte so that I can stop having to pay for broadband just as I've stopped paying for cable TV and a landline phone. I'm also coming at this from the perspective of a Canadian who has even less choice and even higher prices for mobile data than in the US. Rogers, Bell and Telus have a cozy little cartel going on up here.
What good does ever-increasing speed do if I just end up blowing through my data cap that much faster? I can live with lower speeds, I just want reasonable prices per GB.
CBC broadcast radio has no ads, but on occasion they'll have a short preroll ad on podcasts. Shoppers Drug Mart and Ford have both paid for these kinds of ads in the recent past.
What about those of us without houses? A lot of people rent apartments. We don't have the physical room for a full-scale home theatre, and cranking up a surround-sound system is a sure-fire way to get the neighbors to call both your landlord and the police.
Thank you, Dr. Sheldon Cooper.
Absolutely right. Canada's army, navy and air force are useless wastes of money. To the south is the US, who would never invade us for a few trillion economic reasons. To the north we've got a giant frozen tundra followed by a giant frozen ocean bordered by Russia's own giant frozen tundra north - and we get along well with Russia anyway. To the east is an ocean bordered by economic allies and dominated by the US navy, and to the west is the biggest ocean on the planet - also bordered by economic allies and also dominated by the US navy.
CSIS can do the traditional spy stuff. Let the RCMP and local police handle counter-terrorism. The coast guard can do the smuggling interdiction and search-and-rescue. There isn't a single issue that Canada faces that can be handled best by the military. Shut it all down, save the cash, and we'd all be better off.
I'm a very satisfied openSUSE user. I cut my teeth on Slackware back in the day (and still run it wherever stability is really important), and was never really happy with any of the auto-everything distros until I discovered openSUSE a year ago. It has the same balance of reasonably-stable and reasonably-up-to-date that I like about Slackware, combined with a sane out-of-the-box configuration. My MSI Wind U100 netbook is currently running 11.3 right now, and I've had zero problems. If it stays that way for a few days, I'll switch my desktop machine from 11.2 to 11.3.
Freakin' giant alien robots will be stomping all over the planet now looking for it.
We love you, Dan Kim.
Picasa's face-recognition problems aren't limited to identical twins; my brother is constantly mis-tagged as his twin sister. She and I find it utterly hilarious, he doesn't.
It's had some serious setbacks so far. Computers - with their inherent tendency to accurate process information - seem to have difficulty processing the normal levels of cronyism, petty gossip, office politics, nepotism. and "yes-man" traits required to to advance within normal corporate power structures. It's also been a major challenge to properly implement the Peter Principle. We're using a sort of inverted genetic algorithm in which the worst possible candidate is chosen to fill a vacant position. It's promising, but it seems to result in competent upper management too often to be accurate in the real world.
Fortunately, the Bullshit Buzzword component is complete; we outsourced that to this gentleman. He's got an excellent grasp of modern business communications, and beta testers were unable to distinguish his algorithm-generated press releases from actual real-world examples.
Wake me up when Kick-ass 2 is out. Bloodless Bluescreen Battles are getting real old, real fast.
Nikon's marketing decision to restrict manual-lens light metering and in-body autofocus to their expensive bodies is the main reason why I will never buy from them again. Pentax manages to fit both of those features on even their cheapest DSLRs. Pentax, Canon and Olympus bodies can meter with any piece of glass in front of the sensor. Hell, you could stick a coke bottle against the lens mount and the light meter will work fine on even the cheapest bodies from those companies.
Nikon just wants potential D90 owners to cough up the extra cash for a D300S, or for owners of AF-D lenses to have to re-buy the AF-S versions of everything all over again. I ain't playing that game again.
Invest in cruise ship stocks? :) At least intra-continental travelers have the option of rail, as crowded as that may be at the moment.
Oh, tiny cube. Thank goodness. This is proof that I need more coffee right now.
Frankly, you're going to get screwed over by all mobile carriers currently operating in Nova Scotia. Bell, Telus and Rogers all charge an arm and a leg. Combining a skype unlimited US/Canada plan (make sure you pick a local number as your skype-on-the-go number) with a local DID that can forward to skype (virtufon or les.net or others) can save you a boatload on voice costs, but there is no way to get cheap data. Ditch the data plan and stick with wifi when you can get it.
If it detects a pirated game, does it try to kill you with a forklift?
Either available domestically, or with a minimum of shipping hassles?
Isn't he generally associated with the opposite situation?
Four out of six for sure. I'm just waiting to see what the price is, and if it's usable without the usual itunes umbilical.
Bibble 5 allows for selective area editing and multiple layers, all of which is non-destructive. It's nowhere near full-scale Photoshop, but there is much more than in version 4. There's a fully-functional trial version available. It's worth trying out for oneself.
That said, I agree about Gimp. The 8-bit-channel problem renders it almost useless for any kind of professional or advanced amateur work. GEGL is to Gimp what WinG was to Windows 3.1: a deeply ugly and flawed attempt to shoehorn much-needed features into something old and obsolete, instead of doing the needed total rewrite. I've considered Gimp a lost cause for years. KDE's Krita may lack some features right now, but is a far more modern design.
Have you looked at Bibble 5? It was just released in december, and the new interface and featureset is a drastic improvement over version 4. It's now pretty comparable to Lightroom and Aperture, and it runs natively on Linux as well as OSX and Windows. The developers focused heavily on workflow and speed issues, with an eye towards sensible keyboard shortcuts.
I'm not an employee, just a happy customer, even if I do get the evil eye from fellow nerds whenever I fire up a $200 closed-source app on my Slackware machine. :)
Actual translation: Another Slashdot user is unhappy with everything Apple makes or does, so he claims to have all the facts on a device that's not even released yet.
Or I could be extrapolating from current Apple products that have replaced old Apple products. As for being unhappy with Apple's products as of late, you're absolutely right.
First of all, the rumors I've heard from people in the industry like Kevin Rose were saying the new tablet is going to come in at a "surprisingly low price". I'd say that means definitely in the under $1000 range -- since most of the rumor sites were guesstimating it at a price point around $899 or so, before that.
Wow, rumours say it'll be only $900! I was way off in my estimate! Why, that's nowhere near $1000! I shall immediately fall upon my sword out of shame.
It only makes sense that this tablet would support 3G cellular, so it's possible it will be sold with contracts by a carrier of choice, meaning its cost will be further subsidized. If that happens, you may well be able to buy one of these with only $200-300 down.
Only $200-$300, if you sign up for a 2-3 year service contract with a mobile provider.
I don't get your worry about the "battery sucking screen" either? There are possibilities like LED backlighting that runs the perimeter of the screen, casting light in towards the center. This gives the low power consumption advantages found with OLED backlit displays, coupled with a major cost-savings over the expense of doing a full OLED display with a grid of LEDs across the whole back of the panel. In any case, a 9" or 10" tablet would have FAR more room for a battery than an iPhone or iPod Touch does, and both of those devices run for 4-5 hours on a charge.
A 9" or 10" screen also has FAR more surface area, and hence far more of a power draw, than a 3" or 4" LCD. Unless Apple has some magic pixie dust patent that miraculously improves battery life, or they pack a massive battery into it, I would expect normal netbook-class battery life. 2 to 3 hours, tops. They cannae change the laws o' physics.
Apple has tried to build a tablet device for many years now, and has aborted at least 2 previous attempts when Jobs decided one piece or another of the technology needed to make it successful wasn't ready or available.... I don't doubt it may "only have one button" on the front, but that's a good thing, for a device that claims to be a tablet. How many buttons are there on your *real* tablets or pads of paper?
Pads of paper generally don't have web browsers either. I see no good reason to artificially cripple a new technology simply to resemble an old technology.
I'm pretty excited to see what Apple releases, because I know this has been thought out by Apple for a long time. If it was just a "big iPod touch" and little more, they would have released it at least a year ago already - and it wouldn't have been a really big deal.
Of course it'll be just a big ipod touch. What else could it be? The only alternatives are a full-scale OSX computer, or an e-ink ebook reader. The former is possible, but I wouldn't bet on it, and $900 for an e-reader is utterly ridiculous.
It came out last summer that Jobs was intimately involved with every detail of bringing the tablet to market. It seems that the device has finally gotten Jobs's seal of approval: when asked if the tablet rumors were true, a senior Apple executive gave The New York Times a rather coy reply. "I can't really say anything," he said, "but, let's just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet."
Translation: the only button is a power button, it has a battery-sucking colour screen as opposed to an e-ink display, it requires itunes on a mac or PC to use, the only Apple-approved way to run programs is via an app store, it has a non-user-replaceable battery, and it will cost upwards of $1000.
Obviously, someone at Microsoft has a sense of humour.