Interestingly, your post made me think that google glasses might be a foot in the door techwise for something 100 times dorkier and less public: Virtual Reality Googles.
Those guys playing Temple Run today don't yet realize some augmented reality version may be coming to glasses near them
The 3D is cheap The immersive stereo view is built into the nature of glasses The GPS and compasses are already in all smartphones and there's several apps that act like smart HUDs. It's portable and more natural than a headset, and if you [Google] builds it, [someone] will come with implementations.
I just don't want to see people looking like druggies when they extend their hands to touch things that are floating in their HUD. The eerie effect of talking into thin air left Behind by bluetooth is already sad enough
I find it extremely creepy that while they responded badly to this, he had exactly what we are afraid of: good quality pictures / video of your environment at all times. I don't agree with the violence. It's just going to be harder to paint ourselves into corners to avoid connecting with everyone else's field of [perfectly recorded] vision. If Glass takes off, it will be like walking around trying not to step on anyone's shadow: impossible. Here's a stray thought: What will having so much visual info do to people's social networking feeds?
For people who do technical work with a computer, the ability to have several high definition windows open at once is a tremendous benefit. Integrated circuit design, programming, CAD graphics, etc.
Did you forget "reading slashdot clearly at *any* zoom level?";)
I don't know where my router's DDWRT implementation went wrong, but the USB port support has been horrible. I have some NTFS-formatted USB drives and a USB enclosure but it triggers a known issue that consists of an endless reboot loop. The Windows-only driver to use with the stock firmware (this is the Dlink DIR825) had an annoying imposition. It prevents more than one connected user from viewing the files at once. Its DDWRT USB print server fared better, but after some print jobs the router stops processing jobs silently until rebooted. If there are alternatives to DDWRT, it would be nice to hear of them now.
My 2007 router has had native and DDWRT support, but the telco only offers DHCPv6 to its 50Mbps fiber clients. No service in my building because they don't care about wiring up the landlord's property for now.
Meanwhile, their DSL offering was supposed to pump IPv6 late last year since the fiber pilot program has been working. Their website FAQ has just stopped being updated on the matter. It reminds me of Firefox's Electrolysis project page (or what you may know in Chrome as multi-process tabs)... vaporware stinks in software, but even more in hardware.
Software at least comes down the pipe eventually, but hardware must be supported from the core out, which is what makes it so expensive and slow to reach the home user. The slow switch to Wireless A, G, N (stage by stage) and now to 5Ghz is more proof of just what kind of timeframes we are talking about. My 6 year old router offers so many features I cannot use due to a sucky ISP. Since IPv6 is an industrial product that benefits enterprises more than a home-based solution, you'll have to wait a long time before dropping your IPv6 tunnel solutions so you can swap your router.
We are never given a chance to judge the app's invasive permission schemes when it's already on a brand new phone. I would not download it on the Market if given the choice.
Happily I have the option to do so -- my previous device had it in crapware where my only choice was to uninstall upgrades.
Same here with cheap Android 2.2 device. If your device is rootable, you could had a choice of killing FB. Once rooted, you can use a root terminal to find the standard bin folder and move out or delete the facebook APK file. It disappears from the App list.
I wish I had done that much earlier: A friend quickly signed in to check their facebook messages when I lent them the device, the masses don't even dream of using HTTP when there's a juicy app icon they can easily find. They must have hurriedly OK'd the first-run defaults, synching MY Phone contacts with THEIR FB login. I later found random people in my adress book led me to discover the problem.
Even though I went back and decoupled his profile from my phone, Facebook will forever have my phone number, snapshots of my private contact list, location and whatever else researchers demonstrated is fair pickins for bad apps. I suspect that even if nobody ever ran the app on my phone, the SNS FB service had already given up all that info. Could be done periodically between the day I unboxed my phone and the day I uprooted it out of the phone.
I'll be interested to see some youtube uploads in the next few days, but the quality of budget cameras for low-light captures is atrocious. Almost every sky picture that is not captured by a telescope was taken on DSLRs with tripods and exposure tricks. It seems the star-tracking mandatory for telescopes is completely ignored on Flickr and google image results. I cannot believe the Hubble et al seem to lack pictures of the the Milky way from the sky, where they can be horizon free, devoid of light pollution, AND streak free.
About your post, I read in the nineties about a blind man who marveled what some sound was that apparently came from the Auroras overhead. The blind are known to have a stronger sense of hearing. This was on my mind when I went out near 9PM but I only aurora-free stars and a bunch of clouds. I have eyesight but have never caught auroras because I'm too far south, and people favor pictures of it rather than videos. Tonight could have been special.
I have grown adults in their fifties who ask me what to do when we're looking at something and a popup comes up when I'm at their side. I tell them to read it outloud and make a decisión on the two buttons below it. It's still hard for them to do.
Five minutes later a different question or error pops up and I still have to *remind* them that they are not reading an alien language. It is a pain.
It won't be easy finding legal Windows 7 copy without online merchants so that you can live App-free on your new computer.
Unless you plan to build your own PC and put non-Ubuntu FOSS on it, other choices call for wading into uncanny territory or buying older unsold items and used stuff
That said, I don't promote the idea of purchasing a tablet or phones for kids. There's already a living room PC and a laptop sitting around at home and kids do NOT need more room to hide their acts.
does this mean that my $50 Radeon HD 5450 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 can mine bitcoins and blocks and stuff? it will probably take weeks or months to find a block though. lol
Solo mining has a very little chance to work out, so join a mining "pool". Solo mining is like winning the lottery: 25 BTC paid out every 10 minutes to a lucky guy while everyone else on the planet gets nothing for that round, IIRC. With pools you get paid BTC fractions calculated based on your work in the pool. When you hear "bitcoin" you're talking about milli and micro amounts. You quickly get used to the oddly small fractions: 0.00011935 BTC per block processed despite hitting a reasonable 90 Mhash/s.
Any ATI GPU should be fine (AMD Radeon HD 6750 cost me 70 bucks to play games.) I started mining like 3 nights ago in a "why not?" moment but don't think I'll due it more than as a bullet point thing. The first big step is to get the wallet client and prep to get about 6GB worth of data blocks --run this overnight. I hear that it's better to pay the $150 or so USD to buy a bitcoin that you can hoard than to wait until you can waste enough resources to get lucky.
The pool I joined is well known but requires newbies to accumulate 0.01 BTC before sending the payments. I'm like 3 more days away. That's bittersweet.
For vertical tabs, I think Opera supports them. Not sure exactly where you turn them on because I haven't used it in ages. Chrome seems to provide extensions that support it, but I am extremely doubtful of the browser now --trying to just get AdblockPlus was useless because it's not designed for my computer setup or something like that. It used to work some months ago (using Rockmelt)
In case you have not heard, Hotmail's PC chat application, Messenger, is two days from being sunset in favor of Skype. That will be causing a massive migration from users who ignored repeated upgrade emails from the MS team. Just when I thought it was hard to convince my long-term guests that they should ignore the Messenger Icon, forcing themselves to learn the freshly installed Skype forced down our throats, I have to worry about their malware risks from a new vector of attack. I very sparingly use the hotmail/live/OUTLOOK/identityCrisisNameDUJOUR account, and would have uninstalled it if I didn't have said friends from a land where people KNOW nothing else*. The loss of Hotmail integration, loss of social media-ish features, and bold GUI design choices to force you to try their $$$ calling plans really is making me consider shutting the doors on the account.
*We stay off FB. They know OF Yahoo Messenger which I never use. My GTalk is unknown to them and all this stinks of network effects.
Video game music has been useful to me, though some tracks are very hyper and you well have to tweak your playlist. I started with 1000 remix mp3s about a decade ago.
Go to http://ocremix.org/torrents and scroll down to OC ReMix 1 - 1000 and subsequent ones for mostly lyric-free music. For something done by fans on their free time, there are quite few orchestrated arrangements and nice reinterpretations of themes. Love the piano ones.
Since you are bound to emote and have distracting nostalgia fits, I suggest wearing them down on your free time over spring break by small subsets, avoiding the shuffle function so your mind can start to tune them out in a stable playlist. You will be listening for years, because the selection has grown so large and new mixes come out often.
My personal favorites are Mario, Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger mixes
I have taken classes in a few settings, so I hope this helps. I started out at a small but well known and selective private college in a small town. Out of a couple thousand registered students, my 500-something class year had ~30 non-traditional students in my freshman year's facebook. Non-traditional means that they were not fresh out of highschool; most seemed to be in their 30s, with one or two gray haired candidates. The rest of us, including seniors, were between 17 and 21 years old. I never saw bad writing there, but there were few ESL students other than me --that would change later in my other schools. It the late nineties, an age before friendster, facebook and other major public venues of public writing. Blogs were not known, so Geocities, webrings, anime and TV "shrines", "signing" guestbooks and other things that we consider extremely quaint today were the norm, albeit extremely niche even among the elite I had the privilege to study with. One-page college-hosted webpages and Xanga blogs let me see a bit of the writing my friends could produce, but most of it I sampled via class sharing, email, dorm-wide broadcasts made by and for students, and text servers with school gossip.
I transferred for my last year and finished my degree at a public state-funded community college in my large home city. That time around I lacked a dorm life to see their informal writing. The school was had about 3 times the student body, and maybe a quarter or less were in the 17 - 22 age group I had enjoyed at my first college... I think maybe half of the students in my classes had day jobs. The college forced me to take a writing class for curriculum reasons (they did not recognize writing credit from outside schools.) It was like night and day: I had new, greatly lowered expectations of math homework (problems were NOT given daily and went from about 15 x 3 class sessions to about 1/2 or 1/3 of that, and daily calc homework was no longer expected.)
Many people in the school were not born in the US, so in the school-wide writing class, reading comprehension, a few words from the English professor and several cultural details made things somewhat harder for the progress of the class as a whole. Papers were expected to be extremely simple, and I needed to give grammar help to a couple friends. I saw a resume or two after I graduated from friends that wanted some job help. Complexity of software projects was lower too, and I found myself actually doing some optional projects at home that sadly never made it into the class' scope.
I got excellent grades as soon as I got to that school, and my morale went up since I went from below-average to the college honor roll in my new environment. My knowledge came from what I had learned at the first college's tougher curriculum the first 3 years, seen on slashdot or just learned on my own. My second school did show me Linux in labs, but I had already seen Unix. It helped to complement my personal toolchest because I became close enough to someone to borrow his Mandrake 7 CDs back in '03.
In hindsight, I had a glimpse of the age make-up of college for part of my senior year of highschool that I did not understand for years. I got in an intro-level college-credit class at a different local colleges before turning 17 (I was the youngest of those 30 students by far, with a small few in their early twenties.) Most others looked like moms and dads in mid thirties, fourties and so on. I later found out that said state-funded 2-year college has a very long graduating period, and beyond 15000 students. I hope this all helps.
The dumbing down of computers continues. What else is new?
I would not call it dumbing down when the fact is that "the dumb" expect an intuitiveness that is just NOT here yet. A trend started by toolbars decades ago ASSUMES previous familiarity. If we learned anything from the backslash caused back in Office 2003 when the file menu went away, it was that it's hard to explain to someone over the phone what to click on when even your description of the icon can fall flat or cause ambiguity in what the user thinks you're suggesting.
Today, smartphone feature reduction (more like forced simplification) has bled into webmail GUIs. For the adults I tutor one on one, I chose setting them up with Yahoo over Gmail due to richer, written interfaces. I also chose Firefox over Chrome due to the same, back before FF killed the menu in a copy-cat move that would undo this very effort. Imagine all the complaints I got from 3 of these students over 50+ years old when their Yahoo text labels went away last month. They instead got arrows, gear icons, disappearing options (dynamic) and paper clips where they expect "Reply", "Delete", "Attach". Those icons were always there, but they never cared to notice, kinda like people spend years clicking on "Edit \ Copy" without noticing what the Control - C and its icon are supposed to help with. The masses do not pay attention even when there's no pressure, and they did not take being forced to adapt very well. The ones who do are already computer savvy.
Even though the buttons are far fewer, tablets are even worse. My mother unlearned how to Attach a file a dozen times. Finally, she learned the tablet GUI provides fewer confusion, but she's still greatly confused and is afraid of exploring what she thinks is a cryptic GUI and invisible "if you see nothing helpful, you're supposed to hold your finger down for the menu the programmer hid for that option". Android's interface is terrible for teaching an older person with limited memory AND time --I've had limited exposure to iPhones but find them friendlier and more likely to use words. See that gear icon over there [settings]? See that three line icon over here [menu]? See that bifurcating icon over here [share]? See that magnifying glass [search], not to be confused with this magnifying glass with a PLUS in it [zoom]? See those overlapping squares [windows]? Heck, I new it was trouble when I found it impossible to have them master multiple windows, let alone summoning and handling multiple tabs (plus icon in one browser, or square tabby thing in IE, or File \ New Tab in another)
Older people tend to
1) refuse to read our notes, books or sign up for classes in a real school with real homework. Too busy with fun and an "I need it now" attitude 2) tablets have no mouseover help labels 3) refuse to think through "geeky" words when 95% of the sentence makes sense.
With things my mother enjoys on facebook, she constantly uses the hardcover dictionary to confirm spelling and meanings. The second there's a geeky word, she completely locks up and wants a quick way out. Dumbing down provides such a way, but becomes a trap destined to be understood only by the initiated, which are a much younger crowd that has no problem or shame in asking for help.
The down side of lacking NFC is that you can't say that you can bump your phone into random strangers' phones until they "squirt" files at each other.
I don't like NFC either. The downside of innovation is that one day the industry says "pony up for new hardware because we no longer support yours." Bluetooth is cumbersome to use, especially if you have to remember which devices you disabled it on due to battery life problems on your older gadgets.
My point here wasn't so much for NFC, but against the trend to ignore PCs and even the web browser with "download our APP" excuse. After all, it's not that they want to give US the news, but to track us better. And potentially monetize their app with somewhat mandatory updates --they can't quite dig up your Name, phone number, GPS location and friend list with the antiquated OS's that we currently have (meaning more conservatively private.) For instance, I have a good camera but am angry about the lack of enjoying barcode-reading programs on my fully fledged PC. The App scene right now is like a 2.0 rebirth of the nineties' shareware era, except it's mainstream AND lucrative.
I am an advocate for secondary (and tertiary) batteries for cameras. If only smartphones had the same easy spring-loading mechanism! Oddly, it was never a serious thought for me with the smartphone. Probably because 1) Camera batteries cost $20 but smartphone batteries are $50. Smartphone and laptop batteries lose charge duration in a few months. Other batteries, not so much. 2) getting a secondary charger or PC USB data cable blocked any other ideas 3) boot times on the phone are much longer than a camera
On the last point above, it's crazy that we still have to wait for 2 minute boot times on what's basically a low-end phone (to compare the 600Mhz processor speed, an Intel Celeron (not ARM) with Windows 95 should boot in half the time! I did experience Win95 in a 1.1Ghz in 18 seconds). So it would really be nice if we just got fast-boot phones... I wish that someone would combine these facts into a new trend: a) most smartphones aren't hardware modded, so there's no need for the already customized OS carriers ship to check for new parts b) most smartphones are never OS-upgraded by the carrier anyway c) save-states and ROM-burnt OS's are fast
a ROM-chip system bypassing the linear hardware discovery and initialization processes would be sweet. Boot-to-save-state should bring speeds down to what dumb phones and digital cameras already enjoy: a second or two.
It would mean less expandability to hardware modders or Cyanogenmod installers looking for different versions of Android. The trouble is that I've been put off by needing to find illegal or customized ROMs, the same for a factory ROM for failsafes, the chance of bricking, post-upgrade bloat and chances of losing support for Market and other Google apps. All to go from 2.2 to 2.3 (doable for my phone hardware,) let alone the nonexistent 4.0 for it.
So right now, I'm looking for a car stereo which is Android based. I find many on the internet but few where I can see them and most are still running Android 2.x with no plans for updated versions.
I don't own a car don't want this to go lost either...we might hook others into commenting here
I recall seeing car-android systems some time ago regarding older cars, but all I could google was this slashdot link from 4/2012. Search for "DIN" there.
No idea how you're googling, but rather than looking for numbers, you should put "ice cream sandwich" or "jelly bean"... Also Honeycomb (3.x) got skipped except for tablets, so I'm pretty sure the 2.x gap is going to be a stubborn one, hardware-wise. Given that the official $200 Galaxy 7" 2.0 tablet *just* updated itself over the air to Jelly Bean, I doubt car makers are shipping the latter version yet, so that and the Honeycomb lowerbound make things easier on you --it's 4.0 only. Thus...
Copy-paste Search strings that may prove useful for starters: "ice cream sandwich" car entertinment system 2 din "ice cream sandwich" double din "ice cream sandwich"
...happened to the rest of the alphabet sequence? No M?
You jest! BUT... The IEEE suddenly realized they'd have to do like in apartment buildings: Normally named from 1A through Z their units beyond the first 26 combinations require a wrap-and-restart at 1AA for the rest of the units on that floor.
"That's MADNESS! I've never seen these other 20-something protocols!!" a curious slashdotter might say... Yes, there's really a lot of networking protocols AND they're just not ALL in the domain of Wifi tech. It's networking in general. The power of "QoS" we consider so widely-abused by ISPs and something called "Bridge operations procedure", for example, take some of the first few, yet little-known letters.
I have to ask: Is anyone getting even close to these advertised transfer rates in real world scenarios? I haven't seen more than low single digit MB/s over wireless LAN, even under line of sight conditions with hardly any interference.
In 2010 or so I was sadly surprised that my backups (PC Hard drive - > wifi laptop ) hit some invisible barrier of around 1.5 to 2 MByte/s from Windows host to laptop (Ubuntu or Windows). That was despite connections being between 11 and 54Mbit (yeah, the speed negotiated was pretty unstable for some reason, AND overhead plus bit to byte conversions kills about 90% of the fat number we see on the box). PS: Two different rooms, with a drywall separating both machines. The total separation was less than 10 feet given the small size of these apartments. I think I hit a peak of 3M to 4MByte/s, for like one minute out of 30 or so.
I declined to run another home test this year when buying a replacement for my old dead laptop and just opted for a USB adapter for transfer on the main PC. I should have tested, given that I've since plopped DDWRT on the same router, the new laptop's connection is stable in connection speeds and I always do CUT-PASTE rather than COPY-paste to never miss my place for inevitable CRC, Wired SMB errors and Wifi disconnects. Despite my layers of protection, I chalk it up to having lost confidence in Wifi in general. See my other comment for other setbacks.
The problem is just too damned many people are jumping on the wireless bandwagon and even the ISPs have started handing out wireless routers
I remember my first experiences with wifi back in 2006. I recall that the DSL ISP started making it an option back then. G was seldom seen, and everyone was on 2.4ghz, except for the Wireless A guys ( the routers used to tout ABG big time, though WEP was still king and XP didn't quite support WPA out of the box).
A year later I started getting other people set up, buying a few routers and handing my older ones down as gifts. I eventually settled on a dual band one in 2009 and have been pretty satisfied. However, my ISP and most others are lagging behind on real IPv6 support, so DHCP6 goes unused for now. Sadly, I have seen prices drop, yes, but protocols A and B have also disappeared quietly from support lists. The good part is that for about half the price, I can get dual-band now. That took long!
Somewhat off-topic rant: The problem now is that my recent $800 laptop doesn't do 5Ghz, which surprised me considering $70 routers do, and $40 routers support "300N" this year^W^W as of 2012. Neither does my year-old android phone, nor most devices I hook up from work, family or friends. My 2007 laptop had no problem doing so, but it cost the full $1000 and didn't have appealing features with the current year's lineup.
My $500 PC from last year was a satisfying upgrade to the older system I had for years. It surprised by failing to support Gigabit when I finally went and bought the Cat 6 cable. The old $20 NIC I saved up for it is not PCI-E, but had latent support for 1000BaseT, I think. Sad. Today's fragmented networking involves more research than even slashdotters like me care to do, and still moves at a glaciar pace. We ARE being dominated by money-saving choices and ISPs that no longer offer old, non-wifi routers, though most people end up losing...
I have worked a couple jobs where VPNs and/or bandwidth-heavy applications such as stock tickers were the cause of the issue, but the [local or business client] users cleverly hide the fact that they don't know what they're doing when the insist on Wifi just because they got a laptop from their office for work.
We outgrew numbers, or got tired of them. Remember Windows 2000? It begot XP, Vista and Seven. There, thes even has been a hat tip to the old numeric days, but not the year motif that came briefly with 95 and 98.
Anyways, around the same days when I was just barely managing to learn the novelty that are Ubuntu's codenames, I recall that the Android SDK was not very clear on codenames. I think the GUI had something about targets being versions 6 and 7, or maybe 8, but I had no idea what that meant in terms of features. A number doesn't provide a strong mental cue to keep you clued --codewords have *personality.* Well, they do not... but you must realize there's a reason why nobody names their children by order of "activation" like Dragonball androids.
"The ASUS Zenbook Prime is 1920 x 1080 with a 13.3" screen, which is close, if not better, than the Mac books."
It's really not. The 13" MBP display is 2560x1600 pixels.
Stop being an idiot, you're making yourself look bad here, not Apple.
Well, he gave a good lead for what may become the new defacto laptop resolution. Think of it as the DOCTYPE transitional 4.01 HTML tag but for the moving between today's 1200x800 and the drool-worthy high DPI targets that Macs provide. And give it 24 months while old stuff gets phased out.
Somewhere along the line, I hope this will cause the 4K standard for TVs to also be re-visited... even my laptop's HDMI resolution is too much for my HDTV... 720p may be "nice" for cable but it's horrible for laptops. It's just sad to see a screen several times larger than my laptop's go to waste like that. Why not add some special 1080p mode just for non-broadcast purposes? It's 37" versus 15"! Then again, the laptop won't do HD either because of reasons that have been discussed here ad nauseum.
No maybe about it. *OF COURSE* they know Latin letters, to read embossed lettering on signs where no one's bothered with Braille.
I never saw Braille until coming to the US. Now, I see it in elevators, select train station support beams indicating the station's name, and some entrances to buildings. It's magical enough seeing blind people move about freely crossing streets, and navigating their way around a city. Consider that the danger of edges in train platforms is exponentially higher to them, as well as the more mundane uncertainty on what TRAIN they are boarding, as well as the exact number of stops they must count before getting out --to a station where they don't normally ask for confirmation from a sighted passer-by.
Seeing how that seems fairly advanced, I wondered how it is that the blind are expected to know EXACTLY where those Braille plaques are supposed to be. I'm sure with smartphone GPS apps similar to talking clocks, they are living in a better world. Maybe civilization will move away from those randomly placed tags* and using RFID so that the same smartphones can alert them.
* Braille in public signs, ironically, is not much larger than 1/4 inch. Even with latin characters, at that font size, we ourselves would need to come real close to read the message. Speaking of complexity, it's interesting to just find out that there's Braille in Japan, and it looks simpler than their Kanji. Hilarious that they care enough to put a "Sake" label atop aluminum cans so they won't fall into the wrong hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, your post made me think that google glasses might be a foot in the door techwise for something 100 times dorkier and less public: Virtual Reality Googles.
Those guys playing Temple Run today don't yet realize some augmented reality version may be coming to glasses near them
The 3D is cheap
The immersive stereo view is built into the nature of glasses
The GPS and compasses are already in all smartphones and there's several apps that act like smart HUDs.
It's portable and more natural than a headset, and if you [Google] builds it, [someone] will come with implementations.
I just don't want to see people looking like druggies when they extend their hands to touch things that are floating in their HUD. The eerie effect of talking into thin air left Behind by bluetooth is already sad enough
I find it extremely creepy that while they responded badly to this, he had exactly what we are afraid of: good quality pictures / video of your environment at all times. I don't agree with the violence. It's just going to be harder to paint ourselves into corners to avoid connecting with everyone else's field of [perfectly recorded] vision. If Glass takes off, it will be like walking around trying not to step on anyone's shadow: impossible.
Here's a stray thought: What will having so much visual info do to people's social networking feeds?
For people who do technical work with a computer, the ability to have several high definition windows open at once is a tremendous benefit. Integrated circuit design, programming, CAD graphics, etc.
Did you forget "reading slashdot clearly at *any* zoom level?" ;)
I don't know where my router's DDWRT implementation went wrong, but the USB port support has been horrible.
I have some NTFS-formatted USB drives and a USB enclosure but it triggers a known issue that consists of an endless reboot loop. The Windows-only driver to use with the stock firmware (this is the Dlink DIR825) had an annoying imposition. It prevents more than one connected user from viewing the files at once.
Its DDWRT USB print server fared better, but after some print jobs the router stops processing jobs silently until rebooted. If there are alternatives to DDWRT, it would be nice to hear of them now.
My 2007 router has had native and DDWRT support, but the telco only offers DHCPv6 to its 50Mbps fiber clients. No service in my building because they don't care about wiring up the landlord's property for now.
Meanwhile, their DSL offering was supposed to pump IPv6 late last year since the fiber pilot program has been working. Their website FAQ has just stopped being updated on the matter. It reminds me of Firefox's Electrolysis project page (or what you may know in Chrome as multi-process tabs)... vaporware stinks in software, but even more in hardware.
Software at least comes down the pipe eventually, but hardware must be supported from the core out, which is what makes it so expensive and slow to reach the home user. The slow switch to Wireless A, G, N (stage by stage) and now to 5Ghz is more proof of just what kind of timeframes we are talking about. My 6 year old router offers so many features I cannot use due to a sucky ISP. Since IPv6 is an industrial product that benefits enterprises more than a home-based solution, you'll have to wait a long time before dropping your IPv6 tunnel solutions so you can swap your router.
Reminds me of watching commercial- and float-free youtube before google's acquisition.
We are never given a chance to judge the app's invasive permission schemes when it's already on a brand new phone. I would not download it on the Market if given the choice.
Happily I have the option to do so -- my previous device had it in crapware where my only choice was to uninstall upgrades.
Same here with cheap Android 2.2 device. If your device is rootable, you could had a choice of killing FB. Once rooted, you can use a root terminal to find the standard bin folder and move out or delete the facebook APK file. It disappears from the App list.
I wish I had done that much earlier: A friend quickly signed in to check their facebook messages when I lent them the device, the masses don't even dream of using HTTP when there's a juicy app icon they can easily find. They must have hurriedly OK'd the first-run defaults, synching MY Phone contacts with THEIR FB login. I later found random people in my adress book led me to discover the problem.
Even though I went back and decoupled his profile from my phone, Facebook will forever have my phone number, snapshots of my private contact list, location and whatever else researchers demonstrated is fair pickins for bad apps. I suspect that even if nobody ever ran the app on my phone, the SNS FB service had already given up all that info. Could be done periodically between the day I unboxed my phone and the day I uprooted it out of the phone.
I'll be interested to see some youtube uploads in the next few days, but the quality of budget cameras for low-light captures is atrocious. Almost every sky picture that is not captured by a telescope was taken on DSLRs with tripods and exposure tricks. It seems the star-tracking mandatory for telescopes is completely ignored on Flickr and google image results. I cannot believe the Hubble et al seem to lack pictures of the the Milky way from the sky, where they can be horizon free, devoid of light pollution, AND streak free.
About your post, I read in the nineties about a blind man who marveled what some sound was that apparently came from the Auroras overhead. The blind are known to have a stronger sense of hearing. This was on my mind when I went out near 9PM but I only aurora-free stars and a bunch of clouds. I have eyesight but have never caught auroras because I'm too far south, and people favor pictures of it rather than videos. Tonight could have been special.
I have grown adults in their fifties who ask me what to do when we're looking at something and a popup comes up when I'm at their side. I tell them to read it outloud and make a decisión on the two buttons below it. It's still hard for them to do.
Five minutes later a different question or error pops up and I still have to *remind* them that they are not reading an alien language. It is a pain.
Why does your kid need a IPad or a IPhone? Why not buy him a computer with an OS which does not have app stores.
You did say BUY a computer but there's little sale outside these top prebundled OSs:
Ubuntu App store
MacOS X App store
Windows 8 App store
It won't be easy finding legal Windows 7 copy without online merchants so that you can live App-free on your new computer.
Unless you plan to build your own PC and put non-Ubuntu FOSS on it, other choices call for wading into uncanny territory or buying older unsold items and used stuff
That said, I don't promote the idea of purchasing a tablet or phones for kids. There's already a living room PC and a laptop sitting around at home and kids do NOT need more room to hide their acts.
does this mean that my $50 Radeon HD 5450 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 can mine bitcoins and blocks and stuff? it will probably take weeks or months to find a block though. lol
Solo mining has a very little chance to work out, so join a mining "pool". Solo mining is like winning the lottery: 25 BTC paid out every 10 minutes to a lucky guy while everyone else on the planet gets nothing for that round, IIRC. With pools you get paid BTC fractions calculated based on your work in the pool. When you hear "bitcoin" you're talking about milli and micro amounts.
You quickly get used to the oddly small fractions: 0.00011935 BTC per block processed despite hitting a reasonable 90 Mhash/s.
Any ATI GPU should be fine (AMD Radeon HD 6750 cost me 70 bucks to play games.)
I started mining like 3 nights ago in a "why not?" moment but don't think I'll due it more than as a bullet point thing.
The first big step is to get the wallet client and prep to get about 6GB worth of data blocks --run this overnight. I hear that it's better to pay the $150 or so USD to buy a bitcoin that you can hoard than to wait until you can waste enough resources to get lucky.
The pool I joined is well known but requires newbies to accumulate 0.01 BTC before sending the payments. I'm like 3 more days away. That's bittersweet.
For vertical tabs, I think Opera supports them.
Not sure exactly where you turn them on because I haven't used it in ages.
Chrome seems to provide extensions that support it, but I am extremely doubtful of the browser now --trying to just get AdblockPlus was useless because it's not designed for my computer setup or something like that. It used to work some months ago (using Rockmelt)
In case you have not heard, Hotmail's PC chat application, Messenger, is two days from being sunset in favor of Skype. That will be causing a massive migration from users who ignored repeated upgrade emails from the MS team.
Just when I thought it was hard to convince my long-term guests that they should ignore the Messenger Icon, forcing themselves to learn the freshly installed Skype forced down our throats, I have to worry about their malware risks from a new vector of attack.
I very sparingly use the hotmail/live/OUTLOOK/identityCrisisNameDUJOUR account, and would have uninstalled it if I didn't have said friends from a land where people KNOW nothing else*. The loss of Hotmail integration, loss of social media-ish features, and bold GUI design choices to force you to try their $$$ calling plans really is making me consider shutting the doors on the account.
*We stay off FB. They know OF Yahoo Messenger which I never use. My GTalk is unknown to them and all this stinks of network effects.
Video game music has been useful to me, though some tracks are very hyper and you well have to tweak your playlist. I started with 1000 remix mp3s about a decade ago.
Go to http://ocremix.org/torrents and scroll down to OC ReMix 1 - 1000 and subsequent ones for mostly lyric-free music. For something done by fans on their free time, there are quite few orchestrated arrangements and nice reinterpretations of themes. Love the piano ones.
Since you are bound to emote and have distracting nostalgia fits, I suggest wearing them down on your free time over spring break by small subsets, avoiding the shuffle function so your mind can start to tune them out in a stable playlist. You will be listening for years, because the selection has grown so large and new mixes come out often.
My personal favorites are Mario, Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger mixes
What ages are most of the people in the class?
I have taken classes in a few settings, so I hope this helps. I started out at a small but well known and selective private college in a small town. Out of a couple thousand registered students, my 500-something class year had ~30 non-traditional students in my freshman year's facebook. Non-traditional means that they were not fresh out of highschool; most seemed to be in their 30s, with one or two gray haired candidates. The rest of us, including seniors, were between 17 and 21 years old. I never saw bad writing there, but there were few ESL students other than me --that would change later in my other schools. It the late nineties, an age before friendster, facebook and other major public venues of public writing. Blogs were not known, so Geocities, webrings, anime and TV "shrines", "signing" guestbooks and other things that we consider extremely quaint today were the norm, albeit extremely niche even among the elite I had the privilege to study with. One-page college-hosted webpages and Xanga blogs let me see a bit of the writing my friends could produce, but most of it I sampled via class sharing, email, dorm-wide broadcasts made by and for students, and text servers with school gossip.
I transferred for my last year and finished my degree at a public state-funded community college in my large home city. That time around I lacked a dorm life to see their informal writing.
The school was had about 3 times the student body, and maybe a quarter or less were in the 17 - 22 age group I had enjoyed at my first college... I think maybe half of the students in my classes had day jobs. The college forced me to take a writing class for curriculum reasons (they did not recognize writing credit from outside schools.) It was like night and day: I had new, greatly lowered expectations of math homework (problems were NOT given daily and went from about 15 x 3 class sessions to about 1/2 or 1/3 of that, and daily calc homework was no longer expected.)
Many people in the school were not born in the US, so in the school-wide writing class, reading comprehension, a few words from the English professor and several cultural details made things somewhat harder for the progress of the class as a whole. Papers were expected to be extremely simple, and I needed to give grammar help to a couple friends. I saw a resume or two after I graduated from friends that wanted some job help. Complexity of software projects was lower too, and I found myself actually doing some optional projects at home that sadly never made it into the class' scope.
I got excellent grades as soon as I got to that school, and my morale went up since I went from below-average to the college honor roll in my new environment. My knowledge came from what I had learned at the first college's tougher curriculum the first 3 years, seen on slashdot or just learned on my own. My second school did show me Linux in labs, but I had already seen Unix. It helped to complement my personal toolchest because I became close enough to someone to borrow his Mandrake 7 CDs back in '03.
In hindsight, I had a glimpse of the age make-up of college for part of my senior year of highschool that I did not understand for years. I got in an intro-level college-credit class at a different local colleges before turning 17 (I was the youngest of those 30 students by far, with a small few in their early twenties.) Most others looked like moms and dads in mid thirties, fourties and so on. I later found out that said state-funded 2-year college has a very long graduating period, and beyond 15000 students. I hope this all helps.
The dumbing down of computers continues. What else is new?
I would not call it dumbing down when the fact is that "the dumb" expect an intuitiveness that is just NOT here yet. A trend started by toolbars decades ago ASSUMES previous familiarity. If we learned anything from the backslash caused back in Office 2003 when the file menu went away, it was that it's hard to explain to someone over the phone what to click on when even your description of the icon can fall flat or cause ambiguity in what the user thinks you're suggesting.
Today, smartphone feature reduction (more like forced simplification) has bled into webmail GUIs. For the adults I tutor one on one, I chose setting them up with Yahoo over Gmail due to richer, written interfaces. I also chose Firefox over Chrome due to the same, back before FF killed the menu in a copy-cat move that would undo this very effort. Imagine all the complaints I got from 3 of these students over 50+ years old when their Yahoo text labels went away last month. They instead got arrows, gear icons, disappearing options (dynamic) and paper clips where they expect "Reply", "Delete", "Attach". Those icons were always there, but they never cared to notice, kinda like people spend years clicking on "Edit \ Copy" without noticing what the Control - C and its icon are supposed to help with. The masses do not pay attention even when there's no pressure, and they did not take being forced to adapt very well. The ones who do are already computer savvy.
Even though the buttons are far fewer, tablets are even worse. My mother unlearned how to Attach a file a dozen times. Finally, she learned the tablet GUI provides fewer confusion, but she's still greatly confused and is afraid of exploring what she thinks is a cryptic GUI and invisible "if you see nothing helpful, you're supposed to hold your finger down for the menu the programmer hid for that option". Android's interface is terrible for teaching an older person with limited memory AND time --I've had limited exposure to iPhones but find them friendlier and more likely to use words. See that gear icon over there [settings]? See that three line icon over here [menu]? See that bifurcating icon over here [share]? See that magnifying glass [search], not to be confused with this magnifying glass with a PLUS in it [zoom]? See those overlapping squares [windows]? Heck, I new it was trouble when I found it impossible to have them master multiple windows, let alone summoning and handling multiple tabs (plus icon in one browser, or square tabby thing in IE, or File \ New Tab in another)
Older people tend to
1) refuse to read our notes, books or sign up for classes in a real school with real homework. Too busy with fun and an "I need it now" attitude
2) tablets have no mouseover help labels
3) refuse to think through "geeky" words when 95% of the sentence makes sense.
With things my mother enjoys on facebook, she constantly uses the hardcover dictionary to confirm spelling and meanings. The second there's a geeky word, she completely locks up and wants a quick way out. Dumbing down provides such a way, but becomes a trap destined to be understood only by the initiated, which are a much younger crowd that has no problem or shame in asking for help.
The down side of lacking NFC is that you can't say that you can bump your phone into random strangers' phones until they "squirt" files at each other.
I don't like NFC either. The downside of innovation is that one day the industry says "pony up for new hardware because we no longer support yours." Bluetooth is cumbersome to use, especially if you have to remember which devices you disabled it on due to battery life problems on your older gadgets.
My point here wasn't so much for NFC, but against the trend to ignore PCs and even the web browser with "download our APP" excuse. After all, it's not that they want to give US the news, but to track us better. And potentially monetize their app with somewhat mandatory updates --they can't quite dig up your Name, phone number, GPS location and friend list with the antiquated OS's that we currently have (meaning more conservatively private.) For instance, I have a good camera but am angry about the lack of enjoying barcode-reading programs on my fully fledged PC. The App scene right now is like a 2.0 rebirth of the nineties' shareware era, except it's mainstream AND lucrative.
I am an advocate for secondary (and tertiary) batteries for cameras. If only smartphones had the same easy spring-loading mechanism!
Oddly, it was never a serious thought for me with the smartphone. Probably because
1) Camera batteries cost $20 but smartphone batteries are $50. Smartphone and laptop batteries lose charge duration in a few months. Other batteries, not so much.
2) getting a secondary charger or PC USB data cable blocked any other ideas
3) boot times on the phone are much longer than a camera
On the last point above, it's crazy that we still have to wait for 2 minute boot times on what's basically a low-end phone (to compare the 600Mhz processor speed, an Intel Celeron (not ARM) with Windows 95 should boot in half the time! I did experience Win95 in a 1.1Ghz in 18 seconds). So it would really be nice if we just got fast-boot phones... I wish that someone would combine these facts into a new trend:
a) most smartphones aren't hardware modded, so there's no need for the already customized OS carriers ship to check for new parts
b) most smartphones are never OS-upgraded by the carrier anyway
c) save-states and ROM-burnt OS's are fast
a ROM-chip system bypassing the linear hardware discovery and initialization processes would be sweet. Boot-to-save-state should bring speeds down to what dumb phones and digital cameras already enjoy: a second or two.
It would mean less expandability to hardware modders or Cyanogenmod installers looking for different versions of Android. The trouble is that I've been put off by needing to find illegal or customized ROMs, the same for a factory ROM for failsafes, the chance of bricking, post-upgrade bloat and chances of losing support for Market and other Google apps. All to go from 2.2 to 2.3 (doable for my phone hardware,) let alone the nonexistent 4.0 for it.
So right now, I'm looking for a car stereo which is Android based. I find many on the internet but few where I can see them and most are still running Android 2.x with no plans for updated versions.
I don't own a car don't want this to go lost either...we might hook others into commenting here
I recall seeing car-android systems some time ago regarding older cars, but all I could google was this slashdot link from 4/2012. Search for "DIN" there.
No idea how you're googling, but rather than looking for numbers, you should put "ice cream sandwich" or "jelly bean"... Also Honeycomb (3.x) got skipped except for tablets, so I'm pretty sure the 2.x gap is going to be a stubborn one, hardware-wise.
Given that the official $200 Galaxy 7" 2.0 tablet *just* updated itself over the air to Jelly Bean, I doubt car makers are shipping the latter version yet, so that and the Honeycomb lowerbound make things easier on you --it's 4.0 only. Thus...
Copy-paste Search strings that may prove useful for starters:
"ice cream sandwich" car entertinment system
2 din "ice cream sandwich"
double din "ice cream sandwich"
...happened to the rest of the alphabet sequence? No M?
You jest! BUT...
The IEEE suddenly realized they'd have to do like in apartment buildings: Normally named from 1A through Z their units beyond the first 26 combinations require a wrap-and-restart at 1AA for the rest of the units on that floor.
"That's MADNESS! I've never seen these other 20-something protocols!!" a curious slashdotter might say... Yes, there's really a lot of networking protocols AND they're just not ALL in the domain of Wifi tech. It's networking in general. The power of "QoS" we consider so widely-abused by ISPs and something called "Bridge operations procedure", for example, take some of the first few, yet little-known letters.
It was nice visiting this link again, to see that most stuff that is real still doesn't get the mainstream spotlight.
I have to ask: Is anyone getting even close to these advertised transfer rates in real world scenarios? I haven't seen more than low single digit MB/s over wireless LAN, even under line of sight conditions with hardly any interference.
In 2010 or so I was sadly surprised that my backups (PC Hard drive - > wifi laptop ) hit some invisible barrier of around 1.5 to 2 MByte/s from Windows host to laptop (Ubuntu or Windows). That was despite connections being between 11 and 54Mbit (yeah, the speed negotiated was pretty unstable for some reason, AND overhead plus bit to byte conversions kills about 90% of the fat number we see on the box). PS: Two different rooms, with a drywall separating both machines. The total separation was less than 10 feet given the small size of these apartments. I think I hit a peak of 3M to 4MByte/s, for like one minute out of 30 or so.
I declined to run another home test this year when buying a replacement for my old dead laptop and just opted for a USB adapter for transfer on the main PC. I should have tested, given that I've since plopped DDWRT on the same router, the new laptop's connection is stable in connection speeds and I always do CUT-PASTE rather than COPY-paste to never miss my place for inevitable CRC, Wired SMB errors and Wifi disconnects. Despite my layers of protection, I chalk it up to having lost confidence in Wifi in general. See my other comment for other setbacks.
The problem is just too damned many people are jumping on the wireless bandwagon and even the ISPs have started handing out wireless routers
I remember my first experiences with wifi back in 2006. I recall that the DSL ISP started making it an option back then. G was seldom seen, and everyone was on 2.4ghz, except for the Wireless A guys ( the routers used to tout ABG big time, though WEP was still king and XP didn't quite support WPA out of the box).
A year later I started getting other people set up, buying a few routers and handing my older ones down as gifts. I eventually settled on a dual band one in 2009 and have been pretty satisfied. However, my ISP and most others are lagging behind on real IPv6 support, so DHCP6 goes unused for now. Sadly, I have seen prices drop, yes, but protocols A and B have also disappeared quietly from support lists. The good part is that for about half the price, I can get dual-band now. That took long!
Somewhat off-topic rant: The problem now is that my recent $800 laptop doesn't do 5Ghz, which surprised me considering $70 routers do, and $40 routers support "300N" this year^W^W as of 2012. Neither does my year-old android phone, nor most devices I hook up from work, family or friends. My 2007 laptop had no problem doing so, but it cost the full $1000 and didn't have appealing features with the current year's lineup.
My $500 PC from last year was a satisfying upgrade to the older system I had for years. It surprised by failing to support Gigabit when I finally went and bought the Cat 6 cable. The old $20 NIC I saved up for it is not PCI-E, but had latent support for 1000BaseT, I think. Sad. Today's fragmented networking involves more research than even slashdotters like me care to do, and still moves at a glaciar pace. We ARE being dominated by money-saving choices and ISPs that no longer offer old, non-wifi routers, though most people end up losing...
I have worked a couple jobs where VPNs and/or bandwidth-heavy applications such as stock tickers were the cause of the issue, but the [local or business client] users cleverly hide the fact that they don't know what they're doing when the insist on Wifi just because they got a laptop from their office for work.
We outgrew numbers, or got tired of them. Remember Windows 2000? It begot XP, Vista and Seven. There, thes even has been a hat tip to the old numeric days, but not the year motif that came briefly with 95 and 98.
Anyways, around the same days when I was just barely managing to learn the novelty that are Ubuntu's codenames, I recall that the Android SDK was not very clear on codenames. I think the GUI had something about targets being versions 6 and 7, or maybe 8, but I had no idea what that meant in terms of features. A number doesn't provide a strong mental cue to keep you clued --codewords have *personality.* Well, they do not... but you must realize there's a reason why nobody names their children by order of "activation" like Dragonball androids.
"The ASUS Zenbook Prime is 1920 x 1080 with a 13.3" screen, which is close, if not better, than the Mac books."
It's really not. The 13" MBP display is 2560x1600 pixels.
Stop being an idiot, you're making yourself look bad here, not Apple.
Well, he gave a good lead for what may become the new defacto laptop resolution. Think of it as the DOCTYPE transitional 4.01 HTML tag but for the moving between today's 1200x800 and the drool-worthy high DPI targets that Macs provide. And give it 24 months while old stuff gets phased out.
Somewhere along the line, I hope this will cause the 4K standard for TVs to also be re-visited... even my laptop's HDMI resolution is too much for my HDTV... 720p may be "nice" for cable but it's horrible for laptops. It's just sad to see a screen several times larger than my laptop's go to waste like that. Why not add some special 1080p mode just for non-broadcast purposes? It's 37" versus 15"! Then again, the laptop won't do HD either because of reasons that have been discussed here ad nauseum.
No maybe about it. *OF COURSE* they know Latin letters, to read embossed lettering on signs where no one's bothered with Braille.
I never saw Braille until coming to the US. Now, I see it in elevators, select train station support beams indicating the station's name, and some entrances to buildings. It's magical enough seeing blind people move about freely crossing streets, and navigating their way around a city. Consider that the danger of edges in train platforms is exponentially higher to them, as well as the more mundane uncertainty on what TRAIN they are boarding, as well as the exact number of stops they must count before getting out --to a station where they don't normally ask for confirmation from a sighted passer-by.
Seeing how that seems fairly advanced, I wondered how it is that the blind are expected to know EXACTLY where those Braille plaques are supposed to be. I'm sure with smartphone GPS apps similar to talking clocks, they are living in a better world. Maybe civilization will move away from those randomly placed tags* and using RFID so that the same smartphones can alert them.
* Braille in public signs, ironically, is not much larger than 1/4 inch. Even with latin characters, at that font size, we ourselves would need to come real close to read the message. Speaking of complexity, it's interesting to just find out that there's Braille in Japan, and it looks simpler than their Kanji. Hilarious that they care enough to put a "Sake" label atop aluminum cans so they won't fall into the wrong hands.