The economies in all those areas are improving, very rapidly in some cases. Africa is the worst case, as the politics is so fucked up in so many places, but India and especially China are on the verge of massive uptake of computing. That means the potential for lots more profits for Microsoft et al.
Well if it worked once for you and your generator and your house it must work safely every time for everyone in their house with every kind of generator, right? It can work of course, if you know not to overload the sockets, how your GFCIs will react, and never ever forget to cut the mains power. But there's just too much to go wrong for it to be a sensible option for most people, which is why it's dangerous advice and in many places illegal to do.
Everyone has a computer? Get a grip on reality. Does everyone in India have a computer? Everyone in China? Everyone in South America? Everyone in Africa? The US, European and Japanese markets may be approaching a peak of computer penetration, but that's a long way from being "everyone".
Absolutely. It changes the mindset from a social norm to a market norm. Not only do you get a lot more out of people in social relationships than with a small cash reward, but it's extremely difficult to go back to a social norm once you have tried a market norm. If anybody ever gets paid to write for Wikipedia it will either require going the whole professional Britannica route, or Wikipedia will die. They couldn't afford to pay people what it would be worth, in cash terms in a market mindset, to do the work they currently do for free. If you pay someone a dollar, you get a dollar's worth of effort from them, which generally isn't very much. If they volunteer and you pay them nothing, you get their best effort. Here is a decent research article on the subject. Well worth a read if you like knowing how people tick, as are the other articles and papers. You can buy the book too, I suspect it's at least as interesting as the articles.
I find it interesting that you apparently judged me "certainly a judgemental idiot" on the basis of one sentence where I observed a correlation. FYI I don't dislike people for not using T9, though the number of people I've got to know who use txt-speak and haven't found to be in some way rather obnoxious is extremely small.
I have a PS2 with a good few games. When I bought a PS3 I didn't give any thought to whether it would play my PS2 games, because... I already have a PS2. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people who own PS2 games also own a PS2.
XBox 360 controllers do die in droves. Well, they wear out pretty quickly anyway. My 360 owning friend has replaced two so far, with a third on its way out. One RROD too. Compared to Microsoft's excellent PC peripherals, or Sony and Nintendo's robust consoles, the XBox hardware is pretty shoddy.
The burden of proof lies with the one who makes the proposal. The proper answer (as anyone from Missouri can attest) is "Show me", not "You are a poo-poo head."
That depends on how absurd the claim is. If you claimed your car with an internal combustion engine did 200 mpg a degree of skepticism would be reasonable, so "show me" would be the appropriate response. If you claimed it did 5000 mpg the appropriate response would be "fuck off, shithead", because that claim would plainly be bullshit.
Some people aren't stupid, but are very poor. Being poor is much more expensive than being rich. You often have no option but to rent rather than buy, borrow rather than save and buy cheap goods which don't last rather than quality goods which are cheaper in the long run. If the choices for that week's inelastic budget are sufficient food and incandescents, sufficient food and darkness while you save for CFLs or CFLs and hunger, guess which choice wins.
Does either company make a 5-pound 4 DCell flashlight built around a sturdy pipe that you would *not* want to be hit with? MagLites double as nightsticks, which is half their appeal.
No, but you can carry a Surefire and a nightstick, then you can see who you're hitting while you're hitting them.
Maglites were decent enough in the 80s but the flashlight world has moved on and Maglite have just traded on their name and failed even to copy the competition, let alone innovate themselves. They make a nice basis for modified lights with high-power HID bulbs, but as a portable light source they suck.
I'd like to see the accuracy of this system in a real-life setting. On phones with the T9 technology, I found it was faster for me to hit a key three times than to backspace every time the software made a mistake (which was frequently)...
Backspace? Mistake? It's never wrong in the sense that it never suggests a word that can't be made of the letters on the keys you pressed. Erm, you do know how to scroll through the list of suggested words on your phone, don't you? You do know that if it doesn't have a word you can add it to the dictionary and the word you enter will appear in the message you are composing, don't you? The only reason you should have to backspace is if you made a mistake, you don't want to add a word to the dictionary or you don't know how T9 works.
I suspect a lot of people get as far with T9 as entering 2337 expecting "beer", getting "adds" and deciding it doesn't work because it can't read their mind.
Dvorak is designed for efficient touch typing. Virtual keyboards are inherently poor for touch typing (you can't feel which "keys" your fingers are hitting), and most are too small to even attempt it. If you could convince me there is a significant proportion of people who known Dvorak but can't even type one- or two-fingered on a QWERTY I might believe that there is a real need, but I suspect that group of users is vanishingly small.
First, I never use that T9 stuff, because it never chooses the right word. Guessing the word that you want to type isn't convenient, it's annoying. Also, it doesn't allow for purposefully misspelled words and text slang.
At least in good recent implementations it does usually choose the right word, because in addition to having generic word frequency data it learns the most common words you personally use. You can also add your own words to the dictionary, so you can use as many purposefully mispelled words and slang terms as you like. You can always drop out of T9 mode for unusual requirements.
I usually dislike people who don't use T9; they tend to be the idiots who write things like "l8r" (7 key-presses, assuming you can hold the key down to get the 8 and wait between letters) instead of "later" (5 key-presses with T9, entered as fast as you like). A good T9 implementation lets me compose messages with correct spelling and punctuation more rapidly and reliably and with less effort. Messages with correct grammar, spelling and punctuation can be read more reliably and rapidly by the recipients.
One thing that always amazes me, and that most people don't even understand is that the actual atmospheric air pressure difference between here on the ground and being in the "vacuum" of space, is only 14.7 teeny-tiny pounds per square inch.
Only? Atmopsheric pressure is comparable to the weight of a person on the palm of your hand. I'd call that pretty significant on the human scale.
The avoidance on cat-on-keyboard is a real selling point to me. I'm currently using the latest Apple keyboard, which despite its lack of indentations on the keys is actually pretty nice. Good key feel and nice and quiet. Unfortunately, the flat keys mean my cats' feet don't recognise it as a keyboard (I had them trained not to walk on my other keyboards) and they happily walk all over it.
Not that I agree with the summary that it costs "practically nothing" to send text messages, but even if it did, "practically nothing" != "literally nothing".
There often is a noticeable lag when calling a phone which is in motion. It's not rare for there to be a 10+ second delay as (presumably) the network searches cells close to where the phone was last heard from.
The prices range from 0.20 per message to well under a cent per message but either way you're handing the carriers gobs of cash for something that quite literally costs them nothing at all to implement.
Literally nothing to implement? Are you taking the piss, or are you actually that stupid? The services on the network - voice, text, data - have to pay for the infrastructure for a start. Perhaps you were fooled by the newer cell towers which look like trees and thought the networks just grew out of the ground, but they don't. Mobile phone networks costs billions. Lots and lots of billions. In addition to the network, customer service, billing and the rest, there are in fact SMS-specific costs. Things like the servers which store and forward the messages and the people, power, buildings and staff to keep them running. Then there are the SMS termination charges your network has to pay the receiving network for taking the message.
No it doesn't, and that's the point. The control messages will still be sent, only those 160 characters will be blank. All you're doing when texting is changing some of those zeroes to ones - filling in the pad bits with your data. There's no increase in the amount of data being sent from the phone to the tower.
I've had a GSM phone for the best part of a decade. When it's close to a TV or stereo you get a bit of interference every time it talks to the network. At idle, it does that every several minutes minutes. If SMS were piggybacked only on the control messages it was sending anyway, on average I would receive a text several minutes after it was sent (several/2 to send, several/2 to receive). But it doesn't take anything like that long, it only takes a couple of seconds. At idle, phones do not talk to the network every couple of seconds, there's just no need. Thus, the network must be sending additional messages.
Slashdot Mirror
do the moderators even know who timecop is?
Perhaps they do, but they actually like Jean-Claude Van Damme. Some people are weird like that.
The economies in all those areas are improving, very rapidly in some cases. Africa is the worst case, as the politics is so fucked up in so many places, but India and especially China are on the verge of massive uptake of computing. That means the potential for lots more profits for Microsoft et al.
Well if it worked once for you and your generator and your house it must work safely every time for everyone in their house with every kind of generator, right? It can work of course, if you know not to overload the sockets, how your GFCIs will react, and never ever forget to cut the mains power. But there's just too much to go wrong for it to be a sensible option for most people, which is why it's dangerous advice and in many places illegal to do.
That's pretty impressive service from Kohler to call and remind people when they know the power is out in their area.
Everyone has a computer? Get a grip on reality. Does everyone in India have a computer? Everyone in China? Everyone in South America? Everyone in Africa? The US, European and Japanese markets may be approaching a peak of computer penetration, but that's a long way from being "everyone".
What makes you think the next 50 insurance companies don't use SQL Server too?
Absolutely. It changes the mindset from a social norm to a market norm. Not only do you get a lot more out of people in social relationships than with a small cash reward, but it's extremely difficult to go back to a social norm once you have tried a market norm. If anybody ever gets paid to write for Wikipedia it will either require going the whole professional Britannica route, or Wikipedia will die. They couldn't afford to pay people what it would be worth, in cash terms in a market mindset, to do the work they currently do for free. If you pay someone a dollar, you get a dollar's worth of effort from them, which generally isn't very much. If they volunteer and you pay them nothing, you get their best effort. Here is a decent research article on the subject. Well worth a read if you like knowing how people tick, as are the other articles and papers. You can buy the book too, I suspect it's at least as interesting as the articles.
I find it interesting that you apparently judged me "certainly a judgemental idiot" on the basis of one sentence where I observed a correlation. FYI I don't dislike people for not using T9, though the number of people I've got to know who use txt-speak and haven't found to be in some way rather obnoxious is extremely small.
I have a PS2 with a good few games. When I bought a PS3 I didn't give any thought to whether it would play my PS2 games, because... I already have a PS2. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people who own PS2 games also own a PS2.
XBox 360 controllers do die in droves. Well, they wear out pretty quickly anyway. My 360 owning friend has replaced two so far, with a third on its way out. One RROD too. Compared to Microsoft's excellent PC peripherals, or Sony and Nintendo's robust consoles, the XBox hardware is pretty shoddy.
Woosh!
The burden of proof lies with the one who makes the proposal. The proper answer (as anyone from Missouri can attest) is "Show me", not "You are a poo-poo head."
That depends on how absurd the claim is. If you claimed your car with an internal combustion engine did 200 mpg a degree of skepticism would be reasonable, so "show me" would be the appropriate response. If you claimed it did 5000 mpg the appropriate response would be "fuck off, shithead", because that claim would plainly be bullshit.
Some people aren't stupid, but are very poor. Being poor is much more expensive than being rich. You often have no option but to rent rather than buy, borrow rather than save and buy cheap goods which don't last rather than quality goods which are cheaper in the long run. If the choices for that week's inelastic budget are sufficient food and incandescents, sufficient food and darkness while you save for CFLs or CFLs and hunger, guess which choice wins.
Does either company make a 5-pound 4 DCell flashlight built around a sturdy pipe that you would *not* want to be hit with? MagLites double as nightsticks, which is half their appeal.
No, but you can carry a Surefire and a nightstick, then you can see who you're hitting while you're hitting them.
Maglites were decent enough in the 80s but the flashlight world has moved on and Maglite have just traded on their name and failed even to copy the competition, let alone innovate themselves. They make a nice basis for modified lights with high-power HID bulbs, but as a portable light source they suck.
I'd like to see the accuracy of this system in a real-life setting. On phones with the T9 technology, I found it was faster for me to hit a key three times than to backspace every time the software made a mistake (which was frequently)...
Backspace? Mistake? It's never wrong in the sense that it never suggests a word that can't be made of the letters on the keys you pressed. Erm, you do know how to scroll through the list of suggested words on your phone, don't you? You do know that if it doesn't have a word you can add it to the dictionary and the word you enter will appear in the message you are composing, don't you? The only reason you should have to backspace is if you made a mistake, you don't want to add a word to the dictionary or you don't know how T9 works.
I suspect a lot of people get as far with T9 as entering 2337 expecting "beer", getting "adds" and deciding it doesn't work because it can't read their mind.
Dvorak is designed for efficient touch typing. Virtual keyboards are inherently poor for touch typing (you can't feel which "keys" your fingers are hitting), and most are too small to even attempt it. If you could convince me there is a significant proportion of people who known Dvorak but can't even type one- or two-fingered on a QWERTY I might believe that there is a real need, but I suspect that group of users is vanishingly small.
First, I never use that T9 stuff, because it never chooses the right word. Guessing the word that you want to type isn't convenient, it's annoying. Also, it doesn't allow for purposefully misspelled words and text slang.
At least in good recent implementations it does usually choose the right word, because in addition to having generic word frequency data it learns the most common words you personally use. You can also add your own words to the dictionary, so you can use as many purposefully mispelled words and slang terms as you like. You can always drop out of T9 mode for unusual requirements.
I usually dislike people who don't use T9; they tend to be the idiots who write things like "l8r" (7 key-presses, assuming you can hold the key down to get the 8 and wait between letters) instead of "later" (5 key-presses with T9, entered as fast as you like). A good T9 implementation lets me compose messages with correct spelling and punctuation more rapidly and reliably and with less effort. Messages with correct grammar, spelling and punctuation can be read more reliably and rapidly by the recipients.
One thing that always amazes me, and that most people don't even understand is that the actual atmospheric air pressure difference between here on the ground and being in the "vacuum" of space, is only 14.7 teeny-tiny pounds per square inch.
Only? Atmopsheric pressure is comparable to the weight of a person on the palm of your hand. I'd call that pretty significant on the human scale.
I heard about getting baked and eating cake, but I didn't know there would be free beer too! Woohoo!
The avoidance on cat-on-keyboard is a real selling point to me. I'm currently using the latest Apple keyboard, which despite its lack of indentations on the keys is actually pretty nice. Good key feel and nice and quiet. Unfortunately, the flat keys mean my cats' feet don't recognise it as a keyboard (I had them trained not to walk on my other keyboards) and they happily walk all over it.
Not that I agree with the summary that it costs "practically nothing" to send text messages, but even if it did, "practically nothing" != "literally nothing".
Oklahoma already has two hydo plants and one pumped storage plant. You don't need huge elevation changes, a few hundred feet will do.
There often is a noticeable lag when calling a phone which is in motion. It's not rare for there to be a 10+ second delay as (presumably) the network searches cells close to where the phone was last heard from.
The prices range from 0.20 per message to well under a cent per message but either way you're handing the carriers gobs of cash for something that quite literally costs them nothing at all to implement.
Literally nothing to implement? Are you taking the piss, or are you actually that stupid? The services on the network - voice, text, data - have to pay for the infrastructure for a start. Perhaps you were fooled by the newer cell towers which look like trees and thought the networks just grew out of the ground, but they don't. Mobile phone networks costs billions. Lots and lots of billions. In addition to the network, customer service, billing and the rest, there are in fact SMS-specific costs. Things like the servers which store and forward the messages and the people, power, buildings and staff to keep them running. Then there are the SMS termination charges your network has to pay the receiving network for taking the message.
No it doesn't, and that's the point. The control messages will still be sent, only those 160 characters will be blank. All you're doing when texting is changing some of those zeroes to ones - filling in the pad bits with your data. There's no increase in the amount of data being sent from the phone to the tower.
I've had a GSM phone for the best part of a decade. When it's close to a TV or stereo you get a bit of interference every time it talks to the network. At idle, it does that every several minutes minutes. If SMS were piggybacked only on the control messages it was sending anyway, on average I would receive a text several minutes after it was sent (several/2 to send, several/2 to receive). But it doesn't take anything like that long, it only takes a couple of seconds. At idle, phones do not talk to the network every couple of seconds, there's just no need. Thus, the network must be sending additional messages.