There are other forms of "ice pack" than those contained within ziploc bags. It's trivial to find them at most hardgood stores, wrapped in thick, rigid, impermeable, translucent plastic.
Combine with a towel, and very dry desert air, and I'm not thinking that the local humidity will be a problem. (What condensation?)
Poor stawman. Can't accept that someone simply wanted to point out that two different things (one of which is tangible, and the other of which is is intangible) are in fact different.
Lonely strawman, always looking for an agenda when there just isn't one to be found, accusing folks of having one anyway, and then expecting them to defend it.
Sorry, strawman. You're not going to find a hidden agenda here. If you want to argue the one, singular, insular point that I made, then go for it.
And strawman, if you can't remember what that point is is, then scroll up until you find it. Stop looking for hidden messages and meanings, and just read the fucking words.
(And if you're really so starved for attention that you want to continue your completely meaningless accusatory tirade against an opinion that you imagine that I have, please just buy yourself a dog instead.)
What you think I may have said doesn't seem to line up very well with what I did say, but that's really not so much a problem with rooted in my choice of words but rather of your lack of comprehension.
If you think there is no harm in someone copying your bank details, medical history or whatever and publishing it to the world, you're living in a different world than me.
I didn't say it was harmless. I said that it is not the same thing. Please get your fucking arguments straight, and then post them.
I think it simply is what it is: An effort to make cameras smarter and connected using an open operating system, not an end game. This is, after all, the first device of this class -- don't try to read too much into it.
I fully expect, if this thing is not entirely shunned from the get-go, to see proper DSLR hardware appear with similar Android touchscreen functionality in the near future.
A digital camera is a computer with a lens and a light sensor. Has been for a long, long time. The computer runs software. The user interacts mostly with buttons and wheels.
This camera is no different, except that its software is built around Android, and the user interacts with a touchscreen and uses fewer buttons than is traditional.
Or to put it a different way, this interesting product is conspicuously missing the ability to make cellular voice calls for no apparent reason.
There is a very good reason why it doesn't make phone calls: Do you want a phone that is shaped like a camera? I surely don't want a phone that is shaped like a camera.
In terms of marketability, there is some precedent for devices which were fairly good at what they did until some clever marketer says "That's almost perfect! Now all we need to do is ADD A CELL PHONE TO IT!" and then just failing miserably in the marketplace.
No, I do not think that. I could care less about clock speed, and it is not a factor in my comparison.
I think that because they benchmark rather similarly with the E300 being only somewhat faster, but relying on two cores to accomplish this, that my old box will indeed be faster for single-threaded tasks.
If you think differently, you haven't spent enough time using multi-processor computers with single-threaded applications.
Regardless, I blame the people who take the money. If a bank or a shop or some other business has a pile of money sitting out the front (say in an armored car), and it's unguarded, I won't take it. It's not my money. This is one of those few instances which really is black and white.
Sure. The thing is, they didn't take anything, but merely copied it.
This is this point at which analogies that compare tangible things to intangible things always fall apart. They're not at all the same type of thing, and any argument rooted in the presumption that they are the same thing is inherently logically fallacious.
Perhaps you might temper your argument with the realization of the poor state that much of the rest of the US is in where such pathways simply do not exist, and sidewalks are the responsibility of the property owner (who may or may not ever get around to shoveling snow, especially if it is significant).
There's plenty of room for improvement toward enabling a more bicycle-and-pedestrian-friendly society, on average, in the US.
And a six-mile hike? Meh. That's something I do for fun, and I'm decisively not in any sort of great physical fitness.
I do not know if Volkswagen is so-afflicted because I lack familiarity with their products, but BMW is well-known to have different engines (and sometimes even transmissions!) for their domestic market and for US exports.
Some of it is certainly due to testing differences, but the rest of it is because they're not at all the same car once it's said, done, and exported for a foreign market.
(hey, let's use all the free memory as a cache pool! when apps need more memory we'll feed it to them as needed. what could go wrong?)
Sounds a lot like a relatively badass 8-core 16-thread 16GB server box I fixed awhile back, wherein Exchange was very purposefully doing exactly the same thing: The box was so slow that printer drivers on remote machines would time out with errors waiting for it to stop thrashing the swap file.
A few registry hacks later, and Exchange's usage went from "darn near everything" to a much more reasonable couple of gigabytes (which I could've pared down more, but...).
Of course, the MSFT crowd all cries that Exchange will magically release memory as-needed. Yeah, sure...
[It was for a medium-sized dentists office. It had 5 bloody email addresses, only about 2 of which ever saw any use, and that usage was very low. They were also doing some light file and printer-sharing, and that's it. There was no reason for performance on that machine to be other than absolutely stellar, except for Exchange doing what Exchange does.]
My daily-use laptop has a 1.83GHz Pentium-M with a couple of megs of cache. It only supports 2GB of DDR2. It's got a modem (that I do actually use from time to time), 802.11a/b/g, and a 1920x1200 display, integrated Bluetooth, and a video card that does just fine with whatever I throw at it.
So I went looking at walmart.com, home of the modern cheap-shit namebrand computer. They have a $298 Compaq with an AMD E300 which is only just marginally faster with its two cores (the old single-core Pentium-M will run single-threaded apps faster). It has no modem mentioned, no Bluetooth, no 802.11a (and thus no 5.7GHz radio at all), and certainly doesn't have a 1920x1200 display. It does have a bigger hard drive, but whoopdie-do: Mine's only half-full after more than half a decade of slogging.
For $300, it sure doesn't seem like an upgrade at all... even if it can support more RAM.
I'm sure I can find a suitable upgrade for more money, but one that outperforms my old 2GB-max machine "in every performance metric" for $300? It doesn't look that way.
I just bought a Brother all-in-one inkjet for $50, and some third-party ink carts (2 black and a set of color) for $7, after finally giving up on a Laserjet 5 that I'd been flogging for years and years. The Brother machine even has a document feeder that actually works, which makes scanning documents more joyous, and it's WiFi, which makes it trivial to move around.
To work around the clogged print-head issue, I've set up the following: Every Sunday at noon, the printer prints something -- automatically. It was easy to set up Windows to do this (would've been easier with Linux, but I care not about printing in Linux).
It's all tradeoffs, but I wouldn't exactly call this inkjet printer an expensive item to use.
I'd rather have flexible non-conductive plastic shit that can take a beating and be easily replaced when it fails, than ductile/malleable metal that is neither of these.
(Yes, I've had broken iDevices in my hand whose aluminum pack panel was smashed in. No, I haven't seen these effects on Android devices. And yes, it's an anecdote: YMMV.)
Because I have a not-really-so-old Lexicon receiver with a beautiful amplifier section which once cost some schmuck $4,000, and I'm neither interested in "upgrading" it to something that doesn't sound as good nor spending a small fortune to get something that is sonically-equivalent with more features.
DLNA is also not an option because it's not easy to use. You speak of apps, while I speak of random friends trying to share music with others socially. My random friends shouldn't need any special apps to stream music to a nearby audio system; it should be an integral part of their phone and work with whatever apps they've already got by simply transmitting the sound data over the network instead of to the analog section of the handset.
They shouldn't have to learn a whole new playback interface just to play music on my stereo, and at no time should I need to turn on a TV or look at a computer monitor to make their stuff work. Instead, they should be able to open their system settings, select "adolf's stereo" as a default audio destination, and be done.
That said: I've got old laptops. I've got old desktops. I've got PS3s (plural; one hacked, one not). I've got spare, awesome rackmount touchscreen IPS-paneled monitors. I've got all kinds of shit, and I have some willingness to spend time making things work, but I'm not a programmer.
And what I don't have is a way to simply get high-fidelity sound from a phone and into my stereo without wires, lossy Bluetooth, or fuckery. And AFAICT, neither does anyone else, unless they're an Apple user with the correct Airport wireless kit...and then, they've been doing it for years.
And DLNA will always count as "fuckery" as long as current implementations cannot accomplish this grossly simple task, which I was merrily doing with ESD under Linux well over a decade ago with a 10base2 network that was far slower, in all ways, than my current crop of 802.11g wireless kit and Gig-E backend.
So, to me, getting this done seems like a foregone conclusion...because it is.
Back into context: I'll gladly pay hundreds of dollars extra as an early-adopter tax on a new Android phone, if that's what it takes to get it done in the current state of affairs.
But if can't fire up a podcast of Car Talk on my Droid 4 from my Subsonic server and simply have it play on my stereo instead over its internal speaker, the headphone jack, or lossy Bluetooth, then it's a failure. Plain and simple. And DLNA doesn't do that. (It allegedly can, but it doesn't.)
may appeal to non-geeks, assuming that it is all done in such a way that it all works together in the least frustrating manner. Non-geeks tend to be less influenced and excited by spec bullet point lists as they are about the whole package and how painless it is to use. A non-geek would gladly give up one of those features in exchange for polish and usability for the remainder.
Yeah, of course they would. A non-geek can also be perfectly happy with a cheap computer from Wal-Mart, but that doesn't mean that better computers aren't available for those who want them... and plenty of folks do.
The barometer is useful to supplement GPS for finding altitude. Good for fitness geeks, navigation geeks, and folks who can use a bit better accuracy in the course of work (I fit two of these categories).
A gyroscope allows software to differentiate between tilt and acceleration, thus making the accelerometers that everything already has actually useful. Good for car geeks (realtime stats that can subtract body roll from G-force measurements), good for gamer geeks (perhaps), good for navigation, and certainly other stuff that I'm just not thinking of right now. Steve Jobs, visionary feature-cutter extraordinaire, felt gyroscropes to be worthy of inclusion on new iPhone models, so certainly there's a practical use for the things.
And a USB port (with a dongle, probably, just for size reasons) would be magical for lots of folks. Want to get photos from your fancy camera onto Facebook? Just pull the card out and plug it into a USB reader on your phone -- it doesn't get much easier to understand than that. Flash drives today are used almost like floppy disks used to be used, and being able to handle one on a pocket computer would benefit all sorts of business and common folk. Leaving the laptop at home (or never buying one to begin with) is a big plus for all manner of people, and this helps with that goal.
And playing audio on my stereo? I can't be the only clown who has a fairly awesome AV system, a fairly awesome pocket computer, and a well-built home network who has sat on his couch and looked at them together and said to himself "Self, this is fucking stupid. Why do these things not cooperate in a way that makes sense? Why can I not pick a song on my pocket computer and play it on my stereo/computer speakers/poolside speakers/whatever without either hours of fuckery, some manner of wire, or the bane of Bluetooth?"
And of course it needs to be easy to use. Friends come over and want to play a song on their fancy-pants phone, and they're already on my WLAN, but we have to hear the song through a singular tinny phone speaker because doing it any other way is a pain in the ass. It shouldn't be that way (and, no, DLNA is not the answer, but is instead part of the problem).
And an unlocked bootloader. And freedom to build my own kernels. And a clear designation that the warranty of the hardware is unaffected by the state of the software.
the general non-geeky populace couldn't care less about. Therefore, it will be at the very bottom of a mainstream manufacturer's priority list.
My non-geeky friends will care, because I (their geeky friend) will be able to better support their pocket computer. I already root my friends' phones for them so they can use tools like Titanium Backup, and it would be nice if I didn't have to include a disclaimer about warranty status (which the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act says I shouldn't have to do, but I digress).
Manufacturers should care, because it will allow things like Cyanogenmod to work more freely, thus lessening their need to pay developers to keep working on software upgrades that people with older devices still want (due to the 2-year upgrade cycle on hardware imposed by many US carriers).
Indeed, I welcome the day when manufacturers stop trying to play independent software developer, genuinely grasp the concept
Not AFAICT. The newer iPhones have miniature gyroscopes. A barometer is not a power-hungry device, nor is it big, and would be most useful when also doing GPS things (which already chews up batteries with great fury). My phone already has a keyboard. And IPS displays don't seem to be any more challenging to fit than any other type of display, though they are more expensive than some.
All I've really asked for that adds battery drain is a real USB port, and that's only expensive on the power budget when it is being used.
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There are other forms of "ice pack" than those contained within ziploc bags. It's trivial to find them at most hardgood stores, wrapped in thick, rigid, impermeable, translucent plastic.
Combine with a towel, and very dry desert air, and I'm not thinking that the local humidity will be a problem. (What condensation?)
This word, "merely." It does not mean what you think it means.
Poor stawman. Can't accept that someone simply wanted to point out that two different things (one of which is tangible, and the other of which is is intangible) are in fact different.
Lonely strawman, always looking for an agenda when there just isn't one to be found, accusing folks of having one anyway, and then expecting them to defend it.
Sorry, strawman. You're not going to find a hidden agenda here. If you want to argue the one, singular, insular point that I made, then go for it.
And strawman, if you can't remember what that point is is, then scroll up until you find it. Stop looking for hidden messages and meanings, and just read the fucking words.
(And if you're really so starved for attention that you want to continue your completely meaningless accusatory tirade against an opinion that you imagine that I have, please just buy yourself a dog instead.)
No. What I said was what I said.
What you think I may have said doesn't seem to line up very well with what I did say, but that's really not so much a problem with rooted in my choice of words but rather of your lack of comprehension.
We're done here, strawman.
Which part of "intangible things are not the same as tangible things" is a word game?
I replaced the 4-speed automatic in my car with a manual 5-speed, mostly for that reason, and my mileage in-town improved by about 5%.
I didn't say it was harmless. I said that it is not the same thing. Please get your fucking arguments straight, and then post them.
It works?
I think it simply is what it is: An effort to make cameras smarter and connected using an open operating system, not an end game. This is, after all, the first device of this class -- don't try to read too much into it.
I fully expect, if this thing is not entirely shunned from the get-go, to see proper DSLR hardware appear with similar Android touchscreen functionality in the near future.
The rest, as they say, is just software.
(Also: Paragraphs, for God's sake. Paragraphs!)
It's not a stupid word game.
I don't presume to say which criminal act is worse than the other.
All I said is that they are not at all the same thing. This fact is inarguable.
Dropbox on Android already does this. It works well.
I think you're overthinking it.
A digital camera is a computer with a lens and a light sensor. Has been for a long, long time. The computer runs software. The user interacts mostly with buttons and wheels.
This camera is no different, except that its software is built around Android, and the user interacts with a touchscreen and uses fewer buttons than is traditional.
There is a very good reason why it doesn't make phone calls:
Do you want a phone that is shaped like a camera? I surely don't want a phone that is shaped like a camera.
In terms of marketability, there is some precedent for devices which were fairly good at what they did until some clever marketer says "That's almost perfect! Now all we need to do is ADD A CELL PHONE TO IT!" and then just failing miserably in the marketplace.
No, I do not think that. I could care less about clock speed, and it is not a factor in my comparison.
I think that because they benchmark rather similarly with the E300 being only somewhat faster, but relying on two cores to accomplish this, that my old box will indeed be faster for single-threaded tasks.
If you think differently, you haven't spent enough time using multi-processor computers with single-threaded applications.
Sure. The thing is, they didn't take anything, but merely copied it.
This is this point at which analogies that compare tangible things to intangible things always fall apart. They're not at all the same type of thing, and any argument rooted in the presumption that they are the same thing is inherently logically fallacious.
Wait. Your city has bikepaths? Plural? Luxury!
Perhaps you might temper your argument with the realization of the poor state that much of the rest of the US is in where such pathways simply do not exist, and sidewalks are the responsibility of the property owner (who may or may not ever get around to shoveling snow, especially if it is significant).
There's plenty of room for improvement toward enabling a more bicycle-and-pedestrian-friendly society, on average, in the US.
And a six-mile hike? Meh. That's something I do for fun, and I'm decisively not in any sort of great physical fitness.
I do not know if Volkswagen is so-afflicted because I lack familiarity with their products, but BMW is well-known to have different engines (and sometimes even transmissions!) for their domestic market and for US exports.
Some of it is certainly due to testing differences, but the rest of it is because they're not at all the same car once it's said, done, and exported for a foreign market.
Sounds a lot like a relatively badass 8-core 16-thread 16GB server box I fixed awhile back, wherein Exchange was very purposefully doing exactly the same thing: The box was so slow that printer drivers on remote machines would time out with errors waiting for it to stop thrashing the swap file.
A few registry hacks later, and Exchange's usage went from "darn near everything" to a much more reasonable couple of gigabytes (which I could've pared down more, but...).
Of course, the MSFT crowd all cries that Exchange will magically release memory as-needed. Yeah, sure...
[It was for a medium-sized dentists office. It had 5 bloody email addresses, only about 2 of which ever saw any use, and that usage was very low. They were also doing some light file and printer-sharing, and that's it. There was no reason for performance on that machine to be other than absolutely stellar, except for Exchange doing what Exchange does.]
My daily-use laptop has a 1.83GHz Pentium-M with a couple of megs of cache. It only supports 2GB of DDR2. It's got a modem (that I do actually use from time to time), 802.11a/b/g, and a 1920x1200 display, integrated Bluetooth, and a video card that does just fine with whatever I throw at it.
So I went looking at walmart.com, home of the modern cheap-shit namebrand computer. They have a $298 Compaq with an AMD E300 which is only just marginally faster with its two cores (the old single-core Pentium-M will run single-threaded apps faster). It has no modem mentioned, no Bluetooth, no 802.11a (and thus no 5.7GHz radio at all), and certainly doesn't have a 1920x1200 display. It does have a bigger hard drive, but whoopdie-do: Mine's only half-full after more than half a decade of slogging.
For $300, it sure doesn't seem like an upgrade at all... even if it can support more RAM.
I'm sure I can find a suitable upgrade for more money, but one that outperforms my old 2GB-max machine "in every performance metric" for $300? It doesn't look that way.
It's not a DCP, but an MFC. Googling doesn't reveal a clear difference in the designation.
Thoughts?
I just bought a Brother all-in-one inkjet for $50, and some third-party ink carts (2 black and a set of color) for $7, after finally giving up on a Laserjet 5 that I'd been flogging for years and years. The Brother machine even has a document feeder that actually works, which makes scanning documents more joyous, and it's WiFi, which makes it trivial to move around.
To work around the clogged print-head issue, I've set up the following: Every Sunday at noon, the printer prints something -- automatically. It was easy to set up Windows to do this (would've been easier with Linux, but I care not about printing in Linux).
It's all tradeoffs, but I wouldn't exactly call this inkjet printer an expensive item to use.
All I have are pennies and nickles.
Where shall I send them to?
I'd rather have flexible non-conductive plastic shit that can take a beating and be easily replaced when it fails, than ductile/malleable metal that is neither of these.
(Yes, I've had broken iDevices in my hand whose aluminum pack panel was smashed in. No, I haven't seen these effects on Android devices. And yes, it's an anecdote: YMMV.)
Because I have a not-really-so-old Lexicon receiver with a beautiful amplifier section which once cost some schmuck $4,000, and I'm neither interested in "upgrading" it to something that doesn't sound as good nor spending a small fortune to get something that is sonically-equivalent with more features.
DLNA is also not an option because it's not easy to use. You speak of apps, while I speak of random friends trying to share music with others socially. My random friends shouldn't need any special apps to stream music to a nearby audio system; it should be an integral part of their phone and work with whatever apps they've already got by simply transmitting the sound data over the network instead of to the analog section of the handset.
They shouldn't have to learn a whole new playback interface just to play music on my stereo, and at no time should I need to turn on a TV or look at a computer monitor to make their stuff work. Instead, they should be able to open their system settings, select "adolf's stereo" as a default audio destination, and be done.
That said: I've got old laptops. I've got old desktops. I've got PS3s (plural; one hacked, one not). I've got spare, awesome rackmount touchscreen IPS-paneled monitors. I've got all kinds of shit, and I have some willingness to spend time making things work, but I'm not a programmer.
And what I don't have is a way to simply get high-fidelity sound from a phone and into my stereo without wires, lossy Bluetooth, or fuckery. And AFAICT, neither does anyone else, unless they're an Apple user with the correct Airport wireless kit...and then, they've been doing it for years.
And DLNA will always count as "fuckery" as long as current implementations cannot accomplish this grossly simple task, which I was merrily doing with ESD under Linux well over a decade ago with a 10base2 network that was far slower, in all ways, than my current crop of 802.11g wireless kit and Gig-E backend.
So, to me, getting this done seems like a foregone conclusion...because it is.
Back into context: I'll gladly pay hundreds of dollars extra as an early-adopter tax on a new Android phone, if that's what it takes to get it done in the current state of affairs.
But if can't fire up a podcast of Car Talk on my Droid 4 from my Subsonic server and simply have it play on my stereo instead over its internal speaker, the headphone jack, or lossy Bluetooth, then it's a failure. Plain and simple. And DLNA doesn't do that. (It allegedly can, but it doesn't.)
Yeah, of course they would. A non-geek can also be perfectly happy with a cheap computer from Wal-Mart, but that doesn't mean that better computers aren't available for those who want them... and plenty of folks do.
The barometer is useful to supplement GPS for finding altitude. Good for fitness geeks, navigation geeks, and folks who can use a bit better accuracy in the course of work (I fit two of these categories).
A gyroscope allows software to differentiate between tilt and acceleration, thus making the accelerometers that everything already has actually useful. Good for car geeks (realtime stats that can subtract body roll from G-force measurements), good for gamer geeks (perhaps), good for navigation, and certainly other stuff that I'm just not thinking of right now. Steve Jobs, visionary feature-cutter extraordinaire, felt gyroscropes to be worthy of inclusion on new iPhone models, so certainly there's a practical use for the things.
And a USB port (with a dongle, probably, just for size reasons) would be magical for lots of folks. Want to get photos from your fancy camera onto Facebook? Just pull the card out and plug it into a USB reader on your phone -- it doesn't get much easier to understand than that. Flash drives today are used almost like floppy disks used to be used, and being able to handle one on a pocket computer would benefit all sorts of business and common folk. Leaving the laptop at home (or never buying one to begin with) is a big plus for all manner of people, and this helps with that goal.
And playing audio on my stereo? I can't be the only clown who has a fairly awesome AV system, a fairly awesome pocket computer, and a well-built home network who has sat on his couch and looked at them together and said to himself "Self, this is fucking stupid. Why do these things not cooperate in a way that makes sense? Why can I not pick a song on my pocket computer and play it on my stereo/computer speakers/poolside speakers/whatever without either hours of fuckery, some manner of wire, or the bane of Bluetooth?"
And of course it needs to be easy to use. Friends come over and want to play a song on their fancy-pants phone, and they're already on my WLAN, but we have to hear the song through a singular tinny phone speaker because doing it any other way is a pain in the ass. It shouldn't be that way (and, no, DLNA is not the answer, but is instead part of the problem).
My non-geeky friends will care, because I (their geeky friend) will be able to better support their pocket computer. I already root my friends' phones for them so they can use tools like Titanium Backup, and it would be nice if I didn't have to include a disclaimer about warranty status (which the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act says I shouldn't have to do, but I digress).
Manufacturers should care, because it will allow things like Cyanogenmod to work more freely, thus lessening their need to pay developers to keep working on software upgrades that people with older devices still want (due to the 2-year upgrade cycle on hardware imposed by many US carriers).
Indeed, I welcome the day when manufacturers stop trying to play independent software developer, genuinely grasp the concept
Not AFAICT. The newer iPhones have miniature gyroscopes. A barometer is not a power-hungry device, nor is it big, and would be most useful when also doing GPS things (which already chews up batteries with great fury). My phone already has a keyboard. And IPS displays don't seem to be any more challenging to fit than any other type of display, though they are more expensive than some.
All I've really asked for that adds battery drain is a real USB port, and that's only expensive on the power budget when it is being used.
The rest of it is just software and politics.