China may be a different culture, one that has very different ideas about authority and conformity and has for longer than we in the west have been civilized
The lack of Apples popularity had always kept them in niche marketplaces until now but the iPhone now makes them commonplace and popular enough to mean money for blackmarket hacking. This doesn't mean its more secure its totally the opposite. It means it's less secure because it hasn't been targeted until now. In fact I'd spout there are just as many exploits in the wild for iOS and MacOS as there is for Windows Vista in present day.
Such as?
Truthfully, the iPad is a product of that hampering, from my experience its like using a half built house with its scaffolding still attached too it and for the iPhone 4 even the sales people at the phone store cant find feature lists convincing enough to get me to upgrade from a 3GS to a 4. The question "why should i upgrade?" doesn't get answered with a solid response.
What about the iPad?
re: sales people -- it's the phone store, the capitalist equivalent of going to the DMV. I still have a 3gs but the reasons to upgrade are obvious -- vastly improved camera and vastly improved screen. That's what matters to me at least...
It's not even so black and white as you seem to think. Some are increasing, some are decreasing. On the net? Good question, and one I don't know. It seems from recent advances (eg this article) there is still disagreement amongst scientists.
My experience with Skype, VOIP, and even to a lesser degree cell phones is that they all have latency worse than landlines. Is this actually true?
We were considering switching our business phone lines over to Time Warner voip. I talked to one of their people on the phone. My side was landline, theirs was time warner voip. The delay was awful. We kept talking over each other. If that's the best Time Warner can do, I was very not impressed, and as a result was still have our more expensive landlines.
Is there anything to my complaint, or have I just had bad luck??
OK, so if that's not true, why don't they just go over there to feed the starving people, rather than going to feed the starving people and promote Christianity?
That's EXACTLY what very many missionaries do due! Not all strands of Christianity believe in the same kind of missionary work. Sure, you've got Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, etc who are more in your face about conversion, but many (esp. protestant) missions are focused on helping people, not on conversion.
I'm an atheist but my grandparents were missionaries, andConversion was the last thing they were worried about. A friend of mine is a Christian missionary who spends several months each year in Central Asia doing charity dentistry work. The vast majority of people he helps have no idea he is Christian.
It just really makes you seem like an ass when you paint a broad swath of people with the same brush, especially when it's obvious you're essentially ignorant of the subject you're talking about.
Outside of LAN play, both Neverwinter Nights games, right off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
Hmmm, I never played NWN2 and don't remember that from NWN. Are you sure? I even gave NWN1 to a friend when I was done, and don't remember any complaints about not being able to get online...
In any case, you remembering *maybe* two games is just slightly different from "the vast majority of games have never allowed for it"
I think it's because apstring and apvector were both simplified versions of the real deal. And the entire source code for both was pretty small and understandable for people just getting into C++, templates, etc.
We at least created modified versions of them as well, extending or re-implimenting certain functions. I don't really remember too many specifics!
I was in AP computer science over a decade ago. We used C++ using the "apstring" and "apvector" classes that were similar to the STL.
We of course had to implement bubble short, quicksort, insertion sort, and so.
It was fairly slow on our computers (386s/486s/maybe one pentium!) and you could REALLY see a visible difference between the difference sorts. It was very obvious.
I rewrote the sorts using standard C arrays instead of apvector. Even on those ancient computers, the differences were suddenly almost gone. Bubblesort using straight arrays was faster than apvector quicksort--at least for fairly small arrays. I don't remember the specifics anymore, but you had to be sorting IIRC several thousand things before there was much of a recognizable difference.
So yeah, that made a big impression on me. Then again that class, and intro classes in college were the last time I've had to write my own sorting algorithm...
I think it's a good thing that people who have maybe only used 2ghz+ computers are given a chance to experience something else. I guess a better question would be, why is expanding your horizons ever a bad thing?
It's only "hidden" in that it's "in a menu." True, most people don't look in the config menus, but the iPhone's config menu is simpler than many (most?). It's user friend because most people can pick up an iphone and immediately figure out how to do most of the things they want to do. Upon hearing about the VoiceOver feature, the first place I went was "Settings" and then "Accessibility"... perfectly logical.
Mac OS X is somewhat similar in terms of their being a LOT of shortcuts and all you can use, some of which aren't readily apparent. Think of them as bonuses for power users.
The issue is not multiple people playing online at the same time with one copy, but a second person EVER playing Starcraft 2 online. We're not talking spawned installs or anything like that... No resale. No sharing within a family. Does that make sense?
I don't know of any games that limit you to only ever having one multiplayer account associated with that game (other than MMOs of course)... I imagine there are others, but what are some examples?
FWIW, I had no idea the feature was there. The annoying thing is that you have to turn on Voice Over in the accessibility settings...for the entire phone. So the whole interface of the phone changes (you have to double tap buttons, etc) and it's quite annoying to have it on if it's not something you need. I guess you can turn voiceover on/off at will, but it's a decent amount of hassle.
Already, the big names treat the PC platform like crap. Might as well just show them the door, let them have the uber locked down console market, and let Blizzard, ID, and indies with something original to write take over.
Blizzard? I'm not sure they really deserve that anymore. Yes, they create good games still but think of some of the recent annoyances.
no LAN play for SC2... SC2 is linked to one and only one battle.net account ever (effectively getting rid of resale and eliminating multiple people being able to play online via one copy of the game)... bnetd. etc
The number of websites I turn it on for is depressingly high.
I only use NoScript on one computer, occasionally. I mostly find it a pain in the butt, but I do think it's sickening to see how many tracking javascripts are included on many popular sites.
It is the product everyone loves to hate, and yet, that no competitor yet has put a serious dent in. It's possible to both hate Flash and admit the reality that it is king of the jungle. I hope that someone will set a pack of lion-hunting dogs on Flash and take it down, but I still live in a world in which that day has not come and shows no real signs of coming despite what anyone has to say about Silverlight or HTML5 or giant JavaScript libraries or anything else.
I think we're closer than you might imagine. I run Safari with ClickToFlash (basically noflash). Most youtube videos run just fine as HTML5. A lot of websites have recently transitioned away from flash menus/interfaces. Most of the flash I see blocked is banner ads.
Don't get me wrong, I like flash games, and don't have a problem with some uses of flash, but for probably 90% of the content I run into with flash, I hate it. I don't miss it on my iPhone except for the rare instance when a website (usually a restaurant website) doesn't load without flash.
You know, FWIW, the vast majority of computer users don't need to upgrade their video card, and don't upgrade their video card. I play a decent number of games on my media system PC and so far everything I have runs just fine on my Geforce 8800gt that must be about 3 years old by now. The reality--the people that REALLY care about the tiniest framerate differences, the hardcore gamers, etc--would never buy a mac in the first place. Back in highschool it was really fun to whip out the framerates and optimize for tiny differences, but, IMHO, with today's hardware it just doesn't matter to me or most people anymore. So, for most other people, it's fine. Yeah, mac hardware is more expensive, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody deny that. It also tends to have very good support from Apple and lasts well in my experience. I don't begrudge you your choices, why do you care so much what choices other people make?
What does Flash performance have to do with Apple? I also think your assertion is wrong. Flash does suck, but what else is new. It's supremely ironic to me how many geeks have come out as roaring advocates for Flash since the Adobe/Apple battle started, when before that most self-respecting techies (rightfully!) loathed Flash.
Gotta say, I imagine your response is fairly typical of geeks -- they don't want crap hardware with old, old versions of software. I wonder what this says about the future of Android tablets.
I can't claim to have read them all, but one of the first ones -- Samsung Galaxy -- appears to be a tablet with 2.2. Not sure if it meets the definition of pda.
I've read rumors that Google won't allow Android 2.x devices with no cellular radio to have Google's apps or Android Market.
Interesting...though I guess it's getting to the point where everything has a cell radio. I have an iPad 3g, and I DID enable the 3g plan for one month, but rarely needed to use it. I would think a wifi tablet still has plenty of market room (especially with things like the Mifi).
Archos 5 is a tablet, but I don't want 1.6. Which makes and models of tablet were you thinking of that have Android 2.1 or later and Android Market, in sizes comparable to both iPod Touch and iPad?
Barring much knowledge of the Android ecosystem, do you have any clue what so many phones / tablets seem to be released with 1.6? Seems like the Android market is really splintering with different versions possibly becoming problematic?
Also I think it's pretty disingenuous to claim that a smartphone costs $1500 because you found a particular 2-year contract plan that adds up to that much total. You can always buy phones without a plan...even the iPhone.
Good question... from personal experience with the company webpage I manage (which is not at all techy oriented), according to google analytics 5% of the visitors to the to our site are still using IE6. The single largest browser version is IE8 -- 33% of our visitors. Ie6+7+8 is 52% of all visitors.
Firefox is 28% of our visits (almost all running 3.6, but some still on versions as far back as 3.0), Safari 12%, Chrome 6%. iOS is 1%.
Seems to me that that's completely wrong... the comparison between "amount of data stored in genome" and "amount of code needed to simulate a brain" are totally, totally different things. It would be like saying "this blueprint of a house can be represented by these vectors and compressed down to xyz bytes. Ergo, to simulate a house you only need xyz bytes."
Which is perhaps partially true, but think about just a few things that you would need to have to simulate a brain:
1) Code that can read genome and "run" it to create a model of a brain. This alone is far beyond what we can do now. 2) Oh yeah, you're also going to need a very advanced molecular simulator that can model all the biochemical interactions. 3) Let's not forget you need to simulate all sorts of other I/O interfaces to the brain.
so yeah, maybe the genome alone has enough information to describe a brain, but any simulation of such would require an unimaginable amount of code to model physics, molecular chemistry, cell growth, etc. Without it that brain data is probably not going to do a lot of good.
Slashdot Mirror
China may be a different culture, one that has very different ideas about authority and conformity and has for longer than we in the west have been civilized
Nonsense.
Oops, sorry I guess I replied as AC earlier. It was me.
The lack of Apples popularity had always kept them in niche marketplaces until now but the iPhone now makes them commonplace and popular enough to mean money for blackmarket hacking. This doesn't mean its more secure its totally the opposite. It means it's less secure because it hasn't been targeted until now. In fact I'd spout there are just as many exploits in the wild for iOS and MacOS as there is for Windows Vista in present day.
Such as?
Truthfully, the iPad is a product of that hampering, from my experience its like using a half built house with its scaffolding still attached too it and for the iPhone 4 even the sales people at the phone store cant find feature lists convincing enough to get me to upgrade from a 3GS to a 4. The question "why should i upgrade?" doesn't get answered with a solid response.
What about the iPad?
re: sales people -- it's the phone store, the capitalist equivalent of going to the DMV. I still have a 3gs but the reasons to upgrade are obvious -- vastly improved camera and vastly improved screen. That's what matters to me at least...
It's not even so black and white as you seem to think. Some are increasing, some are decreasing. On the net? Good question, and one I don't know. It seems from recent advances (eg this article) there is still disagreement amongst scientists.
My experience with Skype, VOIP, and even to a lesser degree cell phones is that they all have latency worse than landlines. Is this actually true?
We were considering switching our business phone lines over to Time Warner voip. I talked to one of their people on the phone. My side was landline, theirs was time warner voip. The delay was awful. We kept talking over each other. If that's the best Time Warner can do, I was very not impressed, and as a result was still have our more expensive landlines.
Is there anything to my complaint, or have I just had bad luck??
OK, so if that's not true, why don't they just go over there to feed the starving people, rather than going to feed the starving people and promote Christianity?
That's EXACTLY what very many missionaries do due! Not all strands of Christianity believe in the same kind of missionary work. Sure, you've got Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, etc who are more in your face about conversion, but many (esp. protestant) missions are focused on helping people, not on conversion.
I'm an atheist but my grandparents were missionaries, andConversion was the last thing they were worried about. A friend of mine is a Christian missionary who spends several months each year in Central Asia doing charity dentistry work. The vast majority of people he helps have no idea he is Christian.
It just really makes you seem like an ass when you paint a broad swath of people with the same brush, especially when it's obvious you're essentially ignorant of the subject you're talking about.
1) Christian missionaries do that, too. Feeding starving people is a means to an end.
That is really so not true, for so many missionaries...
I think you're missing the point. The OP doesn't care about this subject in particular, he cares about slashdot not sucking more than necessary.
Outside of LAN play, both Neverwinter Nights games, right off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
Hmmm, I never played NWN2 and don't remember that from NWN. Are you sure? I even gave NWN1 to a friend when I was done, and don't remember any complaints about not being able to get online...
In any case, you remembering *maybe* two games is just slightly different from "the vast majority of games have never allowed for it"
I think it's because apstring and apvector were both simplified versions of the real deal. And the entire source code for both was pretty small and understandable for people just getting into C++, templates, etc.
We at least created modified versions of them as well, extending or re-implimenting certain functions. I don't really remember too many specifics!
I was in AP computer science over a decade ago. We used C++ using the "apstring" and "apvector" classes that were similar to the STL.
We of course had to implement bubble short, quicksort, insertion sort, and so.
It was fairly slow on our computers (386s/486s/maybe one pentium!) and you could REALLY see a visible difference between the difference sorts. It was very obvious.
I rewrote the sorts using standard C arrays instead of apvector. Even on those ancient computers, the differences were suddenly almost gone. Bubblesort using straight arrays was faster than apvector quicksort--at least for fairly small arrays. I don't remember the specifics anymore, but you had to be sorting IIRC several thousand things before there was much of a recognizable difference.
So yeah, that made a big impression on me. Then again that class, and intro classes in college were the last time I've had to write my own sorting algorithm...
I think it's a good thing that people who have maybe only used 2ghz+ computers are given a chance to experience something else. I guess a better question would be, why is expanding your horizons ever a bad thing?
It's only "hidden" in that it's "in a menu." True, most people don't look in the config menus, but the iPhone's config menu is simpler than many (most?). It's user friend because most people can pick up an iphone and immediately figure out how to do most of the things they want to do. Upon hearing about the VoiceOver feature, the first place I went was "Settings" and then "Accessibility" ... perfectly logical.
Mac OS X is somewhat similar in terms of their being a LOT of shortcuts and all you can use, some of which aren't readily apparent. Think of them as bonuses for power users.
I think you're confused.
The issue is not multiple people playing online at the same time with one copy, but a second person EVER playing Starcraft 2 online. We're not talking spawned installs or anything like that... No resale. No sharing within a family. Does that make sense?
I don't know of any games that limit you to only ever having one multiplayer account associated with that game (other than MMOs of course) ... I imagine there are others, but what are some examples?
FWIW, I had no idea the feature was there. The annoying thing is that you have to turn on Voice Over in the accessibility settings...for the entire phone. So the whole interface of the phone changes (you have to double tap buttons, etc) and it's quite annoying to have it on if it's not something you need. I guess you can turn voiceover on/off at will, but it's a decent amount of hassle.
Already, the big names treat the PC platform like crap. Might as well just show them the door, let them have the uber locked down console market, and let Blizzard, ID, and indies with something original to write take over.
Blizzard? I'm not sure they really deserve that anymore. Yes, they create good games still but think of some of the recent annoyances.
no LAN play for SC2... SC2 is linked to one and only one battle.net account ever (effectively getting rid of resale and eliminating multiple people being able to play online via one copy of the game)... bnetd. etc
The number of websites I turn it on for is depressingly high.
I only use NoScript on one computer, occasionally. I mostly find it a pain in the butt, but I do think it's sickening to see how many tracking javascripts are included on many popular sites.
Agree re: flash authoring tools.
It is the product everyone loves to hate, and yet, that no competitor yet has put a serious dent in. It's possible to both hate Flash and admit the reality that it is king of the jungle. I hope that someone will set a pack of lion-hunting dogs on Flash and take it down, but I still live in a world in which that day has not come and shows no real signs of coming despite what anyone has to say about Silverlight or HTML5 or giant JavaScript libraries or anything else.
I think we're closer than you might imagine. I run Safari with ClickToFlash (basically noflash). Most youtube videos run just fine as HTML5. A lot of websites have recently transitioned away from flash menus/interfaces. Most of the flash I see blocked is banner ads.
Don't get me wrong, I like flash games, and don't have a problem with some uses of flash, but for probably 90% of the content I run into with flash, I hate it. I don't miss it on my iPhone except for the rare instance when a website (usually a restaurant website) doesn't load without flash.
You know, FWIW, the vast majority of computer users don't need to upgrade their video card, and don't upgrade their video card. I play a decent number of games on my media system PC and so far everything I have runs just fine on my Geforce 8800gt that must be about 3 years old by now. The reality--the people that REALLY care about the tiniest framerate differences, the hardcore gamers, etc--would never buy a mac in the first place. Back in highschool it was really fun to whip out the framerates and optimize for tiny differences, but, IMHO, with today's hardware it just doesn't matter to me or most people anymore. So, for most other people, it's fine. Yeah, mac hardware is more expensive, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody deny that. It also tends to have very good support from Apple and lasts well in my experience. I don't begrudge you your choices, why do you care so much what choices other people make?
What does Flash performance have to do with Apple? I also think your assertion is wrong. Flash does suck, but what else is new. It's supremely ironic to me how many geeks have come out as roaring advocates for Flash since the Adobe/Apple battle started, when before that most self-respecting techies (rightfully!) loathed Flash.
Gotta say, I imagine your response is fairly typical of geeks -- they don't want crap hardware with old, old versions of software. I wonder what this says about the future of Android tablets.
According to the first result from Google for zenpad 4 [engadget.com], Apple has this product handily beat in build quality.
I'm not surprised--are you? Since the early days of the mp3 players, the iPod and successors have beaten most of their competitors in build quality!
So the criteria you're now looking for is:
1) Android 2.2 only
2) iPad / PDA size only
3) Must be >= Apple build quality
That could be hard to find...
Can you specify?
Sure, here's most of what I found:
http://www.engadget.com/tag/android,tablet
I can't claim to have read them all, but one of the first ones -- Samsung Galaxy -- appears to be a tablet with 2.2. Not sure if it meets the definition of pda.
I've read rumors that Google won't allow Android 2.x devices with no cellular radio to have Google's apps or Android Market.
Interesting...though I guess it's getting to the point where everything has a cell radio. I have an iPad 3g, and I DID enable the 3g plan for one month, but rarely needed to use it. I would think a wifi tablet still has plenty of market room (especially with things like the Mifi).
Archos 5 is a tablet, but I don't want 1.6. Which makes and models of tablet were you thinking of that have Android 2.1 or later and Android Market, in sizes comparable to both iPod Touch and iPad?
I haven't used any android tablets, but a google search turns up a lot that are either out now, or soon to be out. Zenpad4? Or a PDA format: http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2010/06/17/88-android-pda/. Amongst many others.
Barring much knowledge of the Android ecosystem, do you have any clue what so many phones / tablets seem to be released with 1.6? Seems like the Android market is really splintering with different versions possibly becoming problematic?
iPhone without a plan? In the United States?
Guess you're right...I think Apple used to let you buy an unsubsidized iPhone, but doesn't look like that's the case anymore.
My mistake.
What about Android tablets?
Also I think it's pretty disingenuous to claim that a smartphone costs $1500 because you found a particular 2-year contract plan that adds up to that much total. You can always buy phones without a plan...even the iPhone.
Good question... from personal experience with the company webpage I manage (which is not at all techy oriented), according to google analytics 5% of the visitors to the to our site are still using IE6. The single largest browser version is IE8 -- 33% of our visitors. Ie6+7+8 is 52% of all visitors.
Firefox is 28% of our visits (almost all running 3.6, but some still on versions as far back as 3.0), Safari 12%, Chrome 6%. iOS is 1%.
So yeah, it's going to be a long time...
Seems to me that that's completely wrong... the comparison between "amount of data stored in genome" and "amount of code needed to simulate a brain" are totally, totally different things. It would be like saying "this blueprint of a house can be represented by these vectors and compressed down to xyz bytes. Ergo, to simulate a house you only need xyz bytes."
Which is perhaps partially true, but think about just a few things that you would need to have to simulate a brain:
1) Code that can read genome and "run" it to create a model of a brain. This alone is far beyond what we can do now.
2) Oh yeah, you're also going to need a very advanced molecular simulator that can model all the biochemical interactions.
3) Let's not forget you need to simulate all sorts of other I/O interfaces to the brain.
so yeah, maybe the genome alone has enough information to describe a brain, but any simulation of such would require an unimaginable amount of code to model physics, molecular chemistry, cell growth, etc. Without it that brain data is probably not going to do a lot of good.