Their price change won't affect me, as I've long ago switched to another provider, where my calls are not dropped, call quality is better and download speeds are faster. I actually had to pay early termination fee because there were still a couple months on my contract, but that was worth every penny.
Maybe they could get more customers or avoid customers switching to other providers if they fixed the issues with their crappy service. Common sense would tell me that increasing their pricing will make matters worse.
I don't have any experience with their 4G service, so can't comment on that. But I doubt I'll ever go back to check it out.
" There are alternatives out there that you can pay for and expect lock your privacy down."
There are? Can you give an example of a hosted email, calendar and contacts service that have good integration on multiple platforms (win, mac, ios, android) where your privacy is guaranteed?
So far the best way I found is to self host these services. And even then I'm not sure if the emails I receive are not data mined on the sender side, or somewhere on the wire between his/her and my email servers.
Electronic privacy is gone. If some information needs to stay private, don't make an electronic version of it.
I have a Nikon DSLR, a smartphone with a camera and now a Nikon J1.
Before I got the Nikon J1, I found that most of the photos were taken with my phone's camera, because the DSLR is just way too big to carry around.
I wanted better photos, but carrying an extra bag with the DSLR everywhere was not an option. So I got the Nikon J1.
The auto focus on the Nikon 1 is incredible. As fast as DSLRs (if not faster than). The images are awesome, despite all the people who never owned 1 (lol) complaining about the small sensor on the internet.
Now I still have a DSLR that stays at home (just like before), and the Nikon 1 in my bag or pocket that takes amazing photos.
I'm pretty sure that other mirrorless compacts cameras (NEX, X100, 4/3s etc) are also great. What sold me on the Nikon 1 was the auto focus.
It's an awesome camera. It has a hybrid phase detection / contrast detection auto focus system, which makes focusing on par with DSLRs. I needed good auto focus, because I mostly take pictures of my kids.
You'll see people complaining about its small sensor size, but in my experience the camera takes amazing photos. You could get better high ISO (low light) photos out of micro four thirds cameras, but what good are they if their auto focus sucks?
I got the 10mm f2.8 lens and the stock 10-30mm lens combo. The 10mm lens is amazing, it's what I use most of the time. With the 10mm lens I can also carry the camera in my pocket.
The camera also takes very nice full HD videos. And the 400fps shooting mode (although at lower resolution) is a lot of fun.
The most accurate review of the camera (ie the one that actually matches my experience) is this one:
My wife has a droid2 and she was completely happy with Froyo on it. I recently upgraded her phone to Gingerbread and she likes some of the new features and she is still happy. But I don't think it much changed her outlook on life, she still uses her phone to make calls, email, browse the internet and navigation.
In a couple of months when she is eligible for an upgrade we'll get her a new phone, because it's scratched here and there, the kids dreweled all over it and she dropped it a couple of times. Then she'll have a phone with the latest Android, and she'll be able to make calls, email, browse the internet and use it for navigation.
With each Android update I found the UI more polished, things running smoother and some kinks worked out.
While iOS updates do the same, I think the main driving factor for Apple is adding new ways to tap the wallets. Like in app purchasing, iCloud, disabling jailbreaks, whatnot. So if they don't update older phones, they will lose money on those people. So yes, you get more shiny new updates, but the main purpose is to get more of your moneys.
Back to my wife: she had an iPhone before the Droid2, and while she got updates, she was not very satisfied with the constant dropped calls, poor reception and bad call quality. Now she gets less updates, but she's more satisfied because her phone just... works.
Be it for economic or selfish reasons, most parents I know spend very little time with their kids. Not counting school time, the kids are with babysitters, nannies or in day care.
This is just as silly as suggesting that kids need tablets because they will use them for educational purposes.
$50 a month extra (which actually worked out for less than that in my case) is little price to pay for phone/data service that actually works.
We had iPhones on at&t, and the service was terrible. If I could finish a phone conversation without dropping out, I felt lucky. Then we switched to at&t blackberries, which was a major improvement, but there were still some dropped calls. Then at&t took unlimited data away.
At that point I had enough, paid the early termination fees and got two droids with unlimited data on verizon. The call quality is great and haven't had a dropped call in over a year of being with them.
I never found a need for surf and talk. As long as navigation works while I'm on the phone (which it somehow does), I'm happy.
The keyboard is amazing. The phone is awesome (even the actual phone part, as in I can hear the other person and the other person can hear me). Dual core processor, very nice screen.
One click rooted, removed motorola/verizon crap, can't be happier.
I really want GIMP to be a a good alternative to Photoshop, but it's not. In fact it's terrible. It's like photoshop from 15 years ago, except with an unusable UI.
I know it's not open source, but it's worth to bend the rules on this one and include Paint.net instead of GIMP.
My wife recently finished law school. When she started we got her a then pretty pricey Fujitsu 10" notebook that fit in her purse. I don't remember the model number, but it also could take another battery pack in place of the dvd drive.
She needed office applications, I first gave her openoffice, but eventually we purchased ms office with an educational discount because she could not open all ms office documents.
She took some notes on the laptop, but mostly used pen and paper. Then retyped them if she needed them digitally, which is a great exercise for memorizing.
If she had to do it today, even with all the tablets available I think she would still pick a laptop. Office and exam software (like secureexam) are probably the main reason, but being able to hook up to printers and projectors on campus is also important.
My suggestion is a small laptop (or if tight on budget, then a netbook), paper and pen.
I can't speak for VIA, I have an Intel Atom based bookshelf unit that runs http://xbmc.org/ on http://archlinux.org/ as a media center, remote controlled using the XBMC android app.
It plays full HD over HDMI (audio also through HDMI). I didn't run into any issues with installation. It also holds backups and serves as network storage. It's awesome.
I also work in Eclipse and the OSX sdk, but most of my work I do in Visual Studio. It's still the best IDE.
Even without multiple desktops, I find Windows 7 (especially with the window snapping shortcuts winkey+arrows) to work best for window management. My next favorite is xmonad on linux, but I really dislike the single menubar of OSX.
Then there are some other things that people already mentioned: working drivers, Adobe applications, citrix and Office.
This is for desktops only. My servers run linux with xmonad.
Why not, they got millions of dollars worth of free advertising by having this story on the front page of every website. By the way:
"An Apple employee loses what believed to be an iphone5 prototype at a bar, found and listed on craigslist without a picture, sold for $200, still no picture, picked up by Apple security forces pretending to be cops."
Does anything in that sentence sound possible (other than maybe the first few words)?
- this Apple employee "lost" an iPhone5 at a bar - this undercover Apple employee "found it" and listed it on craigslist - this undercover Apple employee bought it for $200 - this Apple employee in a uniform picked it up - the whole internet ran wee-wee-wee silliness about it
It's all part of the hype machine's advertising campaign. You guys have all been fooled.
This is a great step in the right direction. While I know the GIMP is far behind the current Photoshop in feature set, having a similar UI will encourage more users to give it a try. Even with the features of Photoshop years ago, the GIMP will be more useful with a decent UI than it is currently.
My girlfriend works at a large law firm where everyone gets a smartphone for mobile email access. They can choose between a Blackberry and an iPhone. Guess what most people pick? (Not the Blackberry. Which is pretty funny, because having an iPhone, I don't think typing emails is a stronghold of it.)
If RIM continues trying to compete with their OS, they will loose most of their market share. I disagree with putting Google in the evil basket on this one, I think they would make pretty good concessions since RIM at this point still has a big market share, especially in the business world, and they have amazing hardware.
I also disagree with Nokia being stupid about WP7. WP7 (although I don't have a WP7 phone) looks pretty impressive, it will be good for both MS and Nokia. MS this way doesn't have to get into making phones, and Nokia has a chance to get the smart phone business going.
I know it sounds like a crazy idea, but if I told you a couple of years ago that we should build a micro blogging internet service where people would be limited to 140 characters, or if I pitched you that we should make crappy flash games and make m(b?)illions on people buying magic carrot seeds for their virtual farms, I think those would've sounded just as crazy.
In my experience Blackberries are the best made phones out their for business because of the superb keyboard and best sound quality over voice calls. (I also own iPhone and Droid2.)
Don't sink $[huge number here] into trying to get another app ecosystem going, go with android so executives can play angry birds, and just port the mail/calendar integration. It's all in java, too, so should not be hard.
RIM can donate to my bitcoin wallet for saving their company. - funny
I love facebook because it made all the juvenile chatter disappear from my inbox. No more emails like "LULZ funny! Cat lights its own fart on fire video!".
It's a great place for my "friends" to discuss all that and what they are eating for dinner right now. Facebook gathered and isolated all that crap. I can only hope that come 2012 that's where they'll promote their political agendas, too.
I'm not saying that everything that goes on on facebook is useless, but it is for me.
Now if only there was a way to block all facebook widgets and twitter widgets in chrome, that would be idyllic living.
But for now, facebook saved my inbox, and for that I [heart] facebook.
Slashdot Mirror
Their price change won't affect me, as I've long ago switched to another provider, where my calls are not dropped, call quality is better and download speeds are faster. I actually had to pay early termination fee because there were still a couple months on my contract, but that was worth every penny.
Maybe they could get more customers or avoid customers switching to other providers if they fixed the issues with their crappy service. Common sense would tell me that increasing their pricing will make matters worse.
I don't have any experience with their 4G service, so can't comment on that. But I doubt I'll ever go back to check it out.
Just take your and her parents, two witnesses, pick a nice spot, get married, have dinner and go home.
Put the thousands of $$$s you saved towards a mortgage. Spending it on a wedding is like setting money on fire.
" There are alternatives out there that you can pay for and expect lock your privacy down."
There are? Can you give an example of a hosted email, calendar and contacts service that have good integration on multiple platforms (win, mac, ios, android) where your privacy is guaranteed?
So far the best way I found is to self host these services. And even then I'm not sure if the emails I receive are not data mined on the sender side, or somewhere on the wire between his/her and my email servers.
Electronic privacy is gone. If some information needs to stay private, don't make an electronic version of it.
...oh, wait, I remember. Those 'smart' clothes:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/18/apple_new_patent_big_brother_shoes/
...if you actually had it with you.
I have a Nikon DSLR, a smartphone with a camera and now a Nikon J1.
Before I got the Nikon J1, I found that most of the photos were taken with my phone's camera, because the DSLR is just way too big to carry around.
I wanted better photos, but carrying an extra bag with the DSLR everywhere was not an option. So I got the Nikon J1.
The auto focus on the Nikon 1 is incredible. As fast as DSLRs (if not faster than). The images are awesome, despite all the people who never owned 1 (lol) complaining about the small sensor on the internet.
Now I still have a DSLR that stays at home (just like before), and the Nikon 1 in my bag or pocket that takes amazing photos.
I'm pretty sure that other mirrorless compacts cameras (NEX, X100, 4/3s etc) are also great. What sold me on the Nikon 1 was the auto focus.
I recently got a Nikon J1.
It's an awesome camera. It has a hybrid phase detection / contrast detection auto focus system, which makes focusing on par with DSLRs. I needed good auto focus, because I mostly take pictures of my kids.
You'll see people complaining about its small sensor size, but in my experience the camera takes amazing photos. You could get better high ISO (low light) photos out of micro four thirds cameras, but what good are they if their auto focus sucks?
I got the 10mm f2.8 lens and the stock 10-30mm lens combo. The 10mm lens is amazing, it's what I use most of the time. With the 10mm lens I can also carry the camera in my pocket.
The camera also takes very nice full HD videos. And the 400fps shooting mode (although at lower resolution) is a lot of fun.
The most accurate review of the camera (ie the one that actually matches my experience) is this one:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-11666-11988
My wife has a droid2 and she was completely happy with Froyo on it. I recently upgraded her phone to Gingerbread and she likes some of the new features and she is still happy. But I don't think it much changed her outlook on life, she still uses her phone to make calls, email, browse the internet and navigation.
In a couple of months when she is eligible for an upgrade we'll get her a new phone, because it's scratched here and there, the kids dreweled all over it and she dropped it a couple of times. Then she'll have a phone with the latest Android, and she'll be able to make calls, email, browse the internet and use it for navigation.
With each Android update I found the UI more polished, things running smoother and some kinks worked out.
While iOS updates do the same, I think the main driving factor for Apple is adding new ways to tap the wallets. Like in app purchasing, iCloud, disabling jailbreaks, whatnot. So if they don't update older phones, they will lose money on those people. So yes, you get more shiny new updates, but the main purpose is to get more of your moneys.
Back to my wife: she had an iPhone before the Droid2, and while she got updates, she was not very satisfied with the constant dropped calls, poor reception and bad call quality. Now she gets less updates, but she's more satisfied because her phone just... works.
Be it for economic or selfish reasons, most parents I know spend very little time with their kids. Not counting school time, the kids are with babysitters, nannies or in day care.
This is just as silly as suggesting that kids need tablets because they will use them for educational purposes.
Adam Carolla was optimistic giving us 50 years. If the we really think the toys on this list are most dangerous, we are already a bunch of p-ssies.
$50 a month extra (which actually worked out for less than that in my case) is little price to pay for phone/data service that actually works.
We had iPhones on at&t, and the service was terrible. If I could finish a phone conversation without dropping out, I felt lucky. Then we switched to at&t blackberries, which was a major improvement, but there were still some dropped calls. Then at&t took unlimited data away.
At that point I had enough, paid the early termination fees and got two droids with unlimited data on verizon. The call quality is great and haven't had a dropped call in over a year of being with them.
I never found a need for surf and talk. As long as navigation works while I'm on the phone (which it somehow does), I'm happy.
It exists. Motorola Droid3 -> http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/DROID-3-by-MOTOROLA-US-EN
The keyboard is amazing. The phone is awesome (even the actual phone part, as in I can hear the other person and the other person can hear me). Dual core processor, very nice screen.
One click rooted, removed motorola/verizon crap, can't be happier.
This is awesome and MS should've done this 10 years ago.
I really want GIMP to be a a good alternative to Photoshop, but it's not. In fact it's terrible. It's like photoshop from 15 years ago, except with an unusable UI.
I know it's not open source, but it's worth to bend the rules on this one and include Paint.net instead of GIMP.
My wife recently finished law school. When she started we got her a then pretty pricey Fujitsu 10" notebook that fit in her purse. I don't remember the model number, but it also could take another battery pack in place of the dvd drive.
She needed office applications, I first gave her openoffice, but eventually we purchased ms office with an educational discount because she could not open all ms office documents.
She took some notes on the laptop, but mostly used pen and paper. Then retyped them if she needed them digitally, which is a great exercise for memorizing.
If she had to do it today, even with all the tablets available I think she would still pick a laptop. Office and exam software (like secureexam) are probably the main reason, but being able to hook up to printers and projectors on campus is also important.
My suggestion is a small laptop (or if tight on budget, then a netbook), paper and pen.
I can't speak for VIA, I have an Intel Atom based bookshelf unit that runs http://xbmc.org/ on http://archlinux.org/ as a media center, remote controlled using the XBMC android app.
It plays full HD over HDMI (audio also through HDMI). I didn't run into any issues with installation. It also holds backups and serves as network storage. It's awesome.
Here's the link to the unit I have on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856176008
I also work in Eclipse and the OSX sdk, but most of my work I do in Visual Studio. It's still the best IDE.
Even without multiple desktops, I find Windows 7 (especially with the window snapping shortcuts winkey+arrows) to work best for window management. My next favorite is xmonad on linux, but I really dislike the single menubar of OSX.
Then there are some other things that people already mentioned: working drivers, Adobe applications, citrix and Office.
This is for desktops only. My servers run linux with xmonad.
Why not, they got millions of dollars worth of free advertising by having this story on the front page of every website. By the way:
"An Apple employee loses what believed to be an iphone5 prototype at a bar, found and listed on craigslist without a picture, sold for $200, still no picture, picked up by Apple security forces pretending to be cops."
Does anything in that sentence sound possible (other than maybe the first few words)?
Maybe E.T. called home? I mean the iPhone5 that is.
- this Apple employee "lost" an iPhone5 at a bar
- this undercover Apple employee "found it" and listed it on craigslist
- this undercover Apple employee bought it for $200
- this Apple employee in a uniform picked it up
- the whole internet ran wee-wee-wee silliness about it
It's all part of the hype machine's advertising campaign. You guys have all been fooled.
If he screws up and AAPL falls to $30 in 10 years, he still gets $30,000,000. That's pretty good retirement money.
I totally agree with you. They basically offset the cost to parents. The choices are:
- hire somebody to watch the kids
- daycare
- try to negotiate 4 day work week
- leave the kids home alone (sounds like the cheapest option, until they start causing trouble)
This is a great step in the right direction. While I know the GIMP is far behind the current Photoshop in feature set, having a similar UI will encourage more users to give it a try. Even with the features of Photoshop years ago, the GIMP will be more useful with a decent UI than it is currently.
It's not what people need, it's what they want.
My girlfriend works at a large law firm where everyone gets a smartphone for mobile email access. They can choose between a Blackberry and an iPhone. Guess what most people pick? (Not the Blackberry. Which is pretty funny, because having an iPhone, I don't think typing emails is a stronghold of it.)
If RIM continues trying to compete with their OS, they will loose most of their market share. I disagree with putting Google in the evil basket on this one, I think they would make pretty good concessions since RIM at this point still has a big market share, especially in the business world, and they have amazing hardware.
I also disagree with Nokia being stupid about WP7. WP7 (although I don't have a WP7 phone) looks pretty impressive, it will be good for both MS and Nokia. MS this way doesn't have to get into making phones, and Nokia has a chance to get the smart phone business going.
I know it sounds like a crazy idea, but if I told you a couple of years ago that we should build a micro blogging internet service where people would be limited to 140 characters, or if I pitched you that we should make crappy flash games and make m(b?)illions on people buying magic carrot seeds for their virtual farms, I think those would've sounded just as crazy.
RIM should make a Blackberry that runs android.
In my experience Blackberries are the best made phones out their for business because of the superb keyboard and best sound quality over voice calls. (I also own iPhone and Droid2.)
Don't sink $[huge number here] into trying to get another app ecosystem going, go with android so executives can play angry birds, and just port the mail/calendar integration. It's all in java, too, so should not be hard.
RIM can donate to my bitcoin wallet for saving their company. - funny
I love facebook because it made all the juvenile chatter disappear from my inbox. No more emails like "LULZ funny! Cat lights its own fart on fire video!".
It's a great place for my "friends" to discuss all that and what they are eating for dinner right now. Facebook gathered and isolated all that crap. I can only hope that come 2012 that's where they'll promote their political agendas, too.
I'm not saying that everything that goes on on facebook is useless, but it is for me.
Now if only there was a way to block all facebook widgets and twitter widgets in chrome, that would be idyllic living.
But for now, facebook saved my inbox, and for that I [heart] facebook.