I hate, hate, hate, hate large phones. If I needed a bigger screen, I'll pull out my tablet or my laptop. I'm a skinny guy, I wear tight-ish jeans.
There are the millions of smartphone consumers in the world who don't have the disposable income to buy a smartphone and tablet. Pocket size is not driving the phablet market. The driving force is consumers who want/need to do computing tasks with their phone, but can't afford or don't want to pay for a secondary tablet. Samsung saw this need in the market [particularly in Asia] several years ago, Apple is just now trying to address it.
Guess it really depends on how big your pockets are.
Wrong. For most people choosing phablets it has nothing to do with pocket size. It's mainly by consumers who are migrating their traditional desktop computing to their mobile devices and the tasks are just easier with a larger screen. Many people don't want to spend double for a phone and a tablet, so they opt for the compromise single-device phablet.
For example, my 27-year old sister does not pay for cable/internet at home, but has a smartphone that she does most of her computing from. In the rare times she really needs a computer for something, she will use PCs at her work during her off-hours or drag out her old laptop at free Wi-Fi cafe. She does not have the disposable income for tablet, so a phablet is perfect for her.
I'm no fan of Apple, but you can't argue that they aren't strategically clever bastards.
First they attempted to lock-up the PC hardware/software market (and thankfully failed). They colluded with AT&T to lock the smart phone market. Walled off iTunes to corner the MP3 market. Tried to fix pricing in the digital book market (which a federal court slapped them for). Now Apple our credit/debit cards in their sights... Bastards is right on.
Netflix is a case study in how to do video technologically wrong and it seems like they're just totally ignoring common sense. Why shouldn't doing things like a luddite, be relatively expensive? (Really, having storage in your box is still considered prohibitively expensive? It sure wasn't expensive in 2000 with Tivo series 1. Things got worse since then?!?)
I agree with this in part, but I don't think the comparison to Tivo is fair, because Netflix doesn't sell physical hardware and they don't want to get into hardware for good reason. Convincing most consumers to buy a new piece of hardware for a service is a big hurdle, but Netflix operates on the existing hardware that people already have (tablets, phones, Smart TVs, game consoles, etc.). That's a huge advantage they (or other streaming content providers) would never willingly give up.
With that said, I think Netflix should be working on programming more local buffering and pre-loading options regardless of this net neutrality decision. Honestly, I'm surprised Netflix has not done this for the benefit of it's customers already, because there are times that ISPs at no fault of their own simply can't keep up with peak loads and streaming content suffers, which in turn hurts Netflix.
This is an amusing story, but I'll cut the announcers some slack, because filling an audio void for ~4 hours (pre-game, game, post-game) mistake free is not easy. I used to be a college radio DJ and in just an hour show talking between songs I had plenty of screw ups.
What I find more amusing is that Microsoft didn't seem to consider this hazard before dumping $400 mil into advertising with the NFL.
You mentioned ease of use for women without pockets, but it could also be useful for any business person who gets stuck in meetings, because they can casually glance at their wrist to check incoming calls or emails.
Wearable tech has been here, but just hasn't caught on... if anyone can make it cool for the masses, it's Apple.
It depends on the level of accuracy you need. If you're a casual user who generally wants to know their heart rate and track daily activity on a macro level, then a wrist monitor is probably fine. A wrist heart monitor is like an upgrade to a pedometer. Even individually inaccurate measurements can become relatively accurate when averaged together over a long period time. But professional/amateur athletes tracking heart rates in real-time throughout a workout, will want the immediate accuracy of a chest strap monitor.
Large vs small hands is not the driving factor in increasing phone sizes.
The trend among smart phone owners is they are doing more conventional computing on their smart phones (e.g. email, web browsing, YouTube videos, banking, shopping, social media, etc.). These tasks are easier to accomplish with on a larger screen. For example my younger sister (27 years old) does not pay for cable or internet in her home, but has a [android] smartphone that she uses for ~90% of her computing needs. In the rare case she needs the full screen/keyboard she a PC at her work or she'll dust off her old lap top. This trend is even more pronounced in less affluent, but still technologically connected countries, like China, Korea, and Japan where smart phone users often have a smartphone, but no other computing alternative. Internationally, Apple products have been losing to Samsung's larger phones (aka "phablets") for a while now, but in the US the trend only became significant recently.
I don't know. But I do know that lost profits and tax revenues by businesses in a widespread power outage can be considerable, and for major metro areas can easily reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost per event. I'm sure someone smarter than me could look at a region of the grid and calculate the expense of upgrades vs the cost of every profit-generating business losing productivity with some additional fudge factors for less tangible effects on higher risk populations at hospitals, nursing homes, etc. If some people are little inconvienced at their home for a few days, I don't really care, but if those people can't go to work, that's a big deal.
My first thought was a better protection of the electric grid would be for more reserves/back-ups/redundancies. I imagine it's very expensive and difficult to protect a nationwide against EVERY form of attack, but creating back-up and support infrastructure to get the power back on quickly would make ANY attack useless, or at least reduce it's effectiveness. Not that I think it's cheap to back-up our entire electrical infrastructure either, but it would seem to be the most effective defensive and has the added benfit of protecting the grid against natural disasters.
The best thing about Anarchy Online was the emote system that let you fluidly do two emotes at once and combine motions into each other to create your own unique emotes/movements. No other MMO has done that [but the rest of the game was completely forgettable].
Arguments for or against this being a sport are all missing the point. It's an activity performed by an elite few that a large population of people want to spectate. It's a spectacle and entertainment. Whether it's a eSports, baseball, food eating competitions, the Olympics, a boxing match, poker, etc. the common denominator for them all is that enough people want to view it that that the activity becomes economically sustainable in some manner.
And you may be right. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I just have a little more hope because I've seen similar situations with large contaminated abandoned factory complexes work out, or at least get a little better.
Honestly, the only private application for Hanford that came to mind for me was a new nuclear power site, but I that would be a tough political battle. But, if a new nuclear reactor is ever built in this country it makes sense to do it in a place like Hanford that's already contaminated, than risk contaminating a virgin location. Further, the risks, environmental safety controls, personnel training, etc. would all be similar; there's already an active nuclear power facility there, there's established infrastructure to build from; and the place is crawling with gov't officials to keep an eye on things.
Environmental liability can be mitigated with the correct contracts/agreements. It happens all the time when contaminated sites are transferred to new owners/operators. (I am an environmental consultant and I've been involved in many similar deals.) There won't be a single, whole-site solution and there might be some areas that will never be useable again, but Hanford is a big place and there are probably some portions of the property that could be safely reclaimed. It takes some people willing to look at the potential risks/gains, add some incentives/protections, and work out a deal.
You're wrong and I can prove it. Scroll through pictures in the article and you'll see a photo of "Steam coming off of Energy Northwest's Columbia Generating Station. The nuclear facility is a private utility but within Hanford's site..." (copied from photo caption)
If there was a way to encourage some private interest in the property things would move things along a little faster. I'm not saying that privatization if the cure to everything, just that when there's no direct economic value in a property, nothing gets done. We have thousands of Brownfield sites across the nation demonstrating this. However, there are also many large abandoned industrial sites that are getting cleaned up and repurposed, because someone is finding something valuable to put there. It even encourages gov't agencies to move, because there's potential new tax revenue, jobs, etc.
I wish we could have that in the USA. But this is a large, sparsely populated country. The cost of a cop on every corner would be very high. And we are, by tradition, the refuge of eccentrics and oddballs.
That could easily be a description for Australia too, but they still manage to survive despite much more restrictive gun control laws than the US.
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I hate, hate, hate, hate large phones. If I needed a bigger screen, I'll pull out my tablet or my laptop. I'm a skinny guy, I wear tight-ish jeans.
There are the millions of smartphone consumers in the world who don't have the disposable income to buy a smartphone and tablet. Pocket size is not driving the phablet market. The driving force is consumers who want/need to do computing tasks with their phone, but can't afford or don't want to pay for a secondary tablet. Samsung saw this need in the market [particularly in Asia] several years ago, Apple is just now trying to address it.
Guess it really depends on how big your pockets are.
Wrong. For most people choosing phablets it has nothing to do with pocket size. It's mainly by consumers who are migrating their traditional desktop computing to their mobile devices and the tasks are just easier with a larger screen. Many people don't want to spend double for a phone and a tablet, so they opt for the compromise single-device phablet.
For example, my 27-year old sister does not pay for cable/internet at home, but has a smartphone that she does most of her computing from. In the rare times she really needs a computer for something, she will use PCs at her work during her off-hours or drag out her old laptop at free Wi-Fi cafe. She does not have the disposable income for tablet, so a phablet is perfect for her.
You haven't traveled or read about much outside of the US have you?
I'm no fan of Apple, but you can't argue that they aren't strategically clever bastards.
First they attempted to lock-up the PC hardware/software market (and thankfully failed). They colluded with AT&T to lock the smart phone market. Walled off iTunes to corner the MP3 market. Tried to fix pricing in the digital book market (which a federal court slapped them for). Now Apple our credit/debit cards in their sights... Bastards is right on.
Netflix is a case study in how to do video technologically wrong and it seems like they're just totally ignoring common sense. Why shouldn't doing things like a luddite, be relatively expensive? (Really, having storage in your box is still considered prohibitively expensive? It sure wasn't expensive in 2000 with Tivo series 1. Things got worse since then?!?)
I agree with this in part, but I don't think the comparison to Tivo is fair, because Netflix doesn't sell physical hardware and they don't want to get into hardware for good reason. Convincing most consumers to buy a new piece of hardware for a service is a big hurdle, but Netflix operates on the existing hardware that people already have (tablets, phones, Smart TVs, game consoles, etc.). That's a huge advantage they (or other streaming content providers) would never willingly give up.
With that said, I think Netflix should be working on programming more local buffering and pre-loading options regardless of this net neutrality decision. Honestly, I'm surprised Netflix has not done this for the benefit of it's customers already, because there are times that ISPs at no fault of their own simply can't keep up with peak loads and streaming content suffers, which in turn hurts Netflix.
I think the idea is that you pay the ISP for a "Netflix booster", and then your Netflix traffic gets un-humped into the fast lane.
That's how I interpretted it... and with this model ISPs could bundle website traffic into packages just like cable TV. No thank you.
This is an amusing story, but I'll cut the announcers some slack, because filling an audio void for ~4 hours (pre-game, game, post-game) mistake free is not easy. I used to be a college radio DJ and in just an hour show talking between songs I had plenty of screw ups.
What I find more amusing is that Microsoft didn't seem to consider this hazard before dumping $400 mil into advertising with the NFL.
I predict that soon after the iPhone 6 Plus launch Apple's will quietly announce that they are discontinuing the Mini.
You mentioned ease of use for women without pockets, but it could also be useful for any business person who gets stuck in meetings, because they can casually glance at their wrist to check incoming calls or emails.
Wearable tech has been here, but just hasn't caught on... if anyone can make it cool for the masses, it's Apple.
It depends on the level of accuracy you need. If you're a casual user who generally wants to know their heart rate and track daily activity on a macro level, then a wrist monitor is probably fine. A wrist heart monitor is like an upgrade to a pedometer. Even individually inaccurate measurements can become relatively accurate when averaged together over a long period time. But professional/amateur athletes tracking heart rates in real-time throughout a workout, will want the immediate accuracy of a chest strap monitor.
Large vs small hands is not the driving factor in increasing phone sizes.
The trend among smart phone owners is they are doing more conventional computing on their smart phones (e.g. email, web browsing, YouTube videos, banking, shopping, social media, etc.). These tasks are easier to accomplish with on a larger screen. For example my younger sister (27 years old) does not pay for cable or internet in her home, but has a [android] smartphone that she uses for ~90% of her computing needs. In the rare case she needs the full screen/keyboard she a PC at her work or she'll dust off her old lap top. This trend is even more pronounced in less affluent, but still technologically connected countries, like China, Korea, and Japan where smart phone users often have a smartphone, but no other computing alternative. Internationally, Apple products have been losing to Samsung's larger phones (aka "phablets") for a while now, but in the US the trend only became significant recently.
I don't know. But I do know that lost profits and tax revenues by businesses in a widespread power outage can be considerable, and for major metro areas can easily reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost per event. I'm sure someone smarter than me could look at a region of the grid and calculate the expense of upgrades vs the cost of every profit-generating business losing productivity with some additional fudge factors for less tangible effects on higher risk populations at hospitals, nursing homes, etc. If some people are little inconvienced at their home for a few days, I don't really care, but if those people can't go to work, that's a big deal.
My first thought was a better protection of the electric grid would be for more reserves/back-ups/redundancies. I imagine it's very expensive and difficult to protect a nationwide against EVERY form of attack, but creating back-up and support infrastructure to get the power back on quickly would make ANY attack useless, or at least reduce it's effectiveness. Not that I think it's cheap to back-up our entire electrical infrastructure either, but it would seem to be the most effective defensive and has the added benfit of protecting the grid against natural disasters.
The best thing about Anarchy Online was the emote system that let you fluidly do two emotes at once and combine motions into each other to create your own unique emotes/movements. No other MMO has done that [but the rest of the game was completely forgettable].
Arguments for or against this being a sport are all missing the point. It's an activity performed by an elite few that a large population of people want to spectate. It's a spectacle and entertainment. Whether it's a eSports, baseball, food eating competitions, the Olympics, a boxing match, poker, etc. the common denominator for them all is that enough people want to view it that that the activity becomes economically sustainable in some manner.
I wonder what Tony Hawk would think of the viability of eSports?
If NASCAR started racing dimpled cars I'll bet the American public would accept them pretty quickly.
Yeah. This acticle has 742 comments and counting on Slashdot in less than 24 hours. Clearly there's a problem if it's creating this much debate.
And you may be right. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I just have a little more hope because I've seen similar situations with large contaminated abandoned factory complexes work out, or at least get a little better.
Honestly, the only private application for Hanford that came to mind for me was a new nuclear power site, but I that would be a tough political battle. But, if a new nuclear reactor is ever built in this country it makes sense to do it in a place like Hanford that's already contaminated, than risk contaminating a virgin location. Further, the risks, environmental safety controls, personnel training, etc. would all be similar; there's already an active nuclear power facility there, there's established infrastructure to build from; and the place is crawling with gov't officials to keep an eye on things.
Environmental liability can be mitigated with the correct contracts/agreements. It happens all the time when contaminated sites are transferred to new owners/operators. (I am an environmental consultant and I've been involved in many similar deals.) There won't be a single, whole-site solution and there might be some areas that will never be useable again, but Hanford is a big place and there are probably some portions of the property that could be safely reclaimed. It takes some people willing to look at the potential risks/gains, add some incentives/protections, and work out a deal.
You're wrong and I can prove it. Scroll through pictures in the article and you'll see a photo of "Steam coming off of Energy Northwest's Columbia Generating Station. The nuclear facility is a private utility but within Hanford's site..." (copied from photo caption)
If there was a way to encourage some private interest in the property things would move things along a little faster. I'm not saying that privatization if the cure to everything, just that when there's no direct economic value in a property, nothing gets done. We have thousands of Brownfield sites across the nation demonstrating this. However, there are also many large abandoned industrial sites that are getting cleaned up and repurposed, because someone is finding something valuable to put there. It even encourages gov't agencies to move, because there's potential new tax revenue, jobs, etc.
Bingo. Last time I heard, he also owns a company that makes rockets too.
Clearly, SpaceX should stop building rockets and just sell rocket fuel.
I wish we could have that in the USA. But this is a large, sparsely populated country. The cost of a cop on every corner would be very high. And we are, by tradition, the refuge of eccentrics and oddballs.
That could easily be a description for Australia too, but they still manage to survive despite much more restrictive gun control laws than the US.
Some wild research students must have gone for a joy ride with the professor's submersible. Kids these days! Get off my oceanic trench!