Most people have incredibly, pathetically mundane lives and an over-inflated sense of how important they are - myself included. Seriously, we're not that interesting. As a data point, in an overall trend, we're probably useful to companies.
But as some anonymous person over the internet. Get real.
Yeah, there's very little to fear actually for the random individual, yet. It's the same as with some natives selling their lands to some foreign visitor for a handful of glass beads. What will he do, they think, take the land and carry it away? Want to have a few stones to go with it? lol, ha ha. Nice, shiny glassbeads! Give!
So, if you're using Android with all the Google apps there's some place deep in a server farm where more and better data about your digital life is laying nicely prepared for analyzing it than you've got yourself, probably. It also shows to whom you connect, what you're searching for and about two thirds of all websites you visit. And all you've got from Google is "We're not evil!".
With Google gathering more and more data from you they're also preparing a really nice monopoly. You can switch to any OS and device you like, as long as it has software supported by Google for their services. And of course right now they want to redefine net neutrality to keep the "Internet" neutral, except "additional services" (== Google apps) and the wireless net of course. -- "All these worlds, including your own, are ours, except these dusty moons of Mars, you can have those"
And then: This is incredibly useful data also for governments. Knowledge is power and what Google piles up here is lots and lots of knowledge. I mean, your voice profile is *valuable* personal digital property. Your personal data is your land you live on in the dimension of intellectual property. Don't give it away for glass beads.
Whatever. There can't be any harm in requiring Google to adhere to some clear rules (like letting you browse all the data they have from you, giving you full control over deletions, offer complete export options with common data formats and so on). Is this unreasonable?
Mind you, I'm not saying what Google does should not be done. It's just progress, it's fascinating and it has as great a potential to change the world as the wheel or written language did. I just want to keep control over my part in it. It's mine after all.
It needs the 3g, turns the voice into some hash then does a lookup.
So Google sees what you're saying and stores it on their servers hanging off your Google account? The same with every page or map you send from Chrome to your phone? Yeah, this is the same then as with everything Google does here.
1) Throw people a nice sweet bait 2) Get their personal data 3) Profit!
I will start to consider Android as soon as Google starts to transfer and store all personal data encrypted, with no way to read it or to link it up with other personal data of mine, except those data points I want to have linked up. Right, and give me a way to browse ALL data that gets stored off my phone at Google and a way to delete it if I want to. This would be the very least that should be required from them.
Is Googles just trying to gather more data on their servers by beaming your voice to their servers which send commands back then? Or is this really running on your phone's hardware?
Re:Solution in need of a (perceived) problem
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
Problem: I want to organize information around a narrow subject and a small number of people. There is already a Facebook group and a standalone website and forum, but those solutions do not meet all of our information requirements, which means that we lose people who could have otherwise contributed to our cause.
Solution: Wiki, Etherpad, Google Wave, etc...
But they don't really work well enough. They are too complicated to administrate or to complicated to use or too slow or too confusing.
I've found that a minimal Wiki site (with CamelCase links) works best. You can't do much and it may be ugly, but what you can do is extremely easy and fast.
Turns out Linux doesn't suck and it is good for something mainstream after all. I still haven't seen the real "year of the Linux desktop" but Android has already given us a year of the Linux phone, and we barely even realized it.
Yeah, but the price is to become for the smartphone universe what Windows was for the PC. With Google being what MS Office and the "industry standard" software was for Windows. Well, could've been worse.
Google tried to directly sell an unlocked phone, badly. They failed and now they say "you can't do that, it doesn't work". Well, they did not try hard enough.
Of course you need retail partners so people can try and see and touch the thing. And you need to have some clear payment options to pay over two years to ease the financial pain.
... industrial designers that did the iPhone case design and overruled the antenna/RF engineers, put them in the test chamber and turn the microwaves up to 'bake'.
It really doesn't matter how many fancy anechoic chambers you've got. If the art majors who spec the kewl stainless steel antenna have the last word, its a culture problem, not a technology problem.
And still most people don't buy technology, they buy products. I mean, they even buy bicycles with no fenders on them. How crazy is that? And last I heard HD even sells vehicles with no roof! You get soaked if it rains! Must also be one of those culture problems. This is clear flaw of their products. Someone should sue them.
The really bizarre thing is I've had an iPhone 4 since day 1, I've seen the glitch and until I got a case it had been affecting my data connections, but I still really like this phone! Is Apple turning us all into battered wives?
No, I think that just goes to show that the least possible signal attenuation in all situations is an important factor, but not the only one. If you deal in more attenuation when touching the naked phone in a certain spot (and the iPhone is a very naked phone without a case) for a smaller package and a larger battery and get a real nice smartphone out of it... it may still be a good deal after all is said and done.
I think Apple knew perfectly well about that tradeoff. They still liked that design good enough to risk it. And while this certainly was a risky decision I'm not really sure it was a bad decision. The first iPhone was risky, too. Sometimes I think the current commotion may be just the new version of "What, a phone with no keyboard? Fail!"
Here's a guess: Could these problems have been overlooked because of their field testing? The field units were placed in dummy cases which would have prevented physical contact with the antenna.
Not even Apple is so dumb to not look at the dBm numbers when lab-testing the first phone with an external antenna as part of the case. Not testing for what difference the hand/grip of the user makes here is totally unthinkable. Really. That this thing works at all is already a miracle, you don't get this by accident.
No, this is either a design tradeoff they just accepted or part of the phones aren't made to spec. Or a bit of both.
I think the proximity sensor issue is worse than the antenna issue, even if it gets hardly any press coverage.
I mean, the iPhone isn't out even one month yet, the antenna issue is in no way clearly understood by anyone. Rushing out a fix or a new hardware revision or even doing a recall of a few million iPhones is nothing you do within weeks. This is just impossible.
Just assume that this is caused by some parts being not always made to spec and this being corrected now (there are reports of replacement phones now looking slightly different and not having the antenna issue). How on earth should Apple get two or three million phones made on the spot? Keeping quiet, replacing phones slowly as customers return them and later dealing with this under the common warranty would be just reasonable.
I'm really looking forward to all the boundless critics eating their pants if Apple should come up with something fair and reasonable tomorrow.
There might be other options like using some large and light drag device (like a large balloon) to already brake high up in the atmosphere with much less heating. If you can manage to have a large surface area to weight ratio heating can be quite gentle.
There have been calculations that a simple table-tennis ball could survive reentry with no further protection for exactly this reason.
There even have been (russian) tests with inflatable heatshields working in this way. The dense reentry-vehicles with ablating heat shields are mostly a heritage from ICBM technology which depend on going in as fast and straight as possible (they're weapons after all).
Doesn't insulating it technically make it no longer truly external? Whether it is encased in 10 inches of plastic or 1/4 mm, it's still protected from conductive surfaces, which is the point.
But it *isn't* the point. All tests that people have done show that just insulating the antenna with thin tape or similar does not change anything. I find it highly interesting that people are again and again coming up with that "coating" idea. It's nonsense. It's not a problem with conductivity, it's a problem with capacity.
What you need is a certain distance between the antenna and your hand. Really thick tape helps a little bit, a bumper or a case helps more.
By the way, switching off WiFi or 3G makes the problem go away too. And it seems that the problem also depends on which of the many frequency bands the iPhone supports it actually uses in a certain situation. It's not that easy, really.
This antenna is obviously not perfect but it's actually a miracle that it works as good as it does. This was not just an oversight. I'm pretty sure they put lots of effort into it to make it work at all. Give them some slack, trying new things is never easy.
I wouldn't be surprised if external antennas integrated with the case would become more common in the future. There's only so much room in a small smartphone and you need room for the battery. Going the easy way and putting the antenna inside the case comes at a cost here.
I'm totally surprised that so many nerds seem to be so much against innovation. Were the first LCD screens really trouble-free? What about the first touchscreens?
The problem is the antennas being shorted by a slightly conductive (sweaty) finger bridging one or more of the three breaks.
Apple doesn't need a recall to fix the problem: future phones can have a coating, and a free bumper ($10 cost to Apple) to existing customers solves all the problems.
At 2M iPhones, the "recall fix" would be a whopping $20M.
No, you can short the antennas even with a piece of metal with no effect. It's a capacitive effect, you need *distance* between the antenna and you hand/finger. A coating would be totally useless. The bumper and other cases work because they provide that crucial distance. Internal antennas avoid this issue by providing distance between the antenna and your hand by the phone casing.
Anyway, the only difference between a plastic phone with an internal antenna and the iPhone with a case applied to it is the fact that you can easily remove or replace the case/bumper on the iPhone while the casing is forever fixed to the phone with the internal antenna. I don't see a real problem here. It's all PR. Actually Apple sells a naked phone you can add any casing you like to and if you're risky you can also use it naked. Looks like the better deal to me. It's bit more expensive, of course. But this is Apple after all.
With all the Apple publicity they probably made an extra $1.5 billion. It's not like the iphone is gods gift, anyone ever been to europe/asia? They had phones like this five years ago.
So this is the reason that the iPhone is right now making up 75% of all smartphones sold in Japan?
I actually hate many of the Mac OS X conventions and interface (especially you Finder!) and I have no interest in paying a premium on Mac hardware.
The day they release iTunes for Linux I'll stop using it on Windows.
I went from Linux to OS X a few years ago (not for servers, though) and at first I also *hated* the Finder.
After a while I started to notice an interesting thing: I had far, far less need for file management than I had on Linux. In fact what I needed was access to a handful of folders and that's it. I would say my time spent with file management has decreased a good order of magnitude. The Finder works totally fine for what you do with it on a Mac.
In short: Don't judge the OS X UI by the habits you've grown into on Linux (or Windows).
Apart from the pork angle there's another thing: Even the original Bush plan for the Moon and Mars looked as if it were designed to get a heavy launcher at all costs. Now this. Really, building launchers at all is not something you need to be the US or Soviet Russia for. Every country not being exactly a developing country can do that now. Even private companies can do that.
Building something able to launch really big payloads though is different. This is hard and expensive and has so few uses that nobody even tries. It has one really good use though: Fscking big military optical and radar spysats. If you want to have an optical spysat in GSO you need more than a few thousand pounds up there. And if you want to have radar spysats with high resolution you also need some serious power and antennas up there.
Being able to launch 70 or more metric tons is something you can rely on nobody else that easily to repeat. And I think this was the real reason for Ares V and now for this. Having some really big eyes in the sky staring down hard day and night, *this* would make a difference. Everyone with half a brain can now time his operations so that no spysat is in the right place when he wants to get some things done without being seen.
CR has been wrong on so many things before when it comes to computers. Not to mention Apple knows there's a problem and they are trying to fix the issue. Like they have said get a case looks nicer then duck tape and protects the phone better. If you spent that much money on an Iphone you should have the few extra dollars buy the case. At least until Apple fixes the issue.
I'd actually agree with you here a bit, but: This is not the only problem. The proximity sensor on the 4 seems to work only randomly, with many people reporting dialing numbers or enabling the speakerphone with their ears while talking. No reaction from Apple. Nobody knows if this a hardware problem (they have put the sensor in a different place compared to the 3GS) or a calibration problem and if it is, if it can be corrected with a software update.
And then there is the fact that the fully exposed glass edges on both front and back are extremely fragile if they hit the ground when you drop the thing. The glass itself is tough, no doubt. The edges aren't, if they have to absorb the full impact the thing *will* shatter. Even without the antenna problem this means that this thing is actually very much unusable without a case. Drop it once or hit with it against a desk lamp or whatever when picking it up in a hurry and you don't have a nice mark in the bezel as with the 3GS, you have a shattered display or back cover.
Add to that the fact that you have no idea which side is front and which is back without looking at the thing and it gets more and more silly. Really, you feel so stupid when you pull the thing out of your pocket or out of a bag and have no idea which side the screen is on before you look at it.
Basically it's a really pretty but incredibly stupid design. It's something to lay on a soft cushion and to look at, not something to carry with you all day long and to actually use.
Yeah, I know, for some geeks this is all what Apple is about anyway. I don't think so, Apple has some really nice and usable hardware. But this design is overstretching it in plain sight.
Provided they get the sensor problem fixed, you can wrap a silly case around it and it's still a (then dull looking) great smartphone. The whole design is still a glaring mistake, though. Even more since it clearly says "Yes, all the Apple haters are right, we are just putting out beautiful but useless hardware to catch the money of clueless idiots".
No, until now I tended to hate Apple, but loved many of the products they sold. Now with that iPhone (and the stupidly expensive new Mac mini with its machined alu case and the iPad with only 256MB of RAM and no camera) there's not much left to love. They may manage to get it straight again with the next product cycle but until then they're dropping good will of their customers left and right every single day.
When I have kids I will guarantee that they spend their entire time outside doing activities and go away every Summer and Winter vacation to camps, no matter what I have to sacrifice for myself to afford the cost. I want my kids to be familiar with nature and be comfortable being in the woods like I was.
Here in Germany there is a new kind of kindergarten gaining momentum. It's called "Waldkindergarten" which literally means "forest kindergarten". They just put a small trailer or so somewhere into a forest which is used as a base station to store things, clothing etc. The actual kindergarten though is the forest. The children are outside all day long (with clothing according to the weather), playing and learning things. Almost all children immediately adopt to that. Rain, snow, cold, sun, whatever. Great idea and even much cheaper to put in service.
But regardless of where we lived, we were around a lot more Natural Stuff. Building materials in relatively raw form, draft animals and their effluvient, street vermin (rats, roaches, etc) and their parasites, basic unprocessed foods complete with whatever contaminants nature (or manure fertilizer) saw fit to distribute.
I expect a similar finding would result from examining people who spend a lot of time out in any fairly natural environment, exposed to Natural Stuff that in one way or another acts as an immune stimulant.
As far as I know it's not so much about having immune stimulants (especially since allergies are a sign of an overreacting immune system you surely don't want to stimulate). The thing is to give the immune system something useful to do because if it's bored out of its mind it starts to turn against random things.
Infecting yourself with parasites (worms) seems to work surprisingly well against allergies. Your immune system seems to get something real to fight against then and stops to bother about harmless things. Shouldn't come as a surprise anyway since most of the time our bodies evolved we'd have been dealing with parasites anyway. Take them away and things may go wrong...
Last I read Notion Ink *will* come later this year with their tablet. But with a regular TFT. The Pixel Qi display will have to wait for a later model.
I agree though that this type of display is more important for tablets than for regular netbooks or notebooks. Only geeks use notebooks out in the sun and even then only rarely. You're much more likely to do only some light consuming out in the sun and this is what tablets are good at. I can image roasting in the sun and reading a book, but programming or such? Give me a dark basement deep at night for that.
Isn't it possible to manufacture helium with fusion? I mean fusion is still not good enough for producing electricity, but it should be able to make helium using hydrogen and electricity.
Basically, yes. But you get so much energy out of it that doing this for the amounts of helium we're using every day would probably vaporize the planet...
Prices rises, lower concentrations become economically viable, util we use all the fucking Earth crust.
Nope. There is a point where this stops to be economical in a very final way, because you can't run an economy anymore on that level of costs for things. There is a point of rising prices when nobody can *afford* to pay them, you know.
What we're doing is living off the wealth that has accumulated over millions and millions of years and we are using them up in a matter of centuries. Many things you can (and have to) replace with others or make them from other things. But helium, as an element, can't be created. And once used most of it vanishes into space. It's gone forever then.
What I didn't realise until I read a review recently is that although the Bumper solves the antenna issue, it means that you cannot plug in your standard iPod/iPhone connectors!
No, you can't plug in many *third-party* connectors which may be thicker than those from Apple. Not exactly surprising.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people have incredibly, pathetically mundane lives and an over-inflated sense of how important they are - myself included. Seriously, we're not that interesting. As a data point, in an overall trend, we're probably useful to companies.
But as some anonymous person over the internet. Get real.
Yeah, there's very little to fear actually for the random individual, yet. It's the same as with some natives selling their lands to some foreign visitor for a handful of glass beads. What will he do, they think, take the land and carry it away? Want to have a few stones to go with it? lol, ha ha. Nice, shiny glassbeads! Give!
So, if you're using Android with all the Google apps there's some place deep in a server farm where more and better data about your digital life is laying nicely prepared for analyzing it than you've got yourself, probably. It also shows to whom you connect, what you're searching for and about two thirds of all websites you visit. And all you've got from Google is "We're not evil!".
With Google gathering more and more data from you they're also preparing a really nice monopoly. You can switch to any OS and device you like, as long as it has software supported by Google for their services. And of course right now they want to redefine net neutrality to keep the "Internet" neutral, except "additional services" (== Google apps) and the wireless net of course. -- "All these worlds, including your own, are ours, except these dusty moons of Mars, you can have those"
And then: This is incredibly useful data also for governments. Knowledge is power and what Google piles up here is lots and lots of knowledge. I mean, your voice profile is *valuable* personal digital property. Your personal data is your land you live on in the dimension of intellectual property. Don't give it away for glass beads.
Whatever. There can't be any harm in requiring Google to adhere to some clear rules (like letting you browse all the data they have from you, giving you full control over deletions, offer complete export options with common data formats and so on). Is this unreasonable?
Mind you, I'm not saying what Google does should not be done. It's just progress, it's fascinating and it has as great a potential to change the world as the wheel or written language did. I just want to keep control over my part in it. It's mine after all.
So Google sees what you're saying and stores it on their servers hanging off your Google account? The same with every page or map you send from Chrome to your phone? Yeah, this is the same then as with everything Google does here.
1) Throw people a nice sweet bait
2) Get their personal data
3) Profit!
I will start to consider Android as soon as Google starts to transfer and store all personal data encrypted, with no way to read it or to link it up with other personal data of mine, except those data points I want to have linked up. Right, and give me a way to browse ALL data that gets stored off my phone at Google and a way to delete it if I want to. This would be the very least that should be required from them.
Is Googles just trying to gather more data on their servers by beaming your voice to their servers which send commands back then? Or is this really running on your phone's hardware?
Problem: I want to organize information around a narrow subject and a small number of people. There is already a Facebook group and a standalone website and forum, but those solutions do not meet all of our information requirements, which means that we lose people who could have otherwise contributed to our cause.
Solution: Wiki, Etherpad, Google Wave, etc...
But they don't really work well enough. They are too complicated to administrate or to complicated to use or too slow or too confusing.
I've found that a minimal Wiki site (with CamelCase links) works best. You can't do much and it may be ugly, but what you can do is extremely easy and fast.
Really. Good dog, too. Someone give that dog a medal.
Turns out Linux doesn't suck and it is good for something mainstream after all. I still haven't seen the real "year of the Linux desktop" but Android has already given us a year of the Linux phone, and we barely even realized it.
Yeah, but the price is to become for the smartphone universe what Windows was for the PC. With Google being what MS Office and the "industry standard" software was for Windows. Well, could've been worse.
Google tried to directly sell an unlocked phone, badly. They failed and now they say "you can't do that, it doesn't work". Well, they did not try hard enough.
Of course you need retail partners so people can try and see and touch the thing. And you need to have some clear payment options to pay over two years to ease the financial pain.
... industrial designers that did the iPhone case design and overruled the antenna/RF engineers, put them in the test chamber and turn the microwaves up to 'bake'.
It really doesn't matter how many fancy anechoic chambers you've got. If the art majors who spec the kewl stainless steel antenna have the last word, its a culture problem, not a technology problem.
And still most people don't buy technology, they buy products. I mean, they even buy bicycles with no fenders on them. How crazy is that? And last I heard HD even sells vehicles with no roof! You get soaked if it rains! Must also be one of those culture problems. This is clear flaw of their products. Someone should sue them.
The really bizarre thing is I've had an iPhone 4 since day 1, I've seen the glitch and until I got a case it had been affecting my data connections, but I still really like this phone! Is Apple turning us all into battered wives?
No, I think that just goes to show that the least possible signal attenuation in all situations is an important factor, but not the only one. If you deal in more attenuation when touching the naked phone in a certain spot (and the iPhone is a very naked phone without a case) for a smaller package and a larger battery and get a real nice smartphone out of it... it may still be a good deal after all is said and done.
I think Apple knew perfectly well about that tradeoff. They still liked that design good enough to risk it. And while this certainly was a risky decision I'm not really sure it was a bad decision. The first iPhone was risky, too. Sometimes I think the current commotion may be just the new version of "What, a phone with no keyboard? Fail!"
Being able to link all your accounts to one person (you) is fully in the interest of Google.
Here's a guess: Could these problems have been overlooked because of their field testing? The field units were placed in dummy cases which would have prevented physical contact with the antenna.
Not even Apple is so dumb to not look at the dBm numbers when lab-testing the first phone with an external antenna as part of the case. Not testing for what difference the hand/grip of the user makes here is totally unthinkable. Really. That this thing works at all is already a miracle, you don't get this by accident.
No, this is either a design tradeoff they just accepted or part of the phones aren't made to spec. Or a bit of both.
I think the proximity sensor issue is worse than the antenna issue, even if it gets hardly any press coverage.
I mean, the iPhone isn't out even one month yet, the antenna issue is in no way clearly understood by anyone. Rushing out a fix or a new hardware revision or even doing a recall of a few million iPhones is nothing you do within weeks. This is just impossible.
Just assume that this is caused by some parts being not always made to spec and this being corrected now (there are reports of replacement phones now looking slightly different and not having the antenna issue). How on earth should Apple get two or three million phones made on the spot? Keeping quiet, replacing phones slowly as customers return them and later dealing with this under the common warranty would be just reasonable.
I'm really looking forward to all the boundless critics eating their pants if Apple should come up with something fair and reasonable tomorrow.
There might be other options like using some large and light drag device (like a large balloon) to already brake high up in the atmosphere with much less heating. If you can manage to have a large surface area to weight ratio heating can be quite gentle.
There have been calculations that a simple table-tennis ball could survive reentry with no further protection for exactly this reason.
There even have been (russian) tests with inflatable heatshields working in this way. The dense reentry-vehicles with ablating heat shields are mostly a heritage from ICBM technology which depend on going in as fast and straight as possible (they're weapons after all).
Doesn't insulating it technically make it no longer truly external? Whether it is encased in 10 inches of plastic or 1/4 mm, it's still protected from conductive surfaces, which is the point.
But it *isn't* the point. All tests that people have done show that just insulating the antenna with thin tape or similar does not change anything. I find it highly interesting that people are again and again coming up with that "coating" idea. It's nonsense. It's not a problem with conductivity, it's a problem with capacity.
What you need is a certain distance between the antenna and your hand. Really thick tape helps a little bit, a bumper or a case helps more.
By the way, switching off WiFi or 3G makes the problem go away too. And it seems that the problem also depends on which of the many frequency bands the iPhone supports it actually uses in a certain situation. It's not that easy, really.
This antenna is obviously not perfect but it's actually a miracle that it works as good as it does. This was not just an oversight. I'm pretty sure they put lots of effort into it to make it work at all. Give them some slack, trying new things is never easy.
I wouldn't be surprised if external antennas integrated with the case would become more common in the future. There's only so much room in a small smartphone and you need room for the battery. Going the easy way and putting the antenna inside the case comes at a cost here.
I'm totally surprised that so many nerds seem to be so much against innovation. Were the first LCD screens really trouble-free? What about the first touchscreens?
The problem is the antennas being shorted by a slightly conductive (sweaty) finger bridging one or more of the three breaks.
Apple doesn't need a recall to fix the problem: future phones can have a coating, and a free bumper ($10 cost to Apple) to existing customers solves all the problems.
At 2M iPhones, the "recall fix" would be a whopping $20M.
No, you can short the antennas even with a piece of metal with no effect. It's a capacitive effect, you need *distance* between the antenna and you hand/finger. A coating would be totally useless. The bumper and other cases work because they provide that crucial distance. Internal antennas avoid this issue by providing distance between the antenna and your hand by the phone casing.
Anyway, the only difference between a plastic phone with an internal antenna and the iPhone with a case applied to it is the fact that you can easily remove or replace the case/bumper on the iPhone while the casing is forever fixed to the phone with the internal antenna. I don't see a real problem here. It's all PR. Actually Apple sells a naked phone you can add any casing you like to and if you're risky you can also use it naked. Looks like the better deal to me. It's bit more expensive, of course. But this is Apple after all.
With all the Apple publicity they probably made an extra $1.5 billion. It's not like the iphone is gods gift, anyone ever been to europe/asia? They had phones like this five years ago.
So this is the reason that the iPhone is right now making up 75% of all smartphones sold in Japan?
I actually hate many of the Mac OS X conventions and interface (especially you Finder!) and I have no interest in paying a premium on Mac hardware.
The day they release iTunes for Linux I'll stop using it on Windows.
I went from Linux to OS X a few years ago (not for servers, though) and at first I also *hated* the Finder.
After a while I started to notice an interesting thing: I had far, far less need for file management than I had on Linux. In fact what I needed was access to a handful of folders and that's it. I would say my time spent with file management has decreased a good order of magnitude. The Finder works totally fine for what you do with it on a Mac.
In short: Don't judge the OS X UI by the habits you've grown into on Linux (or Windows).
Apart from the pork angle there's another thing: Even the original Bush plan for the Moon and Mars looked as if it were designed to get a heavy launcher at all costs. Now this. Really, building launchers at all is not something you need to be the US or Soviet Russia for. Every country not being exactly a developing country can do that now. Even private companies can do that.
Building something able to launch really big payloads though is different. This is hard and expensive and has so few uses that nobody even tries. It has one really good use though: Fscking big military optical and radar spysats. If you want to have an optical spysat in GSO you need more than a few thousand pounds up there. And if you want to have radar spysats with high resolution you also need some serious power and antennas up there.
Being able to launch 70 or more metric tons is something you can rely on nobody else that easily to repeat. And I think this was the real reason for Ares V and now for this. Having some really big eyes in the sky staring down hard day and night, *this* would make a difference. Everyone with half a brain can now time his operations so that no spysat is in the right place when he wants to get some things done without being seen.
CR has been wrong on so many things before when it comes to computers. Not to mention Apple knows there's a problem and they are trying to fix the issue. Like they have said get a case looks nicer then duck tape and protects the phone better. If you spent that much money on an Iphone you should have the few extra dollars buy the case. At least until Apple fixes the issue.
I'd actually agree with you here a bit, but: This is not the only problem. The proximity sensor on the 4 seems to work only randomly, with many people reporting dialing numbers or enabling the speakerphone with their ears while talking. No reaction from Apple. Nobody knows if this a hardware problem (they have put the sensor in a different place compared to the 3GS) or a calibration problem and if it is, if it can be corrected with a software update.
And then there is the fact that the fully exposed glass edges on both front and back are extremely fragile if they hit the ground when you drop the thing. The glass itself is tough, no doubt. The edges aren't, if they have to absorb the full impact the thing *will* shatter. Even without the antenna problem this means that this thing is actually very much unusable without a case. Drop it once or hit with it against a desk lamp or whatever when picking it up in a hurry and you don't have a nice mark in the bezel as with the 3GS, you have a shattered display or back cover.
Add to that the fact that you have no idea which side is front and which is back without looking at the thing and it gets more and more silly. Really, you feel so stupid when you pull the thing out of your pocket or out of a bag and have no idea which side the screen is on before you look at it.
Basically it's a really pretty but incredibly stupid design. It's something to lay on a soft cushion and to look at, not something to carry with you all day long and to actually use.
Yeah, I know, for some geeks this is all what Apple is about anyway. I don't think so, Apple has some really nice and usable hardware. But this design is overstretching it in plain sight.
Provided they get the sensor problem fixed, you can wrap a silly case around it and it's still a (then dull looking) great smartphone. The whole design is still a glaring mistake, though. Even more since it clearly says "Yes, all the Apple haters are right, we are just putting out beautiful but useless hardware to catch the money of clueless idiots".
No, until now I tended to hate Apple, but loved many of the products they sold. Now with that iPhone (and the stupidly expensive new Mac mini with its machined alu case and the iPad with only 256MB of RAM and no camera) there's not much left to love. They may manage to get it straight again with the next product cycle but until then they're dropping good will of their customers left and right every single day.
When I have kids I will guarantee that they spend their entire time outside doing activities and go away every Summer and Winter vacation to camps, no matter what I have to sacrifice for myself to afford the cost. I want my kids to be familiar with nature and be comfortable being in the woods like I was.
Here in Germany there is a new kind of kindergarten gaining momentum. It's called "Waldkindergarten" which literally means "forest kindergarten". They just put a small trailer or so somewhere into a forest which is used as a base station to store things, clothing etc. The actual kindergarten though is the forest. The children are outside all day long (with clothing according to the weather), playing and learning things. Almost all children immediately adopt to that. Rain, snow, cold, sun, whatever. Great idea and even much cheaper to put in service.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_kindergarten
But regardless of where we lived, we were around a lot more Natural Stuff. Building materials in relatively raw form, draft animals and their effluvient, street vermin (rats, roaches, etc) and their parasites, basic unprocessed foods complete with whatever contaminants nature (or manure fertilizer) saw fit to distribute.
I expect a similar finding would result from examining people who spend a lot of time out in any fairly natural environment, exposed to Natural Stuff that in one way or another acts as an immune stimulant.
As far as I know it's not so much about having immune stimulants (especially since allergies are a sign of an overreacting immune system you surely don't want to stimulate). The thing is to give the immune system something useful to do because if it's bored out of its mind it starts to turn against random things.
Infecting yourself with parasites (worms) seems to work surprisingly well against allergies. Your immune system seems to get something real to fight against then and stops to bother about harmless things. Shouldn't come as a surprise anyway since most of the time our bodies evolved we'd have been dealing with parasites anyway. Take them away and things may go wrong...
Last I read Notion Ink *will* come later this year with their tablet. But with a regular TFT. The Pixel Qi display will have to wait for a later model.
I agree though that this type of display is more important for tablets than for regular netbooks or notebooks. Only geeks use notebooks out in the sun and even then only rarely. You're much more likely to do only some light consuming out in the sun and this is what tablets are good at. I can image roasting in the sun and reading a book, but programming or such? Give me a dark basement deep at night for that.
Isn't it possible to manufacture helium with fusion? I mean fusion is still not good enough for producing electricity, but it should be able to make helium using hydrogen and electricity.
Basically, yes. But you get so much energy out of it that doing this for the amounts of helium we're using every day would probably vaporize the planet...
Insightful MY ASS.
Prices rises, lower concentrations become economically viable, util we use all the fucking Earth crust.
Nope. There is a point where this stops to be economical in a very final way, because you can't run an economy anymore on that level of costs for things. There is a point of rising prices when nobody can *afford* to pay them, you know.
What we're doing is living off the wealth that has accumulated over millions and millions of years and we are using them up in a matter of centuries. Many things you can (and have to) replace with others or make them from other things. But helium, as an element, can't be created. And once used most of it vanishes into space. It's gone forever then.
No, you can't plug in many *third-party* connectors which may be thicker than those from Apple. Not exactly surprising.