You have something there. A search says 6 or 7 hours of continuous reading on an iPod touch.
I have an iPod touch and use it with Stanza for reading (quite a lot actually). The battery life is just fine. If you're reading a lot you'll need to recharge it daily, but this has never been a problem for me. Reading five, six or seven hours in a day is enough, I'd say.
No, really. Since I've got my iPod touch and installed Stanza on it, I've read about 50 books on it.
The touch is cheaper, smaller, lighter and has a much better functionality (surfing, email, calendar and thousands of apps). The battery runs down after four or five hours, yes, but then you'll probably attach it to your computer via USB to sync music and videos and your calendar to it daily anyway.
And yes, the screen is small, but it works fine and the thing is much easier to hold than the Kindle or a real book, especially when you're reading while commuting or standing somewhere waiting for a bus. Think about it.
OK, the average home user is fine with a netbook, even as his only machine. If you need the thing for half an hour each day, occasionally longer, no problem.
I was thinking of the average user who works with a computer for 8 or 10 hours a day. I can do that with a laptop, but with a netbook my wrists start complaining after one hour of using the small keyboard and trackpad and the tight screen drives me up the wall.
Meanwhile I have decided that my iPod touch is better for limited things (browsing, music, email) and unlike a netbook I can put that thing in a pocket. But for real work I need a laptop and not a netbook, these things are still much too large to be mobile (instead of portable) and too small to be really useful.
So, yes: Netbooks are the new home computers, no question here. Sorry for the confusion.
They are great as long as you have a second more powerful machine. A regular laptop *can* fully work as your only machine but a netbook can't in most cases.
I have seen too many netbooks ending up as a rarely used toy... and they're too expensive for that actually. If you're wise go for the cheapest you can find, for checking your email and a bit of surfing they are all good enough.
In light of this, it seems absolutely mad to cut off a pretty reliable source of funding.
What? A flight costs a tourist about $20m. Even is this were pure profit (which I doubt) this isn't much. I don't know where the profits finally go, but I doubt that this makes any difference to Russia as a state. Peanuts, really. Russia is actually quite wealthy (the state, not the people), by the way. Building a launcher and a Soyuz craft for dedicated tourist flights seems to be out of the question.
The reason given (no spare seats when the ISS finally has a crew of 6) is totally reasonable and it has been known for a long time that this will be the case. They just had a spare seat now and then until now and sold it.
Anyway, if SpaceX and Bigelow get their way, there will be a commercial space station and commercial US flights for tourists in about five years.
As to what difference is made by rearranging the letters on the keyboard, I believe that the primary argument should not be about speed but efficiency. Most people type only in short bursts anyway, so wpm is a diminishing return metric above a certain threshold (I've heard around 35), but highly efficient layouts dramatically reduce the finger and wrist work required to type the same text, which reduces fatigue and injury.
The thing is that I can not understand why everyone seems to be so obsessed with typing speed. In most real world keyboard usage it's not the typing that slows you down but the editing. Any new keyboard layout that just changes the character keys and still requires you to move your hands around to move the cursor and to delete things is just optimizing in the wrong place.
The question should be: Helps Dvorak actually with finishing an article or a paper or a documentation in less time? Being able to type a few percent faster usually buys you exactly nothing. Being able to edit things much faster and more fluid really helps though.
Hmm, but the ergonomic side of this is still interesting. If you can type at the same speed with less fatigue it may be worth it. If it's worth the trouble shifting between different layouts is another question, though...
Not so often these days. Doesn't matter though, since I'm using OS X which supports Emacs shortcuts natively in all apps, so I'm constantly using them instead of moving my fingers to the cursor keys.
I don't know what you're are doing with your keyboard but I edit as often as I type and moving my hand to and from the home position again and again kills speed like nothing else. Hitting Control-b instead of arrow-left is much faster and easier...
I think this make the layout more comfortable. YMMV of course.
Also depends quite a bit on the language you're typing in... Character frequencies and especially combinations are quite different in English and German for example. Optimizing for one of these can easily make it worse for the other.
My keyboard has two of each. I never press two keys with the same hand.
On many keyboards the right control key is much further away than the left. I just can't use the right control key without either leaving the home position or hurting my pinky. And the right alt key just doesn't exist at all on many non-US keyboards. As long as such simple things go unchanged you really don't need to care for the layout of the character keys.
I have never understood how merely rearranging the keys on the same fscking keyboard could make a real difference. Yeah, you might get a 6% improvement in typing speed. Who cares?
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers. And to have an ergonomic layout of the surrounding keys (cursor movement, backspace, etc.). Our keyboards are in the stone age and the challenge is *not* the arrangement of the character keys, it's the arrangement of everything else. Where in a given layout your p's and q's actually are is a minor thing. Being able to move around your cursor and delete and edit things without leaving your home position can easily *double* your editing speed. That's the reason why people still love vi and Emacs. And this is not a joke.
That, or finally introduce foot pedals. It's a shame that even the most recent keyboards are still bound to torture your hands and your mind just to type capitals, to hit a key combo or to move two words back. Get a decent keyboard that allows to press the control key with the edge of your hand instead of with your pinky and use Emacs and you'll be in editing heaven. Pathetic...
The Russians were planning MIR-2.. it was canceled, what with the fall of the Soviet Union and all.
Yes, and the already built core module of Mir-2 became one of the first modules of ISS (Zvezda), providing the life support equipment for the crew even today.
There's no reason to assume that an iPhone nano will run *any* third-party apps at all. Think of it as an iPod nano with an integrated phone and it almost makes sense. There's no need for an sophisticated OS or third-party apps then. Just a small iPod with a phone, that's it. Nothing wrong with that idea either.
So, if "problems with the astronauts' restraint systems were the ultimate cause of death for the seven astronauts on board" they would have survived the plasma blast while reentering in a vehicle that is being torn apart? I'm going to read the report now, but I think CNN has got something wrong here.
China is for a large part a kind of capitalism gone wild, uncontrolled and unregulated. Corporations there build factories without looking at how their workers fare, without looking at the environment, without looking at anything else than profits.
If you want to work for $1/h or less while living on the streets and travelling all over the land looking for work, without any health insurance or any protection against work-related accidents (lost a hand? You're fired!), look to China and its capitalism.
Additionally, in true communism (which has never been achieved yet) there is no state or government left, since there is no need for it anymore.
But it's true that the kind of fascist corporatism which our capitalist democracies evolve into is the worst of all worlds. The market gets less and less free for all (since startups can't get a foot on the ground) and democracy gets less and less useful (since hardly any of the actual decisions are democratic).
If the US weren't such fearful of everything socialist, the government could just build a factory from tax money, finance R&D together with universities and companies and then rent the factory out to whoever wants to build batteries.
Giving corporations money to do that instead means having the taxpayers pay for it and corporations make a profit from it. Again the worst of all alternatives. But then it seems to be the usual scheme of screwing with the people while at the same time loudly speaking of "freedom" and "free market".
If the market really wants to be free, well, let all these banks and auto companies go bankrupt and the economy collapse.
Then again, Microsoft was surprised by the NetBook success and they're restrained by the anti-trust lawsuit but I expect them to find a way to reduce Linux marketshare on the netbooks.
They already seem to have found a way because hardly any of newly announced netbooks these days even have a Linux option. Would be interesting to know how much a XP license costs per machine here. A few dollars, I guess...
That's the only thing that really could push Linux. Have a new platform with convincing power advantages which is binary incompatible with Intel. Not a large problem for Linux since both the OS and almost all of the apps are Open Source and rather easily recompiled for a new platform. Windows on the other hand would have large problems because even if MS would come up with a compatible version of Windows you'd have to wait for a long time until all (or just most) of the millions of commercial apps for Windows would be available for that OS.
Of course it would be hard to get a large enough market for any platform not able to run Windows in the first place...
But a society where you can only have freedom of expression as long as you're able to hide is not a free society. What you need is both, the freedom to have privacy *and* the freedom to do and to speak openly and freely without having to hide.
I'm amazed that people don't get this. What's freedom worth if people don't dare to act as free people? Anonymity on the net should be a right, yes. But making it the default destroys freedom. Freedom means *not* to have to hide.
Anonymity for defending the rights of free speech is the same as requiring women to wear a full veil so they're free to move in public.
People don't use their real names on the net to not have to fear any consequences. What they get is that they can say what they want without anyone listening and without changing anything.
Getting people to hide from each other is the best way to make them powerless and frustrated. They will cry and whine and protest in the virtual world and hide and do as they're told in the real world. It's so easy to vent your frustation online and then to do nothing and change nothing in the real world.
Yes, anonymity should be a right on the net. But being able to use your name and your identity and actually be an individual being (that is: a not divided being) is a right, too. Freedom does not mean doing what you want as long as you're able to hide, it means doing what you want in the open.
Anonymity is not free, it comes at a high price. Just like abortion it's not the easy way out.
I've installed Linux (with ext3 mounted as ext2 and the noatime option) on a bloody slow Asus 701 (the original Eee PC) more than once and have to say that even the slow SSD in this thing makes me not to want any HD again ever.
Reason? Well, the really fast seek-times make up for the slow data transfer. In all day use you and your apps and your OS are reading constantly tiny files strewn all over the drive and a SSD feels just so much faster here. Slow writing means saving a file takes a second or two, but everything else just flies. Together with the utter silence of the thing this feels just *right*. Going back to a computer with actual spinning platters and fluttering heads feels like driving a steam-driven car now.
Don't believe in numbers. Trust your own experiences.
I think the short answer to "Can machines have souls?" is "no". Simply because "Soul" is something *defined* this way -- not even animals have a soul, how can machines have one then? This answers nothing of course.
The more interesting question would be: If you have a concious machine, are you allowed to just switch it off or would this be murder? Can it have a free will and can it have rights similar to you? From my point of view a machine that is complex enough to request such rights and to argue with me about them would fully deserve them.
So the slightly longer answer to that question would be: Anything that can ask you "Do I have a soul?" surely has one.
And why can't people comprehend that folks write this stuff to sell books and make money? And why can't folks comprehend that Slashdot posts it in order to get page views and make money?
Some folks are even reading and writing here -- for nothing! Unbelievable.
Has anyone checked the price of Apple machines seen over several years? Try to sell a cheap PC notebook after a few years and do the same with a MacBook. You will see that there may be a "Mac tax" but it also applies to used machines.
And I've seen many people being cheap with their notebooks and really regretting it very soon. Paying a bit more hurts only once but using a crappy notebook hurts every day.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an iPod touch and use it with Stanza for reading (quite a lot actually). The battery life is just fine. If you're reading a lot you'll need to recharge it daily, but this has never been a problem for me. Reading five, six or seven hours in a day is enough, I'd say.
No, really. Since I've got my iPod touch and installed Stanza on it, I've read about 50 books on it.
The touch is cheaper, smaller, lighter and has a much better functionality (surfing, email, calendar and thousands of apps). The battery runs down after four or five hours, yes, but then you'll probably attach it to your computer via USB to sync music and videos and your calendar to it daily anyway.
And yes, the screen is small, but it works fine and the thing is much easier to hold than the Kindle or a real book, especially when you're reading while commuting or standing somewhere waiting for a bus. Think about it.
OK, the average home user is fine with a netbook, even as his only machine. If you need the thing for half an hour each day, occasionally longer, no problem.
I was thinking of the average user who works with a computer for 8 or 10 hours a day. I can do that with a laptop, but with a netbook my wrists start complaining after one hour of using the small keyboard and trackpad and the tight screen drives me up the wall.
Meanwhile I have decided that my iPod touch is better for limited things (browsing, music, email) and unlike a netbook I can put that thing in a pocket. But for real work I need a laptop and not a netbook, these things are still much too large to be mobile (instead of portable) and too small to be really useful.
So, yes: Netbooks are the new home computers, no question here. Sorry for the confusion.
They are great as long as you have a second more powerful machine. A regular laptop *can* fully work as your only machine but a netbook can't in most cases.
I have seen too many netbooks ending up as a rarely used toy... and they're too expensive for that actually. If you're wise go for the cheapest you can find, for checking your email and a bit of surfing they are all good enough.
What? A flight costs a tourist about $20m. Even is this were pure profit (which I doubt) this isn't much. I don't know where the profits finally go, but I doubt that this makes any difference to Russia as a state. Peanuts, really. Russia is actually quite wealthy (the state, not the people), by the way. Building a launcher and a Soyuz craft for dedicated tourist flights seems to be out of the question.
The reason given (no spare seats when the ISS finally has a crew of 6) is totally reasonable and it has been known for a long time that this will be the case. They just had a spare seat now and then until now and sold it.
Anyway, if SpaceX and Bigelow get their way, there will be a commercial space station and commercial US flights for tourists in about five years.
The thing is that I can not understand why everyone seems to be so obsessed with typing speed. In most real world keyboard usage it's not the typing that slows you down but the editing. Any new keyboard layout that just changes the character keys and still requires you to move your hands around to move the cursor and to delete things is just optimizing in the wrong place.
The question should be: Helps Dvorak actually with finishing an article or a paper or a documentation in less time? Being able to type a few percent faster usually buys you exactly nothing. Being able to edit things much faster and more fluid really helps though.
Hmm, but the ergonomic side of this is still interesting. If you can type at the same speed with less fatigue it may be worth it. If it's worth the trouble shifting between different layouts is another question, though...
Not so often these days. Doesn't matter though, since I'm using OS X which supports Emacs shortcuts natively in all apps, so I'm constantly using them instead of moving my fingers to the cursor keys.
I don't know what you're are doing with your keyboard but I edit as often as I type and moving my hand to and from the home position again and again kills speed like nothing else. Hitting Control-b instead of arrow-left is much faster and easier...
Also depends quite a bit on the language you're typing in... Character frequencies and especially combinations are quite different in English and German for example. Optimizing for one of these can easily make it worse for the other.
On many keyboards the right control key is much further away than the left. I just can't use the right control key without either leaving the home position or hurting my pinky. And the right alt key just doesn't exist at all on many non-US keyboards. As long as such simple things go unchanged you really don't need to care for the layout of the character keys.
I have never understood how merely rearranging the keys on the same fscking keyboard could make a real difference. Yeah, you might get a 6% improvement in typing speed. Who cares?
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers. And to have an ergonomic layout of the surrounding keys (cursor movement, backspace, etc.). Our keyboards are in the stone age and the challenge is *not* the arrangement of the character keys, it's the arrangement of everything else. Where in a given layout your p's and q's actually are is a minor thing. Being able to move around your cursor and delete and edit things without leaving your home position can easily *double* your editing speed. That's the reason why people still love vi and Emacs. And this is not a joke.
That, or finally introduce foot pedals. It's a shame that even the most recent keyboards are still bound to torture your hands and your mind just to type capitals, to hit a key combo or to move two words back. Get a decent keyboard that allows to press the control key with the edge of your hand instead of with your pinky and use Emacs and you'll be in editing heaven. Pathetic...
Yes, and the already built core module of Mir-2 became one of the first modules of ISS (Zvezda), providing the life support equipment for the crew even today.
There's no reason to assume that an iPhone nano will run *any* third-party apps at all. Think of it as an iPod nano with an integrated phone and it almost makes sense. There's no need for an sophisticated OS or third-party apps then. Just a small iPod with a phone, that's it. Nothing wrong with that idea either.
So, if "problems with the astronauts' restraint systems were the ultimate cause of death for the seven astronauts on board" they would have survived the plasma blast while reentering in a vehicle that is being torn apart? I'm going to read the report now, but I think CNN has got something wrong here.
China is for a large part a kind of capitalism gone wild, uncontrolled and unregulated. Corporations there build factories without looking at how their workers fare, without looking at the environment, without looking at anything else than profits.
If you want to work for $1/h or less while living on the streets and travelling all over the land looking for work, without any health insurance or any protection against work-related accidents (lost a hand? You're fired!), look to China and its capitalism.
Additionally, in true communism (which has never been achieved yet) there is no state or government left, since there is no need for it anymore.
But it's true that the kind of fascist corporatism which our capitalist democracies evolve into is the worst of all worlds. The market gets less and less free for all (since startups can't get a foot on the ground) and democracy gets less and less useful (since hardly any of the actual decisions are democratic).
If the US weren't such fearful of everything socialist, the government could just build a factory from tax money, finance R&D together with universities and companies and then rent the factory out to whoever wants to build batteries.
Giving corporations money to do that instead means having the taxpayers pay for it and corporations make a profit from it. Again the worst of all alternatives. But then it seems to be the usual scheme of screwing with the people while at the same time loudly speaking of "freedom" and "free market".
If the market really wants to be free, well, let all these banks and auto companies go bankrupt and the economy collapse.
They already seem to have found a way because hardly any of newly announced netbooks these days even have a Linux option. Would be interesting to know how much a XP license costs per machine here. A few dollars, I guess...
That's the only thing that really could push Linux. Have a new platform with convincing power advantages which is binary incompatible with Intel. Not a large problem for Linux since both the OS and almost all of the apps are Open Source and rather easily recompiled for a new platform. Windows on the other hand would have large problems because even if MS would come up with a compatible version of Windows you'd have to wait for a long time until all (or just most) of the millions of commercial apps for Windows would be available for that OS.
Of course it would be hard to get a large enough market for any platform not able to run Windows in the first place...
But a society where you can only have freedom of expression as long as you're able to hide is not a free society. What you need is both, the freedom to have privacy *and* the freedom to do and to speak openly and freely without having to hide.
I'm amazed that people don't get this. What's freedom worth if people don't dare to act as free people? Anonymity on the net should be a right, yes. But making it the default destroys freedom. Freedom means *not* to have to hide.
Anonymity for defending the rights of free speech is the same as requiring women to wear a full veil so they're free to move in public.
People don't use their real names on the net to not have to fear any consequences. What they get is that they can say what they want without anyone listening and without changing anything.
Getting people to hide from each other is the best way to make them powerless and frustrated. They will cry and whine and protest in the virtual world and hide and do as they're told in the real world. It's so easy to vent your frustation online and then to do nothing and change nothing in the real world.
Yes, anonymity should be a right on the net. But being able to use your name and your identity and actually be an individual being (that is: a not divided being) is a right, too. Freedom does not mean doing what you want as long as you're able to hide, it means doing what you want in the open.
Anonymity is not free, it comes at a high price. Just like abortion it's not the easy way out.
I've installed Linux (with ext3 mounted as ext2 and the noatime option) on a bloody slow Asus 701 (the original Eee PC) more than once and have to say that even the slow SSD in this thing makes me not to want any HD again ever.
Reason? Well, the really fast seek-times make up for the slow data transfer. In all day use you and your apps and your OS are reading constantly tiny files strewn all over the drive and a SSD feels just so much faster here. Slow writing means saving a file takes a second or two, but everything else just flies. Together with the utter silence of the thing this feels just *right*. Going back to a computer with actual spinning platters and fluttering heads feels like driving a steam-driven car now.
Don't believe in numbers. Trust your own experiences.
They're selling drugs, aren't they?
I think the short answer to "Can machines have souls?" is "no". Simply because "Soul" is something *defined* this way -- not even animals have a soul, how can machines have one then? This answers nothing of course.
The more interesting question would be: If you have a concious machine, are you allowed to just switch it off or would this be murder? Can it have a free will and can it have rights similar to you? From my point of view a machine that is complex enough to request such rights and to argue with me about them would fully deserve them.
So the slightly longer answer to that question would be: Anything that can ask you "Do I have a soul?" surely has one.
If people would regularly look at the subject matter rather than to rely on hearsay, they wouldn't need religion.
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first [biblegateway.com]
You should know that this concept does not work.
And why can't people comprehend that folks write this stuff to sell books and make money? And why can't folks comprehend that Slashdot posts it in order to get page views and make money?
Some folks are even reading and writing here -- for nothing! Unbelievable.
Has anyone checked the price of Apple machines seen over several years? Try to sell a cheap PC notebook after a few years and do the same with a MacBook. You will see that there may be a "Mac tax" but it also applies to used machines.
And I've seen many people being cheap with their notebooks and really regretting it very soon. Paying a bit more hurts only once but using a crappy notebook hurts every day.