There are people who do honestly believe the things in that poll tough. I've counted (on my nightly walks around the neighborhood) no less than 3 bumper stickers that say "show me the birth certificate" on various pickup trucks. I figure if your willing to advertise your ignorance on that back of your vehicle you believe that pretty strongly. I'd be willing to bet actual money that you could walk down the street in any city - find 5 republicans and out of that find at least one person who believes this.
The belief that Obama wasn't born in this country is one widely held by a decent amount of the Republicans I personally know. They often refer to him as Barack Hussein Obama to imply he's a foriegner (or to associate him with Sadam Hussein - also not born here).
Is it a wacky belief? Consider this - applying to be the president probably has you go through the most rigorous background check you'll ever have in your life. I'd assume... that they would be able to determine weather or not you were born here in the US or not before you can take the oath of office. With that in mind - I'd say its an insane notion.
I don't get this myself (at least from a Christian viewpoint) - having read the life and times of Jesus in the Bible he often saved his most scathing review of character towards the often conservative and rather inconsistent high priests.
Every single parable he ever told - the savior of the story is the most hated person in society to whoever he was telling the story to. Best most well known example of this - the good Samaritan. Supposedly the Jews he was talking to hated Samaritans (I suppose if he told the story today it would be called the good Palestinian).
That story alone is a very liberal outlook on society - don't judge, there is good in all people, give people a chance etc.
On labor relations - the Bible is full of examples respect for labor. In Jesus's last days he washed the apostles feet - not the other way around (to his followers he was the King of Kings...).
That's a myth - the biggest reason companies outsource manufacturing to 3rd world countries is a greater return on profit. Instead of making 150 dollars per machine you might make 20 or 30.
Good example of this - up until very recently Dell's corporate desktops (Optiplex line - in fact I'm typing this on a 745 that has a "Assembled in the USA" sticker on it) were made right here in the USA, and didn't cost all that much more than Vostro machines which are made in China. These are rock solid machines (haven't had to replace a single major component on any one of the 200 or so I'm responsible for).
My brother used to work for an importer of Chinese goods (pens/no name tv's [I see them at fry's all the time]/toys) you wouldn't believe the markup some of these goods have. Pens that sell for a dollar for instance they were buying for as little as 5 cents. 5 cents - think about how far they traveled, and how much effort it takes to make a ballpoint pen than you can make 95 cents profit off of. A lot of these 5 cent pens were toys on the side as well (light up, or have an etch-a-sketch attachment on the end - stuff like that) that sold for 2-3 dollars.
I'm interested in open version of a transcription app (I run a lab with a lot of this software/equipment) but this is a very vertical market - up until recently there wasn't any standard interface for the foot pedal (newer ones are hid usb devices now).
I had to throw away a bunch of sony serial devices because they only worked with one app I can't make work on newer versions of Windows.
I had a job like this at a web filtering company (Rulespace Inc if your curious) where we trained porn filtering engines. Basically looking at porn all day long (some nice, some very sick) and grading it for a recognition engine. Once in a blue moon other kinds of content (firearms, gambling etc) but for the most part - porn.
It did desensitize me to the point where I can look at obscene images and not get all that aroused, but at the same time to get to that arousal point my lust for more saucy images went up.
Its kinda like when we were in high school we all wanted that copy of the SI Swimsuit edition - on one hand - the last edition I picked up I certainly appreciated the beauty of the women in there, but on the other hand - not all that arousing.
Sorry if that's too much info, but wasn't quite sure how else to word it.
A lot of the people who worked with me (men and women actually) used to work at a local call center. And it wasn't that bad a job - I used to listen to audio books while the machine presented another site to grade.
The first Official Google/HTC dev phones shipped to the public like the ADP1 and ADP2 were made by HTC - and was a slider that can be totally operated by touch - so I dunno - Android 1.0 certainly seemed more touch friendly than WinCE ever has been.
That's one of the coolest things about Android though - the OS is really designed from the ground up to be compatible with whatever input metaphor you care to design - whether is a blackberry like device, mouse/keyboard, touch, voice command or stylus it has support for it.
Not sure where you'd have to live in Washington to get 11 megabits - when I lived in Seattle (Queen Anne) the only two providers were Comcast and Qwest - and with Qwest it was DSL 3 megabits (and a slow DSL at that - I never saw that kind of performance).
Now that I live in Oregon - 3 megabits is par for the course unless you want to spent a lot more money:( - and again - it rarely ever goes that fast.
However when my parents were living in Scotland (South Gyle Wynd to be specfic) they got 30 megabits/cable tv/phone for about 100 dollars a month - and it was very fast.
Yeah everywhere I've been to visit and stay with friends (mostly Europe) they have it much much better and are paying far less for more service.
It shouldn't be a surprise that support is like an insurance pool. The company your calling may lose the entire sale profit if you have to call for support. I know in software this is true.
With the monthly fee you have a point though - so who knows. Support is a cost center - usually doesn't profit in any meaningful way so reducing that cost is always a big deal.
To be fair - a lot of android sites talk about rooting your phone like its installing some app - no caution or warning at all. These days I work at a community college and I end up fixing a lot of phones (they've asked us to help students/faculty with whatever the best we can) - you'd be surprised how many rooted phones I've come across that aren't behaving properly and how many people have rooted these without any real knowledge to what they did - these are more often users who aren't even remotely technical.
Restoring a rooted phone can be kinda tricky sometimes as the modified bootloader often won't load the stock rom anymore (HTC Eris is a good example of this).
The most likely reason why Motorola (and HTC more and more lately) did this is simply because they (and Verizon/Sprint/AT&T/T-Mobile) are sick to death of trying to support hacked phones - because people really truely do call in about issues with their phones after they have been rooted.
Having done front line support (at one of these call center mills no less) I can sympathize - its often better to prevent users from screwing their phones up rather than tell people that they are unsupported because they screwed the phone up and to fix it they'll have to send it in and pay to have it restored.
I've seen Olbermann criticize Democrats and Obama (and even himself when he was wrong), where I've seen personalities on Fox come up with some pretty insane justifications to explain away Bush and the Republicans.
I guess that's one of the benefits of having a completely un-unified party.
I'm sure they can recover though - it wasn't so long ago that Apple products were complete shit (I'm talking about the 120+ models of beige crap they used to support).
Do you actually need friends to play that game? Its worse than running around some zone along in world of warcraft killing monsters all day long as far as I can tell.
I have Flash 10.1 Beta 1 on my Nexus One and its kinda handy actually - its fun to watch some of those funny web cartoons, or the videos on The Escapist, or the videos on crooksandliars.com, or an inline video someone linked on a blog to youtube/vimeo or whatever. Oddly enough this really is a case of "it just works" you can rest assured visit any site and everything on it will work without any external app I have to pay for or download. Yeah sometimes its a bit buggy (its never crashed though), and the phone itself sometimes doesn't handle really complex (or poorely optimized) flash files, but I suspect much of this will be addressed in the coming releases.
For me personally if I'm browsing the web I want it - and it is a deal breaker for me if the device doesn't have it.
And to answer the question of the Jobsian followers - it hasn't had any effect on battery performance - in fact since I've been using Froyo battery life on my Android phone has never been better.
So serious question - how does hiring antenna engineers solve a hardware design issue in an existing shipping product you've already delivered a million of?
If they were serious about solving this - they would have given away a free case to insulate the antenna from the user instead of charging 30 dollars for something that cost 10 cents to make in china.
The Kin's market really was "free" (with 2 year contract) feature phone - it would have done well in that segment, but no - 200$ smartphone with no apps, no support etc launched at the same time as the rise of the droids (when one could easily argue Android started to gain serious marketshare).
You would? What actual advantage would you get from a 64 bit version of flash over the 32 bit version? None really unless it was an absolutely massive project.
The only reason they did anything about it on Linux is because the default browser (often Firefox) was a 64 bit build.
If its anything like where I work (community college) actually doing the work to get more printers purchased is more work then installing 32 bit version of Windows.
The other thing - having dealt with this exact issue - often similar drivers will work on older printers. For example - if there are Vista 64 or XP-64 drivers those will work - or failing that a similar PCL-5 driver (that may actually come with the OS). Also many printers support postscript emulation - and while postscript isn't technically device independent its often close enough to work.
For the 64 gig support on a 32 bit machine you often need special servers with chipsets that bank the memory appropriately and special system drivers (Serverworks is/was famous for this) on top of that - its really only something you need to do if you were running Metaframe (I think its called XenApp server?) because most Windows apps won't go past 2 gigs of allocation anyhow.
My understand is the reason for this is just special hardware/driver support - many consumer motherboards for instance map real world pci resources in the 4 gig address range. Its probably easier on quality assurance to only support what they do on server OS's.
64 bit system doesn't have any of these limitations and you can address all the memory in one chunk without any work-arounds - hence the wider support for more ram there.
Its easy to say the web killed Hypercard (it's what wikipedia says) but in reality - if you want to put a program on a disk (or download from the Android Marketplace or Apple App-store) and you want it to be displayed accurately across multiple-platforms the web doesn't deliver (this was especially true when Hypercard was still popular). I've seen plenty of Hypercard stacks that you could only really reliably be recreated using Flash until recently. Come to think about it - maybe Flash killed Hypercard? Flash's rise does coincide with Hypercard 3's downfall (which also promised in web browser support).
I'd agree that the situation is much much better now than in the late 90's, but there are still plenty of browsers that don't fully support the latest greatest specs fully.
I've had about 10-12 nvidia cards in my personal workstation - never had a single issue with any of them drawing a single pixel wrong - currently have 2x GTX 280's in a 2x quad core xeon machine and they are working perfectly and generating a lot of heat but apparently dissipating it properly.
Now ATI cards - I had the problem documented here: http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1288 - after 6 cards (not even kidding) die in less than 24 hours of use I finally sent the last one back and told them to really take their time (I had bought a Nvidia 59xx by then) because I really didn't care about the card anymore and that one worked like a top (took them a solid month to get one that worked I should mention). Sold it on eBay to someone in Australia and never bought an ATI video card again. I'm sure they are just fine - especially as now they allow 3rd party OEM's to make them, but back in the day their quality assurance was horrible.
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There are people who do honestly believe the things in that poll tough. I've counted (on my nightly walks around the neighborhood) no less than 3 bumper stickers that say "show me the birth certificate" on various pickup trucks. I figure if your willing to advertise your ignorance on that back of your vehicle you believe that pretty strongly. I'd be willing to bet actual money that you could walk down the street in any city - find 5 republicans and out of that find at least one person who believes this.
The belief that Obama wasn't born in this country is one widely held by a decent amount of the Republicans I personally know. They often refer to him as Barack Hussein Obama to imply he's a foriegner (or to associate him with Sadam Hussein - also not born here).
Is it a wacky belief? Consider this - applying to be the president probably has you go through the most rigorous background check you'll ever have in your life. I'd assume... that they would be able to determine weather or not you were born here in the US or not before you can take the oath of office. With that in mind - I'd say its an insane notion.
I don't get this myself (at least from a Christian viewpoint) - having read the life and times of Jesus in the Bible he often saved his most scathing review of character towards the often conservative and rather inconsistent high priests.
Every single parable he ever told - the savior of the story is the most hated person in society to whoever he was telling the story to. Best most well known example of this - the good Samaritan. Supposedly the Jews he was talking to hated Samaritans (I suppose if he told the story today it would be called the good Palestinian).
That story alone is a very liberal outlook on society - don't judge, there is good in all people, give people a chance etc.
On labor relations - the Bible is full of examples respect for labor. In Jesus's last days he washed the apostles feet - not the other way around (to his followers he was the King of Kings...).
No more marketplace access - but maybe that is there goal.
That's a myth - the biggest reason companies outsource manufacturing to 3rd world countries is a greater return on profit. Instead of making 150 dollars per machine you might make 20 or 30.
Good example of this - up until very recently Dell's corporate desktops (Optiplex line - in fact I'm typing this on a 745 that has a "Assembled in the USA" sticker on it) were made right here in the USA, and didn't cost all that much more than Vostro machines which are made in China. These are rock solid machines (haven't had to replace a single major component on any one of the 200 or so I'm responsible for).
My brother used to work for an importer of Chinese goods (pens/no name tv's [I see them at fry's all the time]/toys) you wouldn't believe the markup some of these goods have. Pens that sell for a dollar for instance they were buying for as little as 5 cents. 5 cents - think about how far they traveled, and how much effort it takes to make a ballpoint pen than you can make 95 cents profit off of. A lot of these 5 cent pens were toys on the side as well (light up, or have an etch-a-sketch attachment on the end - stuff like that) that sold for 2-3 dollars.
I'm interested in open version of a transcription app (I run a lab with a lot of this software/equipment) but this is a very vertical market - up until recently there wasn't any standard interface for the foot pedal (newer ones are hid usb devices now).
I had to throw away a bunch of sony serial devices because they only worked with one app I can't make work on newer versions of Windows.
I had a job like this at a web filtering company (Rulespace Inc if your curious) where we trained porn filtering engines. Basically looking at porn all day long (some nice, some very sick) and grading it for a recognition engine. Once in a blue moon other kinds of content (firearms, gambling etc) but for the most part - porn.
It did desensitize me to the point where I can look at obscene images and not get all that aroused, but at the same time to get to that arousal point my lust for more saucy images went up.
Its kinda like when we were in high school we all wanted that copy of the SI Swimsuit edition - on one hand - the last edition I picked up I certainly appreciated the beauty of the women in there, but on the other hand - not all that arousing.
Sorry if that's too much info, but wasn't quite sure how else to word it.
A lot of the people who worked with me (men and women actually) used to work at a local call center. And it wasn't that bad a job - I used to listen to audio books while the machine presented another site to grade.
Thats because they were made by TI:
http://www.crn.com/hardware/206504527;jsessionid=JH3QI5R0XZVC5QE1GHRSKHWATMY32JVN?pgno=2 - this was a device built to develop Android on OMAP cpu's. It was never even intended to resemble a shipping product.
The first Official Google/HTC dev phones shipped to the public like the ADP1 and ADP2 were made by HTC - and was a slider that can be totally operated by touch - so I dunno - Android 1.0 certainly seemed more touch friendly than WinCE ever has been.
That's one of the coolest things about Android though - the OS is really designed from the ground up to be compatible with whatever input metaphor you care to design - whether is a blackberry like device, mouse/keyboard, touch, voice command or stylus it has support for it.
You're just being mean now - you know what I meant.
Not sure where you'd have to live in Washington to get 11 megabits - when I lived in Seattle (Queen Anne) the only two providers were Comcast and Qwest - and with Qwest it was DSL 3 megabits (and a slow DSL at that - I never saw that kind of performance).
Now that I live in Oregon - 3 megabits is par for the course unless you want to spent a lot more money :( - and again - it rarely ever goes that fast.
However when my parents were living in Scotland (South Gyle Wynd to be specfic) they got 30 megabits/cable tv/phone for about 100 dollars a month - and it was very fast.
Yeah everywhere I've been to visit and stay with friends (mostly Europe) they have it much much better and are paying far less for more service.
It shouldn't be a surprise that support is like an insurance pool. The company your calling may lose the entire sale profit if you have to call for support. I know in software this is true.
With the monthly fee you have a point though - so who knows. Support is a cost center - usually doesn't profit in any meaningful way so reducing that cost is always a big deal.
To be fair - a lot of android sites talk about rooting your phone like its installing some app - no caution or warning at all. These days I work at a community college and I end up fixing a lot of phones (they've asked us to help students/faculty with whatever the best we can) - you'd be surprised how many rooted phones I've come across that aren't behaving properly and how many people have rooted these without any real knowledge to what they did - these are more often users who aren't even remotely technical.
Restoring a rooted phone can be kinda tricky sometimes as the modified bootloader often won't load the stock rom anymore (HTC Eris is a good example of this).
The most likely reason why Motorola (and HTC more and more lately) did this is simply because they (and Verizon/Sprint/AT&T/T-Mobile) are sick to death of trying to support hacked phones - because people really truely do call in about issues with their phones after they have been rooted.
Having done front line support (at one of these call center mills no less) I can sympathize - its often better to prevent users from screwing their phones up rather than tell people that they are unsupported because they screwed the phone up and to fix it they'll have to send it in and pay to have it restored.
It may not be right, but I do understand why.
No doubt - it seems like when Sprint/Verizon come out with a new Android phone they have to do *something* to screw it up for the geek in me.
For Sprint's EVO it was the 10$ data tax - which has to be paid even if you don't live in a 4G area (and never will).
I have a nexus one right now and its perfect, but it only works on AT&T :/.
Its pretty typical to test a phone being dropped from 3-5 feet - here's a video of that process at another company: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1sz5c-R9h0
There's another video floating around of Nokia testing doing similar things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCYD3kAnR5U - fake ad for a payphone finder app ;).
I've seen Olbermann criticize Democrats and Obama (and even himself when he was wrong), where I've seen personalities on Fox come up with some pretty insane justifications to explain away Bush and the Republicans.
I guess that's one of the benefits of having a completely un-unified party.
I'm sure they can recover though - it wasn't so long ago that Apple products were complete shit (I'm talking about the 120+ models of beige crap they used to support).
Do you actually need friends to play that game? Its worse than running around some zone along in world of warcraft killing monsters all day long as far as I can tell.
I have Flash 10.1 Beta 1 on my Nexus One and its kinda handy actually - its fun to watch some of those funny web cartoons, or the videos on The Escapist, or the videos on crooksandliars.com, or an inline video someone linked on a blog to youtube/vimeo or whatever. Oddly enough this really is a case of "it just works" you can rest assured visit any site and everything on it will work without any external app I have to pay for or download. Yeah sometimes its a bit buggy (its never crashed though), and the phone itself sometimes doesn't handle really complex (or poorely optimized) flash files, but I suspect much of this will be addressed in the coming releases.
For me personally if I'm browsing the web I want it - and it is a deal breaker for me if the device doesn't have it.
And to answer the question of the Jobsian followers - it hasn't had any effect on battery performance - in fact since I've been using Froyo battery life on my Android phone has never been better.
So serious question - how does hiring antenna engineers solve a hardware design issue in an existing shipping product you've already delivered a million of?
If they were serious about solving this - they would have given away a free case to insulate the antenna from the user instead of charging 30 dollars for something that cost 10 cents to make in china.
The Kin's market really was "free" (with 2 year contract) feature phone - it would have done well in that segment, but no - 200$ smartphone with no apps, no support etc launched at the same time as the rise of the droids (when one could easily argue Android started to gain serious marketshare).
You would? What actual advantage would you get from a 64 bit version of flash over the 32 bit version? None really unless it was an absolutely massive project.
The only reason they did anything about it on Linux is because the default browser (often Firefox) was a 64 bit build.
If its anything like where I work (community college) actually doing the work to get more printers purchased is more work then installing 32 bit version of Windows.
The other thing - having dealt with this exact issue - often similar drivers will work on older printers. For example - if there are Vista 64 or XP-64 drivers those will work - or failing that a similar PCL-5 driver (that may actually come with the OS). Also many printers support postscript emulation - and while postscript isn't technically device independent its often close enough to work.
For the 64 gig support on a 32 bit machine you often need special servers with chipsets that bank the memory appropriately and special system drivers (Serverworks is/was famous for this) on top of that - its really only something you need to do if you were running Metaframe (I think its called XenApp server?) because most Windows apps won't go past 2 gigs of allocation anyhow.
My understand is the reason for this is just special hardware/driver support - many consumer motherboards for instance map real world pci resources in the 4 gig address range. Its probably easier on quality assurance to only support what they do on server OS's.
64 bit system doesn't have any of these limitations and you can address all the memory in one chunk without any work-arounds - hence the wider support for more ram there.
Its easy to say the web killed Hypercard (it's what wikipedia says) but in reality - if you want to put a program on a disk (or download from the Android Marketplace or Apple App-store) and you want it to be displayed accurately across multiple-platforms the web doesn't deliver (this was especially true when Hypercard was still popular). I've seen plenty of Hypercard stacks that you could only really reliably be recreated using Flash until recently. Come to think about it - maybe Flash killed Hypercard? Flash's rise does coincide with Hypercard 3's downfall (which also promised in web browser support).
I'd agree that the situation is much much better now than in the late 90's, but there are still plenty of browsers that don't fully support the latest greatest specs fully.
I've had about 10-12 nvidia cards in my personal workstation - never had a single issue with any of them drawing a single pixel wrong - currently have 2x GTX 280's in a 2x quad core xeon machine and they are working perfectly and generating a lot of heat but apparently dissipating it properly.
Now ATI cards - I had the problem documented here: http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1288 - after 6 cards (not even kidding) die in less than 24 hours of use I finally sent the last one back and told them to really take their time (I had bought a Nvidia 59xx by then) because I really didn't care about the card anymore and that one worked like a top (took them a solid month to get one that worked I should mention). Sold it on eBay to someone in Australia and never bought an ATI video card again. I'm sure they are just fine - especially as now they allow 3rd party OEM's to make them, but back in the day their quality assurance was horrible.