No matter where one stands on the Mac versus Windows divide, it's good to see that someone finally pulls off a PC that is not a standard box. Pity that it's the first one in 10 years or so. It's even more surprising given the unbelievable number of crappy Intel and Microsoft we-could-be-just-as-cool-as-Apple-if-only-we-wanted-to prototypes that got dragged out to some trade show or other every year.
Now, you see, who here believes me? No one, obviously, because I'm just another vulgar, anonymous, raving lunatic on the internet. With very few exceptions, anonymous slander doesn't cause significant damage in today's rumor-jaded world John McCain has a baby out of wedlock. WITH A BLACK WOMAN!
Now, you see, who here believes that? No one, obviously, because it's from just another vulgar, anonymous, raving lunatic on the internet. With very few exceptions, anonymous slander doesn't cause significant damage in today's rumor-jaded world.
This is one more reason not to pay money to watch grown men sweat a lot and scratch themselves. Oh puh-leeeze. Have you ever seen a baseball player sweat on the field, rather than in front of a grand jury?
OK, given that China is a communist dictatorship, wouldn't it be great if you and the US Congress would get cracking on:
Article 5. [Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the highest percentage of people in prison and on death row except for China]
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 8. [Gitmo]
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9. [Gitmo]
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10. [Gitmo]
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 12. [Warrantless wire tapping, and the nice comments about email we just heard from the FBI]
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13. [No, you don't have a right to a passport in the US]
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 21. [at least 2 million convicted felons are prohibited from voting, even after they finish their sentence]
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Now I am not implying that the US--the country I chose to live in--is even close to China/North Korea/etc in oppression, but what happened to REPUBLICAN values?
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.
Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address to the Nation Oval Office January 11, 1989
RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America, so why should they give a hoot about band copyrights. Their job is to defend the rights and further the goals of the recording industry. This is like expecting the National Cattlemen's Beef Association to defend the rights of cows.
I'm wondering where one can actually buy electronics anymore and not get completely turned off by the shopping experience? I don't even expect customer service, or knowledgeable staff anymore, but electronics stores are really undershooting any performance metric for resale. So I nowadays order most upmarket stuff from Amazon and the mow end things from Walmart, at least I know they take it back, and are usually not trying to jerk me around. I still get my cables and batteries from Frys because they are just across the street.
In the last year
Frys: Completely disinterested sales guy tells me he's not "Walking all the way over there to demo a $500 camera."
Frys: Sales guy tells me they "have been completely out of this model of Bluetooth head phones" while standing in front of a 5 foot display full of them.
Best Buy: "We don't sell this TV without extended warranty."
Local PC store: "Those RAMs don't work in MacBooks, you have to buy special Apple memory."
Circuit City: "We don't take items under warranty back unless you have bought extended warranty. I don't have the phone number of the manufacturer, but you can probably find it on the web."
The Good Guys: "Well, there seems to a a short in the wiring. We can give you a tool to take out the radio and check yourself." Radio was bouthg from them 3 months earlier.
May they all die a horrible corporate death. They don't offer a price advantage, can't provide product information that's not written on the box, and are usually rude as hell. I know retail is a tough business to be in, why do I get great service at REI, Nordstrom, Trader Joes, my local bike store, IKEA, and the many ethnic stores here while every single electronics place screws up six ways from Sunday every time?
I wouldn't call it "junk analysis" either, but I'd still put it into the junk science category. Admittedly, IAAP (I am a physicist), but the idea of hanging a long term societal trend on a simple variation in a single--or even a few dozen--variables just smacks of wishful thinking.
An interesting control would be to check how this relates to crime rates in Europe where leaded gasoline was in use much longer than in the US. THe article states that this has not been investigated. Yes, they probably proved that lead rates and crime went down in the same time frame, but even the lead researches says "it seemed that this big change in people's exposure to lead might have led to some big changes in behavior."
An even better test would be going back in history and try to explain the crime rates in Victorian England or other places before the invention of leaded gasoline with this theory. Interestingly enough, there are some historians who claim that the fall of the Roman empire was caused by the increased use of lead pipes in Roman cities.
So at best, it's shoddy reporting. And as many others here have pointed out, it's probably a journalist trying for one of the oh so popular simple explanations.
I would still side with "lets find some empirical proof that lead damaged children are more criminal than less lead damaged children", obviously taking into account that usually poorer people live closer to the freeways.
So, yes, the story is still out, and even the researchers say that they found intriguing statistical correlations, but no proof whatsoever. But 50% of crime because of leaded gasoline smells of something...and it's not complex aromatics.
A really interesting meta study would be if there are scientific fields where the advent of computers have hurt more than they helped. Obviously, my field of nuclear physics has profited enormously--as has this researchers' field of economics, but I can't help feeling that an over reliance on statistical correlations is keeping many from doing real scientific investigation and empirical studies in some fields. In many ways, natural scientists are the lucky ones, because we can experimentally test hypothesis in most cases. Social scientists very rarely have this option.
Actually, "designed for Windows Vista" is a WHQL certification that a developer gets when his software has passed testing by Microsoft's Windows High Quality Laboratory or a third party test facility approved by Microsoft. ISV cannot assign that logo to themselves.
I'm involved in WHQL certification for my company, and the whole Windows Vista testing suite is a bigger disaster than Vista could ever be. The tests and the test manager software--at least for driver testing--are buggy to a point where Microsoft tells us to submit your test results on the WHQL web site, and to file a trouble ticket with WHQL to have your test results passed manually once the test results have been rejected by the automatic certification software.
One not so minor flaw is, for example this statement "The US dollar has real value, i.e., it represents tangible wealth, such as gold securely stored at Fort Knox."
The gold standard was abolished on June 5th, 1933. After WWII, the Bretton Woods agreement fixed currency exchange rates in a narrow 1% band around the value of gold, but there was no 1-1 relation between the amount of gold a country had and the total money in circulation. In 1971, the US abolished convertibility from currency to gold, and for all intents and purposed ended any relation between gold and currency. Many banks, including the Fed have been slowly selling off gold reserves ever since.
So either the author or the reviewer doesn't know even the most basic historical facts. Fun additional fact, in 1999, the total worth of all the world's gold was $1.1 trillion, the US GDP alone was $9.3 trillion. So all the world's gold couldn't even have paid for 1/8th of the good and services produced that year in the US alone.
Wasn't there a TI calculator with back light in the early 80s? I think I used one of the TI-3x series with a back light button at some point in high school?
Some people really need to get a hobby. Uh, sorry, I forgot this is Slashdot--so this is the hobby Seriously, how interesting is a cell phone that we now had a few hundred stories about it.
It's a phone, not food, water or shelter
It's one of hundreds of phones in the market, you can buy it or not
OpenMoko will be out soon and it will be much better than the iPhone. And it will play ogg.
OK, coming back to your point: No major US wireless company sells unlocked GSM phones, you have to go to Europe or Asia for that. And since only 15% of US citizens even have a passport, AT&T and Apple couldn't really give a hoot.
Anyway, I have an iPhone, I travel to about 10 countries a year, so yeah, I'd love to have an unlocked iPhone. But I knew that when I bought it--and quite frankly, on most European data plans, I would not want to use any GSM smart phone. A number of Australian carries have pretty sweet $20/month data plans, though.
But please, doesn't anyone have anything more important to do than bitch about a phone???? Oh yeah, I forgot, this is slashdot...
I was sure this Virgin Store was an iTunes killer. Differential pricing, backed by a major record label, subscription and purchase options, not restricted to an iPod.
------------------ Those who don't understand sarcasm are doomed to misread it.
(1) Make the horizontal keyboard available for every application, not just Safari. (2) Copy notes between Mac/PC and the iPhone (3) Make locations in Google Maps save able (4) Song controls in CoverFlow (5) On-off switch for auto-correction. It's really good for English, but try to type a French/German/Italian message. Oh, yeah, international keyboards. Some of us are fluent in more than one language.
Other than that, kick AT&T to offer a non-extortionist international data plan.
There is a huge difference: RIM is a Canadian company. This simple fact limited them in three very important aspects:
(1) Many US Courts are biased in favor of US litigants. (2) As a foreign company, RIM is severely limited in the amount of campaign contributions to US politicians. (3) As a Canadian company, RIM does not have a home town congressman and senator.
All of these limitations are not unique to the US, they largely apply to US companies suing or getting sued overseas. See the different treatment Microsoft got in the US and the EU cases.
I just came back from 2 weeks in Australia with my iPhone, and even having it on a couple of hours a day to surf or check email over wifi, I didn't rack up a single cent of roaming charges. The TFA leaves out two bits of information. For one, you have to specifically activate international roaming at AT&T's web site or an AT&T store for any AT&T phone to hook up to any network overseas. Secondly, unlike a Blackberry, the iPhone does not check email periodically, this was much criticized by many, even here on Slashdot. It's actually a bit of a pain even in the US, you have to turn on the phone AND go to mail to get updates. The only email that can be pushed is Yahoo email
I hope that they try, because German governments tend to not react well to intimidation. But similarly to the US policy of not invading countries that (a) don't have oil and (b) could up a fight, I doubt that the US government is eager to hassle the World's third largest economy.
On the other hand, this is a decision at the lowest tier of Germany's court system. Unless the RIAA equivalent appeals twice (first to the Landgericht, then to an Oberlandesgericht) and gets smacked down, this doesn't really have any legal binding for other German courts.
The Heise article makes the interesting point that the prosecutors' offices in see these cases as a waste of time, so they'll probably be even more reluctant to bring charges.
it could include automatically backing up work PC's somehow I am not sure where you work. But if the place you are working at doesn't back up work PCs daily, inevitably, and without any user intervention, you should fire your IT personnel, or if it's not in your power to do so, run like hell.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an Apple store in the Castro? Seriously, though, the one on Market is more popular than Diesel.
No matter where one stands on the Mac versus Windows divide, it's good to see that someone finally pulls off a PC that is not a standard box. Pity that it's the first one in 10 years or so. It's even more surprising given the unbelievable number of crappy Intel and Microsoft we-could-be-just-as-cool-as-Apple-if-only-we-wanted-to prototypes that got dragged out to some trade show or other every year.
Standards are slipping. We did have better than 100% turnout in Chicago during the entire first Daley administration.
Now, you see, who here believes that? No one, obviously, because it's from just another vulgar, anonymous, raving lunatic on the internet. With very few exceptions, anonymous slander doesn't cause significant damage in today's rumor-jaded world.
Not directly related, but here is a nice picture a German submarine took of the USS Enterprise during a NATO exercise. http://rula.de/marktplatz/files/zielfoto_u24_enterprise.jpg
And IIRC, that was during an antisubmarine drill.
OK, given that China is a communist dictatorship, wouldn't it be great if you and the US Congress would get cracking on:
Article 5. [Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the highest percentage of people in prison and on death row except for China]
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 8. [Gitmo]
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9. [Gitmo]
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10. [Gitmo]
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 12. [Warrantless wire tapping, and the nice comments about email we just heard from the FBI]
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13. [No, you don't have a right to a passport in the US]
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 21. [at least 2 million convicted felons are prohibited from voting, even after they finish their sentence]
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Now I am not implying that the US--the country I chose to live in--is even close to China/North Korea/etc in oppression, but what happened to REPUBLICAN values?
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.
Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address to the Nation
Oval Office
January 11, 1989
Music on your cellphone may one day be a real business.
RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America, so why should they give a hoot about band copyrights. Their job is to defend the rights and further the goals of the recording industry. This is like expecting the National Cattlemen's Beef Association to defend the rights of cows.
In the last year
Frys: Completely disinterested sales guy tells me he's not "Walking all the way over there to demo a $500 camera."
Frys: Sales guy tells me they "have been completely out of this model of Bluetooth head phones" while standing in front of a 5 foot display full of them.
Best Buy: "We don't sell this TV without extended warranty."
Local PC store: "Those RAMs don't work in MacBooks, you have to buy special Apple memory."
Circuit City: "We don't take items under warranty back unless you have bought extended warranty. I don't have the phone number of the manufacturer, but you can probably find it on the web."
The Good Guys: "Well, there seems to a a short in the wiring. We can give you a tool to take out the radio and check yourself." Radio was bouthg from them 3 months earlier.
May they all die a horrible corporate death. They don't offer a price advantage, can't provide product information that's not written on the box, and are usually rude as hell. I know retail is a tough business to be in, why do I get great service at REI, Nordstrom, Trader Joes, my local bike store, IKEA, and the many ethnic stores here while every single electronics place screws up six ways from Sunday every time?
I wouldn't call it "junk analysis" either, but I'd still put it into the junk science category. Admittedly, IAAP (I am a physicist), but the idea of hanging a long term societal trend on a simple variation in a single--or even a few dozen--variables just smacks of wishful thinking.
An interesting control would be to check how this relates to crime rates in Europe where leaded gasoline was in use much longer than in the US. THe article states that this has not been investigated. Yes, they probably proved that lead rates and crime went down in the same time frame, but even the lead researches says "it seemed that this big change in people's exposure to lead might have led to some big changes in behavior."
An even better test would be going back in history and try to explain the crime rates in Victorian England or other places before the invention of leaded gasoline with this theory. Interestingly enough, there are some historians who claim that the fall of the Roman empire was caused by the increased use of lead pipes in Roman cities.
So at best, it's shoddy reporting. And as many others here have pointed out, it's probably a journalist trying for one of the oh so popular simple explanations.
I would still side with "lets find some empirical proof that lead damaged children are more criminal than less lead damaged children", obviously taking into account that usually poorer people live closer to the freeways.
So, yes, the story is still out, and even the researchers say that they found intriguing statistical correlations, but no proof whatsoever. But 50% of crime because of leaded gasoline smells of something...and it's not complex aromatics.
A really interesting meta study would be if there are scientific fields where the advent of computers have hurt more than they helped. Obviously, my field of nuclear physics has profited enormously--as has this researchers' field of economics, but I can't help feeling that an over reliance on statistical correlations is keeping many from doing real scientific investigation and empirical studies in some fields. In many ways, natural scientists are the lucky ones, because we can experimentally test hypothesis in most cases. Social scientists very rarely have this option.
Make that 3rd floor with backup power. Flooding can be a real bitch in a data center.
But can you tell if he's spinning without opening the casket?
If the GPhone can get a same day reservation for Chez Panisse, I am so buying it.
Actually, "designed for Windows Vista" is a WHQL certification that a developer gets when his software has passed testing by Microsoft's Windows High Quality Laboratory or a third party test facility approved by Microsoft. ISV cannot assign that logo to themselves.
I'm involved in WHQL certification for my company, and the whole Windows Vista testing suite is a bigger disaster than Vista could ever be. The tests and the test manager software--at least for driver testing--are buggy to a point where Microsoft tells us to submit your test results on the WHQL web site, and to file a trouble ticket with WHQL to have your test results passed manually once the test results have been rejected by the automatic certification software.
Man did some reviewer drink the Cool Aid.
One not so minor flaw is, for example this statement "The US dollar has real value, i.e., it represents tangible wealth, such as gold securely stored at Fort Knox."
The gold standard was abolished on June 5th, 1933. After WWII, the Bretton Woods agreement fixed currency exchange rates in a narrow 1% band around the value of gold, but there was no 1-1 relation between the amount of gold a country had and the total money in circulation. In 1971, the US abolished convertibility from currency to gold, and for all intents and purposed ended any relation between gold and currency. Many banks, including the Fed have been slowly selling off gold reserves ever since.
So either the author or the reviewer doesn't know even the most basic historical facts. Fun additional fact, in 1999, the total worth of all the world's gold was $1.1 trillion, the US GDP alone was $9.3 trillion. So all the world's gold couldn't even have paid for 1/8th of the good and services produced that year in the US alone.
Wasn't there a TI calculator with back light in the early 80s? I think I used one of the TI-3x series with a back light button at some point in high school?
Seriously, how interesting is a cell phone that we now had a few hundred stories about it.
It's a phone, not food, water or shelter
It's one of hundreds of phones in the market, you can buy it or not
OpenMoko will be out soon and it will be much better than the iPhone. And it will play ogg.
OK, coming back to your point: No major US wireless company sells unlocked GSM phones, you have to go to Europe or Asia for that. And since only 15% of US citizens even have a passport, AT&T and Apple couldn't really give a hoot.
Anyway, I have an iPhone, I travel to about 10 countries a year, so yeah, I'd love to have an unlocked iPhone. But I knew that when I bought it--and quite frankly, on most European data plans, I would not want to use any GSM smart phone. A number of Australian carries have pretty sweet $20/month data plans, though.
But please, doesn't anyone have anything more important to do than bitch about a phone???? Oh yeah, I forgot, this is slashdot...
I was sure this Virgin Store was an iTunes killer. Differential pricing, backed by a major record label, subscription and purchase options, not restricted to an iPod.
------------------
Those who don't understand sarcasm are doomed to misread it.
(1) Make the horizontal keyboard available for every application, not just Safari.
(2) Copy notes between Mac/PC and the iPhone
(3) Make locations in Google Maps save able
(4) Song controls in CoverFlow
(5) On-off switch for auto-correction. It's really good for English, but try to type a French/German/Italian message. Oh, yeah, international keyboards. Some of us are fluent in more than one language.
Other than that, kick AT&T to offer a non-extortionist international data plan.
There is a huge difference: RIM is a Canadian company. This simple fact limited them in three very important aspects:
(1) Many US Courts are biased in favor of US litigants.
(2) As a foreign company, RIM is severely limited in the amount of campaign contributions to US politicians.
(3) As a Canadian company, RIM does not have a home town congressman and senator.
All of these limitations are not unique to the US, they largely apply to US companies suing or getting sued overseas. See the different treatment Microsoft got in the US and the EU cases.
I just came back from 2 weeks in Australia with my iPhone, and even having it on a couple of hours a day to surf or check email over wifi, I didn't rack up a single cent of roaming charges. The TFA leaves out two bits of information. For one, you have to specifically activate international roaming at AT&T's web site or an AT&T store for any AT&T phone to hook up to any network overseas. Secondly, unlike a Blackberry, the iPhone does not check email periodically, this was much criticized by many, even here on Slashdot. It's actually a bit of a pain even in the US, you have to turn on the phone AND go to mail to get updates. The only email that can be pushed is Yahoo email
I hope that they try, because German governments tend to not react well to intimidation. But similarly to the US policy of not invading countries that (a) don't have oil and (b) could up a fight, I doubt that the US government is eager to hassle the World's third largest economy.
On the other hand, this is a decision at the lowest tier of Germany's court system. Unless the RIAA equivalent appeals twice (first to the Landgericht, then to an Oberlandesgericht) and gets smacked down, this doesn't really have any legal binding for other German courts.
The Heise article makes the interesting point that the prosecutors' offices in see these cases as a waste of time, so they'll probably be even more reluctant to bring charges.
Or how about using AHEAD? It actually works, is available now, and is evolutionary technology rather than some pie in the sky project.
This freaking laser beams on freaking trucks sounds a lot like Northrop's Nautilus project which ended in abject failure.