All I was pointing out is that the Spanish don't in fact eat as late in the evening as they appear to.
Maybe not compared to a neighbouring country, but in comparison to the time they got up in the morning they sure do, and that's really the only important metric. The time on the clock *is* relevant if it's consistent from one end of the day to the other.
Not just Spain, the same was true in Greece. It was actually kind of funny for us as tourists. When we arrived in Athens at 7pm nothing was open, we were worried we wouldn't be able to find anything to eat. Turned out that by 9pm the restaurants were just starting to open again.
Then we went in to a more touristy area, and everywhere we went the restaurants had someone on the sidewalk very aggressively trying to get our business. The only sure-fire way we found to turn them down without them chasing us down the street was to say that it was too early to eat, they always understood that, even if it was 10pm. (Any other excuse resulted in them still trying, but nobody ever continued to pursue us if we said it was too early)
It probably also sent you several hundred times as much data as would have been needed to just do it in raw HTML.
This is the way the web has become though. Any "professional" site is cursed with garbage like that, and there's zero excuse for it. It works on only one or two specific browsers of specific version numbers, it usually doesn't flow properly if your window isn't the exact same size as the one used by the developer, and it breaks if you look at it funny.
I guess nobody has heard of "KISS" anymore? (Keep It Simple Stupid!)
We're not talking assembly here, we're talking HTML. HTML is far easier to understand than the garbage most "developers" use these days, while keeping the page TINY by comparison. Assembler on the other hand is much harder to understand and program in.
If you're writing a few lines of static content, there's no excuse to take as much as a few megabytes of code to do it.
This is actually the opposite of your example, all the extra code makes it more difficult to write, not easier, and it has the added issue of providing ZERO benefit, and often major drawbacks. For instance, if you just put raw HTML text on a page, it will format to every browser ever made, it will nicely fill the window, regardless of the size. But instead, developers put in all sorts of extraneous code to format it to specific window sizes, and the end result tends to be that it looks horrible on all of them (don't you just love the pages that only allow you to use 1/4 of the width of your screen for content with the other 3/4 being vast empty space, and yet you have to scroll for days to find the bottom?)
If you want "view source" to be useful, you need to go back to coding with simplicity in mind.
The original post talks about viewing the source of the google homepage and getting an incomprehensible slurry. But why? What does that actually accomplish? The page is one text entry box, and 2 buttons, plus a graphic above it. There is ZERO excuse for it being over 47,000 characters (not counting all the other stuff it pulls in). But this isn't at all rare on today's web. This is also why so many pages are so horrendously slow to load, it's all scripts and links to other files and domains, even the simplest websites use absolutely incredible amounts of bandwidth, and yet do no more than could be done in 1/100th the size or less, and be human readable.
99.99999% of these sites aren't huge for any good reason, they're just horribly inefficient.
Competition is good, however it's not worth picking an inferior choice just for the sake of competition, the competition needs to be able to compete on it's own merits.
To be blunt, Despite the massive marketing push by MS that put these at the forefront of every carrier's store, discounted them to effectively free, and pushed them on every TV show and movie, nobody was willing to put up with Windows Phone.
I also don't use Firefox because it isn't the best choice. I do however use Linux on the desktop, because it's better than the alternatives.
The success of failure of a product is the responsibility of those developing the product, not of the consumers. It is not our obligation to adopt a product that we don't want just to support the concept of competition.
Numbers in the article talk about "80%" and "20%" assuming whole numbers of devices, that would imply there were actually FIVE devices remaining in service!
Bluetooth actually has over 3 times the range of this device, and can support transmitting and receiving at the same time, so I don't think this is a good analogy either.
Apparently you missed that this "invention" also != mobile phone.
Unless by "mobile phone" you mean a device that can't talk and listen at the same time, and has a usable range from the handset to the "tower" shorter than the distance from my bedroom to my kitchen.
In most parts of the world it is perfectly legal to receive any signal that hits your antenna. (Often there are caveats for particular types of signals, but usually that's just about decoding and reading/listening to the data contained in the signal, not in whether you took some of the energy out of the air)
If you insist on trying to torture your verbal gymnastics, you'd try to tell us that a cell phone, a cordless phone, and a wired phone are all the same because they can all talk to people on the other side of the planet. But people know the difference is in how far they can walk with it before they lose a signal (for wired that's the length of the cord, for cordless that's somewhere on their front lawn, and for cellular it's anywhere where there's a tower within a few kilometres)
Based on that definition, this device is somewhere between the wired and cordless phones. So calling this a cell phone is pretty stupid.
The irony is that MS actually makes pretty good hardware, I love their keyboards and mice for instance, and the Surface line of tablets are pretty slick too.
It's too bad MS doesn't have a clue how to do software.
Exactly this. People keep talking about how it was a horrible business idea, but it doesn't sound like that to me.
It sounds like it was a good idea, but that they didn't get the pricing model right. Now there may be cases where umbrellas are damaged or stolen that you don't have control over, but most of the time the person who stole the umbrella is the person who you rented it to. In those cases it should be easy enough to make your money back, you just need to price it right. If you're charging a deposit anyway, the deposit should cover all costs associated with replacing missing/damaged property. Including purchasing a new one, and getting it in to circulation at the appropriate stand. If not charging a deposit, then you need to make sure that the rental continues to get charged until either you've made back the cost of the umbrella, or it's returned.
As a general rule, the cheaper the item you're renting, the higher the deposit needs to be as a percentage of the cost of the item. (cheaper items tend to go missing with no re-course, expensive items tend to be worth a police investigation, so you're more worried about repairing damage than replacing the whole item) This is also why most cheap items aren't rented, at a certain point it's easier to just sell them. (ever try to rent/borrow a gas can from a gas station? they usually only sell them, not rent them)
There seems to be this impression that if your business idea involves "the internet" or "on a computer" etc, that it's somehow immune to the laws of economics. It's not.
That only works if you have no insulation at all in the walls to start. If you instead have decades old insulation that has a low R value and lots of gaps, you can't blow more insulation in that way and have to remove the drywall, or the exterior sheathing to replace it, or add insulation on the outside when residing. Where I live that means that you can only really use this procedure on houses built 100 years ago as basically anything newer has something in the walls already, even if it's useless.
We're actually in the middle of adding insulation to our 1973 house as part of a major exterior renovation. The exterior sheathing is being removed, then the insulation is being replaced with spray foam before the sheathing is put back on and new siding is added. This should effectively double the R value we currently have, and improve the vapour seal as well. But it's not cheap, and only makes sense because we plan to be in this house for a very long time to come.
I have looked in to ground source heat pump systems several times, and in their current state the payback period on a retrofit is more than my expected lifespan. However on new builds they seem to make sense. I hope Google has some luck in changing this, but I'm not really holding my breath. (Especially with Google's product track record of quickly abandoning projects, and of not expanding then outside the USA)
I don't know how a user replaceable battery limits the processing power, memory, screen resolution, etc of a phone. In fact, I know for a fact that it does not.
A user replaceable battery adds a negligible amount to the physical size of the device (less than 1mm of thickness) It does not affect anything else.
Nobody tried offering a phone that was 1 mm thicker, with the rest of the specs the same, but a replaceable battery.
The reason we won't see the situation is that the companies realized that if all the other manufacturers are doing it too, there's no downside to them doing it (nobody will go with the competition for a feature the competition doesn't offer either) while increasing the planned obsolescence of their devices.
It has exactly ZERO to do with not being able to make a similar phone design with a removable battery. The way you talk you'd think that batteries were now weird shapes distributed throughout the phone, they aren't, they're still a monolithic brick in one place, usually resting against the back panel of the device. The only real difference is that the back panels no longer snap off, and the connections are soldered instead of pressure fit. That's because of greed, not because of functionality.
Being able to sell your device in that market makes you more money than not being allowed to sell your device.
You're right that corrupt governments who have been paid off by the manufacturers are unlikely to make these rules enforceable, but there is nothing at all in our current system that prevents them from doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
All I was pointing out is that the Spanish don't in fact eat as late in the evening as they appear to.
Maybe not compared to a neighbouring country, but in comparison to the time they got up in the morning they sure do, and that's really the only important metric.
The time on the clock *is* relevant if it's consistent from one end of the day to the other.
Not just Spain, the same was true in Greece. It was actually kind of funny for us as tourists. When we arrived in Athens at 7pm nothing was open, we were worried we wouldn't be able to find anything to eat. Turned out that by 9pm the restaurants were just starting to open again.
Then we went in to a more touristy area, and everywhere we went the restaurants had someone on the sidewalk very aggressively trying to get our business. The only sure-fire way we found to turn them down without them chasing us down the street was to say that it was too early to eat, they always understood that, even if it was 10pm. (Any other excuse resulted in them still trying, but nobody ever continued to pursue us if we said it was too early)
I don't think he can yet pass the Turing test, so I'm not sure that counts as true AI.
Companies don't "lie". They engage in "marketing".
Legally you never could.
It probably also sent you several hundred times as much data as would have been needed to just do it in raw HTML.
This is the way the web has become though. Any "professional" site is cursed with garbage like that, and there's zero excuse for it. It works on only one or two specific browsers of specific version numbers, it usually doesn't flow properly if your window isn't the exact same size as the one used by the developer, and it breaks if you look at it funny.
I guess nobody has heard of "KISS" anymore? (Keep It Simple Stupid!)
If you have to look very closely to tell that it's not static content, then it doesn't deserve 47KB to render.
We're not talking assembly here, we're talking HTML. HTML is far easier to understand than the garbage most "developers" use these days, while keeping the page TINY by comparison. Assembler on the other hand is much harder to understand and program in.
If you're writing a few lines of static content, there's no excuse to take as much as a few megabytes of code to do it.
This is actually the opposite of your example, all the extra code makes it more difficult to write, not easier, and it has the added issue of providing ZERO benefit, and often major drawbacks. For instance, if you just put raw HTML text on a page, it will format to every browser ever made, it will nicely fill the window, regardless of the size. But instead, developers put in all sorts of extraneous code to format it to specific window sizes, and the end result tends to be that it looks horrible on all of them (don't you just love the pages that only allow you to use 1/4 of the width of your screen for content with the other 3/4 being vast empty space, and yet you have to scroll for days to find the bottom?)
The vast majority of the time, there was no reason to use javascript, or ANY script.
Most pages are still static content. Static content doesn't require scripts.
If you want "view source" to be useful, you need to go back to coding with simplicity in mind.
The original post talks about viewing the source of the google homepage and getting an incomprehensible slurry. But why? What does that actually accomplish? The page is one text entry box, and 2 buttons, plus a graphic above it. There is ZERO excuse for it being over 47,000 characters (not counting all the other stuff it pulls in). But this isn't at all rare on today's web. This is also why so many pages are so horrendously slow to load, it's all scripts and links to other files and domains, even the simplest websites use absolutely incredible amounts of bandwidth, and yet do no more than could be done in 1/100th the size or less, and be human readable.
99.99999% of these sites aren't huge for any good reason, they're just horribly inefficient.
Competition is good, however it's not worth picking an inferior choice just for the sake of competition, the competition needs to be able to compete on it's own merits.
To be blunt, Despite the massive marketing push by MS that put these at the forefront of every carrier's store, discounted them to effectively free, and pushed them on every TV show and movie, nobody was willing to put up with Windows Phone.
I also don't use Firefox because it isn't the best choice. I do however use Linux on the desktop, because it's better than the alternatives.
The success of failure of a product is the responsibility of those developing the product, not of the consumers. It is not our obligation to adopt a product that we don't want just to support the concept of competition.
Numbers in the article talk about "80%" and "20%" assuming whole numbers of devices, that would imply there were actually FIVE devices remaining in service!
A hard drive?
Bluetooth actually has over 3 times the range of this device, and can support transmitting and receiving at the same time, so I don't think this is a good analogy either.
Apparently you missed that this "invention" also != mobile phone.
Unless by "mobile phone" you mean a device that can't talk and listen at the same time, and has a usable range from the handset to the "tower" shorter than the distance from my bedroom to my kitchen.
Not at all a fair comparison. With a long enough string you could easily get a longer range than they did on this device...
Hence the reference to "the thing" because it was in fact a transmitter...
It's really "the thing" and a crystal radio in the same box. Hardly revolutionary.
citation needed.
In most parts of the world it is perfectly legal to receive any signal that hits your antenna. (Often there are caveats for particular types of signals, but usually that's just about decoding and reading/listening to the data contained in the signal, not in whether you took some of the energy out of the air)
If you insist on trying to torture your verbal gymnastics, you'd try to tell us that a cell phone, a cordless phone, and a wired phone are all the same because they can all talk to people on the other side of the planet. But people know the difference is in how far they can walk with it before they lose a signal (for wired that's the length of the cord, for cordless that's somewhere on their front lawn, and for cellular it's anywhere where there's a tower within a few kilometres)
Based on that definition, this device is somewhere between the wired and cordless phones. So calling this a cell phone is pretty stupid.
The irony is that MS actually makes pretty good hardware, I love their keyboards and mice for instance, and the Surface line of tablets are pretty slick too.
It's too bad MS doesn't have a clue how to do software.
Exactly this. People keep talking about how it was a horrible business idea, but it doesn't sound like that to me.
It sounds like it was a good idea, but that they didn't get the pricing model right. Now there may be cases where umbrellas are damaged or stolen that you don't have control over, but most of the time the person who stole the umbrella is the person who you rented it to. In those cases it should be easy enough to make your money back, you just need to price it right. If you're charging a deposit anyway, the deposit should cover all costs associated with replacing missing/damaged property. Including purchasing a new one, and getting it in to circulation at the appropriate stand. If not charging a deposit, then you need to make sure that the rental continues to get charged until either you've made back the cost of the umbrella, or it's returned.
As a general rule, the cheaper the item you're renting, the higher the deposit needs to be as a percentage of the cost of the item. (cheaper items tend to go missing with no re-course, expensive items tend to be worth a police investigation, so you're more worried about repairing damage than replacing the whole item) This is also why most cheap items aren't rented, at a certain point it's easier to just sell them. (ever try to rent/borrow a gas can from a gas station? they usually only sell them, not rent them)
There seems to be this impression that if your business idea involves "the internet" or "on a computer" etc, that it's somehow immune to the laws of economics. It's not.
That only works if you have no insulation at all in the walls to start. If you instead have decades old insulation that has a low R value and lots of gaps, you can't blow more insulation in that way and have to remove the drywall, or the exterior sheathing to replace it, or add insulation on the outside when residing.
Where I live that means that you can only really use this procedure on houses built 100 years ago as basically anything newer has something in the walls already, even if it's useless.
We're actually in the middle of adding insulation to our 1973 house as part of a major exterior renovation. The exterior sheathing is being removed, then the insulation is being replaced with spray foam before the sheathing is put back on and new siding is added. This should effectively double the R value we currently have, and improve the vapour seal as well. But it's not cheap, and only makes sense because we plan to be in this house for a very long time to come.
I have looked in to ground source heat pump systems several times, and in their current state the payback period on a retrofit is more than my expected lifespan. However on new builds they seem to make sense. I hope Google has some luck in changing this, but I'm not really holding my breath. (Especially with Google's product track record of quickly abandoning projects, and of not expanding then outside the USA)
I don't know how a user replaceable battery limits the processing power, memory, screen resolution, etc of a phone. In fact, I know for a fact that it does not.
A user replaceable battery adds a negligible amount to the physical size of the device (less than 1mm of thickness) It does not affect anything else.
Nobody tried offering a phone that was 1 mm thicker, with the rest of the specs the same, but a replaceable battery.
The reason we won't see the situation is that the companies realized that if all the other manufacturers are doing it too, there's no downside to them doing it (nobody will go with the competition for a feature the competition doesn't offer either) while increasing the planned obsolescence of their devices.
It has exactly ZERO to do with not being able to make a similar phone design with a removable battery. The way you talk you'd think that batteries were now weird shapes distributed throughout the phone, they aren't, they're still a monolithic brick in one place, usually resting against the back panel of the device. The only real difference is that the back panels no longer snap off, and the connections are soldered instead of pressure fit. That's because of greed, not because of functionality.
I'm sorry, you looked at your phone sideways, that's against the terms of your warranty, we're not able to repair it. Go ahead... sue us.
Oh wait, this is in Europe? hmmmm... might actually work. It's too bad north america doesn't actually have any consumer protection though.
Being able to sell your device in that market makes you more money than not being allowed to sell your device.
You're right that corrupt governments who have been paid off by the manufacturers are unlikely to make these rules enforceable, but there is nothing at all in our current system that prevents them from doing so.