Once upon a time links in Roland stories would direct you to his own blog where you could find a link to the real story. His blog has some ads so this was seen as profit-mongering. This hasn't been done for a long time but apparently some people never forgive.
The 1GB Nano was never $250. The product debuted with 4GB and 2GB models for $250 and $200. The 1GB was released a few months later, and the only price it ever sold at was $150. At about the same time the 1GB Shuffle was sold for $100.
Since the Stone doesn't seem to have much of a screen, it seems to me that the Shuffle is a better comparison, but either way we're quite a long ways from your "4x the money" line. How did you make such a large mistake?
Well, the obvious car analogy is all those pickups and SUVs sold with some "off-road package" or whatever, but which are entirely unsuited to off-road use beyond a dirt road or maybe a beach.
inducing an artificial shortage (by not making enough)
Come on... I'm not buying that line for a minute. Nintendo sold something like 20 million GameCubes over five years. Interest was simply never all that high. Now it's one thing to believe in your products, but another to put capital on the line for expensive production capacity assuming that your new system will sell 15 million in *one* year after your last system sold 20 million in five years. There's no way that Nintendo, always a conservative company when it comes to business stuff, would make an assumption like that.
Truth is, last November, nobody knew that this was going to happen, least of all Nintendo. If they planned out a shortage to increase demand, they would have made fewer Wiis than they did GameCubes (which, after the second shipment or so, was never in short supply anywhere). But that's just not what happened.
What are you talking about? The Constitution says nothing about Internet privacy, so Ron Paul would leave that issue to local control or the free market. Consider his position on the FDA -- he says that it's not necessary for any government body to ensure that drugs or supplements are safe because people will stop buying from companies that sell dangerous ones. Such a president wouldn't care if Google is snooping your search results -- they'd tell you to deal with it or use some other search engine.
Don't get me wrong -- Ron Paul is an interesting candidate, and there are great advantages to a constitutional form of government. I just think that he's becoming the new Ralph Nader, with this underground movement which considers him the solution to all of our problems. He's certainly not the solution to Internet privacy concerns.
To be fair, if I could live on a frickin' starship with a warp drive, zooming around the galaxy, I wouldn't ask too many questions about my paycheck either.
He's totally confused. As I understand, you do have to register the copyright before you can bring a lawsuit, but once registered you can sue retroactively.
Look, when the feel of the device is most important is when you're reading books on it, not the 1% of the interaction time that you spend loading books on it. The "free wireless" is restricted to book purchasing and a handful of specific features, so it's not really that useful.
After the Kindle flop, if Amazon still wants to make a book reader, they should first make something that does nothing else, and get that part right. Then they can start with the features. EVDO on this thing is like air conditioning on a Model T.
It's not surprising, though, that Amazon would make the mistake of focusing on the book-purchasing experience, as it's obviously the part they know best.
Except that Amazon gave in to creeping featurism before they had even managed to establish their market in the first place. So rather than a simple "device that feels similar to a real book and lets you concentrate on the reading", we have a monstrosity with dozens of buttons and wireless connectivity... much unlike a real book.
Dumb judge rules that a spam message was a "personal e-mail" exempt from anti-spam laws on the basis that it was written as if the spammer knew the recipient. So watch out for dumb judges in your rape trial!
Yeah, this article was surprisingly useless in that way. Since it doesn't discuss the auto-correction we're left to wonder (and argue) about what the findings even mean.
It's too bad that we couldn't get a more useful article about this interesting topic.
The dirty little secret about power calculations is that there is another factor thrown in, typically about 0.65, called the 'power factor' that UPS and power supply manufacturers use to lower the overall wattage.
It's not "thrown in" by the manufacturers. The dirty little secret is simply that you are talking about AC circuits. 1W = 1VA in AC circuits only if the volts and the amps are in phase -- which they aren't.
Take a sine wave -- in AC, that's what your voltage looks like, always changing. If you're powering something purely resistive like an incandescent bulb, your amps follow the same sine wave and 1W=1VA. But inductive loads like power supplies introduce a lag in the current, so that the amps aren't in phase with the volts. As a result, you cannot naively multiply the RMS volts by the RMS amps to get the average wattage -- you have to take the integral of volts times amps through the curve. And for part of that curve, the voltage and the current flow in different directions, which represents negative power (that is, the inductive circuitry is pushing current back across the wire). As a result of this the overall power will always be less than the volt-amps.
Except that Linux support on the PS3 is lousy and useless. Just like it was on the PS2 -- that was so bad that everyone forgot it existed and got excited all over again about Linux on the PS3.
I suppose this cycle will start all over again with the PS4.
New readers may not understand why such vitriol would be addressed to someone who submits interesting science stories to Slashdot. After all, while there is a link to his blog if you click on his name, this is standard practice with story submissions. So what's the big deal?
Well, there was a time back when Roland first started submitting stories where he would put a link to his blog in the summary content, blatantly suggesting that said blog might be a good place to discuss the story. Since there are ad links on his blog, that makes it horrible, evil and self-serving; readers were in an uproar.
Since then the blog link has been restricted to the submitter name at the beginning of the summary (again, standard practice). But some people really cannot ever let go, and we have to put up with silly tags and dumb trolls on every single one of his submissions. Kinda makes you long for the days when almost everyone on Slashdot was more interested in science than name-calling.
This is
in response to serious attacks reported in recent years against cryptographic hash algorithms, including SHA-1 and
because SHA-1 and the SHA-2 family share a similar design.
You won't catch me defending this abomination of a sentence, but that's how I'd parse such a thing.
Yeah, it's not surprising that Congress tends to have a low approval rating. After all, (generally) about half the voters in the country actually voted for the current president (whoever he is). But any given voter didn't even get to vote for most members of Congress, only the member from their district. So people usually have a higher opinion of the reps from their own district than they do of the congress as a whole.
It's just a truism in American politics that everyone looks at Congress and wonders, "who elected all these clowns? I sure didn't."
The iPhone is an incredibly useful device. You can argue that other, similar devices are also useful, or more useful, or whatever, but "toy" seems simply irrational and anti-fanboyish. Carrying an iPhone around all the time, though, I find that I'm opening it up to get directions to somewhere, or look up some Web page with a tidbit of information that I need, or what have you, all the time.
I'm sure that owners of other convergence phones also have the same experience, but on a regular old cell phone the best I could do was Google SMS. There aren't even any good iPhone games, so I think there's something wrong with the thinking of the people who tag every iPhone story "toy".
Just oppose fanboyism with rationality. It's not necessary to become irrational to cancel out the fanboys.
Except that the AT&T plans could be cheaper if there wasn't a secret subsidy. People could reasonably buy the iPhone and think it was unsubsidized because you don't have to sign a contract at the time of purchase. Given that, they might wonder why they can't switch to a lower-priced plan that better fits their needs.
Well, I am an Apple Fanboi (according to those with the time to track such things) so I'm obviously biased, but I'll answer your questions anyway.
Hidden charges: the iPhone is sold at retail for $400, giving the impression that you pay $400 and own one, but that isn't exactly the case. The device will not function (even as an iPod or whatever) until activated with AT&T. The AT&T plans available aren't exactly out of line for unlimited data plans but they aren't discount plans either. All these limitations are because Apple also receives a subsidy from AT&T, which is a sort of hidden charge.
As for "available to all", there are a few possible answers. As of now the phone isn't available outside the US and (without hacking) won't work with, say, Canadian carriers. Or if you speak in terms of development, right now nobody outside Apple can develop applications (without hacking).
The iPhone is still rather great, at least for those of us who happen to live in a place where AT&T coverage is really far better than any of the competing coverage. But I think everyone is glad to see Google put on some pressure in this space. Apple makes some good software but can get stuck in a bit of a cathedral mindset that can make their platforms a bit stale.
Slashdot Mirror
The reviews linked on Amazon are "all pretty positive". Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal says it sucks.
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20071129/amazons-kindle-makes-buying-e-books-easy-reading-them-hard/
Once upon a time links in Roland stories would direct you to his own blog where you could find a link to the real story. His blog has some ads so this was seen as profit-mongering. This hasn't been done for a long time but apparently some people never forgive.
The 1GB Nano was never $250. The product debuted with 4GB and 2GB models for $250 and $200. The 1GB was released a few months later, and the only price it ever sold at was $150. At about the same time the 1GB Shuffle was sold for $100.
Since the Stone doesn't seem to have much of a screen, it seems to me that the Shuffle is a better comparison, but either way we're quite a long ways from your "4x the money" line. How did you make such a large mistake?
Well, the obvious car analogy is all those pickups and SUVs sold with some "off-road package" or whatever, but which are entirely unsuited to off-road use beyond a dirt road or maybe a beach.
inducing an artificial shortage (by not making enough)
Come on... I'm not buying that line for a minute. Nintendo sold something like 20 million GameCubes over five years. Interest was simply never all that high. Now it's one thing to believe in your products, but another to put capital on the line for expensive production capacity assuming that your new system will sell 15 million in *one* year after your last system sold 20 million in five years. There's no way that Nintendo, always a conservative company when it comes to business stuff, would make an assumption like that.
Truth is, last November, nobody knew that this was going to happen, least of all Nintendo. If they planned out a shortage to increase demand, they would have made fewer Wiis than they did GameCubes (which, after the second shipment or so, was never in short supply anywhere). But that's just not what happened.
Fair enough, but nine out of ten "online privacy" stories I see are actions of private companies, not the government.
What are you talking about? The Constitution says nothing about Internet privacy, so Ron Paul would leave that issue to local control or the free market. Consider his position on the FDA -- he says that it's not necessary for any government body to ensure that drugs or supplements are safe because people will stop buying from companies that sell dangerous ones. Such a president wouldn't care if Google is snooping your search results -- they'd tell you to deal with it or use some other search engine.
Don't get me wrong -- Ron Paul is an interesting candidate, and there are great advantages to a constitutional form of government. I just think that he's becoming the new Ralph Nader, with this underground movement which considers him the solution to all of our problems. He's certainly not the solution to Internet privacy concerns.
Ah, but what about the hot air from the Apple haters? It must be good for something too!
To be fair, if I could live on a frickin' starship with a warp drive, zooming around the galaxy, I wouldn't ask too many questions about my paycheck either.
Well, it's a beefed up CAT scan, and those have always been X-ray based.
He's totally confused. As I understand, you do have to register the copyright before you can bring a lawsuit, but once registered you can sue retroactively.
Look, when the feel of the device is most important is when you're reading books on it, not the 1% of the interaction time that you spend loading books on it. The "free wireless" is restricted to book purchasing and a handful of specific features, so it's not really that useful.
After the Kindle flop, if Amazon still wants to make a book reader, they should first make something that does nothing else, and get that part right. Then they can start with the features. EVDO on this thing is like air conditioning on a Model T.
It's not surprising, though, that Amazon would make the mistake of focusing on the book-purchasing experience, as it's obviously the part they know best.
Except that Amazon gave in to creeping featurism before they had even managed to establish their market in the first place. So rather than a simple "device that feels similar to a real book and lets you concentrate on the reading", we have a monstrosity with dozens of buttons and wireless connectivity... much unlike a real book.
Whoops.
Dumb judge rules that a spam message was a "personal e-mail" exempt from anti-spam laws on the basis that it was written as if the spammer knew the recipient. So watch out for dumb judges in your rape trial!
Yeah, this article was surprisingly useless in that way. Since it doesn't discuss the auto-correction we're left to wonder (and argue) about what the findings even mean.
It's too bad that we couldn't get a more useful article about this interesting topic.
The dirty little secret about power calculations is that there is another factor thrown in, typically about 0.65, called the 'power factor' that UPS and power supply manufacturers use to lower the overall wattage.
It's not "thrown in" by the manufacturers. The dirty little secret is simply that you are talking about AC circuits. 1W = 1VA in AC circuits only if the volts and the amps are in phase -- which they aren't.
Take a sine wave -- in AC, that's what your voltage looks like, always changing. If you're powering something purely resistive like an incandescent bulb, your amps follow the same sine wave and 1W=1VA. But inductive loads like power supplies introduce a lag in the current, so that the amps aren't in phase with the volts. As a result, you cannot naively multiply the RMS volts by the RMS amps to get the average wattage -- you have to take the integral of volts times amps through the curve. And for part of that curve, the voltage and the current flow in different directions, which represents negative power (that is, the inductive circuitry is pushing current back across the wire). As a result of this the overall power will always be less than the volt-amps.
Except that Linux support on the PS3 is lousy and useless. Just like it was on the PS2 -- that was so bad that everyone forgot it existed and got excited all over again about Linux on the PS3.
I suppose this cycle will start all over again with the PS4.
New readers may not understand why such vitriol would be addressed to someone who submits interesting science stories to Slashdot. After all, while there is a link to his blog if you click on his name, this is standard practice with story submissions. So what's the big deal?
Well, there was a time back when Roland first started submitting stories where he would put a link to his blog in the summary content, blatantly suggesting that said blog might be a good place to discuss the story. Since there are ad links on his blog, that makes it horrible, evil and self-serving; readers were in an uproar.
Since then the blog link has been restricted to the submitter name at the beginning of the summary (again, standard practice). But some people really cannot ever let go, and we have to put up with silly tags and dumb trolls on every single one of his submissions. Kinda makes you long for the days when almost everyone on Slashdot was more interested in science than name-calling.
This is
in response to serious attacks reported in recent years against cryptographic hash algorithms, including SHA-1
and
because SHA-1 and the SHA-2 family share a similar design.
You won't catch me defending this abomination of a sentence, but that's how I'd parse such a thing.
Yeah, it's not surprising that Congress tends to have a low approval rating. After all, (generally) about half the voters in the country actually voted for the current president (whoever he is). But any given voter didn't even get to vote for most members of Congress, only the member from their district. So people usually have a higher opinion of the reps from their own district than they do of the congress as a whole.
It's just a truism in American politics that everyone looks at Congress and wonders, "who elected all these clowns? I sure didn't."
That would be a pretty stupid thing to do -- the comment presents a reasonable argument. You can disagree but that doesn't suggest a flamebait mod.
Toy? What, pray tell, are you smoking?
The iPhone is an incredibly useful device. You can argue that other, similar devices are also useful, or more useful, or whatever, but "toy" seems simply irrational and anti-fanboyish. Carrying an iPhone around all the time, though, I find that I'm opening it up to get directions to somewhere, or look up some Web page with a tidbit of information that I need, or what have you, all the time.
I'm sure that owners of other convergence phones also have the same experience, but on a regular old cell phone the best I could do was Google SMS. There aren't even any good iPhone games, so I think there's something wrong with the thinking of the people who tag every iPhone story "toy".
Just oppose fanboyism with rationality. It's not necessary to become irrational to cancel out the fanboys.
Except that the AT&T plans could be cheaper if there wasn't a secret subsidy. People could reasonably buy the iPhone and think it was unsubsidized because you don't have to sign a contract at the time of purchase. Given that, they might wonder why they can't switch to a lower-priced plan that better fits their needs.
Well, I am an Apple Fanboi (according to those with the time to track such things) so I'm obviously biased, but I'll answer your questions anyway.
Hidden charges: the iPhone is sold at retail for $400, giving the impression that you pay $400 and own one, but that isn't exactly the case. The device will not function (even as an iPod or whatever) until activated with AT&T. The AT&T plans available aren't exactly out of line for unlimited data plans but they aren't discount plans either. All these limitations are because Apple also receives a subsidy from AT&T, which is a sort of hidden charge.
As for "available to all", there are a few possible answers. As of now the phone isn't available outside the US and (without hacking) won't work with, say, Canadian carriers. Or if you speak in terms of development, right now nobody outside Apple can develop applications (without hacking).
The iPhone is still rather great, at least for those of us who happen to live in a place where AT&T coverage is really far better than any of the competing coverage. But I think everyone is glad to see Google put on some pressure in this space. Apple makes some good software but can get stuck in a bit of a cathedral mindset that can make their platforms a bit stale.
Actually, if you R(TRO)TFA, you'll find that Ubuntu is not issuing that command at all. Rather, this is a default set by the drive manufacturer.