I think if you want an automotive analogy, you want to look at the iOS devices as cars, and Macs/PCs as trucks (think big trucks not little pickup trucks).
Cars are really a lot less versatile. They don't have big engines or hauling capacity, and you can't attach whatever you want. Heck, for most cars these days, the manual recommends against trying to hook up even a little U-Haul trailer. Though (much like jailbreaking an iOS device) you can hook one up if you really want to. Obviously most people buy cars for purposes like driving to work or the grocery store, but nobody imagines that you'd use a car to haul bricks around or anything.
The proliferation of cars doesn't mean trucks are going away; cars are ill-suited to many tasks, including the task of hauling the car parts to the factory so you can make cars. But many companies make only cars, or only trucks; and plenty of companies still make both. Cars and trucks certainly have a lot in common, but there are reasons for both to exist.
Lots of geeks are big-time truck drivers who can't understand why you'd want a vehicle without a complete complement of hauling attachment options, but there's no reason at all to be paranoid that greedy evil Steve is going to come take our trucks away. Desktop computing is very much going to change (as it always has) but there will still be complex, non-console systems like the Mac. They might be less attractive to the general public over time for sure.
The great thing about "predictions" like yours is that you can keep "predicting" forever. If you don't tell us HOW soon you think this will happen, you'll never be proven wrong.
If this hasn't taken place by 2014 or so will you admit that you never really understood what Apple was up to?
Apple has sold a keyboard dock for the iPad from day one, AND the iPad has been compatible with Bluetooth keyboards from day one. So how would a keyboard be "next"?
The "mistake argument" isn't claiming that the whole location history implementation is a mistake, it's claiming that it's intended to be a cache, not a permanent archive. Nothing in the patent has anything to do with this.
If the price listed on the SpaceX website ($125M) is accurate, "we" are making progress, if by "we" you mean the people who actually work on this stuff rather than posting on Slashdot. Saturn V launches cost in the hundreds of millions each, in 1970 dollars.
If you're invited inside a big datacenter and want to take good pictures, at least rent an ultra-wide-angle lens. These pedestrian shots of individual wiring cabinets feel extremely flat.
You're comparing time I'd actually have to spend myself (10 minutes running to the store, if I had a game store down the block, which I don't, but never mind) with time my computer would have to spend (2 hours downloading). Sure, I'll happily task my computer with hours of work just to save myself ten minutes (especially when those ten minutes are actually half an hour at least).
Besides, in the case of Dragon Age 2 you could get an encrypted pre-download and have the whole thing ready to go on release day, so if I were really impatient to play it the digital download would be way better.
Back in the real world, all the dozens of Safari-based Web browsers in the App Store have always had the same designation. This is not a new policy and has nothing to do with Opera being a competitor; it's part of the parental control system. It's not as if the designation makes a difference to anyone who doesn't have parental controls enabled.
How do the Android parental controls handle issues like this?
It's a mystery to me why this is such a big story. Compaq used Torx screws exclusively for years and years. Why? Who cares? It's just a screw, you want to work on Compaqs you buy a Torx set.
Do you really, really truly, believe that a significant portion of Apple's user base is capable of successfully servicing their own phones? This obviously doesn't have much effect on independent repair shops, who are already able to open the new screws anyway. Since end-users can't fix their own phones anyway and independent repair shops will still be able to open the phones, how does this affect the serviceability of the phone?
Has anyone drawn up a comparison diagram of which manufacturers use what kind of screws in their cell phones? Does that equate to the elusive "openness" now? At least it's better than arguing about whether Flash or H.264 is more "open", I guess.
Jeopardy has a substantial penalty for incorrect answers, so blindly buzzing in requires a high threshold of confidence that you will be able to correctly answer any possible question (or, um, correctly question any possible answer).
While the titanium M9 is sort of dumb the sensor is "full-frame" (24mmx36mm) so it's going to be a whole lot better than a point-and-shoot. But no better than the regular M9 which is "only" $7000.
That's kind of odd, since uppercase letters are all similar to each other, and harder to distinguish (custom isn't the only reason people hate them). The only advantage of uppercase letters is that they are mostly slightly larger. Using all caps may be easier, but simply using a larger font size may be more effective.
You've got to be kidding. Since careful analysis and research has nothing to do with how average people make decisions in their daily lives, insisting that government decisions be driven by careful analysis and research is tantamount to just turning the country over to an uncaring, common-sense-lacking elite.
What people want the government to do (including those here on Slashdot, apparently) is to make decisions based on snap judgements. If 6-year-olds are getting run over by cars backing up, obviously the problem is the driver (especially helpful because this doesn't lead to any solutions at all). Never mind that it's hard to see a 6-year-old out the back of a car; even a sedan. It's better for there to be no real solution, since the possibility of a solution might entangle us in annoying moral obligations.
Sigh, that isn't even close to what happened. Steve said something about how he didn't like task managers; then Apple releases iOS 4 which includes a task switcher thing. Haters gotta hate I guess, but pointing to the task switcher and screaming "haha you admitted you blew it" is really stupid. (For one thing the iOS multitasking implementation had already been written at the time of the quote, but I digress.)
Look guys, the task switcher isn't a task manager; it just lists recently used apps. Important point: it lists recently used apps *whether they are even running or not*. It's almost all interface. The only manager-ish thing it does is that when you remove items from the list, they are killed if they were even actually running. This is not very useful for improving battery life, since they aren't likely to be using any battery unless you see the "playing music" icon or "using GPS" icon (but go ahead and clear things out if you like voodoo). Mostly the app-killing feature is useful to reset apps that have gotten themselves suspended into a bad state.
How dare we determine our government by population, rather than by imaginary lines drawn on a map! Why, one imaginary region might have less influence than another!
"Reality"? That's a bit of a stretch. Who decides what a country is "really" called? You're just going to accept the decisions of whoever has the most guns?
Re:Not sure I'll buy it.
on
Diablo 3 Hands-On
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I get that, but I think my point is that the GP is going on about "Blizzard's attitude toward gamers" as if the cheaters are some sort of innocent victims. Nobody's speaking up for the players who want to play fair.
Maybe "Blizzard's attitude toward gamers" is that they want the gamers who pay for the product to have a good experience. Such as, I don't notice the DRM except that I have to type my password. And it's great that I can play on any computer, and I don't need the DVD, etc.
And maybe Blizzard doesn't want to fight cheaters one-at-a-time, searching through the server logs: "was he cheating in that multiplayer game? Did he have the cheat installed but not use it? Did the fact that he had the cheat available to rebuild his economy if needed affect his strategy so that he could win that game without it?" Why should someone playing fair have to lose to a cheater before they get banned, anyway?
Cheating is the great scourge of Internet gameplay, and Blizzard has plenty of experience with that. Cheaters drive out paying customers. There's no reason to treat them lightly.
BTW, I don't really understand the argument about single-player cheats. Ok, hacking the game lets you do more, but what's the interest or reason for that? Do players really find the single-player on Easy mode so hard that even the built-in cheats aren't enough?
Because what it sounds like, is someone hacked the game and developed a cheating tool that works in both multi-player and single-player, and Blizzard banned some people who used the tool but only used it in single player. But why did they pay for the tool just to use it in single-player? I don't get why anybody would need or want to do that.
Really I feel like a lot of this is revenge PR from the company that made the cheating programs; I suspect that the players who were banned fully intended to cheat at multi-player eventually.
My experience has been that SC2 matchmaking is pretty reasonable, and there are a TON of totally bad players out there to give n00bs like you and me a reasonable win percentage. So yeah, you'll be ranked super-low but your win percentage will probably be okay.
Other than looking pretty, what purpose does having a glass back serve?
I'm not a materials engineer (or any kind of engineer for that matter) but I think the issue is a little more complex than that. First of all, though laypeople like us refer to a material as "glass" or "plastic" each of these terms describes a large class of particular materials with sometimes widely divergent properties. The iPhone 4's "glass" isn't the same as the glass in your drinking glass. (I guess they call it "aluminosilicate glass" but I don't know what that means.) And who knows if the glass on the back is the same as the glass on the front.
Unless an Apple engineer shows up it's hard to guess at the exact reasons they would use one material over another, but we can guess. For one, they say this material is stronger than plastic, though obviously it may be more prone to shattering when dropped. That's an interesting trade-off; maybe using the glass improved the structural integrity overall, reducing the need for internal structural components and thus increasing the space available for the battery. Maybe Apple's testing showed that dropped phones were likely to break regardless, and the glass back didn't increase the average damage per drop much. Maybe testing found that people were naturally more careful with glass objects.
I think it's too easy for Slashdot types to have this reaction that some product design decision was completely stupid because they see some obvious downside, and the advantages are sometimes harder to see. But there are a lot of products which seem to have no obvious flaws, but completely suck because the designers never take any risks (see: Microsoft Word). I don't like to use those kinds of products.
Slashdot Mirror
I think if you want an automotive analogy, you want to look at the iOS devices as cars, and Macs/PCs as trucks (think big trucks not little pickup trucks).
Cars are really a lot less versatile. They don't have big engines or hauling capacity, and you can't attach whatever you want. Heck, for most cars these days, the manual recommends against trying to hook up even a little U-Haul trailer. Though (much like jailbreaking an iOS device) you can hook one up if you really want to. Obviously most people buy cars for purposes like driving to work or the grocery store, but nobody imagines that you'd use a car to haul bricks around or anything.
The proliferation of cars doesn't mean trucks are going away; cars are ill-suited to many tasks, including the task of hauling the car parts to the factory so you can make cars. But many companies make only cars, or only trucks; and plenty of companies still make both. Cars and trucks certainly have a lot in common, but there are reasons for both to exist.
Lots of geeks are big-time truck drivers who can't understand why you'd want a vehicle without a complete complement of hauling attachment options, but there's no reason at all to be paranoid that greedy evil Steve is going to come take our trucks away. Desktop computing is very much going to change (as it always has) but there will still be complex, non-console systems like the Mac. They might be less attractive to the general public over time for sure.
The great thing about "predictions" like yours is that you can keep "predicting" forever. If you don't tell us HOW soon you think this will happen, you'll never be proven wrong.
If this hasn't taken place by 2014 or so will you admit that you never really understood what Apple was up to?
Apple has sold a keyboard dock for the iPad from day one, AND the iPad has been compatible with Bluetooth keyboards from day one. So how would a keyboard be "next"?
The "mistake argument" isn't claiming that the whole location history implementation is a mistake, it's claiming that it's intended to be a cache, not a permanent archive. Nothing in the patent has anything to do with this.
If the price listed on the SpaceX website ($125M) is accurate, "we" are making progress, if by "we" you mean the people who actually work on this stuff rather than posting on Slashdot. Saturn V launches cost in the hundreds of millions each, in 1970 dollars.
If you're invited inside a big datacenter and want to take good pictures, at least rent an ultra-wide-angle lens. These pedestrian shots of individual wiring cabinets feel extremely flat.
You're comparing time I'd actually have to spend myself (10 minutes running to the store, if I had a game store down the block, which I don't, but never mind) with time my computer would have to spend (2 hours downloading). Sure, I'll happily task my computer with hours of work just to save myself ten minutes (especially when those ten minutes are actually half an hour at least).
Besides, in the case of Dragon Age 2 you could get an encrypted pre-download and have the whole thing ready to go on release day, so if I were really impatient to play it the digital download would be way better.
Back in the real world, all the dozens of Safari-based Web browsers in the App Store have always had the same designation. This is not a new policy and has nothing to do with Opera being a competitor; it's part of the parental control system. It's not as if the designation makes a difference to anyone who doesn't have parental controls enabled.
How do the Android parental controls handle issues like this?
Yeah, the royalty-free period on h.264 was already extended to forever. Still only applies to certain uses though (as always).
That doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
It's a mystery to me why this is such a big story. Compaq used Torx screws exclusively for years and years. Why? Who cares? It's just a screw, you want to work on Compaqs you buy a Torx set.
Do you really, really truly, believe that a significant portion of Apple's user base is capable of successfully servicing their own phones? This obviously doesn't have much effect on independent repair shops, who are already able to open the new screws anyway. Since end-users can't fix their own phones anyway and independent repair shops will still be able to open the phones, how does this affect the serviceability of the phone?
Has anyone drawn up a comparison diagram of which manufacturers use what kind of screws in their cell phones? Does that equate to the elusive "openness" now? At least it's better than arguing about whether Flash or H.264 is more "open", I guess.
Jeopardy has a substantial penalty for incorrect answers, so blindly buzzing in requires a high threshold of confidence that you will be able to correctly answer any possible question (or, um, correctly question any possible answer).
While the titanium M9 is sort of dumb the sensor is "full-frame" (24mmx36mm) so it's going to be a whole lot better than a point-and-shoot. But no better than the regular M9 which is "only" $7000.
That's kind of odd, since uppercase letters are all similar to each other, and harder to distinguish (custom isn't the only reason people hate them). The only advantage of uppercase letters is that they are mostly slightly larger. Using all caps may be easier, but simply using a larger font size may be more effective.
You've got to be kidding. Since careful analysis and research has nothing to do with how average people make decisions in their daily lives, insisting that government decisions be driven by careful analysis and research is tantamount to just turning the country over to an uncaring, common-sense-lacking elite.
What people want the government to do (including those here on Slashdot, apparently) is to make decisions based on snap judgements. If 6-year-olds are getting run over by cars backing up, obviously the problem is the driver (especially helpful because this doesn't lead to any solutions at all). Never mind that it's hard to see a 6-year-old out the back of a car; even a sedan. It's better for there to be no real solution, since the possibility of a solution might entangle us in annoying moral obligations.
Sigh, that isn't even close to what happened. Steve said something about how he didn't like task managers; then Apple releases iOS 4 which includes a task switcher thing. Haters gotta hate I guess, but pointing to the task switcher and screaming "haha you admitted you blew it" is really stupid. (For one thing the iOS multitasking implementation had already been written at the time of the quote, but I digress.)
Look guys, the task switcher isn't a task manager; it just lists recently used apps. Important point: it lists recently used apps *whether they are even running or not*. It's almost all interface. The only manager-ish thing it does is that when you remove items from the list, they are killed if they were even actually running. This is not very useful for improving battery life, since they aren't likely to be using any battery unless you see the "playing music" icon or "using GPS" icon (but go ahead and clear things out if you like voodoo). Mostly the app-killing feature is useful to reset apps that have gotten themselves suspended into a bad state.
Who cares whether the machines can save images or not anyway? Any screener with a camera phone could just take a picture of the screen.
Hype? They just said you wouldn't forget today. Have you forgotten today yet? No? STFU and come back once you have.
Since the Electoral College amplifies majorities, how does it "check" the "tyranny of the majority"?
How dare we determine our government by population, rather than by imaginary lines drawn on a map! Why, one imaginary region might have less influence than another!
"Reality"? That's a bit of a stretch. Who decides what a country is "really" called? You're just going to accept the decisions of whoever has the most guns?
I get that, but I think my point is that the GP is going on about "Blizzard's attitude toward gamers" as if the cheaters are some sort of innocent victims. Nobody's speaking up for the players who want to play fair.
Maybe "Blizzard's attitude toward gamers" is that they want the gamers who pay for the product to have a good experience. Such as, I don't notice the DRM except that I have to type my password. And it's great that I can play on any computer, and I don't need the DVD, etc.
And maybe Blizzard doesn't want to fight cheaters one-at-a-time, searching through the server logs: "was he cheating in that multiplayer game? Did he have the cheat installed but not use it? Did the fact that he had the cheat available to rebuild his economy if needed affect his strategy so that he could win that game without it?" Why should someone playing fair have to lose to a cheater before they get banned, anyway?
Cheating is the great scourge of Internet gameplay, and Blizzard has plenty of experience with that. Cheaters drive out paying customers. There's no reason to treat them lightly.
BTW, I don't really understand the argument about single-player cheats. Ok, hacking the game lets you do more, but what's the interest or reason for that? Do players really find the single-player on Easy mode so hard that even the built-in cheats aren't enough?
Because what it sounds like, is someone hacked the game and developed a cheating tool that works in both multi-player and single-player, and Blizzard banned some people who used the tool but only used it in single player. But why did they pay for the tool just to use it in single-player? I don't get why anybody would need or want to do that.
Really I feel like a lot of this is revenge PR from the company that made the cheating programs; I suspect that the players who were banned fully intended to cheat at multi-player eventually.
My experience has been that SC2 matchmaking is pretty reasonable, and there are a TON of totally bad players out there to give n00bs like you and me a reasonable win percentage. So yeah, you'll be ranked super-low but your win percentage will probably be okay.
Just because there was a problem does not mean the environment is now "worse off". Clearly this is happening to a tiny fraction of overall cars.
Other than looking pretty, what purpose does having a glass back serve?
I'm not a materials engineer (or any kind of engineer for that matter) but I think the issue is a little more complex than that. First of all, though laypeople like us refer to a material as "glass" or "plastic" each of these terms describes a large class of particular materials with sometimes widely divergent properties. The iPhone 4's "glass" isn't the same as the glass in your drinking glass. (I guess they call it "aluminosilicate glass" but I don't know what that means.) And who knows if the glass on the back is the same as the glass on the front.
Unless an Apple engineer shows up it's hard to guess at the exact reasons they would use one material over another, but we can guess. For one, they say this material is stronger than plastic, though obviously it may be more prone to shattering when dropped. That's an interesting trade-off; maybe using the glass improved the structural integrity overall, reducing the need for internal structural components and thus increasing the space available for the battery. Maybe Apple's testing showed that dropped phones were likely to break regardless, and the glass back didn't increase the average damage per drop much. Maybe testing found that people were naturally more careful with glass objects.
I think it's too easy for Slashdot types to have this reaction that some product design decision was completely stupid because they see some obvious downside, and the advantages are sometimes harder to see. But there are a lot of products which seem to have no obvious flaws, but completely suck because the designers never take any risks (see: Microsoft Word). I don't like to use those kinds of products.