A theory is the top of the food chain, otherwise known as a fact. A theory is something never once proven wrong, and so far always shown to be correct.
Lies! How this particular bit of misinformation entered the mainstream I'll never know.
A theory is a predictive model. A hypothesis is a testable prediction. There are plenty of theories (that are still theories) which have been abandoned because the predictions they make are not supported by evidence and experiment. (You don't test a theory, you can't, you can only test the predictions that it makes!)
when people talk about a superposition of two particles that are quantum entangled are they just saying "we know an event happened to one of these particles we just don't know which one until we look"
But now I just have more questions. Like, "I will put a ball in one of these boxes, but I will not tell you which one I put it in. Now from your perspective, Neither the statement 'this box has the ball in it' nor 'this box does not have the ball in it' is true. You have no way of selecting which box I put the ball in." How is this any different?
It is very very different. In this case the "ball" is actually in both "boxes" at once. Upon observing one of the "boxes", the ball is in one or the other, but not before. (Reality has a lot to do with knowledge and knowability [what can, in principle, be known] -- in your case, the location of the ball is both known and knowable.)
Freaky, isn't it? Relativity is just as wacky and unintuitive, but we managed to get used to that quickly enough.
Quantum mechanics does sound ridiculous, but it's the best-tested theory we have. Again, it's not that you "don't know" or "can't know" which path, which crystal, which whatever -- it really is "both" (e.g. "both paths", "both crystals"). It's frighteningly unintuitive, but this has held up experimentally (see: Bell's Inequality).
For some reason, slashdotters seem to desperately want to return to a nice, neat, deterministic, Newtonian billiard-ball universe where everything appeals to our intuition. Unfortunately for them, this is getting less and less likely every year.
Sure. RIM's future does look bright -- they've made some fantastic acquisitions over the past few years, Torch Mobile, QNX, DataViz, The Astonishing Tribe (TaT) just to name a few.
As for the appeal of their devices, the PlayBook (while slammed in the media) is a really great tablet in terms of hardware and the software get's better with each release. The UI is undeniably next-gen (they're well ahead of the game here).
Their phones are rock-solid. They have best-in-class security. They have one of the best web browsers on the market (until iOS5, they had the best HTML5 support.) Their messaging software from email to BBM is, again, best-in-class (refined over more than 10 years to make text communication as simple seamless and fast as possible). Oh, the battery life is fantastic. While the 9900 got low-marks in the battery department, that's only if you compare it to older blackberries:) iOS and Android users who have made the switch find the battery life to be astonishing.
Really, the only thing wrong with their phones is that they're a bit boring. Using a Blackberry isn't an event like other platforms. I see the famous blinking light, type a response, and I'm back on-task. I don't need to engage with it like other phones. The myriad of shortcuts and UI designed for productivity make doing just about any task completely effortless.
For the technophiles, BBX (QNX for Blackberry) represents the future of mobile computing. It is, undeniably, the most advanced and capable mobile OS in the world. From stability to capability, QNX is simply unmatched. Developers will love the TaT designed Cascades UI Framework, which lets developers do some pretty amazing things, almost effortlessly.
IF you have the physical device, and IF you have developer access to it, and IF you explicitly sideload this... then some additional access has been obtained to the OS.
Unlike the iPhone/Android "jailbreak" concept, this lets you muck about in the OS but doesn't give any way to overwrite the bootloader.
It's an interesting proof of concept, and certainly something RIM should be looking into... but it also isn't the fatal flaw in RIM security that much of the popular tech press is reporting.
It's not a major issue, and RIM will undoubtedly fix it (they usually catch this sort of thing and patch it long before it's discovered).
Not for everyone else -- they're sold-out almost everywhere.
Still, RIM is on track to convert to Android.
In what twisted world? RIM has the most advanced, capable, and secure mobile OS around! Switching to Android would be taking a massive step backward.
And privacy isn't much of a problem for RIM any more. They are no more or less secure than Facebook
When it comes to mobile security, RIM is still #1 -- oh, and no other player even comes close. To compare the historically masterful security of RIM to the joke that is Facebook is like saying Fort Knox security is on-par with a hide-a-key rock.
their corporate clients are losing any hope of being safe from the prying eyes of sovreign states.
Oh, FFS, this nonsense again? As always, if you're running BES you're secure. No Government can spy on you. RIM can't give away the keys because they don't have them.
I know that it's fun for you to bash RIM. However, security and their new OS are two of RIM's massive strengths (they've been leading the competition here for years). You should try picking on them for actual weaknesses, you might have more success.
In addition, the notion that '8 cups of water a day' is of therapeutic benefit to any extent is also completely bunk.
Before you call something bunk, you need to do the science.
I say an experiment is in order! Let's give one group of patents 8 cups of water a day and another group 0 cups of water a day to see if a difference in their health develops after a few days.
Step two, though, is to phase out BleakBerry OS and go to a modified Android for their handsets.
I've heard this before. It's, quite possibly, the worst idea ever. Not only would RIM then become "just another android phone vendor", they'd be giving up QNX. As you already know, QNX is the most advanced,capable, stable, and secure mobile OS around.
Besides, with BBX comes the ability to run Android apps. While it won't convert all apps, the limitations are not nearly as vast as the barely-informed on Slashdot would have you believe. Essentially, if it's a "normal" app (like a game, calculator, whatever) it's very likely to "just work". This gives them some measure of access to the Android app infrastructure, which is a nice advantage.
What's with all this "RIM is unreliable" nonsense? Apple's MobileMe has been down more this year that RIM has in the last 10. They've had 3 outages in the last decade, the longest being the most recent (still less than a day for most users). Even then, most of their users were completely unaffected; many of those affected only experienced some slowdowns. Oh, and RIM didn't lose a single message.
RIM is more reliable than your service provider. Hell, the electricity in your house is more likely to go out than RIM's services.
So, when was the last time any decent technology company had a three day outage? Well, I don't know about three days, but in 2008 Apple's MobileMe service was out for 18 days -- and that's a $99/year service! iCloud and Siri have also already experienced outages -- WTF?
Google also suffers from outages, again, far more often than RIM. All things considered, RIM is the only company that you can seriously rely on to provide consistent service.
It's definitely worth that price. However the original for 500 it definitely isn't
Why? It has the most advanced mobile operating system on the market, hardware that is top-of-the-line, and a brilliant and innovative UI. Bridge even negates the need for an additional data plan when on the go.
The only complaint I've seen about the PB was the lack of native email -- which is a complete non-issue for blackberry owners (who would just use bridge anyway) and most consumers (who'd just use web mail like they do on their computers). Besides, if you really need it, there are a number of third-party apps. No on criticized the build quality, the UI, OS, or the hardware specs.
You get a lot more with the Playbook than most other tablets at that price point. $200 is a steal.
Now someone needs to hack android onto it:)
Why? You'd be giving up so much to gain... what, exactly? More apps? Kind of silly, as you can already load many (most?) Android apps now if you're willing to put in a tiny bit of effort (BBH-Tool does it in one click) -- or, you know, just wait until February.
While the Fire looks virtually identical to the PlayBook, they're actually very different in terms of what's under the hood.
Still, I agree that QNX offers some serious advantages over other mobile operating systems. We'll know more next year when we see the new BBX handsets and the PlayBook 2.0 software update.
I agree. JavaScript can be a very nice and simple language, if you know what features to avoid.
Aside from general advice, like "code first for readability" and "don't do anything clever", any developer would do well to stay well clear of creating their own objects (except in the rare case where it helps readability), avoid anonymous functions, interact with the DOM only in a few well-defined and obvious places, and register event handlers in one place (if at all possible).
Oh, and learn to use the var keyword. Saying clear of anonymous functions and proper use of var will save you from dealing with most of problems caused by JS bizarre and unintuitive scoping rules.
It's not a complete list, but it's a good start -- even for developers who are intimately familiar with all of the details of JS, as it'll make their code readable to the zillions of other (lesser) JS developers who may need to maintain or just learn from your code in the future.
our company has a mix of Android and iPhones and we have had more issues with iPhones! And don't get me started with Black Berry, most people I know are glad they ditch their BB phones!
Glad to ditch their BB phones? What antique BB's did you have them running? I know they're reliable and easy to manage, but your users seem to also want the features in the new BB's like the browser, which beats out all but iOS 5.
Anyhow, had you read the article, you'd know that 12.6% of all technical support calls related to hardware failures for Android, 9.3% for Windows Phones, 8% for Apple, and only 5.5% for BlackBerry.
The headline should read "Blackberry handsets most reliable, Android the least"
Instead of asking "What does this story have to do with Android?" You should be asking "What does this story have to do with Apple?" Which is just some random company in the middle of the list.
Slashdot Mirror
A theory is the top of the food chain, otherwise known as a fact.
A theory is something never once proven wrong, and so far always shown to be correct.
Lies! How this particular bit of misinformation entered the mainstream I'll never know.
A theory is a predictive model. A hypothesis is a testable prediction. There are plenty of theories (that are still theories) which have been abandoned because the predictions they make are not supported by evidence and experiment. (You don't test a theory, you can't, you can only test the predictions that it makes!)
when people talk about a superposition of two particles that are quantum entangled are they just saying "we know an event happened to one of these particles we just don't know which one until we look"
Not even close.
Interacting with it causes the wave function to collapse
Well, that's actually a huge problem. See, if a particle interacts with the system, it too becomes entangled.
The fact of the matter is that no one has a clue what causes the wave function to collapse (or if it even does at all).
But now I just have more questions. Like, "I will put a ball in one of these boxes, but I will not tell you which one I put it in. Now from your perspective, Neither the statement 'this box has the ball in it' nor 'this box does not have the ball in it' is true. You have no way of selecting which box I put the ball in." How is this any different?
It is very very different. In this case the "ball" is actually in both "boxes" at once. Upon observing one of the "boxes", the ball is in one or the other, but not before. (Reality has a lot to do with knowledge and knowability [what can, in principle, be known] -- in your case, the location of the ball is both known and knowable.)
Freaky, isn't it? Relativity is just as wacky and unintuitive, but we managed to get used to that quickly enough.
Quantum mechanics does sound ridiculous, but it's the best-tested theory we have. Again, it's not that you "don't know" or "can't know" which path, which crystal, which whatever -- it really is "both" (e.g. "both paths", "both crystals"). It's frighteningly unintuitive, but this has held up experimentally (see: Bell's Inequality).
For some reason, slashdotters seem to desperately want to return to a nice, neat, deterministic, Newtonian billiard-ball universe where everything appeals to our intuition. Unfortunately for them, this is getting less and less likely every year.
Sure. RIM's future does look bright -- they've made some fantastic acquisitions over the past few years, Torch Mobile, QNX, DataViz, The Astonishing Tribe (TaT) just to name a few.
As for the appeal of their devices, the PlayBook (while slammed in the media) is a really great tablet in terms of hardware and the software get's better with each release. The UI is undeniably next-gen (they're well ahead of the game here).
Their phones are rock-solid. They have best-in-class security. They have one of the best web browsers on the market (until iOS5, they had the best HTML5 support.) Their messaging software from email to BBM is, again, best-in-class (refined over more than 10 years to make text communication as simple seamless and fast as possible). Oh, the battery life is fantastic. While the 9900 got low-marks in the battery department, that's only if you compare it to older blackberries :) iOS and Android users who have made the switch find the battery life to be astonishing.
Really, the only thing wrong with their phones is that they're a bit boring. Using a Blackberry isn't an event like other platforms. I see the famous blinking light, type a response, and I'm back on-task. I don't need to engage with it like other phones. The myriad of shortcuts and UI designed for productivity make doing just about any task completely effortless.
For the technophiles, BBX (QNX for Blackberry) represents the future of mobile computing. It is, undeniably, the most advanced and capable mobile OS in the world. From stability to capability, QNX is simply unmatched. Developers will love the TaT designed Cascades UI Framework, which lets developers do some pretty amazing things, almost effortlessly.
What's not to love?
Well, if you want *real* push email, you'll already have a Blackberry, so ... what exactly is your point again?
Congratulations?
See thePowerOfGrayskull's comment above:
IF you have the physical device, and IF you have developer access to it, and IF you explicitly sideload this... then some additional access has been obtained to the OS.
Unlike the iPhone/Android "jailbreak" concept, this lets you muck about in the OS but doesn't give any way to overwrite the bootloader.
It's an interesting proof of concept, and certainly something RIM should be looking into ... but it also isn't the fatal flaw in RIM security that much of the popular tech press is reporting.
It's not a major issue, and RIM will undoubtedly fix it (they usually catch this sort of thing and patch it long before it's discovered).
Best Buy is trying to dump these for $199.
Only about $99 too high for me.
Not for everyone else -- they're sold-out almost everywhere.
Still, RIM is on track to convert to Android.
In what twisted world? RIM has the most advanced, capable, and secure mobile OS around! Switching to Android would be taking a massive step backward.
And privacy isn't much of a problem for RIM any more. They are no more or less secure than Facebook
When it comes to mobile security, RIM is still #1 -- oh, and no other player even comes close. To compare the historically masterful security of RIM to the joke that is Facebook is like saying Fort Knox security is on-par with a hide-a-key rock.
their corporate clients are losing any hope of being safe from the prying eyes of sovreign states.
Oh, FFS, this nonsense again? As always, if you're running BES you're secure. No Government can spy on you. RIM can't give away the keys because they don't have them.
I know that it's fun for you to bash RIM. However, security and their new OS are two of RIM's massive strengths (they've been leading the competition here for years). You should try picking on them for actual weaknesses, you might have more success.
In addition, the notion that '8 cups of water a day' is of therapeutic benefit to any extent is also completely bunk.
Before you call something bunk, you need to do the science.
I say an experiment is in order! Let's give one group of patents 8 cups of water a day and another group 0 cups of water a day to see if a difference in their health develops after a few days.
(Yes, I know the water thing is nonsense.)
Step two, though, is to phase out BleakBerry OS and go to a modified Android for their handsets.
I've heard this before. It's, quite possibly, the worst idea ever. Not only would RIM then become "just another android phone vendor", they'd be giving up QNX. As you already know, QNX is the most advanced,capable, stable, and secure mobile OS around.
Besides, with BBX comes the ability to run Android apps. While it won't convert all apps, the limitations are not nearly as vast as the barely-informed on Slashdot would have you believe. Essentially, if it's a "normal" app (like a game, calculator, whatever) it's very likely to "just work". This gives them some measure of access to the Android app infrastructure, which is a nice advantage.
What's with all this "RIM is unreliable" nonsense? Apple's MobileMe has been down more this year that RIM has in the last 10. They've had 3 outages in the last decade, the longest being the most recent (still less than a day for most users). Even then, most of their users were completely unaffected; many of those affected only experienced some slowdowns. Oh, and RIM didn't lose a single message.
RIM is more reliable than your service provider. Hell, the electricity in your house is more likely to go out than RIM's services.
So, when was the last time any decent technology company had a three day outage? Well, I don't know about three days, but in 2008 Apple's MobileMe service was out for 18 days -- and that's a $99/year service! iCloud and Siri have also already experienced outages -- WTF?
Google also suffers from outages, again, far more often than RIM. All things considered, RIM is the only company that you can seriously rely on to provide consistent service.
Are you actually advocating determinism? Do you also advocate blood-letting or other scientifically outdated ideas?
there's little hope of human civilization lasting more than 10^20th years.
Thank goodness -- I was terrified that it would only be 10^15 years!
Oddly enough, the Blackberry PlayBook will, in fact, run windows 3.1
Now you can get your "ski free" and "rodent's revenge" fix on the go!
That's because no IM app (iMessage included) comes close to matching the features of BBM.
Even better, I don't have to give out my email address or phone number to connect with other BBM users.
It's definitely worth that price. However the original for 500 it definitely isn't
Why? It has the most advanced mobile operating system on the market, hardware that is top-of-the-line, and a brilliant and innovative UI. Bridge even negates the need for an additional data plan when on the go.
The only complaint I've seen about the PB was the lack of native email -- which is a complete non-issue for blackberry owners (who would just use bridge anyway) and most consumers (who'd just use web mail like they do on their computers). Besides, if you really need it, there are a number of third-party apps. No on criticized the build quality, the UI, OS, or the hardware specs.
You get a lot more with the Playbook than most other tablets at that price point. $200 is a steal.
Now someone needs to hack android onto it :)
Why? You'd be giving up so much to gain ... what, exactly? More apps? Kind of silly, as you can already load many (most?) Android apps now if you're willing to put in a tiny bit of effort (BBH-Tool does it in one click) -- or, you know, just wait until February.
Try this giant list
From personal experience, I can recommend WINKS. It's ridiculously easy to use.
$50 million to compensate for hundreds of thousands of infringing uses of sound recordings.
$50 million is only like 2 or 3 pirated mp3's here in the states.
While the Fire looks virtually identical to the PlayBook, they're actually very different in terms of what's under the hood.
Still, I agree that QNX offers some serious advantages over other mobile operating systems. We'll know more next year when we see the new BBX handsets and the PlayBook 2.0 software update.
The Apple products I've had all exceeded their stated battery life.
I guess you didn't "upgrade" to the iPhone 4S then.
I agree. JavaScript can be a very nice and simple language, if you know what features to avoid.
Aside from general advice, like "code first for readability" and "don't do anything clever", any developer would do well to stay well clear of creating their own objects (except in the rare case where it helps readability), avoid anonymous functions, interact with the DOM only in a few well-defined and obvious places, and register event handlers in one place (if at all possible).
Oh, and learn to use the var keyword. Saying clear of anonymous functions and proper use of var will save you from dealing with most of problems caused by JS bizarre and unintuitive scoping rules.
It's not a complete list, but it's a good start -- even for developers who are intimately familiar with all of the details of JS, as it'll make their code readable to the zillions of other (lesser) JS developers who may need to maintain or just learn from your code in the future.
our company has a mix of Android and iPhones and we have had more issues with iPhones! And don't get me started with Black Berry, most people I know are glad they ditch their BB phones!
Glad to ditch their BB phones? What antique BB's did you have them running? I know they're reliable and easy to manage, but your users seem to also want the features in the new BB's like the browser, which beats out all but iOS 5.
Anyhow, had you read the article, you'd know that 12.6% of all technical support calls related to hardware failures for Android, 9.3% for Windows Phones, 8% for Apple, and only 5.5% for BlackBerry.
The headline should read "Blackberry handsets most reliable, Android the least"
Instead of asking "What does this story have to do with Android?" You should be asking "What does this story have to do with Apple?" Which is just some random company in the middle of the list.
Resistive sucks
Nonsense! For many uses, resistive touch screens are much better than capacitive.