You see this type of thing a lot in healthcare actually (not usually so egregious). IT has a requirement to follow policy and legal regulations, (HIPAA, SOX, HITECH, etc).
Correction: Everyone is required to follow policy and regulations.
If there were no more trolls on Slashdot I wouldn't enjoy this forum half as much. It may be hard for you to understand, but some of us aren't particularly thin-skinned or prudish and we don't take the kind of content that's posted on Slashdot all that deadly seriously. I browse at -1; you, however, may choose to up your threshold a little bit so that you'll be less likely to see troll posts (once they're modded). The decision not to censor Slashdot was made many years before you ever started coming here, and I don't see any trends or new developments that I'd consider compelling reasons to change that decision.
I value reading, not publishers, not making more money for people who didn't write the book. I don't care about your business model.
But that's a little disingenuous, don't you think? One hundred percent of the money you pay for a book doesn't go to the author, therefore you refuse to give the author anything. You start out saying it's not the price, then proceed to give ten arguments why you won't spend money on books. And I still say books don't cost that much. A book costs less than a meal in a restaurant -- which took more effort to make?
Spending money on used books instead of new ones supports local used bookstores, so I respect and approve of that. But you act like you have some kind of vendetta against new books, which still doesn't make any sense to me. I don't think you've done the math. A trade paperback today costs less than four gallons of gas, which might let you drive for an hour. I'll take the book, and I'll be happy the author got to make some money from it.
What are you smoking? The full quote is: "There's no stand-alone Flash app for Android. The installer simply adds Flash support to the existing Android Web browser, much like the Flash plug-in does for desktop browsers." That's what it does. Your link is for Adobe AIR, which is a different product from Flash Player (which was what I was reviewing). But if you must know, there's no standalone Adobe AIR app either.
RIAs that don't work on 4 inch screens? OMG switch to HTML!
The Xoom has an eight-inch screen. And "switch to HTML" is my advice, because I've hardly found any HTML sites that suffer as badly on a tablet as Flash content does. You don't have to believe the review. If you don't, go ahead and buy a Motorola Xoom (or some other Android tablet) and enjoy Flash to your heart's content. People who have actually tried it already, on the other hand, know the review is accurate.
Book prices have become very bloated these days, and the advent of cursed "trade paperbacks" pretty much stopped me from really seeking new books out, unless their by authors I know.
Seriously? One of those "cursed" paperbacks still costs less than an IMAX movie, which only lasts 100 minutes. Assuming neither is discounted, a book costs less than a DVD or a CD. For a guy who talks about reading, you sure don't seem to value it very much. And what's so "cursed" about a high-quality paperback edition with comfortable-sized type?
None of what you just said has anything to do with reviewing a beta product. (For the record: I hate Flash and have it blocked everywhere)
--Jeremy
And if you read the review you'll see that I address that, and that few if any of the problems I found could be attributed to the player still being in beta on the Xoom.
So, my choices are ads for free news sites, or, The Daily? I'll go with option #3 - AdFree, which blocks all ad content on an Android (rooted) device.
I swear, you'd think people like InfoWorld's Neil McAllister were as smart as they sound. Oh, but wait, he wants the "default" experience. M'kay, then he shouldn't run "beta" products.
You're a pretty clever guy, I guess. So how do you figure a mainstream tech publication is going to run a review of a user experience that you can only get if you root your tablet? How many Xooms do you think Motorola has sold, how many of those are going to be rooted, and how many of those rooted Xooms are going to have a good user experience running Flash? (Read the review for a hint.)
Shown in a demo, but nobody has tried it, I wonder why? Can you provide a link to a review please?
Oh come on, you really think Microsoft Office is written with so much assembly language code that it would require a substantial rewrite to run on ARM?
Getting an application to run on multiple operating systems is hard, sure. But when Microsoft has already implemented the entire Windows OS and all its APIs? They could probably have Office running in a day.
if enough people decide it is a good idea and participate, it may take much shorter than you can imagine.
Designing and implementing a new programming language that's intended as a direct challenge to Java... by committee... using a distributed development model... "much shorter than I can imagine"? Have you followed the history of Java at all? Or of any language?
linux prevailed, firefox prevailed.
And both were written in a language people already knew.
It's stupid commentary about how 48fps films require twice as much film compared to 24 fps films of the same length (meaning Kodak gets twice as much money).
Ah. Well, since Jackson will be shooting The Hobbit using the Epic Red digital damera, that really was pretty lame.
Q. How will Pure Digital’s products be sold and serviced? A: For the time being, Pure Digital will continue to sell their product as they do today, on the web, via retail stores and through on-line retailers. Together Cisco and Pure Digital will work to expand sales opportunities for these exciting products.
Q. How will Cisco and Pure Digital customers be affected by the acquisition? A: Cisco often acquires companies that can accelerate the development of a product, technology or platform. With Pure Digital, Cisco acquires consumer-friendly video products and technology, as well as a brand with mass-market appeal. Pure Digital customers will continue to receive the same great products and technology they are accustomed to receiving and will experience no negative impact in terms of features or service.
Can anyone explain the editorializing in the summary? I searched TFA and I can't find mention of Kodak or Stanley Kubrick anywhere. Why would Kodak be happy that Peter Jackson is shooting at a higher framerate? As far as I know, all modern 3D movies are shot with digital cameras. And what does Kubrick have to do with anything? For all anyone knows, he'd be shooting digital today, too -- digital cinema cameras weren't even around when he died.
Seriously? If everyone would stop buying these issues, they'd stop and go back to actual plots.
Sadly, I already have. Between non-event-events like these character deaths and company-wide "mega-events" that are nothing more than weak stories padded out to cross over into every single book the company publishes, I just have no more patience for comics. Who can afford to buy ten issues of comics featuring characters they don't care for just to follow a "major event" story that will have no lasting impact on any of the characters whatsoever -- especially when each issue is $4 a pop? Fatigue has set in, and they've pretty much run me out of the comics market.
I think it should be stressed that the doctor was somehow regenerated, ie the same being gets a new body.
And yet, while they say it's "the same being," each actor is pretty much given free reign to interpret the character as he sees fit. The character's appearance changes, his mode of dress changes, his speech patterns change, even his personality can change. Because of the nature of this particular character, though, the audience always goes along with it. It's a very lucky series in that respect.
I guess we can give the guy a little bit of a break. He opens the article with "When I was a child..." and proceeds to talk about watching a movie with his mum... a movie that came out in 1993. Little wonder that he doesn't realize that the story with Gandalf and the white robes was written 40 years before he was born.
And of course, replacing Dr. Who's became the norm back long before most of us were even born.
I don't think that counts. The whole point there was that they wanted to continue the series, but the actor didn't. They didn't really leave the audience hanging -- the regeneration usually happened in the last episode of the series, not the first episode of the new series. Other series have replaced actors for ongoing roles; Doctor Who just came up with a fun (if cheap) excuse for it.
This isn't really a sci-fi problem. It's called shitty clichéd writing. Is nobody here old enough to remember "Who shot J.R."?
Every other sci-fi thread on/. I hear a million people claiming Genre Series XYZ is the greatest literature known to man, surpassing all the known classics of history, and that anybody who doesn't eat, sleep, and breathe genre fiction is just a small-minded idiot who lacks vision and creative thinking. Can I seriously now be hearing someone on here suggest that the bulk of science fiction actually fucking sucks? Say it ain't so.
Replying to myself because I forgot to mention: If anything, the real crime about the modern programmable graphing calculators -- and this includes HP and TI, both -- is that the manuals suck so incredibly hard. With the HP 50G, which is probably the most complicated calculator ever built, you get this dinky manual that barely scratches the surface of what it can do. It doesn't even mention that programming the calculator is even possible, let alone explain how to do it. If you want to get into that, you can delve into not one, but two "real" manuals, each of which is the size of a college textbook -- but those manuals are provided in PDF form only, and they are not included with the calculator, you must download them from HP's site (once you locate the calculator section). It's a travesty. Most people have no idea what these calculators can really do -- and by "most people" I mean the ones who buy them! Thus, you sit in a class and you look over the shoulder of a guy who has one of these fancy calculators, and he's not doing anything that you couldn't do with an $8 special from the office supply store. Why not? Because nobody ever told him how. That's probably the main advantage TI has: In a lot of classrooms, the instructors explain how to use the calculators as part of the curriculum. No such luck with HP, where it's probably just as easy to teach yourself piano tuning as it is to learn all of the functions of a high-end HP calculator.
The HP-48 and TI-85 were a good value 15 years ago. Now they are nice, but way overpriced. Seriously, the old HP scientific calculators used to be really expensive. Now you can get a decent scientific calculator for $10-15. Why isn't the same true of graphing calculators?
People keep calling them "graphing calculators." I've never used the graphing function on my HP 50G more than once or twice. On the other hand, you can buy cheap, solar-powered scientific graphing calculators for $20 or so. But that's not why you buy an HP 50G.
I suspect the high price is something like the high price of Microsoft Office. Sure, nobody needs to do every single thing a high-end HP calculator can do. But is there any cheap scientific calculator on the market that can solve algebraic equations with unit conversion? Do they have statistical functions built in? How about libraries to handle all the basic functions you need for electrical engineering? Do they have all the well-known mathematical constants predefined? Can you load up a library that will let you call up the molecular mass of any chemical compound you enter with the touch of one button, allowing you to plug those figures into formulas as you go along? And so on.
"Sure," you say, "but my Android phone could do all of that with the right software. And it would be faster at it, too, because the processor is much faster than the calculator. If I wanted to do graphs, the graphs would look nicer, too, because the screen is better." All true. And yet, where is "the right software"? I know of no package for an Android phone that can do all that. And significantly, HP has invested in the engineering so that the answers you get out of an HP calculator for (for example) engineering equations will be correct. Remember that standard floating-point math is not going to cut it for, say, financial calculations. It's HP's ass on the line. What Android developer is going to step up and offer that for less than $100?
I agree that there doesn't seem to be much middle ground, but I wouldn't say there's none. I have a ~$15 solar-powered Casio that can handle a lot of heavy math (including integration and derivation), has about 40 scientific constants built-in, and can do unit conversions. It sounds like the main reason you can't find what you want is that the only company that ever made calculators like you describe was HP, and HP has not exactly been chasing after the calculator market the way TI has. TI's products are mainly geared toward college students, while it sounds like you want something more practical. I empathize, but I suggest that the chair you're sitting on probably doesn't perform any functions at all other than giving you a place to plant your ass, and it probably cost more than the $120 it costs to get an HP 50G.
In the calculus classes at my school, calculators were not required, but their use was encouraged as a learning tool... except during exams, where they were forbidden.
To me the policy was analogous to that of the organic chemistry classes, where homework counted almost nothing toward your grade and in some cases wasn't collected at all. If you never turned in any homework, it wouldn't hurt your grade... but if you thought you were going to pass the exams without doing the work, you were in for a rude awakening.
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You see this type of thing a lot in healthcare actually (not usually so egregious). IT has a requirement to follow policy and legal regulations, (HIPAA, SOX, HITECH, etc).
Correction: Everyone is required to follow policy and regulations.
If there were no more trolls on Slashdot I wouldn't enjoy this forum half as much. It may be hard for you to understand, but some of us aren't particularly thin-skinned or prudish and we don't take the kind of content that's posted on Slashdot all that deadly seriously. I browse at -1; you, however, may choose to up your threshold a little bit so that you'll be less likely to see troll posts (once they're modded). The decision not to censor Slashdot was made many years before you ever started coming here, and I don't see any trends or new developments that I'd consider compelling reasons to change that decision.
I value reading, not publishers, not making more money for people who didn't write the book. I don't care about your business model.
But that's a little disingenuous, don't you think? One hundred percent of the money you pay for a book doesn't go to the author, therefore you refuse to give the author anything. You start out saying it's not the price, then proceed to give ten arguments why you won't spend money on books. And I still say books don't cost that much. A book costs less than a meal in a restaurant -- which took more effort to make?
Spending money on used books instead of new ones supports local used bookstores, so I respect and approve of that. But you act like you have some kind of vendetta against new books, which still doesn't make any sense to me. I don't think you've done the math. A trade paperback today costs less than four gallons of gas, which might let you drive for an hour. I'll take the book, and I'll be happy the author got to make some money from it.
There's no stand-alone Flash app for Android.
And a simple Google search shows you're wrong: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/02/adobe-air-2-6-for-android-is-now-available.html
What are you smoking? The full quote is: "There's no stand-alone Flash app for Android. The installer simply adds Flash support to the existing Android Web browser, much like the Flash plug-in does for desktop browsers." That's what it does. Your link is for Adobe AIR, which is a different product from Flash Player (which was what I was reviewing). But if you must know, there's no standalone Adobe AIR app either.
RIAs that don't work on 4 inch screens? OMG switch to HTML!
The Xoom has an eight-inch screen. And "switch to HTML" is my advice, because I've hardly found any HTML sites that suffer as badly on a tablet as Flash content does. You don't have to believe the review. If you don't, go ahead and buy a Motorola Xoom (or some other Android tablet) and enjoy Flash to your heart's content. People who have actually tried it already, on the other hand, know the review is accurate.
Book prices have become very bloated these days, and the advent of cursed "trade paperbacks" pretty much stopped me from really seeking new books out, unless their by authors I know.
Seriously? One of those "cursed" paperbacks still costs less than an IMAX movie, which only lasts 100 minutes. Assuming neither is discounted, a book costs less than a DVD or a CD. For a guy who talks about reading, you sure don't seem to value it very much. And what's so "cursed" about a high-quality paperback edition with comfortable-sized type?
None of what you just said has anything to do with reviewing a beta product. (For the record: I hate Flash and have it blocked everywhere)
--Jeremy
And if you read the review you'll see that I address that, and that few if any of the problems I found could be attributed to the player still being in beta on the Xoom.
Reading the story, that guy appears to have an agenda. I can't take him as a credible source.
What's the agenda as you see it, may I ask?
So, my choices are ads for free news sites, or, The Daily? I'll go with option #3 - AdFree, which blocks all ad content on an Android (rooted) device.
I swear, you'd think people like InfoWorld's Neil McAllister were as smart as they sound. Oh, but wait, he wants the "default" experience. M'kay, then he shouldn't run "beta" products.
You're a pretty clever guy, I guess. So how do you figure a mainstream tech publication is going to run a review of a user experience that you can only get if you root your tablet? How many Xooms do you think Motorola has sold, how many of those are going to be rooted, and how many of those rooted Xooms are going to have a good user experience running Flash? (Read the review for a hint.)
And yes, I am InfoWorld's Neil McAllister.
Shown in a demo, but nobody has tried it, I wonder why? Can you provide a link to a review please?
Oh come on, you really think Microsoft Office is written with so much assembly language code that it would require a substantial rewrite to run on ARM?
Getting an application to run on multiple operating systems is hard, sure. But when Microsoft has already implemented the entire Windows OS and all its APIs? They could probably have Office running in a day.
if enough people decide it is a good idea and participate, it may take much shorter than you can imagine.
Designing and implementing a new programming language that's intended as a direct challenge to Java... by committee... using a distributed development model... "much shorter than I can imagine"? Have you followed the history of Java at all? Or of any language?
linux prevailed, firefox prevailed.
And both were written in a language people already knew.
A "Java killer" that relies on the JVM to run sounds like it's in for an uphill battle.
Writing an SDK from scratch in a homebrewed language that does everything the Java SDK does? Well, good luck anyway.
It's stupid commentary about how 48fps films require twice as much film compared to 24 fps films of the same length (meaning Kodak gets twice as much money).
Ah. Well, since Jackson will be shooting The Hobbit using the Epic Red digital damera, that really was pretty lame.
From Cisco's FAQ about the acquisition:
Q. How will Pure Digital’s products be sold and serviced?
A: For the time being, Pure Digital will continue to sell their product as they do today, on the web, via retail stores and through on-line retailers. Together Cisco and Pure Digital will work to expand sales opportunities for these exciting products.
Q. How will Cisco and Pure Digital customers be affected by the acquisition?
A: Cisco often acquires companies that can accelerate the development of a product, technology or platform. With Pure Digital, Cisco acquires consumer-friendly video products and technology, as well as a brand with mass-market appeal. Pure Digital customers will continue to receive the same great products and technology they are accustomed to receiving and will experience no negative impact in terms of features or service.
So much for truth in marketing.
Can anyone explain the editorializing in the summary? I searched TFA and I can't find mention of Kodak or Stanley Kubrick anywhere. Why would Kodak be happy that Peter Jackson is shooting at a higher framerate? As far as I know, all modern 3D movies are shot with digital cameras. And what does Kubrick have to do with anything? For all anyone knows, he'd be shooting digital today, too -- digital cinema cameras weren't even around when he died.
Not to mention that 60FPS is overkill - the human eye can't see any faster than 50FPS.
When I travel to the UK and Europe it takes me several days before I stop seeing the "flickeriness" of 50Hz televisions. Why is that?
Seriously? If everyone would stop buying these issues, they'd stop and go back to actual plots.
Sadly, I already have. Between non-event-events like these character deaths and company-wide "mega-events" that are nothing more than weak stories padded out to cross over into every single book the company publishes, I just have no more patience for comics. Who can afford to buy ten issues of comics featuring characters they don't care for just to follow a "major event" story that will have no lasting impact on any of the characters whatsoever -- especially when each issue is $4 a pop? Fatigue has set in, and they've pretty much run me out of the comics market.
I think it should be stressed that the doctor was somehow regenerated, ie the same being gets a new body.
And yet, while they say it's "the same being," each actor is pretty much given free reign to interpret the character as he sees fit. The character's appearance changes, his mode of dress changes, his speech patterns change, even his personality can change. Because of the nature of this particular character, though, the audience always goes along with it. It's a very lucky series in that respect.
Ever since the death of Superman woke up an audience for DC, every couple of years they kill or maim someone iconic just for the publicity.
Apparently it works. Marvel just announced plans to kill off a major character every quarter.
I guess we can give the guy a little bit of a break. He opens the article with "When I was a child..." and proceeds to talk about watching a movie with his mum... a movie that came out in 1993. Little wonder that he doesn't realize that the story with Gandalf and the white robes was written 40 years before he was born.
Then again, the same was true of MS Office, Operating Systems, and everything else back in the 80s and early 90s. Expectations have changed.
If I'm honest, if I hadn't taught myself Forth in the 80s, I might have gone with a TI. ;-)
And of course, replacing Dr. Who's became the norm back long before most of us were even born.
I don't think that counts. The whole point there was that they wanted to continue the series, but the actor didn't. They didn't really leave the audience hanging -- the regeneration usually happened in the last episode of the series, not the first episode of the new series. Other series have replaced actors for ongoing roles; Doctor Who just came up with a fun (if cheap) excuse for it.
This isn't really a sci-fi problem. It's called shitty clichéd writing. Is nobody here old enough to remember "Who shot J.R."?
Every other sci-fi thread on /. I hear a million people claiming Genre Series XYZ is the greatest literature known to man, surpassing all the known classics of history, and that anybody who doesn't eat, sleep, and breathe genre fiction is just a small-minded idiot who lacks vision and creative thinking. Can I seriously now be hearing someone on here suggest that the bulk of science fiction actually fucking sucks? Say it ain't so.
Sturgeon's Law, people.
Replying to myself because I forgot to mention: If anything, the real crime about the modern programmable graphing calculators -- and this includes HP and TI, both -- is that the manuals suck so incredibly hard. With the HP 50G, which is probably the most complicated calculator ever built, you get this dinky manual that barely scratches the surface of what it can do. It doesn't even mention that programming the calculator is even possible, let alone explain how to do it. If you want to get into that, you can delve into not one, but two "real" manuals, each of which is the size of a college textbook -- but those manuals are provided in PDF form only, and they are not included with the calculator, you must download them from HP's site (once you locate the calculator section). It's a travesty. Most people have no idea what these calculators can really do -- and by "most people" I mean the ones who buy them! Thus, you sit in a class and you look over the shoulder of a guy who has one of these fancy calculators, and he's not doing anything that you couldn't do with an $8 special from the office supply store. Why not? Because nobody ever told him how. That's probably the main advantage TI has: In a lot of classrooms, the instructors explain how to use the calculators as part of the curriculum. No such luck with HP, where it's probably just as easy to teach yourself piano tuning as it is to learn all of the functions of a high-end HP calculator.
The HP-48 and TI-85 were a good value 15 years ago. Now they are nice, but way overpriced. Seriously, the old HP scientific calculators used to be really expensive. Now you can get a decent scientific calculator for $10-15. Why isn't the same true of graphing calculators?
People keep calling them "graphing calculators." I've never used the graphing function on my HP 50G more than once or twice. On the other hand, you can buy cheap, solar-powered scientific graphing calculators for $20 or so. But that's not why you buy an HP 50G.
I suspect the high price is something like the high price of Microsoft Office. Sure, nobody needs to do every single thing a high-end HP calculator can do. But is there any cheap scientific calculator on the market that can solve algebraic equations with unit conversion? Do they have statistical functions built in? How about libraries to handle all the basic functions you need for electrical engineering? Do they have all the well-known mathematical constants predefined? Can you load up a library that will let you call up the molecular mass of any chemical compound you enter with the touch of one button, allowing you to plug those figures into formulas as you go along? And so on.
"Sure," you say, "but my Android phone could do all of that with the right software. And it would be faster at it, too, because the processor is much faster than the calculator. If I wanted to do graphs, the graphs would look nicer, too, because the screen is better." All true. And yet, where is "the right software"? I know of no package for an Android phone that can do all that. And significantly, HP has invested in the engineering so that the answers you get out of an HP calculator for (for example) engineering equations will be correct. Remember that standard floating-point math is not going to cut it for, say, financial calculations. It's HP's ass on the line. What Android developer is going to step up and offer that for less than $100?
I agree that there doesn't seem to be much middle ground, but I wouldn't say there's none. I have a ~$15 solar-powered Casio that can handle a lot of heavy math (including integration and derivation), has about 40 scientific constants built-in, and can do unit conversions. It sounds like the main reason you can't find what you want is that the only company that ever made calculators like you describe was HP, and HP has not exactly been chasing after the calculator market the way TI has. TI's products are mainly geared toward college students, while it sounds like you want something more practical. I empathize, but I suggest that the chair you're sitting on probably doesn't perform any functions at all other than giving you a place to plant your ass, and it probably cost more than the $120 it costs to get an HP 50G.
In the calculus classes at my school, calculators were not required, but their use was encouraged as a learning tool ... except during exams, where they were forbidden.
To me the policy was analogous to that of the organic chemistry classes, where homework counted almost nothing toward your grade and in some cases wasn't collected at all. If you never turned in any homework, it wouldn't hurt your grade ... but if you thought you were going to pass the exams without doing the work, you were in for a rude awakening.