If you write it in J2ME, and stick to a relatively commonly used subset of J2ME, you'll be able to run it on any phone you might have that supports java. iPhone is a nice flavour of the month, but will you ALWAYS have an iPhone? If there's any chance of ever switching phones, suddenly all your objective C is useless. If you target J2ME, you'll be able to run it on any Blackberry or Nokia phone at least, and possibly Android as well (though admittedly I'm not too familiar with Android).
it gave seats to people not [...] voted into power.
This is not always a bad thing by necessity. I recall a while back there was a push to change from an appointed to elected senate. I was watching an interview with one of the current senators, unfortunately her name escapes me. She was firmly against the idea of an elected senate, and her reasons were something along the lines of (paraphrased) "if we go to an elected senate, it will take less than a decade for every seat to fill up with rich white men with large campaign chests". Now here is a woman with the power to approve and reject legal status for some of our most important issues, and she enjoys the ability to speak frankly and openly about these issues, with no fear of reprisal. I'd love to hear an elected senator say the same thing on national television. More likely you'd get a bunch of dancing around the issue, with the senator hoping to muster enough votes to keep their jobs.
Moral of the story - electing people to power is not always necessarily the best way to go about things.
Just out of curiosity, does that Separate+ plugin do the job well enough? People are always constantly bitching about the lack of CMYK support, and now it seems it's here. If it does indeed do a good enough job, what other reasons are holding professional publishers back from using Gimp? Please don't say that it's harder to use than photoshop - which one is harder to use all depends on which one you're familiar with. I'm asking what kind of fundamental limitations are there that prevent publishing houses from using it?
Follow it for a month or two. That's about how long it took me to sort of understand what was going on (I was bored in a mostly do-nothing job:) ). Or go down to my other post in this article and check out some of my recommended arcs. For the first few weeks I had no idea what was going on, but the more you read the more it grows on you. I've come to see Ray and Beef (two main characters) as sort of old friends. As someone who likes Arrested Development and Wes Anderson movies, I highly recommend Achewood. And I think all three appeal to the same part of my personality.
Today's strip is a continuation of a story arc that goes back a week or two....which is a continuation of another theme that was developed three years back or so. Achewood is something you have to know how to read. If you just read a comic or two here or there, you're probably not going to get it. You have to follow it for a few weeks before it even begins to make a little bit of sense. After you get to know the characters a bit, it becomes much more enjoyable.
XKCD is funny in a one-off, quick laugh kind of way. It's very clever, but there are no real characters. I find reading even a bad Achewood strip more rewarding than most XKCDs. To me, each Achewood character has their own voice, and their own personality - you feel like you personally know these cats.
I also find the dialogue between the characters hilarious, despite the seemingly staggering number of people here on Slashdot who don't seem to "get it".
this just stinks of the same quality as the occasional "MS did something not noteworthy, but we can spin it to be negative" article
Apple releases one of the most anticipated phones in recent history, only to find that it performs HORRIBLY in the real world. It drops calls, the UI is slow, people complain about having to reboot it several times per day. There are stories about updates taking 18 hours, and updates failing and users having to restore the factory image. Then Apple releases iTunes 8 - lots of neat features, only it crashes the OS whenever it's installed on Windows Vista. Now Apple releases new iPod touches, complete with wifi, and they don't work on more than half the networks in the world.
Apple used to put out some quality stuff, but I don't know what's going through their head these days. It seems that the last 3 major releases they've had have fallen flat on their faces straight out the gate. There are still apologists that tell people "oh you're just putting a negative spin on it", but you have to admit, something's been up with Apple lately.
Maybe it is a ploy to make the iphone a little crappier. It was too good. They think they need to bring it down a little.. I just "upgraded" my phone today and had to spend the next two hours restoring the phone due to a crash in the upgrade.
Admittedly, it's been some time since I've used wine. But I remember back in the day playing Civ III on Wine under Linux with a semi-dated computer, and it was almost unplayable. _REALLY_ slow animations, even doing something as simple as clicking and holding the mouse to move a unit from one point to another took a good 5 seconds (running in its native Windows on the same machine, it took less than 1/2 a second). Have things improved at all in this respect? While Civ III was indeed playable, it was much less than fun with the game play reduced to a snail's pace.
Ok, sure. If I really wanted to, as in going to the gym 7 days a week and running like a madman and really watching what I eat and paying thousands of dollars for a personal trainer, yeah I probably could. My point is that I get 10x the exercise of the average office guy, eat better than most people I know, and I don't have washboard abs, while other people get no exercise and eat whatever they feel like eating, and they have great bodies. Genetics plays a role, no matter how determined you are.
I seem to feel the need to post a counterpoint to just about everything you said, because I've noticed the complete opposite of your entire post. Think of this as an antipost to your post.
I did decrease my calorie consumption after university. Most of my diet consists of fresh vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts, tofu, and low fat seafoods. I get most of my protein from non-animal sources, I avoid white/bleached grains, and eat primarily vegetables, in sensible portion sizes. I made this shift in my diet probably two years ago. While I haven't been getting bigger, or fatter, I have been hovering around a 38" waist. I'm not pear-shaped or round, but you definitely can't see my abs. In addition to diet, for the last two years or so I have been going to the gym 3 times per week, playing four hours of soccer per week, baseball twice per week, and biking everywhere (I don't have a car, so 100% of my transit is by bicycle). I consider my lifestyle apart from my computer desk job to be very healthy - I eat right and I exercise. But it's just not in my genes to have the six pack and lean body. My father is the same way - he works construction for a living, goes to the gym every single day and runs for 45 minutes, and while he's not fat by any stretch of the imagination, he's definitely not lean and skinny. At the same time, I know people who are beanstalk-thin and eat whatever they want. Entire pizzas to themselves, entire pots of pasta with cream sauce, basically throwing dietary caution to the wind. Your diet plays a role in your body shape, but genetics does as well. And that's where I see this proposed "fat tax" as really inappropriate. In order for me to get to a 33" waist, I would pretty much have to starve myself to dangerous levels. It simply wouldn't be a safe thing for me to do with my body type.
As for sugary foods appearing at the supermarkets, I have always seen sugary foods in the supermarkets. Pulp-free juice has been around as long as I can remember, and we were begging our mom for sugary cereals since we were old enough to walk and talk and eat cereal. What I have noticed lately is the growth of that remote corner of the grocery store dedicated to organic food and healthy eating. What once was two or three shelves hidden away at the back of the store has expanded to be a good 15% of the place. Whole grain pastas, natural peanut butters, wild/brown rice, etc etc. Not only that, but I've been seeing "certified organic" alternatives to just about every product on the shelf, even outside of the organic section. This includes produce and preserves. It seems people are honestly more interested in putting better things in their bodies these days, and grocery stores all over the region have changed to reflect this in the last five years or so. This could however just be a difference between where you and I live (I'm north of the border in Canada).
Yes but that won't count towards the record attempt, if that's what you're going for. The only thing that will count is going to mozilla's sites and downloading the installer like a normal person.
It depends on the machine. I measured my old (7 years old or so) Dell with a kill a watt the other day, and with the machine idle it was pulling in 80W. The monitor was another 50W. This is doing nothing, the computer just sitting there and looking at you waiting for instructions. That's about the same as keeping a very bright incandescent lightbulb on 24/7. Then again, this is technology from 7 years ago with a 15" CRT monitor, so YMMV with a newer machine.
I did the same test with my 3 year old iBook. Sitting idle it drew 50W or so, but when I put it to sleep the consumption went down to 2W. So it is worth it to suspend your machines when you're not around.
To each his own. If you swap "Gnome desktop" and "OS X GUI" in that sentence you have something a little closer to my situation. OS X bothers me, and I love Gnome.
Someone working in tech is more likely to be working on the automation that replaces other workers than to be replaced by automation, unless you define "tech" to be something like working in a call center. No matter how many machines we have doing our jobs for us, there will always be people at the helm designing better machines. Until, that is, the machines become sentient and start to improve themselves without human intervention, at which point machine designers will lose their jobs in droves.
And then who will there be to buy art from the artist?:)
Whatever happened to that "install this plugin" dialog that used to appear in Firefox? This is always how I installed flash in the past. I visit a page that needs flash, a little bar pops up with an "install missing plugins" box, and when I click it the browser just goes to work and makes it all happen.
"lots of useful third-party apps that make you want to carry it with you in your personal life, not just when your job tells you to"
I don't understand this. People are always going on about how the blackberry is lacking all these third party apps, but really, I can't think of anything that mine doesn't do that I would want it to do. Using my blackberry that my work gives me, I can:
-browse the web -listen to my music -create/view multimedia -send/receive email in real time -use IM -make/receive phone calls -find my way around with GPS
I've stopped carrying around my normal cell phone in favour of my 8110. I use it literally 24 hours a day (even during the night, as an alarm clock). At any given time I'm probably on the phone, casually pinging emails back and forth with friends and family, chatting on IM, looking something up on the web, or en route to somewhere listening to music. I pretty much can't think of anything I would want to do that it doesn't already do. So why all this stigma? What are these 3rd party apps that everyone is going on about that this device is so lacking?
I see this a lot. People go with Teksavvy and they're rabid with loyalty. They must be doing _something_ right. I'm moving in a few months and they're definitely the first option I'm looking into, based on this fact alone.
Slashdot Mirror
If you write it in J2ME, and stick to a relatively commonly used subset of J2ME, you'll be able to run it on any phone you might have that supports java. iPhone is a nice flavour of the month, but will you ALWAYS have an iPhone? If there's any chance of ever switching phones, suddenly all your objective C is useless. If you target J2ME, you'll be able to run it on any Blackberry or Nokia phone at least, and possibly Android as well (though admittedly I'm not too familiar with Android).
Write it once, run it anywhere. Makes sense, no?
it gave seats to people not [...] voted into power.
This is not always a bad thing by necessity. I recall a while back there was a push to change from an appointed to elected senate. I was watching an interview with one of the current senators, unfortunately her name escapes me. She was firmly against the idea of an elected senate, and her reasons were something along the lines of (paraphrased) "if we go to an elected senate, it will take less than a decade for every seat to fill up with rich white men with large campaign chests". Now here is a woman with the power to approve and reject legal status for some of our most important issues, and she enjoys the ability to speak frankly and openly about these issues, with no fear of reprisal. I'd love to hear an elected senator say the same thing on national television. More likely you'd get a bunch of dancing around the issue, with the senator hoping to muster enough votes to keep their jobs.
Moral of the story - electing people to power is not always necessarily the best way to go about things.
Just out of curiosity, does that Separate+ plugin do the job well enough? People are always constantly bitching about the lack of CMYK support, and now it seems it's here. If it does indeed do a good enough job, what other reasons are holding professional publishers back from using Gimp? Please don't say that it's harder to use than photoshop - which one is harder to use all depends on which one you're familiar with. I'm asking what kind of fundamental limitations are there that prevent publishing houses from using it?
Follow it for a month or two. That's about how long it took me to sort of understand what was going on (I was bored in a mostly do-nothing job :) ). Or go down to my other post in this article and check out some of my recommended arcs. For the first few weeks I had no idea what was going on, but the more you read the more it grows on you. I've come to see Ray and Beef (two main characters) as sort of old friends. As someone who likes Arrested Development and Wes Anderson movies, I highly recommend Achewood. And I think all three appeal to the same part of my personality.
If you're like me, and want to show why this comic is so fantastic, post your fav arcs / one-offs here:
Great Arcs:
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05182006
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04052006
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=03212007
One-offs:
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07192006
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02112008
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02072008
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07032006
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=08252006
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=09192006
Today's strip is a continuation of a story arc that goes back a week or two....which is a continuation of another theme that was developed three years back or so. Achewood is something you have to know how to read. If you just read a comic or two here or there, you're probably not going to get it. You have to follow it for a few weeks before it even begins to make a little bit of sense. After you get to know the characters a bit, it becomes much more enjoyable.
XKCD is funny in a one-off, quick laugh kind of way. It's very clever, but there are no real characters. I find reading even a bad Achewood strip more rewarding than most XKCDs. To me, each Achewood character has their own voice, and their own personality - you feel like you personally know these cats.
I also find the dialogue between the characters hilarious, despite the seemingly staggering number of people here on Slashdot who don't seem to "get it".
Goes a whole lot further back than Intelliscreen.
http://www.blackberrycool.com/2005/03/bbtoday-overview/
this just stinks of the same quality as the occasional "MS did something not noteworthy, but we can spin it to be negative" article
Apple releases one of the most anticipated phones in recent history, only to find that it performs HORRIBLY in the real world. It drops calls, the UI is slow, people complain about having to reboot it several times per day. There are stories about updates taking 18 hours, and updates failing and users having to restore the factory image. Then Apple releases iTunes 8 - lots of neat features, only it crashes the OS whenever it's installed on Windows Vista. Now Apple releases new iPod touches, complete with wifi, and they don't work on more than half the networks in the world.
Apple used to put out some quality stuff, but I don't know what's going through their head these days. It seems that the last 3 major releases they've had have fallen flat on their faces straight out the gate. There are still apologists that tell people "oh you're just putting a negative spin on it", but you have to admit, something's been up with Apple lately.
Maybe it is a ploy to make the iphone a little crappier. It was too good. They think they need to bring it down a little..
I just "upgraded" my phone today and had to spend the next two hours restoring the phone due to a crash in the upgrade.
Wow. That does indeed sound too good.
Admittedly, it's been some time since I've used wine. But I remember back in the day playing Civ III on Wine under Linux with a semi-dated computer, and it was almost unplayable. _REALLY_ slow animations, even doing something as simple as clicking and holding the mouse to move a unit from one point to another took a good 5 seconds (running in its native Windows on the same machine, it took less than 1/2 a second). Have things improved at all in this respect? While Civ III was indeed playable, it was much less than fun with the game play reduced to a snail's pace.
That didn't work, but Google caught it
Ok, sure. If I really wanted to, as in going to the gym 7 days a week and running like a madman and really watching what I eat and paying thousands of dollars for a personal trainer, yeah I probably could. My point is that I get 10x the exercise of the average office guy, eat better than most people I know, and I don't have washboard abs, while other people get no exercise and eat whatever they feel like eating, and they have great bodies. Genetics plays a role, no matter how determined you are.
I seem to feel the need to post a counterpoint to just about everything you said, because I've noticed the complete opposite of your entire post. Think of this as an antipost to your post.
I did decrease my calorie consumption after university. Most of my diet consists of fresh vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts, tofu, and low fat seafoods. I get most of my protein from non-animal sources, I avoid white/bleached grains, and eat primarily vegetables, in sensible portion sizes. I made this shift in my diet probably two years ago. While I haven't been getting bigger, or fatter, I have been hovering around a 38" waist. I'm not pear-shaped or round, but you definitely can't see my abs. In addition to diet, for the last two years or so I have been going to the gym 3 times per week, playing four hours of soccer per week, baseball twice per week, and biking everywhere (I don't have a car, so 100% of my transit is by bicycle). I consider my lifestyle apart from my computer desk job to be very healthy - I eat right and I exercise. But it's just not in my genes to have the six pack and lean body. My father is the same way - he works construction for a living, goes to the gym every single day and runs for 45 minutes, and while he's not fat by any stretch of the imagination, he's definitely not lean and skinny. At the same time, I know people who are beanstalk-thin and eat whatever they want. Entire pizzas to themselves, entire pots of pasta with cream sauce, basically throwing dietary caution to the wind. Your diet plays a role in your body shape, but genetics does as well. And that's where I see this proposed "fat tax" as really inappropriate. In order for me to get to a 33" waist, I would pretty much have to starve myself to dangerous levels. It simply wouldn't be a safe thing for me to do with my body type.
As for sugary foods appearing at the supermarkets, I have always seen sugary foods in the supermarkets. Pulp-free juice has been around as long as I can remember, and we were begging our mom for sugary cereals since we were old enough to walk and talk and eat cereal. What I have noticed lately is the growth of that remote corner of the grocery store dedicated to organic food and healthy eating. What once was two or three shelves hidden away at the back of the store has expanded to be a good 15% of the place. Whole grain pastas, natural peanut butters, wild/brown rice, etc etc. Not only that, but I've been seeing "certified organic" alternatives to just about every product on the shelf, even outside of the organic section. This includes produce and preserves. It seems people are honestly more interested in putting better things in their bodies these days, and grocery stores all over the region have changed to reflect this in the last five years or so. This could however just be a difference between where you and I live (I'm north of the border in Canada).
I've been using FF3 for a while now, and I had to use safari the other day. It didn't do what FF3 did when I started typing stuff from my history.
After using FF3 for a while, other browsers, including FF2, are physically painful to use.
Yes but that won't count towards the record attempt, if that's what you're going for. The only thing that will count is going to mozilla's sites and downloading the installer like a normal person.
You owe me a new radiator.
It depends on the machine. I measured my old (7 years old or so) Dell with a kill a watt the other day, and with the machine idle it was pulling in 80W. The monitor was another 50W. This is doing nothing, the computer just sitting there and looking at you waiting for instructions. That's about the same as keeping a very bright incandescent lightbulb on 24/7. Then again, this is technology from 7 years ago with a 15" CRT monitor, so YMMV with a newer machine.
I did the same test with my 3 year old iBook. Sitting idle it drew 50W or so, but when I put it to sleep the consumption went down to 2W. So it is worth it to suspend your machines when you're not around.
Screw military applications - this means my roomba might be able to handle the stairs soon!
:)
Exciting times
To each his own. If you swap "Gnome desktop" and "OS X GUI" in that sentence you have something a little closer to my situation. OS X bothers me, and I love Gnome.
Someone working in tech is more likely to be working on the automation that replaces other workers than to be replaced by automation, unless you define "tech" to be something like working in a call center. No matter how many machines we have doing our jobs for us, there will always be people at the helm designing better machines. Until, that is, the machines become sentient and start to improve themselves without human intervention, at which point machine designers will lose their jobs in droves.
:)
And then who will there be to buy art from the artist?
When I think 'games', if there's one brand that comes to mind, it's Apple.
Whatever happened to that "install this plugin" dialog that used to appear in Firefox? This is always how I installed flash in the past. I visit a page that needs flash, a little bar pops up with an "install missing plugins" box, and when I click it the browser just goes to work and makes it all happen.
That was a good system. Why didn't it work here?
"lots of useful third-party apps that make you want to carry it with you in your personal life, not just when your job tells you to"
I don't understand this. People are always going on about how the blackberry is lacking all these third party apps, but really, I can't think of anything that mine doesn't do that I would want it to do. Using my blackberry that my work gives me, I can:
-browse the web
-listen to my music
-create/view multimedia
-send/receive email in real time
-use IM
-make/receive phone calls
-find my way around with GPS
I've stopped carrying around my normal cell phone in favour of my 8110. I use it literally 24 hours a day (even during the night, as an alarm clock). At any given time I'm probably on the phone, casually pinging emails back and forth with friends and family, chatting on IM, looking something up on the web, or en route to somewhere listening to music. I pretty much can't think of anything I would want to do that it doesn't already do. So why all this stigma? What are these 3rd party apps that everyone is going on about that this device is so lacking?
"You've never seen MySpace have you?"
I don't think we should be taking MySpace as an example to be followed. In any respect whatsoever.
I see this a lot. People go with Teksavvy and they're rabid with loyalty. They must be doing _something_ right. I'm moving in a few months and they're definitely the first option I'm looking into, based on this fact alone.