I don't know which GT version you played, but I remember quite well that in GT4, there is a course (maybe Seattle or SF?) that has a downhill portion with step-like contour, and the car definitely went airborne between the steps. I remember very well that once that happened, before the car hit the ground again, the steering wheel has completely no effect.
But after another second, I figured that I would prefer Google to have this information than Verizon (where my caching DNS server currently forwards to)
Dude, all of your traffic are passing through your ISP already, what makes you think they won't log your DNS requests to Google if they found enough people are using it?
Isn't the whole point of Android is that it is "Open"?
How could your mobile operator prevent you from accessing any sites? They may block the site through their 3G network, but what prevents you from using Wifi, proxy, or thousands other way to work around it?
Why aren't there simple programs available for Optus customers to auto bypass it?
Are you saying it is easier to jail-break a closed iPhone than it is to work around simple blocks on the open Android?
Alternatively, you can make your own sushi as it is not very hard to do. If you can make a sandwich, you can definitely make sushi.
This is like saying "writing a scientific paper is not hard. If you can write high school essay, you can definitely write a paper.". While true in a very naive technical sense, it complete missed all the practical differences.
Also no wonder you don't eat sushi, if you think little or no skill is needed to make one, the sushi shops is your neighborhood must be very very bad.
Like a science paper, if you start with bad ingredients, even a sushi master cannot make anything good. However, part of being a master is the know how to pick good ingredients and discard bad ones, for sushi or for writing papers. Judging from you comments, I can only assume those who operate in your neighbor are not very good at sushi to start with.
Next time you travel to Asia, especially Japan, be sure to try some sushi to get a real taste of it. Ask your friends or even the hotel manager to recommend a good place, even if it may be a bit expensive. The experience would be worth the price.
Even if you ignore for the fact that owners of jailbroken iPhones are even less likely to pay for apps, i.e. assume the same percentage as normal iPhones.
So 400 apps sold to 95% normal iPhone owners. Extrapolate to the remaining 5% means 400x5/95~=21 people with jailbroken iPhone would would have bought the app if cracked version not available.
So it means at most ~5% (21/400) of "sales lost". Less if you take in account that fact that jailbreakers are not likely to buy any app anyway.
Strange that for/., when it comes to iPhone, all the flawed calculation from BSA are suddenly valid.
Aside from the typical/. China bashing, why is anyone here surprised by this at all?
I mean, if you keep pressuring a country to "enforce IP rights" and keep spreading propaganda, uh, educational message about how many billions was "lost" due to IP rights violations. Is it that a surprise that the group of people who stands to gain the most would be responding, who those who stand to lose money will drag their feet?
Are so many/.ers here so blinded by their anti-China prejudice that you cannot even realize that with over 1 billion people, there will be different groups of people with different agenda? What's the point of lumping this authors' guild with software pirates in this discussion?
What's more, isn't this exactly the case for American companies to demonstrated how IP rights should be respected? Or will this be another demonstration of pure greed? Do you think anyone in China is going to take "IP rights" seriously (there are few enough who does so, but supposedly we want that to change, right?) if Google demonstrates that US companies are just going violate others right when it suits them?
Perhaps it took them 10 years to find a Chinese court that will accept the case? That they are not optimistic nor rich enough to hope to win the case in US courts?
Or maybe it is just a pawn in the latest volley between the US-China trade disputes?
It could just be a small warning to US, that if they push too hard at China's IP law enforcement, they might find a few of their own companies being hit?
Maybe you never had this expierience, but in my school we have proffessors who cannot teach (who often do you poorly designed powerpoints) but still take attendance. It's easy to say, skip the lecture and read the book, and for a lot of classes I'd love to, but not surprisingly the worse the proffessor is the more they like to take attendance.
Yes, I have had these experience. What I learned is that is a no-win situation, so the best option is to walk away (drop the course) if possible.
If you have to stay, then you could just as well ignore the prof and read the book during the lectures (to meet the attendence requirement while not wasting the time). Generally, just suck it up. You will encounter plenty of such situation in your life at work anyway, treat these lectures as "specialtraining sessions" for your patience. What doesn't kill you makes your stronger. Try to make the most of each course you took, good or bad.
Do the research, pull together the resources, and present them as a whole. It's nice if you can propose that one book covers pretty much everything, but teaching exclusively from that one book is insane and produces cultists, not graduates.
Although I agree this method is great for learning from students' POV.
Unfortunately, if any prof actually did that, except for the more elite classes, they will get just as much (if not more) complains from students. E.g. (1) they can't find the materials in the book to study for the exam, (2) if the prof listed more than 1 primary book, they will complain the high cost of buying the books or unavailable from library. So they end up staying within one textbook and now he is being called insane.
A lot of times people who don't know about joins do the basic join of select x.a y.b from x, y where x.c = y.c Not realizing that Most SQL engines will take all the records of x and cross them with y so you will have x.records*y.records Loaded in your system, the it goes and removes the matches.
I don't know what RDBMS you used, but from my experience with both Oracle and DB2, neither would do something that stupid normally. I very much expect SQL Server, Sybase, Postgres, etc would not either, and I suspect even MySQL would be smarter than that.
In fact, I would say most RDBMS would NOT do that.
If yours is doing something so stupid on something so fundamental as a simple inner join, go and use another database.
I do agree that a lot of people have trouble writing sensible SQL though.
The interesting thing for me is I am old enough to remember when students complain that some professors actually still writes on the board instead of using powerpoint! Because (1) their handwriting is poor, (2) professors write too fast anyway, trying to copy and listen at the same time is too much for many students, (3) professors could send out the powerpoint if they used it, so students don't have to copy them down!
Now, cue a decade later, professors used powerpoints and student complained they do not write on the board.
Yeah, right.
Newsflash! Learning is hard work. Unlike watching movies where you just sit in stupor for 2 hours and be entertained, when you attend a lecture you work hard to absorb and understand the materials presented by the professor. Most professor don't have $100M movie budget and 2 years to prepare a 2 hour lecture to entertain you.
If the presentation is lacking, then you take the effort to understand the content from it. If you cannot find any content in the lecture, then the course is probably not for you, either too easy or too hard, go enroll in another course, or read the textbooks yourself if you think the lectures are too easy.
You are responsible for your own learning. And if you are good, you might have understood this already before you leave school.
Even now, in this office, my efforts to better myself and the department are being thwarted by mundane corporate politics, and a pair of managers that are a bit thick, and very resistant to change and to anyone they perceive as a threat (this is not my opinion; pretty much the whole department feels this way).
Go and find another job. Seriously.
If you are really as smart as you described, you should understand by now that stupid people will stay stupid no matter how many clues you gave them. (maybe you are still young yet?) Worse still, some stupid people hate to discover there are people smarter than they are, and your managers seem to be of this kind, trying to show them a better way will only get yourself a world of hurt, both emotionally and careerwise.
Use your smarts to find a job where your smarts can be utilized. If you have trouble with that, you may need to make some personal adjustment (attitude, social skills, etc), but you should be smart enough to handle that, right?
It seems you completely misunderstood my point, maybe my writing is too confusing.
What I mean is, you comparing the 50+ Android smartphones with 50 version of Ubuntu Linux, and I say that would be a true analogy only in the best case scenario. My past experience with the fragmentation of the Palm platform, and also the J2ME platform (which is unrelated to Palm), make me not as optimistic as you.
You might think paying more just so you don't have to look around is being stupid, it would be true if you have more time and interest than money. But when you earn enough money, with some to spare, but don't have as much time (due to work and family responsibilities) to compare the features of 10 or 20 similar smartphones, then you choice is (a) pick one at best guess and hope it works out, or (b) pay a premium for a brand name that you have confidence that it will work well.
Don't always discount people paying more for simple stupidity, not everyone has the time nor the interest to compare and weight the cost/benefit of slight technical details to save maybe 100 bucks (actually a comparable Android phone is not that much cheaper than iPhone anyway). The peace of mind and time saved would be easily worth ~20% of the price for many people, Apple understand this, and the huge sales of iPhone is a testament to it.
For owning an iPhone for 2 months, I have already bought maybe 20-30 USD worth of apps, and the process of buying apps is practically foolproof. My friend bought a HTC Magic, and he said when he tried to pay for an app he wanted, he found that he cannot pay because he is not living in the US! The payment system only works in some selected country (but not his), even though the HTC Magic is officially available where he lived! So basically he either has to not use the app, or he has to pirate the app, even though he intended to pay for it.
This is "user experience", it might not worth anything to you, but many people are willing to pay for it.
Apple is already having to deal with something similar between it's own versions of iPhone models, so it basically is not inevitable.
That is one of the problems, but Apple could still somewhat manage the issue as they are the sole source of new iPhone/iPod models. You can already see the problem for developers as some apps need to clarify exactly which model has been tested and which model will have missing features due to missing hardware (e.g. no compass in iPod).
With Android, no one could stop other manufacturer from make one with additional hardware (e.g. higher res, extra front facing camera) which could make some apps support additional function. While some would say this is a good thing. But from a marketing pov, too many choice is only going to confuse he average Joe, especially if the choices have real impact on his "user experience" (e.g. high screen res may make apps create for lower res look ugly, either due to scaling or smaller size). If he found a good app, he cannot automatically assume his friend's phone can run it as good.
I have seen this first hand on the Palm with Sony Clie series. A Palm app is no longer simply a Palm app, I have to look at the fine prints to see if it supports the Clie's resolution, and if it supports color, etc. For me, the user, the "Palm apps" space has fragmented into many small spaces, each for different hardware spec (160x160 mono, 160x160 color, 320x320 color, etc). I can imagine the pain it caused to the developers.
Similar problems with Java MIDP stuff. The core profile is so weak you can't much useful stuff there. Move up to higher profiles and you have to worry which phone actually supports the feature set you need. Too few phones and you got too small a market, too many phones and you got a huge testing effort.
What I see with the Android is the same thing happening.
Your scenario with 50+ ubuntu linux all capable of running most apps is the best case scenario, but I cannot find the same optimism from my past experience with the Palm platform and the Java MIDP platform.
Maybe I did not put it as eloquent as you did, I hope it is not because Android has become the sacred cow of/. and no criticism against it is tolerate.
Is it for real? IMO, this would be the worst thing that could happen for the Android platform!
Imagine what would a PC user who wants to try Linux reacts if he sees 50+ different distributions of Linux on the shelf! Each with different features, strengths and price (not free for the sake of analogy). He would be confused and do not know how to choose!
Good luck sorting out the features of different phones and the compatibility/usability of different apps among them. It would be worst than try to figure out if a given PC game can run properly on your home PC.
Having 100+ models works for ordinary mobile phones, as you mostly do not expect to install any extra software other than which comes with the phone. With a "smartphone" (I hate the term) that is practically a mini-PC, there is value in keeping a small set of uniform performance/feature profile. It is the same trade-off between PC gaming vs console gaming.
With two or three strong Android models, it has a chance of overtaking iPhone. With 50+ different models, average Joe is not going to bother to sort them out and just buy an iPhone.
I own both an iPhone and the PS3. I hate DRM as much as the usual/.er, but for Apple's App Store and Sony's PSN, I honestly admit they have hit the right balance, most importantly on the point that as a user, I am not perceptibly worse off due to the DRM.
E.g. with a DRM'ed CD or game, there would things that a legit buyer cannot do compared to a normal CD or game (namely, backup the content, or even use it normally). But for App Store and PSN, I get to do the usual things I do for what I bought there. Namely, I get to use the app on the iPhone, backup it up on PC. For PSN, I can play the game on my PS3, and re-download in case I replace my HD or my PS3 (yes, I know there is a limit, but frankly I don't expect to replace my PS3 as often I do with PCs).
What's more, I can buy stuff from App Store and PSN even more easily than buying a book from Amazon! (I didn't enable 1-click purchase in Amazon, but neither for App Store also) And I can get what I bought in less than a few minutes of download time, then I get to use it without a glitch.
Whatever criticism you level at Apple for tightly controlling the iPhone, at least they succeeded in making stuff "just works". Similarly for the PS3, but this kind of control is the norm for the console market. (And I guess the XBox 360 store would be similar, else it would lose a lot of market share to PS3)
I have my share of experience of tinkering with the PC, from the old days of tuning DOS config.sys to squeeze out the last byte out of EMS, mucking around interrupts of COM1 and COM2 to get CommandHQ to run using both mouse and modem. But as I got older and have more money but less time, I am more inclined to pay a bit more for stuff that works with minimum hassle.
What's more, with iPhone, I can safely recommend to any non-techy friends with the need of long explanation about how it works.
That's why the iPhone is selling so well. There won't be any "iPhone-killer" unless some other company can make their product with user experience at least just as good. So it is unlikely it will come from a US telecom company. There would be more chance if it came from Nintendo than Verizon.
because we are FAR better served as a country by having professional journalists and bloggers, than by having bloggers alone.
While I agree this statement on the basis that by "professional journalists" mean people who "reported fairly and factually on world events important to most people". However, I have to contend that most (but not all) "media" we see day to day, including Murdoch's, are NOT populated by "professional journalists".
The only "professional" about most journalists we see in the media are only the sense that they get paid, i.e. it is their "profession" as a journalist.
About "actually do research and write something", most media companies are only doing the "write something" part, and are seriously lacking in the "do research" part. Note that I said "most", I admit there are a few journalists out there that really "do research and write something".
So, given that the current business model only give you a handful of real "professional journalists" mixed in sea of "journalists" not much better than bloggers, I am not sure what is the value of preserving this business model by having Google pay those media companies. It is the same argument for supporting RIAA because a few of their "artists" are really talented and deserved to be paid. Well, I suppose most people would think there should be a better business model to achieve that goal.
Google is fairly high on contention for "most profitable site on the 'web." A big reason for why they are so profitable is that they have a trusted search engine & an only sliightly-less-trusted news aggrigator. Both of these two exist by pointing to work someone ELSE is doing.
While this is somewhat off-topic regarding Murdoch, I think this statement downplayed the value Google is providing.
Consider this, there are lots and lots of knowledge available in the world, both static like a cooking recipe, or dynamic like the news or a blog. But the fact is, for most of human history, these knowledge are not available cheaply and timely to most people. What Google did is making the knowledge that already exists on the web available to anyone, that alone is providing tremendous value to most people, and I congratulate them for thinking of a business model that can also make a profit doing it.
Is it really that hard to work out a fairly simple percentage in your head?
Unfortunately, yes, it is really that hard for many people in the US of A. I finally realized this fact after seeing a college undergraduate whips out a calculator to calculate this difficult multiplication: 8 x 1/4 to get the answer is 2.
When college students cannot do this kind of calculation in a glance, I don't expect they can calculate any percentage without a calculator.
Evolution is not a directed process based on what you do, but based on which traits survive and get passed to offspring.
There is no evolutionary pressure for your children to have a bigger stomach at all, i.e. those that have a smaller stomach are not more likely to die, nor will they have less chance to have children.
Actually, the opposite is more likely. Your children that is less suited to be a vegetarian, due to being less able to absorb nutrient from vegetarian diet, and assuming they take up the vegetarian life style, will have less problem at being obese, and would actually live longer and have a better chance at finding a good mate.
Thus the evolutionary pressure for your children is to have a digestive system NOT tuned at digesting vegetarian diet.
I find it disturbing, too, that the media just reports the polling companies' results, without reporting things like what questions were asked, in what order, how the poll was conducted or who commissioned it, all of which can have a big effect on the results. A lot of "push polling" goes on, especially when the polls are commissioned by special interest groups, business associations, unions or political parties themselves.
tl,dr. (Too long, didn't read).
Unfortunately, for most of the world, this will be the response from most readers if the media took the time to report on the details of the poll.
Although, really, in the internet age, the media could have added a link so anyone interested could see the details of the poll. However, I suspect doing so would just expose to world how ignorant/lazy the reporters are, because you may find most poll results are either horribly slanted or extremely poorly designed (to the point that the poll was designed to mislead will be obvious).
For example, I recall seeing a newpaper headline saying ">80% of women has been sexually assaulted at least once". Surprised at this, I RTFA, and it turned out the "poll" was done by an NGO aimed at helping rape victims, and they "polled" 8 (eight) of their staff to get this result. My view of that newspaper (and reporters/editors in general) dropped a few notch after that.
Slashdot Mirror
cars will be incapable of going airborne.
I don't know which GT version you played, but I remember quite well that in GT4, there is a course (maybe Seattle or SF?) that has a downhill portion with step-like contour, and the car definitely went airborne between the steps. I remember very well that once that happened, before the car hit the ground again, the steering wheel has completely no effect.
Can't say about the other aspects though.
But after another second, I figured that I would prefer Google to have this information than Verizon (where my caching DNS server currently forwards to)
Dude, all of your traffic are passing through your ISP already, what makes you think they won't log your DNS requests to Google if they found enough people are using it?
In fact, if GM REALLY wanted to excel, they would break themselves up, and have the divisions compete.
Yeah, IBM tried this wonderful idea a couple decades ago and it almost killed the company.
Isn't the whole point of Android is that it is "Open"?
How could your mobile operator prevent you from accessing any sites? They may block the site through their 3G network, but what prevents you from using Wifi, proxy, or thousands other way to work around it?
Why aren't there simple programs available for Optus customers to auto bypass it?
Are you saying it is easier to jail-break a closed iPhone than it is to work around simple blocks on the open Android?
Alternatively, you can make your own sushi as it is not very hard to do. If you can make a sandwich, you can definitely make sushi.
This is like saying "writing a scientific paper is not hard. If you can write high school essay, you can definitely write a paper.". While true in a very naive technical sense, it complete missed all the practical differences.
Also no wonder you don't eat sushi, if you think little or no skill is needed to make one, the sushi shops is your neighborhood must be very very bad.
Like a science paper, if you start with bad ingredients, even a sushi master cannot make anything good. However, part of being a master is the know how to pick good ingredients and discard bad ones, for sushi or for writing papers. Judging from you comments, I can only assume those who operate in your neighbor are not very good at sushi to start with.
Next time you travel to Asia, especially Japan, be sure to try some sushi to get a real taste of it. Ask your friends or even the hotel manager to recommend a good place, even if it may be a bit expensive. The experience would be worth the price.
I can do number 1 without jailbreaking my iPhone also (you can also buy one next time to travel to Hong Kong).
For number 2, Skype is available in App Store, why do you have to jailbreak to run it?
Exactly.
Even if you ignore for the fact that owners of jailbroken iPhones are even less likely to pay for apps, i.e. assume the same percentage as normal iPhones.
So 400 apps sold to 95% normal iPhone owners. Extrapolate to the remaining 5% means 400x5/95~=21 people with jailbroken iPhone would would have bought the app if cracked version not available.
So it means at most ~5% (21/400) of "sales lost". Less if you take in account that fact that jailbreakers are not likely to buy any app anyway.
Strange that for /., when it comes to iPhone, all the flawed calculation from BSA are suddenly valid.
Aside from the typical /. China bashing, why is anyone here surprised by this at all?
I mean, if you keep pressuring a country to "enforce IP rights" and keep spreading propaganda, uh, educational message about how many billions was "lost" due to IP rights violations. Is it that a surprise that the group of people who stands to gain the most would be responding, who those who stand to lose money will drag their feet?
Are so many /.ers here so blinded by their anti-China prejudice that you cannot even realize that with over 1 billion people, there will be different groups of people with different agenda? What's the point of lumping this authors' guild with software pirates in this discussion?
What's more, isn't this exactly the case for American companies to demonstrated how IP rights should be respected? Or will this be another demonstration of pure greed? Do you think anyone in China is going to take "IP rights" seriously (there are few enough who does so, but supposedly we want that to change, right?) if Google demonstrates that US companies are just going violate others right when it suits them?
Perhaps it took them 10 years to find a Chinese court that will accept the case? That they are not optimistic nor rich enough to hope to win the case in US courts?
Or maybe it is just a pawn in the latest volley between the US-China trade disputes?
It could just be a small warning to US, that if they push too hard at China's IP law enforcement, they might find a few of their own companies being hit?
Maybe you never had this expierience, but in my school we have proffessors who cannot teach (who often do you poorly designed powerpoints) but still take attendance. It's easy to say, skip the lecture and read the book, and for a lot of classes I'd love to, but not surprisingly the worse the proffessor is the more they like to take attendance.
Yes, I have had these experience. What I learned is that is a no-win situation, so the best option is to walk away (drop the course) if possible.
If you have to stay, then you could just as well ignore the prof and read the book during the lectures (to meet the attendence requirement while not wasting the time). Generally, just suck it up. You will encounter plenty of such situation in your life at work anyway, treat these lectures as "specialtraining sessions" for your patience. What doesn't kill you makes your stronger. Try to make the most of each course you took, good or bad.
Do the research, pull together the resources, and present them as a whole. It's nice if you can propose that one book covers pretty much everything, but teaching exclusively from that one book is insane and produces cultists, not graduates.
Although I agree this method is great for learning from students' POV.
Unfortunately, if any prof actually did that, except for the more elite classes, they will get just as much (if not more) complains from students. E.g. (1) they can't find the materials in the book to study for the exam, (2) if the prof listed more than 1 primary book, they will complain the high cost of buying the books or unavailable from library. So they end up staying within one textbook and now he is being called insane.
A lot of times people who don't know about joins do the basic join of select x.a y.b from x, y where x.c = y.c Not realizing that Most SQL engines will take all the records of x and cross them with y so you will have x.records*y.records Loaded in your system, the it goes and removes the matches.
I don't know what RDBMS you used, but from my experience with both Oracle and DB2, neither would do something that stupid normally. I very much expect SQL Server, Sybase, Postgres, etc would not either, and I suspect even MySQL would be smarter than that.
In fact, I would say most RDBMS would NOT do that.
If yours is doing something so stupid on something so fundamental as a simple inner join, go and use another database.
I do agree that a lot of people have trouble writing sensible SQL though.
The interesting thing for me is I am old enough to remember when students complain that some professors actually still writes on the board instead of using powerpoint! Because (1) their handwriting is poor, (2) professors write too fast anyway, trying to copy and listen at the same time is too much for many students, (3) professors could send out the powerpoint if they used it, so students don't have to copy them down!
Now, cue a decade later, professors used powerpoints and student complained they do not write on the board.
Yeah, right.
Newsflash! Learning is hard work. Unlike watching movies where you just sit in stupor for 2 hours and be entertained, when you attend a lecture you work hard to absorb and understand the materials presented by the professor. Most professor don't have $100M movie budget and 2 years to prepare a 2 hour lecture to entertain you.
If the presentation is lacking, then you take the effort to understand the content from it. If you cannot find any content in the lecture, then the course is probably not for you, either too easy or too hard, go enroll in another course, or read the textbooks yourself if you think the lectures are too easy.
You are responsible for your own learning. And if you are good, you might have understood this already before you leave school.
Even now, in this office, my efforts to better myself and the department are being thwarted by mundane corporate politics, and a pair of managers that are a bit thick, and very resistant to change and to anyone they perceive as a threat (this is not my opinion; pretty much the whole department feels this way).
Go and find another job. Seriously.
If you are really as smart as you described, you should understand by now that stupid people will stay stupid no matter how many clues you gave them. (maybe you are still young yet?) Worse still, some stupid people hate to discover there are people smarter than they are, and your managers seem to be of this kind, trying to show them a better way will only get yourself a world of hurt, both emotionally and careerwise.
Use your smarts to find a job where your smarts can be utilized. If you have trouble with that, you may need to make some personal adjustment (attitude, social skills, etc), but you should be smart enough to handle that, right?
It seems you completely misunderstood my point, maybe my writing is too confusing.
What I mean is, you comparing the 50+ Android smartphones with 50 version of Ubuntu Linux, and I say that would be a true analogy only in the best case scenario. My past experience with the fragmentation of the Palm platform, and also the J2ME platform (which is unrelated to Palm), make me not as optimistic as you.
You might think paying more just so you don't have to look around is being stupid, it would be true if you have more time and interest than money. But when you earn enough money, with some to spare, but don't have as much time (due to work and family responsibilities) to compare the features of 10 or 20 similar smartphones, then you choice is (a) pick one at best guess and hope it works out, or (b) pay a premium for a brand name that you have confidence that it will work well.
Don't always discount people paying more for simple stupidity, not everyone has the time nor the interest to compare and weight the cost/benefit of slight technical details to save maybe 100 bucks (actually a comparable Android phone is not that much cheaper than iPhone anyway). The peace of mind and time saved would be easily worth ~20% of the price for many people, Apple understand this, and the huge sales of iPhone is a testament to it.
For owning an iPhone for 2 months, I have already bought maybe 20-30 USD worth of apps, and the process of buying apps is practically foolproof. My friend bought a HTC Magic, and he said when he tried to pay for an app he wanted, he found that he cannot pay because he is not living in the US! The payment system only works in some selected country (but not his), even though the HTC Magic is officially available where he lived! So basically he either has to not use the app, or he has to pirate the app, even though he intended to pay for it.
This is "user experience", it might not worth anything to you, but many people are willing to pay for it.
Apple is already having to deal with something similar between it's own versions of iPhone models, so it basically is not inevitable.
That is one of the problems, but Apple could still somewhat manage the issue as they are the sole source of new iPhone/iPod models. You can already see the problem for developers as some apps need to clarify exactly which model has been tested and which model will have missing features due to missing hardware (e.g. no compass in iPod).
With Android, no one could stop other manufacturer from make one with additional hardware (e.g. higher res, extra front facing camera) which could make some apps support additional function. While some would say this is a good thing. But from a marketing pov, too many choice is only going to confuse he average Joe, especially if the choices have real impact on his "user experience" (e.g. high screen res may make apps create for lower res look ugly, either due to scaling or smaller size). If he found a good app, he cannot automatically assume his friend's phone can run it as good.
I have seen this first hand on the Palm with Sony Clie series. A Palm app is no longer simply a Palm app, I have to look at the fine prints to see if it supports the Clie's resolution, and if it supports color, etc. For me, the user, the "Palm apps" space has fragmented into many small spaces, each for different hardware spec (160x160 mono, 160x160 color, 320x320 color, etc). I can imagine the pain it caused to the developers.
Similar problems with Java MIDP stuff. The core profile is so weak you can't much useful stuff there. Move up to higher profiles and you have to worry which phone actually supports the feature set you need. Too few phones and you got too small a market, too many phones and you got a huge testing effort.
What I see with the Android is the same thing happening.
Your scenario with 50+ ubuntu linux all capable of running most apps is the best case scenario, but I cannot find the same optimism from my past experience with the Palm platform and the Java MIDP platform.
Agree, I got the same reaction, sometimes less is more. Unfortunately, my similar post http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1411079&cid=29807997 got modded as troll instead.
Maybe I did not put it as eloquent as you did, I hope it is not because Android has become the sacred cow of /. and no criticism against it is tolerate.
50+ Android phones coming?!
Is it for real? IMO, this would be the worst thing that could happen for the Android platform!
Imagine what would a PC user who wants to try Linux reacts if he sees 50+ different distributions of Linux on the shelf! Each with different features, strengths and price (not free for the sake of analogy). He would be confused and do not know how to choose!
Good luck sorting out the features of different phones and the compatibility/usability of different apps among them. It would be worst than try to figure out if a given PC game can run properly on your home PC.
Having 100+ models works for ordinary mobile phones, as you mostly do not expect to install any extra software other than which comes with the phone. With a "smartphone" (I hate the term) that is practically a mini-PC, there is value in keeping a small set of uniform performance/feature profile. It is the same trade-off between PC gaming vs console gaming.
With two or three strong Android models, it has a chance of overtaking iPhone. With 50+ different models, average Joe is not going to bother to sort them out and just buy an iPhone.
it's about the user experience
Exactly.
I own both an iPhone and the PS3. I hate DRM as much as the usual /.er, but for Apple's App Store and Sony's PSN, I honestly admit they have hit the right balance, most importantly on the point that as a user, I am not perceptibly worse off due to the DRM.
E.g. with a DRM'ed CD or game, there would things that a legit buyer cannot do compared to a normal CD or game (namely, backup the content, or even use it normally). But for App Store and PSN, I get to do the usual things I do for what I bought there. Namely, I get to use the app on the iPhone, backup it up on PC. For PSN, I can play the game on my PS3, and re-download in case I replace my HD or my PS3 (yes, I know there is a limit, but frankly I don't expect to replace my PS3 as often I do with PCs).
What's more, I can buy stuff from App Store and PSN even more easily than buying a book from Amazon! (I didn't enable 1-click purchase in Amazon, but neither for App Store also) And I can get what I bought in less than a few minutes of download time, then I get to use it without a glitch.
Whatever criticism you level at Apple for tightly controlling the iPhone, at least they succeeded in making stuff "just works". Similarly for the PS3, but this kind of control is the norm for the console market. (And I guess the XBox 360 store would be similar, else it would lose a lot of market share to PS3)
I have my share of experience of tinkering with the PC, from the old days of tuning DOS config.sys to squeeze out the last byte out of EMS, mucking around interrupts of COM1 and COM2 to get CommandHQ to run using both mouse and modem. But as I got older and have more money but less time, I am more inclined to pay a bit more for stuff that works with minimum hassle.
What's more, with iPhone, I can safely recommend to any non-techy friends with the need of long explanation about how it works.
That's why the iPhone is selling so well. There won't be any "iPhone-killer" unless some other company can make their product with user experience at least just as good. So it is unlikely it will come from a US telecom company. There would be more chance if it came from Nintendo than Verizon.
because we are FAR better served as a country by having professional journalists and bloggers, than by having bloggers alone.
While I agree this statement on the basis that by "professional journalists" mean people who "reported fairly and factually on world events important to most people". However, I have to contend that most (but not all) "media" we see day to day, including Murdoch's, are NOT populated by "professional journalists".
The only "professional" about most journalists we see in the media are only the sense that they get paid, i.e. it is their "profession" as a journalist.
About "actually do research and write something", most media companies are only doing the "write something" part, and are seriously lacking in the "do research" part. Note that I said "most", I admit there are a few journalists out there that really "do research and write something".
So, given that the current business model only give you a handful of real "professional journalists" mixed in sea of "journalists" not much better than bloggers, I am not sure what is the value of preserving this business model by having Google pay those media companies. It is the same argument for supporting RIAA because a few of their "artists" are really talented and deserved to be paid. Well, I suppose most people would think there should be a better business model to achieve that goal.
Google is fairly high on contention for "most profitable site on the 'web." A big reason for why they are so profitable is that they have a trusted search engine & an only sliightly-less-trusted news aggrigator. Both of these two exist by pointing to work someone ELSE is doing.
While this is somewhat off-topic regarding Murdoch, I think this statement downplayed the value Google is providing.
Consider this, there are lots and lots of knowledge available in the world, both static like a cooking recipe, or dynamic like the news or a blog. But the fact is, for most of human history, these knowledge are not available cheaply and timely to most people. What Google did is making the knowledge that already exists on the web available to anyone, that alone is providing tremendous value to most people, and I congratulate them for thinking of a business model that can also make a profit doing it.
Is it really that hard to work out a fairly simple percentage in your head?
Unfortunately, yes, it is really that hard for many people in the US of A. I finally realized this fact after seeing a college undergraduate whips out a calculator to calculate this difficult multiplication: 8 x 1/4 to get the answer is 2.
When college students cannot do this kind of calculation in a glance, I don't expect they can calculate any percentage without a calculator.
No, they won't.
Evolution is not a directed process based on what you do, but based on which traits survive and get passed to offspring.
There is no evolutionary pressure for your children to have a bigger stomach at all, i.e. those that have a smaller stomach are not more likely to die, nor will they have less chance to have children.
Actually, the opposite is more likely. Your children that is less suited to be a vegetarian, due to being less able to absorb nutrient from vegetarian diet, and assuming they take up the vegetarian life style, will have less problem at being obese, and would actually live longer and have a better chance at finding a good mate.
Thus the evolutionary pressure for your children is to have a digestive system NOT tuned at digesting vegetarian diet.
I really want to fix this problem
Easy, you just forward those email to your local newspaper on a slow news day. After hitting the front page, those email will stop right away.
I'm quite surprised iPhone hasn't had MMS yet. It has been on phones since like 2003.
Not surprisingly, this is only the case in the US. Same with the AT&T lock-in.
Here, iPhones can send/receive MMS just fine for a long while already, and I can plug any SIM card in it and it just works.
I find it disturbing, too, that the media just reports the polling companies' results, without reporting things like what questions were asked, in what order, how the poll was conducted or who commissioned it, all of which can have a big effect on the results. A lot of "push polling" goes on, especially when the polls are commissioned by special interest groups, business associations, unions or political parties themselves.
tl,dr. (Too long, didn't read).
Unfortunately, for most of the world, this will be the response from most readers if the media took the time to report on the details of the poll.
Although, really, in the internet age, the media could have added a link so anyone interested could see the details of the poll. However, I suspect doing so would just expose to world how ignorant/lazy the reporters are, because you may find most poll results are either horribly slanted or extremely poorly designed (to the point that the poll was designed to mislead will be obvious).
For example, I recall seeing a newpaper headline saying ">80% of women has been sexually assaulted at least once". Surprised at this, I RTFA, and it turned out the "poll" was done by an NGO aimed at helping rape victims, and they "polled" 8 (eight) of their staff to get this result. My view of that newspaper (and reporters/editors in general) dropped a few notch after that.