I'm not sure if most handset vendors just don't care, since they really want you to buy the new hardware, whether they just don't have a sufficient history of in-house software expertise, or whether the vendors of low-power mobile silicon are far nastier about driver blobs and things than their PC counterparts; but smartphones seem surprisingly glitchy for a fixed platform product with substantial vendor control over most of the software.
They are too busy pushing the marketing for the next big thing to let something petty like actually testing the product get in the way. See they know then can fool customers into buying poor quality crap, then they just pull the model before glitches are sorted for next big thing. So the customer never has a trusty older model to go to. We still buy the shit, so why should they spend more to make it better?
I'm all for progress but life was better when a new model lasted say 3 years instead of 1, and early adopters took the risks and could replace with same towards the end of the cycle if they liked it but it broke or they lost it. Meanwhile buying slightly older tech had it's benefits too - products were ironed out and bugs were actually fixed. Now you replace one immature piece of junk with another, and if you actually find something that works well for you and it comes to an untimely demise, you're stuck gambling on another piece of unreliable untested shit.
Nothing the management of HP has announced lately has actually stuck. It is bad enough that they are indecisive, but the fact that they can't stick to a decision means I'm not touching anything HP for a very long time. It would not surprise me if after open sourcing it and a lot of developers put a lot of time and effort into it, they attempted to close it back up.
They're moving towards a complete lease model as opposed to ownership.
You already lease your software anyway.
This version of Windows will pretty much make you lease your hardware what with the "secure" boot for all practical purposes. And you'll be leasing any administrator access MS might grant you as well.
Actually it will push me to Linux - something I thought i'd never do. I've always used Microsoft Windows because it was the better solution - it runs more of the software I want to run (including games and graphics intensive apps) and thus gave me the most flexibility. But now Windows gaming is all but dead, all the apps have become ridiculously priced (Have you seen what Photoshop costs these days???) and now they want to control what I can run. Seeya! Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out.
Persians first calculated the volume of the earth, as a sphere. Invented spherical trigonometry, and all kinds of things.
Remember all that "Arab scientists and mathematicians" kind of talk? None of 'em were arabs. Mostly Persians, with roots in Khorasan - writing in Arabic.
It's similar to calling Sir Issac Newton a "Latin Physicist" because of the language used in the "Principia".
A set of two AA batteries would be enough to power a keyboard using the BCM20730 Bluetooth chip to connect with a computer for its entire lifetime
The silly thing is, chances are keyboards using such chip would actually include that set of two AA batteries.
As opposed to sticking a 1 cm^2 solar cell + supercapacitor onto it. Or a mechanism for "tilt back & forth a few times, use rest of the week". Well you get the point: if low-power enough, use that to get rid of batteries, not just prolong their life.
No thanks. I want to be able to replace the batteries if they die sooner than expected without throwing out the whole keyboard. This is exactly where things are headed. "I'm sorry your keyboard only lasted 2 years sir. You can buy our new improved model for just $79.95 which has been tested and rated to work for 15 years".....all lies designed to make you throw out perfectly functional equipment by crippling it.
Most stuff nowadays is cheap shit made in India or China or whatever? None of it is going to work in ten years time. You'll be lucky if you're still using it in 2 or 3 years. And that's if we've not moved onto another even better standard than Bluetooth, which doesn't seem to have taken off outside of headsets.
I have plenty of cheap newer stuff that has lasted me for a few years and I imagine will make 10. I have too many old wired keyboards at my house and don't have the heart to throw them out since they all work.
Out of interest, why exactly don't *all* TVs/DBD players etc use bluetooth? It would be quite handy to be able to use any phone made in the last 10 years to control them all using free, intuitive software, rather than a pile of ugly plastic crap, all of which need battery maintenance, all work in different ways etc?
For one thing interfeerence. Too many bluetooth devices will saturate your 2.4GHz band very quickly. You can also get interference from microwave ovens. Still IR has it's issues too. I'd like to see something on a different band that doesn't require line of sight.
Why not put wires on the key board (perhaps even a USB connection), and the battery is not even needed. Wow.
Added bonus - the kids and wife are less likely to walk away with it and misplace it. I don't know how much of my life I've wasted looking for remote controls.
We're seeing this with point and shoot cameras now. As recently as 2-3 years ago models that ran on AA batteries existed and some of them had decent battery life (a couple of hundred shots with flash). Now every new camera model is tied to a different proprietary lithium battery.
Yes, but the batteries are smaller, denser, and last longer. What is the problem, exactly?
Several problems: - Forget to charge your battery? You're out of luck! You won't be able to get a standard replacement alkaline battery for a couple of bucks at the corner store - Looked after your camera for many years and want to sell it or show your children a vintage camera? You're out of luck! Your battery is too old to hold charge and they don't make batteries for that model camera any more - Have a lot of different cameras, and want to share a couple of sets of batteries between them? You're out of luck. Each camera you own uses a different battery. You need at least one per camera - You're a camera enthusiast and want to buy spare battteries? You'll have to decide which camera you need a spare battery for. You can't afford $30 x number of spares x cameras
I've seen a lot of silly justifications ranging from the technology keeps improving so why would you want to use the old camera to who owns lots of cameras. But I promise you for me and many others these things matter. We talk about recycling and reuse, have shopping bags too flimsy to hold our goods that we are now charged for, conserve water, and use less than optimal lighting solutions to conserve energy, but the moment a company stands to make a profit by making something throw away or selling you a whole bunch of junk when one item would suffice, well the environment goes out the window. It's moronic to be this wasteful.
I'm not sure what kind of camera you use, but the rechargeable, proprietary battery that came with my Canon DSLR has worked well for years and gone through hundreds of charge / discharge cycles without any noticeable reduction in battery life. While not as cheap as AA batteries, I just looked up replacement cost and found that I could get a new battery for about $30 -- not that I have any need to at this point.
And while the battery is proprietary to canon, it's used in a number of their DSLR cameras, so there's a good chance that if I replace my camera I'll be able to keep the old battery as a spare.
Try getting that proprietary battery in another 5-10 years. There are vintage cameras operating today that are many decades old. This will not be the case in future.
Also some manufacturers are worse than others and have a new camera per camera or set of similar cameras. Others re-use the same battery.
What is needed is a set of standard sized Lithium batteries...There's no reason for the current mess other than planned obsolence and price gouging. Heck Sony has even started chipping their cameras the way printer manufacturers chip their cartridges to prevent 3rd party batteries from eating into their overpriced originals.
...to increase battery life of course....and when they fail in 3 years instead of the promised 10, you get to go out and buy a whole new keyboard. (It lasts 10 years so why allow the user to change the battery).
We're seeing this with point and shoot cameras now. As recently as 2-3 years ago models that ran on AA batteries existed and some of them had decent battery life (a couple of hundred shots with flash). Now every new camera model is tied to a different proprietary lithium battery. This is for the good of the consumer of course, not so the camera manufacturer can gouge on batteries and make it more cost effective for the customer to replace the camera every 2-3 years. Makes me want to spit.
I thought you were talkinga bout primary school and gifted students, and therefore was interested. As soon as I realized this was about politics, I became very bored.
Each person caught cheating would have incentive to dob someone else in whether or not they cheat. You would HAVE to tape it just to prove the person actually cheated. It would also be a huge distraction to have people pulled out of the test. If the lab is designed correctly, it should be trivial to make the Internet unreachable. If not, fix it and you're good to go for all future exams.
However all this is a waste of time - all you're testing here is memorisation skills. If that's what you need to test, fine. But otherwise design the test so the student only passes if they can actually apply the material. Then allow external references including the Internet.
Yep first thing I thought of was disconnect the Internet connection. Pulling each ethernet cable won't do it especially if you have LAN logins, but making the Internet unreachable should be trivial.
Our five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before so we can target them and take them out.
If you're going to quote Star Trek, get it right. The plan was for Kirk to shag as many green and blue 3 breasted women as he could.
I mean our fundamentalists already go crazy over basic science like evolution or climate change or conception, just imagine what they'd do if we weren't the Chosen planet,
They would be divided between falling over each other reinterpretting their holy book to show that it predicted first contact, and insisting that first contact is a sign of the end of days and the aliens are devils in disguise.
Yeah.... and the longer I do systems administration on Microsoft Windows based networks, the more of my hair turns gray. No beard though....
Reporter: Wow! he looks so old! He must be ancient! Sir! Sir!! Over here Sir! What is your secret to a long and healthy life? Greybeard: Women! Women in the morning! Women in the afternoon! Women at night? Reporter: And how old are you if you don't mind me asking, sir? Greybeard: On Tuesday I'll be 26.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if most handset vendors just don't care, since they really want you to buy the new hardware, whether they just don't have a sufficient history of in-house software expertise, or whether the vendors of low-power mobile silicon are far nastier about driver blobs and things than their PC counterparts; but smartphones seem surprisingly glitchy for a fixed platform product with substantial vendor control over most of the software.
They are too busy pushing the marketing for the next big thing to let something petty like actually testing the product get in the way. See they know then can fool customers into buying poor quality crap, then they just pull the model before glitches are sorted for next big thing. So the customer never has a trusty older model to go to. We still buy the shit, so why should they spend more to make it better?
I'm all for progress but life was better when a new model lasted say 3 years instead of 1, and early adopters took the risks and could replace with same towards the end of the cycle if they liked it but it broke or they lost it. Meanwhile buying slightly older tech had it's benefits too - products were ironed out and bugs were actually fixed. Now you replace one immature piece of junk with another, and if you actually find something that works well for you and it comes to an untimely demise, you're stuck gambling on another piece of unreliable untested shit.
Nothing the management of HP has announced lately has actually stuck. It is bad enough that they are indecisive, but the fact that they can't stick to a decision means I'm not touching anything HP for a very long time. It would not surprise me if after open sourcing it and a lot of developers put a lot of time and effort into it, they attempted to close it back up.
They're moving towards a complete lease model as opposed to ownership.
You already lease your software anyway.
This version of Windows will pretty much make you lease your hardware what with the "secure" boot for all practical purposes. And you'll be leasing any administrator access MS might grant you as well.
Actually it will push me to Linux - something I thought i'd never do. I've always used Microsoft Windows because it was the better solution - it runs more of the software I want to run (including games and graphics intensive apps) and thus gave me the most flexibility. But now Windows gaming is all but dead, all the apps have become ridiculously priced (Have you seen what Photoshop costs these days???) and now they want to control what I can run. Seeya! Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out.
Persians first calculated the volume of the earth, as a sphere. Invented spherical trigonometry, and all kinds of things.
Remember all that "Arab scientists and mathematicians" kind of talk? None of 'em were arabs. Mostly Persians, with roots in Khorasan - writing in Arabic.
It's similar to calling Sir Issac Newton a "Latin Physicist" because of the language used in the "Principia".
Let me guess. Isaac Newton was actually Persian?
GM badly bungled the execution of this vehicle, making a tin-can low quality econobox into a $40K car that nobody wants.
They should never have let this guy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F - design the thing
Dude have you ever tried getting a proprietary battery for a 1980s film camera? Good luck finding it cheap.
FTA:
A set of two AA batteries would be enough to power a keyboard using the BCM20730 Bluetooth chip to connect with a computer for its entire lifetime
The silly thing is, chances are keyboards using such chip would actually include that set of two AA batteries.
As opposed to sticking a 1 cm^2 solar cell + supercapacitor onto it. Or a mechanism for "tilt back & forth a few times, use rest of the week". Well you get the point: if low-power enough, use that to get rid of batteries, not just prolong their life.
No thanks. I want to be able to replace the batteries if they die sooner than expected without throwing out the whole keyboard. This is exactly where things are headed. "I'm sorry your keyboard only lasted 2 years sir. You can buy our new improved model for just $79.95 which has been tested and rated to work for 15 years".....all lies designed to make you throw out perfectly functional equipment by crippling it.
Most stuff nowadays is cheap shit made in India or China or whatever? None of it is going to work in ten years time. You'll be lucky if you're still using it in 2 or 3 years. And that's if we've not moved onto another even better standard than Bluetooth, which doesn't seem to have taken off outside of headsets.
I have plenty of cheap newer stuff that has lasted me for a few years and I imagine will make 10. I have too many old wired keyboards at my house and don't have the heart to throw them out since they all work.
Out of interest, why exactly don't *all* TVs/DBD players etc use bluetooth? It would be quite handy to be able to use any phone made in the last 10 years to control them all using free, intuitive software, rather than a pile of ugly plastic crap, all of which need battery maintenance, all work in different ways etc?
For one thing interfeerence. Too many bluetooth devices will saturate your 2.4GHz band very quickly. You can also get interference from microwave ovens. Still IR has it's issues too. I'd like to see something on a different band that doesn't require line of sight.
Why not put wires on the key board (perhaps even a USB connection), and the battery is not even needed. Wow.
Added bonus - the kids and wife are less likely to walk away with it and misplace it. I don't know how much of my life I've wasted looking for remote controls.
We're seeing this with point and shoot cameras now. As recently as 2-3 years ago models that ran on AA batteries existed and some of them had decent battery life (a couple of hundred shots with flash). Now every new camera model is tied to a different proprietary lithium battery.
Yes, but the batteries are smaller, denser, and last longer. What is the problem, exactly?
Several problems:
- Forget to charge your battery? You're out of luck! You won't be able to get a standard replacement alkaline battery for a couple of bucks at the corner store
- Looked after your camera for many years and want to sell it or show your children a vintage camera? You're out of luck! Your battery is too old to hold charge and they don't make batteries for that model camera any more
- Have a lot of different cameras, and want to share a couple of sets of batteries between them? You're out of luck. Each camera you own uses a different battery. You need at least one per camera
- You're a camera enthusiast and want to buy spare battteries? You'll have to decide which camera you need a spare battery for. You can't afford $30 x number of spares x cameras
I've seen a lot of silly justifications ranging from the technology keeps improving so why would you want to use the old camera to who owns lots of cameras. But I promise you for me and many others these things matter. We talk about recycling and reuse, have shopping bags too flimsy to hold our goods that we are now charged for, conserve water, and use less than optimal lighting solutions to conserve energy, but the moment a company stands to make a profit by making something throw away or selling you a whole bunch of junk when one item would suffice, well the environment goes out the window. It's moronic to be this wasteful.
I'm not sure what kind of camera you use, but the rechargeable, proprietary battery that came with my Canon DSLR has worked well for years and gone through hundreds of charge / discharge cycles without any noticeable reduction in battery life. While not as cheap as AA batteries, I just looked up replacement cost and found that I could get a new battery for about $30 -- not that I have any need to at this point.
And while the battery is proprietary to canon, it's used in a number of their DSLR cameras, so there's a good chance that if I replace my camera I'll be able to keep the old battery as a spare.
Try getting that proprietary battery in another 5-10 years. There are vintage cameras operating today that are many decades old. This will not be the case in future.
Also some manufacturers are worse than others and have a new camera per camera or set of similar cameras. Others re-use the same battery.
What is needed is a set of standard sized Lithium batteries...There's no reason for the current mess other than planned obsolence and price gouging. Heck Sony has even started chipping their cameras the way printer manufacturers chip their cartridges to prevent 3rd party batteries from eating into their overpriced originals.
...to increase battery life of course....and when they fail in 3 years instead of the promised 10, you get to go out and buy a whole new keyboard. (It lasts 10 years so why allow the user to change the battery).
We're seeing this with point and shoot cameras now. As recently as 2-3 years ago models that ran on AA batteries existed and some of them had decent battery life (a couple of hundred shots with flash). Now every new camera model is tied to a different proprietary lithium battery. This is for the good of the consumer of course, not so the camera manufacturer can gouge on batteries and make it more cost effective for the customer to replace the camera every 2-3 years. Makes me want to spit.
I thought you were talkinga bout primary school and gifted students, and therefore was interested. As soon as I realized this was about politics, I became very bored.
Each person caught cheating would have incentive to dob someone else in whether or not they cheat. You would HAVE to tape it just to prove the person actually cheated. It would also be a huge distraction to have people pulled out of the test. If the lab is designed correctly, it should be trivial to make the Internet unreachable. If not, fix it and you're good to go for all future exams.
However all this is a waste of time - all you're testing here is memorisation skills. If that's what you need to test, fine. But otherwise design the test so the student only passes if they can actually apply the material. Then allow external references including the Internet.
Pull out the Ethernet connection. TADA!
Yep first thing I thought of was disconnect the Internet connection. Pulling each ethernet cable won't do it especially if you have LAN logins, but making the Internet unreachable should be trivial.
Our five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before so we can target them and take them out.
If you're going to quote Star Trek, get it right. The plan was for Kirk to shag as many green and blue 3 breasted women as he could.
I mean our fundamentalists already go crazy over basic science like evolution or climate change or conception, just imagine what they'd do if we weren't the Chosen planet,
They would be divided between falling over each other reinterpretting their holy book to show that it predicted first contact, and insisting that first contact is a sign of the end of days and the aliens are devils in disguise.
What if you got really sick?
I call this the 'Hit By A Bus' scenario. If you're hit by a bus in the next five minutes can the business carry on without you?
That's just lazy! If it takes more than 5 minutes to get out of the bus' way you deserve to be hit! :p~~~~
It doesn't seem to work anymore, but for a while they had "http://rim.jobs"...
I thought about going to http://head.jobs/ but I'm at work and would prefer not to risk being fired if it works.
Yeah.... and the longer I do systems administration on Microsoft Windows based networks, the more of my hair turns gray. No beard though....
Reporter: Wow! he looks so old! He must be ancient! Sir! Sir!! Over here Sir! What is your secret to a long and healthy life?
Greybeard: Women! Women in the morning! Women in the afternoon! Women at night?
Reporter: And how old are you if you don't mind me asking, sir?
Greybeard: On Tuesday I'll be 26.
Mix with current age elephants and unix-gurues - should make for diversity, while keeping the hairyness.
SSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHH!!!! PETA will hear you!
The ministry of truth.
Hey, great band!!!
Oh, for fuck's sake, that's your answer to everything. Social injustice?
What's the alternative? Blind social acceptance?
You could always join them. I'm sure you could pick up a Nazi uniform cheap on Ebay.
Censoring the Internet != Afternoon Egg McMuffin...
...and torture isn't a big mac, fries and a small coke. Your point? ;-)
That cute girl you see at the laundromat won't go out with you? Civil disobedience.
Absolutely. It's clearly a government conspiracy that she won't go out with you.
If only there were some way of coming across as a dangerous rebel.....I know.....CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE!!!!
If "Democracy" is so good, so perfect, why can't the Indians elect someone with more integrity?
Because demcracy as practiced by the western world requires that people vote for politicians.