Golly, you make so many assumptions there I don't know where to start. I have no masters in marine biology, I've just lived by the ocean my whole life. I'm not thousands of miles away, either. One of the reasons that I wasn't overly surprised by this is that every 10-12 years something similar to this happens around here.
Last year it was millions of brown jellyfish all over the shore and in the water, in concentrations that none of the old-timers could ever remember having seen. It was bizarre, and shocking.
Once, back in the mid '80s, there was an unbelievable swarm of pelagic crabs--little red swimming guys about the size of a small crawfish. Nobody in the area had ever seen one before, but now they were covering the beaches up to the high tide mark--some live, some dead--for miles and miles up and down the coast. From a distance it was a thick band of crimson between the water and the rocks or dunes. They were thick in the water too. They've never come back.
Dont get me started on algae blooms.
These things happen. And yes, panicking about it is an overreaction.
They say that when they dry up, they turn powdery and blow away. So some blow onto the beach, dry into a powder, and blow around town, sticking to anything that's wet, including rain buckets.
You know, either that or they're really from outer space and this is chapter one of some sort of Robin Cook novel. All things considered, I'm gonna stick with the wind theory.
According to a ton of different reports on Google news, the substance was tested and found to be crustacean eggs of some type.
So crustaceans: crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles. Considering the location and volume, I'm suspecting something like a huge krill spawn that was swept onto the shore by unusual currents, a storm system or the like. As for it being toxic, that's pretty laughable. Toxic crustaceans are very few and far between (one that hasn't been eating toxic algae, and considering these are eggs, they haven't been eating anything).
As far the natives not seeing anything like this before... well it's a big planet. Completely natural, explainable things happen all over the globe every day that haven't happened in that particular spot for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Erm, download your podcasts over wi-fi and cache them on the phone for later listening pleasure. There goes 9/10ths of your data usage.
That isn't really your complaint, though. Your real complaint is that you were sold an unlimited plan and that's what you want. I understand, I really do. Went through it myself not too long back. However, if you take just a little step back you'll realize that radio spectrum isn't an unlimited resource, and with data usage growing at such phenomenal rates there's no real way to get people to be more efficient about their usage (like, for example, pulling your podcasts over landlines instead of clogging up cell towers with them) without usage limits of some sort.
The standard response at this point is to say that the bandwidth saturation problem is the carrier's problem because they are just being greedy, won't improve their network blah blah blah. OK, so put yourself in their shoes. Come up with a 5-year network hardware expansion plan that can compensate for unrestricted *exponential growth*. Let that sink in for a minute.
There's another option you're missing. 8) Make enough money to buy an individual insurance plan on your own. It's extremely expensive, and will probably be a big portion of your income unless you're pretty well-off, but people do it.
Otherwise good list, although I would quibble with 7... pretty much all full-time government workers get pretty damn good health care plans, not just the high ranking ones.
1984 called and they want their complaints back. Seriously, when the original Mac came out there was no end to the wailing and gnashing of teeth because it didn't boot into BASIC like the Apple ][, but into a GUI without a CLI at all. "How will I write a program? How can anything be accomplished on a machine that's so locked down and sealed up!?!" Of course, anyone who cared could get into it fairly easily, as evidenced by the explosion of shareware and freeware on the Mac
Jump forward 27 years and it's the same pious caterwauling about tablets. Yes, you can't really develop for a tablet on a tablet. You need another machine to actually do the work on, but those are hardly rare. I saw a couple of machines being turned in for recycling yesterday that would be perfectly adequate to develop on.
Besides, programming--while important--is not the be-all/end-all of creativity. Things I've personally witnessed being created on tablets: books being researched and written, artwork drawn, websites designed, music written AND performed live, video edited and published, photographs edited and retouched, numbers crunched, slide presentations put together... and it just goes on and on and on.
Technology is here to make the things we do easier and better. For the vast, vast majority it isn't an end in itself.
In general, the strategy is this: You want the opposing party's voters to have huge majorities in order to confine their influence to as few districts as possible, while arranging it so that your party has a small majority in as many districts as possible.
Needless to say, this is insane and doesn't follow logic in the slightest. In a fair/just system, districts would be chosen on a strict mathematical basis to create rectangular districts of equal population on some kind of a strict grid. Let the votes fall where they may.
If you disagree, perhaps you could explain why. Instead of, you know, calling me a troll and moving on.
To clarify, my position is that "Everyone who likes ___________ is an idiot!", is in fact a boring, useless and all-too pervasive theme on/., and that this is yet one more example.
I'm going to go way out on a limb and suggest that perhaps I got modded up because, I dunno, I'm not the only person who feels that way....but you know, hey, whatever: I'm the kind of idiot who thought he had a great time at Avatar 3D! I guess I didn't notice how miserable I was!
It's an entertainment program. I don't think anyone is being forced into anything.
What I'm hearing from you is "I want something, but I want it the way I want it for the price I want it." The person selling that thing can charge whatever they want for it, and sell whatever version they want. You don't have a right to have what you want, the way you want it, and for the price you want to pay. Why do you feel entitled to "have it your way?" When I was a kid we didn't even have a VCR, and we were just fine.
Here's an idea, if something costs more than you want to pay... then don't buy it. It's really not very complicated.
You don't acknowledge that reasonable people can have very different approaches to that topic? Is that correct? It's really hard to have a rational discussion on any topic if you can't establish that baseline.
To which phone are you referring? I had a Motorola MicroTAC (which is pretty damn American) way way back in the early '90s, and the only people who were dismissive were those who hated the idea of being reachable 24/7. Most everyone else just lusted after it. Especially geeks, because it looked like a trek communicator.
Typical geek blither-blather. "I don't like it therefore everyone who does is an idiot who's being duped." Here on/. I've seen this argument used against: Apple, craft beer, very spicy chiles, tablets in general, 3d film and TV, hybrid cars, wind power, solar power, drug laws, Democrats, Republicans and organized sports.
Just accept that people like different things and move on. I realize this is a strain to the borderline Asbergers types who are rife around here, but come on. Sometimes there isn't a "right answer" for everyone.
I use a 600k scoville-rated ghost pepper sauce on a daily basis. I'm a "non-taster" on the old scale, so I require a lot of stimulation in my food to find it enjoyable. The endorphin rush is significant and pleasurable.
In soup for example, I use a few drops, which gives me the effect of adding a ton of some milder hot sauce. The advantage is that I get a tiny fraction of the sodium that I would from Tabacso or something similar--and sodium's something I'm trying very hard to keep a lid on.
The interesting thing is that after a month or two of this, my tolerance level went through the roof. The great thing is that now that the heat has died away somewhat for me, the complex and fruity flavors of the ghost pepper itself really shine through. Delicious stuff.
I use Air Video to stream any kind of video file from my PC to my iOS devices. There's maybe a 2-5 second delay depending on format after hitting play, but the quality is flawless and the interface is really clean.
I would disagree. The iOS APIs specifically allow for graceful degradation of framerate in 3d rendering. To give a concrete example, when I switched from the iPhone 3GS to the 4, framerates for 3d games and augmented reality apps shot through the roof.
As far as adding adjustable graphics settings, it's completely unnecessary. With only a handful of devices to support, standard practice to to pre-select optimized settings for each device, which are transparently loaded without user involvement. Very elegant and very very easy for developers to implement.
I suspect that the only people who really use OSX server these days (beyond those you've mentioned) are big Mac labs at Uni's, or big Mac-only departments or businesses, like at the ad agency I used to work at.
How the hell is this still marked "insightful?" I have the AT&T unlimited data plan with my iPhone and every month go over 5GB, and have yet to see an additional charge or throttling. I think my highest usage month was something like 13GB (which takes a certain amount of doing over 3G, I tell you...).
Hey, if you want to astroturf for Sprint, feel free, but expect to get called on it.
I think the problem is when people who are smart and informed in their specific field of knowledge try to apply that experience and logic to other disciplines. Instead of realizing that they don't really understand the area, they transfer their feelings of competence and intelligence where they really don't belong.
The human ego is an interesting thing. For some reason, geek culture is rife with this kind of thing. It's hard for some people to admit that being smart about one thing doesn't equal being smart about everything.
There's clearly more than enough marketshare for both types of phones to co-exist.
The real answer is that "we" win, as long as the competition exists to drive innovation and downward pricing pressure in the industry. This is the real accomplishment of the iPhone. It wasn't a marketing thing, it was a wake-up call to an industry that had gotten exceptionally lazy and non-innovative. Keep handing out the same crap in smaller and skinnier packages with the same terrible interfaces, and eventually someone else is going to come along and eat your lunch. Read about the RIM internal reaction to the first iPhone demo, and you'll see what I mean.
What gets really funny is to look back at that first iPhone (what, 4 years ago now?) and realize what a crap phone it was by today's standards. It was slow, the network connection was glacial, the only features were the ones built in because there were no apps. The battery life was a fraction of what we have now. The camera was horrific. No GPS. I mean, seriously. And yet it was such a huge leap from the state of art (Razor v3? Ugh!) at the time that people literally believed that the demo was rigged. Why, with all of the billions and billions of dollars in the industry devoted to research, didn't RIM or Nokia or Sony or M-freaking-S come up with this? Why did it take Apple? Was it just a failure of imagination?
...for the same reason that people have been becoming scientists since well before the concept of "scientist" was codified. I'll give you a hint, and tell you a few things that it's not about: - fame - wealth - job security - the "cool factor" - the sexy colleagues - the easy job - the power - the influence...so what's left? Why, everything that truly matters.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Golly, you make so many assumptions there I don't know where to start. I have no masters in marine biology, I've just lived by the ocean my whole life. I'm not thousands of miles away, either. One of the reasons that I wasn't overly surprised by this is that every 10-12 years something similar to this happens around here.
Last year it was millions of brown jellyfish all over the shore and in the water, in concentrations that none of the old-timers could ever remember having seen. It was bizarre, and shocking.
Once, back in the mid '80s, there was an unbelievable swarm of pelagic crabs--little red swimming guys about the size of a small crawfish. Nobody in the area had ever seen one before, but now they were covering the beaches up to the high tide mark--some live, some dead--for miles and miles up and down the coast. From a distance it was a thick band of crimson between the water and the rocks or dunes. They were thick in the water too. They've never come back.
Dont get me started on algae blooms.
These things happen. And yes, panicking about it is an overreaction.
They say that when they dry up, they turn powdery and blow away. So some blow onto the beach, dry into a powder, and blow around town, sticking to anything that's wet, including rain buckets.
You know, either that or they're really from outer space and this is chapter one of some sort of Robin Cook novel. All things considered, I'm gonna stick with the wind theory.
According to a ton of different reports on Google news, the substance was tested and found to be crustacean eggs of some type.
So crustaceans: crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles. Considering the location and volume, I'm suspecting something like a huge krill spawn that was swept onto the shore by unusual currents, a storm system or the like. As for it being toxic, that's pretty laughable. Toxic crustaceans are very few and far between (one that hasn't been eating toxic algae, and considering these are eggs, they haven't been eating anything).
As far the natives not seeing anything like this before... well it's a big planet. Completely natural, explainable things happen all over the globe every day that haven't happened in that particular spot for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Erm, download your podcasts over wi-fi and cache them on the phone for later listening pleasure. There goes 9/10ths of your data usage.
That isn't really your complaint, though. Your real complaint is that you were sold an unlimited plan and that's what you want. I understand, I really do. Went through it myself not too long back. However, if you take just a little step back you'll realize that radio spectrum isn't an unlimited resource, and with data usage growing at such phenomenal rates there's no real way to get people to be more efficient about their usage (like, for example, pulling your podcasts over landlines instead of clogging up cell towers with them) without usage limits of some sort.
The standard response at this point is to say that the bandwidth saturation problem is the carrier's problem because they are just being greedy, won't improve their network blah blah blah. OK, so put yourself in their shoes. Come up with a 5-year network hardware expansion plan that can compensate for unrestricted *exponential growth*. Let that sink in for a minute.
There's another option you're missing.
8) Make enough money to buy an individual insurance plan on your own. It's extremely expensive, and will probably be a big portion of your income unless you're pretty well-off, but people do it.
Otherwise good list, although I would quibble with 7... pretty much all full-time government workers get pretty damn good health care plans, not just the high ranking ones.
1984 called and they want their complaints back. Seriously, when the original Mac came out there was no end to the wailing and gnashing of teeth because it didn't boot into BASIC like the Apple ][, but into a GUI without a CLI at all. "How will I write a program? How can anything be accomplished on a machine that's so locked down and sealed up!?!" Of course, anyone who cared could get into it fairly easily, as evidenced by the explosion of shareware and freeware on the Mac
Jump forward 27 years and it's the same pious caterwauling about tablets. Yes, you can't really develop for a tablet on a tablet. You need another machine to actually do the work on, but those are hardly rare. I saw a couple of machines being turned in for recycling yesterday that would be perfectly adequate to develop on.
Besides, programming--while important--is not the be-all/end-all of creativity. Things I've personally witnessed being created on tablets: books being researched and written, artwork drawn, websites designed, music written AND performed live, video edited and published, photographs edited and retouched, numbers crunched, slide presentations put together... and it just goes on and on and on.
Technology is here to make the things we do easier and better. For the vast, vast majority it isn't an end in itself.
In general, the strategy is this: You want the opposing party's voters to have huge majorities in order to confine their influence to as few districts as possible, while arranging it so that your party has a small majority in as many districts as possible.
Needless to say, this is insane and doesn't follow logic in the slightest. In a fair/just system, districts would be chosen on a strict mathematical basis to create rectangular districts of equal population on some kind of a strict grid. Let the votes fall where they may.
So, you don't have a choice to not take illegal drugs? Really?
If you disagree, perhaps you could explain why. Instead of, you know, calling me a troll and moving on.
To clarify, my position is that "Everyone who likes ___________ is an idiot!", is in fact a boring, useless and all-too pervasive theme on /., and that this is yet one more example.
I'm going to go way out on a limb and suggest that perhaps I got modded up because, I dunno, I'm not the only person who feels that way. ...but you know, hey, whatever: I'm the kind of idiot who thought he had a great time at Avatar 3D! I guess I didn't notice how miserable I was!
It's an entertainment program. I don't think anyone is being forced into anything.
What I'm hearing from you is "I want something, but I want it the way I want it for the price I want it." The person selling that thing can charge whatever they want for it, and sell whatever version they want. You don't have a right to have what you want, the way you want it, and for the price you want to pay. Why do you feel entitled to "have it your way?" When I was a kid we didn't even have a VCR, and we were just fine.
Here's an idea, if something costs more than you want to pay... then don't buy it. It's really not very complicated.
You don't acknowledge that reasonable people can have very different approaches to that topic? Is that correct? It's really hard to have a rational discussion on any topic if you can't establish that baseline.
To which phone are you referring? I had a Motorola MicroTAC (which is pretty damn American) way way back in the early '90s, and the only people who were dismissive were those who hated the idea of being reachable 24/7. Most everyone else just lusted after it. Especially geeks, because it looked like a trek communicator.
3 more good examples.
Oh, yeah good point.That kind of thing was very common here about Halo and the Xbox in general.
I stand variously corrected.
Typical geek blither-blather. "I don't like it therefore everyone who does is an idiot who's being duped." Here on /. I've seen this argument used against: Apple, craft beer, very spicy chiles, tablets in general, 3d film and TV, hybrid cars, wind power, solar power, drug laws, Democrats, Republicans and organized sports.
Just accept that people like different things and move on. I realize this is a strain to the borderline Asbergers types who are rife around here, but come on. Sometimes there isn't a "right answer" for everyone.
I use a 600k scoville-rated ghost pepper sauce on a daily basis. I'm a "non-taster" on the old scale, so I require a lot of stimulation in my food to find it enjoyable. The endorphin rush is significant and pleasurable.
In soup for example, I use a few drops, which gives me the effect of adding a ton of some milder hot sauce. The advantage is that I get a tiny fraction of the sodium that I would from Tabacso or something similar--and sodium's something I'm trying very hard to keep a lid on.
The interesting thing is that after a month or two of this, my tolerance level went through the roof. The great thing is that now that the heat has died away somewhat for me, the complex and fruity flavors of the ghost pepper itself really shine through. Delicious stuff.
I use Air Video to stream any kind of video file from my PC to my iOS devices. There's maybe a 2-5 second delay depending on format after hitting play, but the quality is flawless and the interface is really clean.
http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/index.html;jsessionid=074BC9C49C5102ED2C668AFF92496C55
the first thing that comes to mind is augmented reality, with a chip that's fast enough to actually be useful.
I'm using AR apps on my iPhone 4 fairly often, and have more than once wished my iPad could do the same.
I would disagree. The iOS APIs specifically allow for graceful degradation of framerate in 3d rendering. To give a concrete example, when I switched from the iPhone 3GS to the 4, framerates for 3d games and augmented reality apps shot through the roof.
As far as adding adjustable graphics settings, it's completely unnecessary. With only a handful of devices to support, standard practice to to pre-select optimized settings for each device, which are transparently loaded without user involvement. Very elegant and very very easy for developers to implement.
I suspect that the only people who really use OSX server these days (beyond those you've mentioned) are big Mac labs at Uni's, or big Mac-only departments or businesses, like at the ad agency I used to work at.
How the hell is this still marked "insightful?" I have the AT&T unlimited data plan with my iPhone and every month go over 5GB, and have yet to see an additional charge or throttling. I think my highest usage month was something like 13GB (which takes a certain amount of doing over 3G, I tell you...).
Hey, if you want to astroturf for Sprint, feel free, but expect to get called on it.
I think the problem is when people who are smart and informed in their specific field of knowledge try to apply that experience and logic to other disciplines. Instead of realizing that they don't really understand the area, they transfer their feelings of competence and intelligence where they really don't belong.
The human ego is an interesting thing. For some reason, geek culture is rife with this kind of thing. It's hard for some people to admit that being smart about one thing doesn't equal being smart about everything.
There's clearly more than enough marketshare for both types of phones to co-exist.
The real answer is that "we" win, as long as the competition exists to drive innovation and downward pricing pressure in the industry. This is the real accomplishment of the iPhone. It wasn't a marketing thing, it was a wake-up call to an industry that had gotten exceptionally lazy and non-innovative. Keep handing out the same crap in smaller and skinnier packages with the same terrible interfaces, and eventually someone else is going to come along and eat your lunch. Read about the RIM internal reaction to the first iPhone demo, and you'll see what I mean.
What gets really funny is to look back at that first iPhone (what, 4 years ago now?) and realize what a crap phone it was by today's standards. It was slow, the network connection was glacial, the only features were the ones built in because there were no apps. The battery life was a fraction of what we have now. The camera was horrific. No GPS. I mean, seriously. And yet it was such a huge leap from the state of art (Razor v3? Ugh!) at the time that people literally believed that the demo was rigged. Why, with all of the billions and billions of dollars in the industry devoted to research, didn't RIM or Nokia or Sony or M-freaking-S come up with this? Why did it take Apple? Was it just a failure of imagination?
...for the same reason that people have been becoming scientists since well before the concept of "scientist" was codified. I'll give you a hint, and tell you a few things that it's not about: ...so what's left? Why, everything that truly matters. :-)
- fame
- wealth
- job security
- the "cool factor"
- the sexy colleagues
- the easy job
- the power
- the influence