With iOS 4, you can browse on Safari whilst your navigation app runs in the background (location based multitasking is one of the options Apple provides). I don't want to be near you when you're driving and being distracted by whatever porn site you are viewing, but you should be able to do this.
Why would I care about bittorrent on the phone - I'd rather access my home computer and initiate it there, instead of getting a massive hit on my mobile data usage? If it's a short download, the iPhone has an option for that as well.
It would be nice if iOS 4 had a "if power is connected, allow to run in the background regardless of the type of multitasking required" function.
They have x development resource, y features to implement, and those x developers can only do n features per major release (where n y). Cut and Paste didn't make the cut for the initial iPhone OS. Same as why multitasking for general apps didn't appear until iOS 4.
Microsoft are three years behind the iPhone, so they're still at the initial development. Cut and Paste will come eventually.
Until it does, it will be compared directly to iOS 4 and Android 2.2, and it won't be able to compete in terms of features. The Windows Mobile crowd who were very vocal about cut and paste on the iPhone have gone very quiet (or are now iPhone users). In addition Microsoft have created an interface that looks like a cross between a grim hospital or austere sci-fi environment and the paintings of a ADD sufferer. How the general public will take to it will be interesting to see - there's a simplicity to the iPhone's app icons, or Android's widgets + app icons.
Who cares about "shared web host" plans, when you can get a cheap virtual server these days and install Tomcat yourself? And then you can use a proper language and infrastructure for developing web applications instead of PHP. I'm a big fan of Java + PostgreSQL + Linux + Tomcat. Yeah, it's a bit harder than PHP and MySQL, but so much more fun.
Java wasn't dead with mobile development either, it was very much alive with J2ME games and apps. iPhone and Android killed that platform off though, I doubt much development is happening here these days.
The main problem with Android was that until Android 2.2, it was purely interpreted because it used it's own virtual machine.
As for desktop Java, the main issues people had with that were AWT and Swing, and Android doesn't provide these.
And as for "enterprise" development, when you see the abortions that.NET "developers" are creating, you will long for Java.
Depends on how noisy it is. Mac Minis have been quiet in the past, but this one integrates the PSU (which is worth something to me) and is slimmer.
A quiet attractive computer on the desk, with an attractive wireless keyboard and mouse, and a decent monitor, can de-clutter some people's minds and let them get some work done.
For others a pile of computer parts and cables and clutter and mess is their ideal spot. I still don't think they'd complain if there was a Mac Mini in the middle, unless they threw it away with the pizza boxes by accident.
But you've always paid more for miniaturisation of technology. It's just that Apple doesn't like to offer something that's not quite as small.
It's $599 for the dual-core 1.8GHz option that's closest to the Mac Mini.
Bigger hard drive (750GB) and 4GB RAM however. Weaker graphics, weaker CPU, bigger box. You can upgrade the graphics to the HD4330 for another $75. You can't upgrade the CPU.
I'd say the prices were comparable, but with the Mac Mini you can update the hard drive space or add it via USB or FW800, and you can increase the memory. You can't increase the CPU on the Dell.
Windows / Mac OS X is personal preference of course, but iLife has to be worth something compared to the add-on software that Dell offers in their personalisation process.
Yeah, well the pound has fallen against the dollar.
But the price still sucks, and it's expensive for the UK market.
In the US, the original in 2005 was $499, and now it's $699. Ooh, 50% higher! Except when you consider inflation, it's actually 28% higher.
In the UK, that £399 is actually around £450 after inflation is accounted for (I did 2004 - 2009 on the BoE inflation calculator). So the £649 is actually 44% higher rather than the original price in the UK. These days you get $1.48 for a quid, back then (22/01/2005) you got $1.87 for a quid, 26% more. So £450 * 1.26 = £567. The actual rise in price in the UK is 14%.
Still doesn't negate the fact that the Mac Mini is quite expensive for a Core 2 Duo based system with 2GB RAM these days. You do pay for miniaturisation of course, but there's no non-miniaturised consumer system that isn't an iMac.
I think they should throw in something like iWork as a sweetener.
If the website's article is clear and easy to read, with a fair balance between article length and the number of pages it is spread over, then people won't click on the Reader icon as they won't need to.
However some sites are so cluttered and unreadable, with too many moving adverts, that the content is hard to read - indeed the distraction of moving items besides the text (or those hover ads in-lined within the article) actually strain the reader's eyes, and tire the reader's brain. Reader functionality may force these sites to actually consider their readers, and in doing so they might actually increase the number of visitors and thus increase their ad hits.
As an advertiser, I would like people who avoid ads to not generate multiple hits (and thus fees).
This just sucks for the middle-man, the content providers. I'm sure they'll find a way to inline ads in Reader view, but they'll hopefully be static images.
A bullshit one, in 1992 MPEG decoding (MPEG1, not MPEG2) needed hardware cards (for VCD), costing around £200 (MPEG card for CD32). MPEG2 wasn't around at all. Never mind ATSC and all the other stuff.
He's probably talking about accepting a signal from a digital terrestrial receiver box, which is standard composite or RF.
So your entire village clubs together and gets them for under $10 apiece...
I just think that the design is odd, four dinky little solar panels that won't ever be angled perfectly for sunlight capture. Far better to have all those panels separate, maybe even fixed in a good location, and to plug the light in to charge during the day. Or to have the top part of the bulb be some form of focussing material that will focus sunlight onto a single solar panel at the focal point.
As an extreme example, you could invent a means of carrying electricity from the panels to the battery+bulb over a short distance, and keep the bulb inside, and the panel outside. The bulb would recharge from sunrise until sunset with no user action required, nor having to display it on a post outside their residence.
"And the point being, unless you read your iPhone held 18 inches away from your face, your eyes can detect more detail than the iPhone screen has"
What you don't point out is the fact that you need perfect vision for the article to be correct.
The average person has 20/20 vision, and thus can discern around 290ppi at 12 inches.
I mean, all you need to do is get an iPhone 4, draw an aliased circle on the screen, and ask people if they can see the stepping (pixelation) around the edge or not. Some people will (good to excellent vision), most people won't (average or worse vision). Then you show them the same image with anti-aliasing enabled...
Also as your post points out - "excellent acuity" = 50CPD.
The wikipedia articles states "A resolution of 2 arcminutes per line pair corresponds to 20/20 (normal vision) in humans." - compare to the 1.2 arcminutes per line that this article is talking about. That's 286ppi versus 477ppi. The iPhone is 318ppi. So for most people the iPhone 4's pixels (in a curve, etc) are impossible to discern - and that's before we consider anti-aliasing.
So the linked article is basically a troll, unless you like being hunched over your phone, or if you have way above average visual acuity. Or if you're an android with zoom vision function.
Doing 56 mph in a 45 mph zone eh? That's quite a bit over the speed limit.
No sympathy at all for the guy. If the speed limit is artificially low, then fight it in other ways. Obey the speed limits because it could be there for a valid reason. Maybe a FOI request as to why the speed limit is set at that speed there, if it is 50/55/60/65/70 elsewhere on the same stretch of road.
Looking at an iPad on the train earlier today with the iPhone Metro newspaper application, it certainly looked to me as if the scaling up for text and certain imagery (zoomable images) was at the higher resolution, not pixel doubling.
Most apps don't scale perfectly because they come bundled with (e.g.) 320 pixel wide images, so they need resolution specific imagery supplied for the iPad (and now the iPhone 4). Which is how Android handles things anyway.
Anyway, for many apps the iPad is such a larger screen it demands a redesign of the app's UI to make best use of it.
You'd best let the California police who are dealing with this case know that Jason Chen was told by people on his website that it was stolen, and that he also likely destroyed this evidence by removing the posts from his website.
Or you hand it to the police as California civil law states, wait 60 days, and get it back legally if it isn't claimed by the owner.
Or you hand it back to the owner directly, get bought a beer, and actually feel good about your actions instead of a scummy anonymous troll who never washes, lives in their divorced mother's basement, and hears her bang a different dude every night whilst you masturbate over low bitrate porn videos.
I did Z80 and 68000 assembly programming. I also did a bit of 8080 programming via the CP/M assembler on the Z80 system I had.
The Z80 had IX and IY index registers - one of the improvements over the 8080. It also had a stack pointer registers.
It also had the shadow register set.
I think you are rushing to denigrate a CPU that actually was a significant improvement over what it replaced, whilst not pretending to be anything more.
The Z80 was a major improvement over the 8080 that it was derived from. It became the most popular 8-bit CPU, and still sells millions every year in variants such as the eZ80 and Z8 microcontrollers.
The 8086 was an extension of the 8080, and thus inherited all of its limitations as well, and they held x86 back for a long time. As you say, a new design, the 68000, was far more pleasurable to use.
However where the 8080 succeeded was being the fourth major Intel CPU design (4004, 8008, 4040, 8080) which gave Intel a massive amount of developer feedback as to what the essential operations they needed to support in their CPU were.
As for "Reduced" in RISC, it actually stands for "Simplified", meaning orthogonal instructions, a reduced number of instruction formats, and so on.
To be fair the device is really quite small. But there's a lack of software for Linux that is optimised for tiny screens. Using the MIPS port of Android could be an idea?
Maybe they should use the new quad-core Chinese Godson 3A CPU - 10W for four 1GHz cores...
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With iOS 4, you can browse on Safari whilst your navigation app runs in the background (location based multitasking is one of the options Apple provides). I don't want to be near you when you're driving and being distracted by whatever porn site you are viewing, but you should be able to do this.
Why would I care about bittorrent on the phone - I'd rather access my home computer and initiate it there, instead of getting a massive hit on my mobile data usage? If it's a short download, the iPhone has an option for that as well.
It would be nice if iOS 4 had a "if power is connected, allow to run in the background regardless of the type of multitasking required" function.
Both companies have the same reason:
They have x development resource, y features to implement, and those x developers can only do n features per major release (where n y). Cut and Paste didn't make the cut for the initial iPhone OS. Same as why multitasking for general apps didn't appear until iOS 4.
Microsoft are three years behind the iPhone, so they're still at the initial development. Cut and Paste will come eventually.
Until it does, it will be compared directly to iOS 4 and Android 2.2, and it won't be able to compete in terms of features. The Windows Mobile crowd who were very vocal about cut and paste on the iPhone have gone very quiet (or are now iPhone users). In addition Microsoft have created an interface that looks like a cross between a grim hospital or austere sci-fi environment and the paintings of a ADD sufferer. How the general public will take to it will be interesting to see - there's a simplicity to the iPhone's app icons, or Android's widgets + app icons.
Who cares about "shared web host" plans, when you can get a cheap virtual server these days and install Tomcat yourself? And then you can use a proper language and infrastructure for developing web applications instead of PHP. I'm a big fan of Java + PostgreSQL + Linux + Tomcat. Yeah, it's a bit harder than PHP and MySQL, but so much more fun.
Java wasn't dead with mobile development either, it was very much alive with J2ME games and apps. iPhone and Android killed that platform off though, I doubt much development is happening here these days.
The main problem with Android was that until Android 2.2, it was purely interpreted because it used it's own virtual machine.
As for desktop Java, the main issues people had with that were AWT and Swing, and Android doesn't provide these.
And as for "enterprise" development, when you see the abortions that .NET "developers" are creating, you will long for Java.
Usually such program listings were a bazillion lines of DATA statements with a simple DATA reader / memory poker routine:
e.g.,
DATA reader / poker / binary saver routine in Listing 1 (quite a good one, with checksums and a line counter for errors)
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/imgs/9/95/Amstrad_Computer_User8508_038.jpg
(back from the days when magazines would have a three page listing and no screenshot of the results).
Depends on how noisy it is. Mac Minis have been quiet in the past, but this one integrates the PSU (which is worth something to me) and is slimmer.
A quiet attractive computer on the desk, with an attractive wireless keyboard and mouse, and a decent monitor, can de-clutter some people's minds and let them get some work done.
For others a pile of computer parts and cables and clutter and mess is their ideal spot. I still don't think they'd complain if there was a Mac Mini in the middle, unless they threw it away with the pizza boxes by accident.
But you've always paid more for miniaturisation of technology. It's just that Apple doesn't like to offer something that's not quite as small.
It's $599 for the dual-core 1.8GHz option that's closest to the Mac Mini.
Bigger hard drive (750GB) and 4GB RAM however.
Weaker graphics, weaker CPU, bigger box.
You can upgrade the graphics to the HD4330 for another $75. You can't upgrade the CPU.
I'd say the prices were comparable, but with the Mac Mini you can update the hard drive space or add it via USB or FW800, and you can increase the memory. You can't increase the CPU on the Dell.
Windows / Mac OS X is personal preference of course, but iLife has to be worth something compared to the add-on software that Dell offers in their personalisation process.
Yeah, well the pound has fallen against the dollar.
But the price still sucks, and it's expensive for the UK market.
In the US, the original in 2005 was $499, and now it's $699. Ooh, 50% higher! Except when you consider inflation, it's actually 28% higher.
In the UK, that £399 is actually around £450 after inflation is accounted for (I did 2004 - 2009 on the BoE inflation calculator). So the £649 is actually 44% higher rather than the original price in the UK. These days you get $1.48 for a quid, back then (22/01/2005) you got $1.87 for a quid, 26% more. So £450 * 1.26 = £567. The actual rise in price in the UK is 14%.
Still doesn't negate the fact that the Mac Mini is quite expensive for a Core 2 Duo based system with 2GB RAM these days. You do pay for miniaturisation of course, but there's no non-miniaturised consumer system that isn't an iMac.
I think they should throw in something like iWork as a sweetener.
Exactly.
If the website's article is clear and easy to read, with a fair balance between article length and the number of pages it is spread over, then people won't click on the Reader icon as they won't need to.
However some sites are so cluttered and unreadable, with too many moving adverts, that the content is hard to read - indeed the distraction of moving items besides the text (or those hover ads in-lined within the article) actually strain the reader's eyes, and tire the reader's brain. Reader functionality may force these sites to actually consider their readers, and in doing so they might actually increase the number of visitors and thus increase their ad hits.
As an advertiser, I would like people who avoid ads to not generate multiple hits (and thus fees).
This just sucks for the middle-man, the content providers. I'm sure they'll find a way to inline ads in Reader view, but they'll hopefully be static images.
A bullshit one, in 1992 MPEG decoding (MPEG1, not MPEG2) needed hardware cards (for VCD), costing around £200 (MPEG card for CD32). MPEG2 wasn't around at all. Never mind ATSC and all the other stuff.
He's probably talking about accepting a signal from a digital terrestrial receiver box, which is standard composite or RF.
So your entire village clubs together and gets them for under $10 apiece...
I just think that the design is odd, four dinky little solar panels that won't ever be angled perfectly for sunlight capture. Far better to have all those panels separate, maybe even fixed in a good location, and to plug the light in to charge during the day. Or to have the top part of the bulb be some form of focussing material that will focus sunlight onto a single solar panel at the focal point.
As an extreme example, you could invent a means of carrying electricity from the panels to the battery+bulb over a short distance, and keep the bulb inside, and the panel outside. The bulb would recharge from sunrise until sunset with no user action required, nor having to display it on a post outside their residence.
I see the number keeps on increasing to try and make Apple look worse.
For 20/20 vision, the magic number is around 290ppi at a foot.
For perfect++ ultra-vision, the magic number is 477ppi. Being pedantic, this is the retina's resolution. No where near 700ppi that you write.
I mean, if you want to make an argument and be pedantic, you really do need to stick to the facts.
"And the point being, unless you read your iPhone held 18 inches away from your face, your eyes can detect more detail than the iPhone screen has"
What you don't point out is the fact that you need perfect vision for the article to be correct.
The average person has 20/20 vision, and thus can discern around 290ppi at 12 inches.
I mean, all you need to do is get an iPhone 4, draw an aliased circle on the screen, and ask people if they can see the stepping (pixelation) around the edge or not. Some people will (good to excellent vision), most people won't (average or worse vision). Then you show them the same image with anti-aliasing enabled...
Sadly it wasn't even fact based.
It used the example of perfect vision, not the average case of 20/20 vision.
And the maths, when applied to 20/20 vision, supports Apple, and then some more.
The average person has 20/20 vision however. As a comment on the link post on zdnet says:
"Well I guess you will have to accept the fact that the expert quoted in the article uses a standard of human vision significantly better than 20/20.
If going by 20/20 vision (which is 1.0 arc minutes per pixel, not 0.6 the expert claims) Apples claims stands."
Except in the end it was the article that was trolling.
Normal people's vision (20/20) is nowhere near as discerning than the higher end of perfect vision this article was talking about.
Never mind the effect of anti-aliasing on the curves.
Heh.
Also as your post points out - "excellent acuity" = 50CPD.
The wikipedia articles states "A resolution of 2 arcminutes per line pair corresponds to 20/20 (normal vision) in humans." - compare to the 1.2 arcminutes per line that this article is talking about. That's 286ppi versus 477ppi. The iPhone is 318ppi. So for most people the iPhone 4's pixels (in a curve, etc) are impossible to discern - and that's before we consider anti-aliasing.
So the linked article is basically a troll, unless you like being hunched over your phone, or if you have way above average visual acuity. Or if you're an android with zoom vision function.
Doing 56 mph in a 45 mph zone eh? That's quite a bit over the speed limit.
No sympathy at all for the guy. If the speed limit is artificially low, then fight it in other ways. Obey the speed limits because it could be there for a valid reason. Maybe a FOI request as to why the speed limit is set at that speed there, if it is 50/55/60/65/70 elsewhere on the same stretch of road.
Until he does that, this guy is a whiny pussy.
And that comment would be: "lame"
Because it is so short, it would be scored -1, and thus not be viewable by default.
And productivity at geeky workplaces around the world would thusly increase.
Looking at an iPad on the train earlier today with the iPhone Metro newspaper application, it certainly looked to me as if the scaling up for text and certain imagery (zoomable images) was at the higher resolution, not pixel doubling.
Most apps don't scale perfectly because they come bundled with (e.g.) 320 pixel wide images, so they need resolution specific imagery supplied for the iPad (and now the iPhone 4). Which is how Android handles things anyway.
Anyway, for many apps the iPad is such a larger screen it demands a redesign of the app's UI to make best use of it.
You'd best let the California police who are dealing with this case know that Jason Chen was told by people on his website that it was stolen, and that he also likely destroyed this evidence by removing the posts from his website.
Until the police find you, idiot.
Or you hand it to the police as California civil law states, wait 60 days, and get it back legally if it isn't claimed by the owner.
Or you hand it back to the owner directly, get bought a beer, and actually feel good about your actions instead of a scummy anonymous troll who never washes, lives in their divorced mother's basement, and hears her bang a different dude every night whilst you masturbate over low bitrate porn videos.
I did Z80 and 68000 assembly programming. I also did a bit of 8080 programming via the CP/M assembler on the Z80 system I had.
The Z80 had IX and IY index registers - one of the improvements over the 8080. It also had a stack pointer registers.
It also had the shadow register set.
I think you are rushing to denigrate a CPU that actually was a significant improvement over what it replaced, whilst not pretending to be anything more.
The Z80 was a major improvement over the 8080 that it was derived from. It became the most popular 8-bit CPU, and still sells millions every year in variants such as the eZ80 and Z8 microcontrollers.
The 8086 was an extension of the 8080, and thus inherited all of its limitations as well, and they held x86 back for a long time. As you say, a new design, the 68000, was far more pleasurable to use.
However where the 8080 succeeded was being the fourth major Intel CPU design (4004, 8008, 4040, 8080) which gave Intel a massive amount of developer feedback as to what the essential operations they needed to support in their CPU were.
As for "Reduced" in RISC, it actually stands for "Simplified", meaning orthogonal instructions, a reduced number of instruction formats, and so on.
Oh well, sucks to not be able to run every piece of C64 software. However a lot could run, and that's better than nothing.
To be fair the device is really quite small. But there's a lack of software for Linux that is optimised for tiny screens. Using the MIPS port of Android could be an idea?
Maybe they should use the new quad-core Chinese Godson 3A CPU - 10W for four 1GHz cores...