It's a phone. Its purpose is to make phone calls. If you want more capability, get a laptop.
A mobile phone is a device that most people will have on them pretty much all the time. And if you are carrying it around anyway, why not use it:
- to make pictures (you don't carry a camera around all the time, do you? neither do I, but I use my phone all the time to make snaps of notes on whiteboards and such).
- to manage your agenda and to-do list (instead of having to carry around a separate organiser or diary).
- to look up stuff on the internet (The apps with the Dutch train schedule and road conditions are ones that I use pretty much every day, on the go).
- to find directions? (we're men; god forbid that we should have to *ask* someone).
Come to think of it, I don't actually make that many calls on my iPhone. But even that functionality is there when I need it, and for all that I have to carry around just one tiny, lightweight device. I for one am glad that the functionality of phones has been expanded, the latest meaningful change (to me) being always-on internet that is actually usable.
I wonder how long it stays readable though, before it succumbs to some kind of rot.
I imagine the future after mankind has passed away, where some alien race stumbles upon one of these libraries with the collective wisdom of humanity preserved on it, and upon trying to make sense of the contents, instead see a message: "We cannot verify you rights to access this material; the DRM server that can validate your license appears to be down. Please try again later".
...it's when companies start abusing their monopoly that watchdogs should (potentially) step in.
Microsoft has had a few clear cases where it abused its monopoly. Google? I am not so sure, though of course any monopoly bears keeping a close eye on.
If documenting your technical procedures puts your job at risk, then you aren't the right things, to be valuable enough to your company in the first place.
Exactly. Also, do not forget that the best way to ensure you will never be promoted, is to make yourself indispensable at your current position. As all career counsellors will say: on any job, you should be training your replacement from day one.
Not really, if running an MMO is what your company does. Keeping such logs is key to analysing game balance, tweaking the environment to optimise fun and game challenge, banning exploiters, and in general understanding the weak and strong points of your game, and fixing the weak ones. If you think those decisions are made solely on the basis of whiny posts on the forum, you have another think coming.
The interesting part is that this data is now being analysed in a different way, to study social interaction and behaviour... an area still somewhat poorly understood by MMO operators but in the end rather important to the success of their game. I can see why Sony was happy to allow their data to be used for this.
Oh, I am a huge fan of road pricing, insofar it means making the people who use the road pay for it.
There are two arguments against this:
1) Privacy. If they implement this on all roads, the government or whomever owns the road has a nice log of where you've driven, day to day. Has your government ever given any indication that they are trustworthy enough to gain this information?
2) As others have pointed out: this offers even better ways to milk motorists. And don't think people will protest too much if they gradually raise prices, that's what they've done over here. Motorists in the Netherlands already bring in 3 times the yearly road and public transport expenditure (for example: VAT + a special tax on new cars add as much as 66% to the sticker price); the rest is blown on other useless stuff. Once this system is in place, you can bet that prices will go up, a few points over inflation, every single year.
Oh, and they get a free 100% accurate speed trap out of this. They've implemented such a system for just that reason around a few of our cities. At least that old system is anonymous (it turns the picture of your license plate into a "signature", which is compared against the signatures read at the end of the stretch of road being monitored. Only if a speeding violation is detected will it perform an OCR on the plate and send you the ticket. But for road pricing they need proof that you've used the road at the time you are billed for).
That was my first thought as well; even the first-generation (and insanely expensive) Iliad does better in this regard. This is a book reader, lose the damn keyboard already. (I know, some people might find it handy, but I am one of those persons who prefer a phone/pda with an on-screen keyboard instead of a physical one).
Exactly. Recently scammers and spammers have achieved a step change in their approach, which greatly increases the danger they pose even to alert citizens:
I thought the gameplay itself was ok. Not brilliant, but enjoyable. What I miss though is a story. Many (MMO)RPGs these days have an overarching quest series to guide you through the main story in a linear fashion, with a bunch of little subplots or miniquests to earn you weapons or abilities. Far Cry 2 felt like it was just the miniquests, with the main storyline missing. The game is fun but there's not a lot to keep you going, not even the urge to discover what's over the next hill or in the next hamlet. Because you already know what you'll find there: corrugated steel buildings with a lot of pissed-off locals in them.
I had hoped to get some good multiplayer action out of this game as well... but online play eats. Especially the server selection screen, due to its absence. Most good multiplayer games give us a list of servers that we can filter on game type or nr of players, and sort on ping time and whatnot. Usually it lets you track favourite servers and opponents, so that you can find a good game quickly. Far Cry 2 has none of that... you pick the type of game you prefer, then you are connected to the first outgoing server with that game type starting.
Which in itself would not be so bad. After a few games you'll find a good server with nice people on it, and you have a great round of shooting each other. And then... the game ends. That's right, after the match the server does not start a new round, but kicks everyone out. Fun. This is the sort of crap I expect from console multiplayer games (and in fact the PC version looks like it was a straight console port), not from PC games where decent server selection screens have been the norm for years. Very disappointing.
To charge in 10 minutes, you'd need to shove in power at 300 kW! At 220V, that means you'd need 1300 A of current!?!
Perhaps the trick is to run a thick steel cable up a bell tower and wait for a thunderstorm. A lightning strike delivers its 1.21GW for 1/6th of a second, you'll get 50kWH and your car is charged. Come on people, we've seen this work...
This is definitely something that needs to be curtailed -- these are not adults making a rational decision about these pictures, these are teenagers who think it is exciting
Curtailed, sure. If by that you mean educating children and parents about the risks of making such pictures and sharing them with friends. But we do not need any damn law against children photographing themselves. The judge should think of the children, these children, and throw the case out. Prosecuting and punishing this will mess up the rest of their lives more than the average internet perv ever would.
In general, I am suspicious about anyone who wants to "get tough" on child pornographers. Sure, exploiting children like this is and should be a crime, a despicable one, and it should be punished. But let's not get carried away here. Already in my own country it is illegal to make or own stuff that looks like child porn, even if they're computer renderings with no actual children involved. A politician here got done for having a whopping 2 images of suspected (not proven or glaringly obvious) child porn in his considerable but otherwise vanilla porn pile. Suspected child molesters are treated like Hitler, Stalin and Satan all rolled into one, and yes, I do think we're getting carried away there. And I do suspect the people who are egging us on for having some hidden agenda. People like that always start with the easy, universally disliked enemy. And then they move on to the next.
Just so, at least in my case. And I hope that music and movie publishers will come to this sensible conclusion as well. I'd love to be able to download a legal "zero day" copy of movies direct from the studios... or go see the movie in the week of its release. Not wait until they finally get around releasing it in my country. As for music... the not-really-legal AllOfMP3 should be an example to the music industry. A wide selection of music, and more importantly, a wide selection of formats, from MP3, WAV, to OGG. Now there's "plays for sure" for you... And you could choose the bitrate as well, from small files to files without compression.
If publishers stop punishing their legit customers with crippled products and late releases, those customers might decide to not turn to piracy.
If he had a caffeine addiction and his parents took away his Coke would that mean that it was the fault of the Coke that he murdered them?
But of course it is, and of course they'll use that defense: "Yes I did it, your honour, but it was someone else's fault". Society itself would probably not accept the fact that even more or less sane people sometimes shoot each other in a fit of rage. That smacks too much of accidents, and things that society cannot control. Pointing fingers (at games, the gun lobby, failing education, jink food, etc) is so much more comforting.
Don't! Like this blogger probably already discovered to his detriment, they could put you down for Customs Schedule 405 (mandatory cavity search) or the dreaded Schedule 209 (loud rock music, salad oil, night stick) just for making fun of them on the Internet.
Seriously, these guys need no excuse nor justification to make any traveler's life a living hell. I'm just wondering if they do that in certain cases, just because they can.
Those are good reasons, but the most important reason I think is that the user interface just works so damn well. It does for me... I am no Apple fanboy (the only other Apple device I own is an iPod, the rest is all Windows stuff), but I bought one, despite
- no out-of-the-box todo lists
- no notepad that is actually useful (and syncs)
- no cut & paste (a major omission), and poor (if any) communication between apps
- crippled Bluetooth (only works with headsets, can't use it to hook up a Bluetooth keyboard or other peripherals).
- locked down OS (can't replace the standard keyboard with a custom one, for instance).
- rumours of poor battery life and poor reception (I haven't noticed any of these. Tip to increase battery life: turn off location services; the GPS chip is power hungry... like it is on any other cell phone).
So why are people buying despite all this? I don't think having a built-in iPod and some amusing apps make up for this. The following, however, does:
- Form factor. It's small. And I thank Apple for not putting a damn physical keybord inside, which would make it considerably bulkier.
- Ease of use. The UI is simple and responsive certainly compared to WME.
- The multi-touch screen: brilliant not because of the cute "pinch" zoom gesture, but because I can operate it with my fat fingers. Whereas my other smart phones required me to use a fingernail or the stylus, I can operate the iPhone 1-handed using my thumb.
Typing messages is actually pretty good on the iPhone. As you'd expect, typing speed is somewhere between the on-screen keyboard & stylus of WME phones, and phones with a physical keyboard. But that's not what Apple needs to work on to capture the business market. Apple needs to address security by offering a mandatory PIN login that cannot be disabled by the user, and a remote wipe function. Without those two, you can forget about corporations allowing these things to VPN in and access the Exchange server.
Run those same resolutions on a screen with 2x (7 inch) or 2.5x (9 inch) resolution and you're looking at 60-80ppi of massively pixelated crap.
On a device of that size, they can afford to have more processing power (and battery capacity to match), so perhaps they can extend the GUI allowing these apps to run windowed, in parallel. That would make sense on a device with a screen of that size.
<3 Hmm... "Dwarf in a pointy hat mooning you" That was my first of many guesses. It took me a while too before I understood that it is a heart, and I didn't infer it from the context or by looking at it; I had to be told as well. Oh well, maybe I am getting old.
For example, would it type my username as Goobermunch or Gobermunch? How would it know the difference? How does Swyping accommodate the William Wallaces of the world? Are they doomed to being Wiliam Walaces?
I don't know about Swype, but when using Shapewriter, an iPhone notepad application that works (suspiciously) similar as other have pointed out, you just ignore double letters. I just tried "William Wallace" on ShapeWriter by tracing "Wiliam Walace" and it came out just fine. If there is an ambiguity between two valid words ("planner" and "planer"), they'll both be shown in a pick list from which you just select the right one.
The technology relies on a dictionary, so it won't recognise words such as your username until you add it manually.
Perhaps, if you dwell for a sufficiently long period of time, it will count the character beneath the stylus twice.
Someone else mentioned looping around a letter to make it a double, which beats waiting. I seriously detest any input method that makes me wait, like the Multitap input on old pre-T9 cell phones, where you'd have to wait a second before hitting the "3" key again to type a double "e" (else you'd just get an "f")
Here is the thing, I hate the drug laws, despise them actually. But I can't go out and start smoking pot because today it is STILL ILLEGAL.... The solution is to legalize pot, not smoke it and yell at the top of my lungs and say how dumb the laws are (they are...) How do I legalize pot? Work with the system and get it legalized.
What if those drug laws also made it illegal to buy Aspirin? That's the thing: P2P and filesharing in themselves are not evil, and have legitimate applications. For instance, updates for a number of games are distributed via Torrents.
Making laws should work like this: you define what's immoral, dangerous or otherwise undesirable, then you make laws to prevent that, and only that, from happening. If you feel that software piracy is immoral, outlaw it. If you can come up with something that would prevent piracy and nothing else, implement that. But the many legit activities that would suffer from this proposal are not acceptable collateral damage.
I've also read a few stories where those who especially hate speed cameras will obscure its vision in some manner so that it cannot take accurate pictures or any pictures at all.
A couple of.44 magnum rounds will "obscure its vision" nicely. Ok, that doesn't happen all that often here due to firearms regulations, but these cameras are often broken, burnt, even blown up. Every now and then someone driving a 4WD will notice that he has been photographed, drive back, sling a chain around the camera, rip it out and take it with him.
Minor nitpick, but I think it's misleading to speak of "functionality" separate from "ease-of-use." One of the roots of Apple's continued success is their understanding that for a very large percentage of consumers, if a particular function isn't easy to use, it might as well not exist.
True: these things are not separate, but they are not the same thing either. What functionality is there on the iPhone is wonderfully easy to use. But some functionality is simply missing. Especially in light of the remark that Apple is after a slice of the corporate (i.e. Blackberry) market:
- No to-do list
- Notepad functionality that looks like prototype leftovers added as an afterthought (with no sync options).
- Zero syncing options for Windows 2000 (which is still a staple OS in the corporate environment).
All of these functions are available on Windows Mobile or Blackberry phones. They're crap to use, but they are there.
I love my Apple TV, but it's not a very successful product, over all. Time capsule is probably about the same. The Cube was a failure, and quite frankly the MacBook Air ONLY has its form factor going for it (otherwise it is so hellaciously overpriced that it's like a time warp back to the mid 1990s for Apple).
The fact that a lot of people buy a MacBook Air despite its ridiculous price/performance ratio and solely for its form factor, is saying a lot about the importance of the package technology comes in. Same for the iPhone: from a pure functional point of view it's not a very good phone, and it has a few issues that we would not accept from any other manufacturer, but still people are literally lining up to get their hands on one. Despite some important areas where the iPhone performs poorly, there are other things like the form factor, design and ease-of-use where it outshines the competition.
And it's precisely design, form factor and ease-of-use where Steve Jobs has a lot of influence. Perhaps not directly as a designer, but as a (purportedly) insanely demanding critic. Someone ascribed Apple's success as a trendsetter in design to this; where other companies design for an identified or assumed market segment, Apple designs for Steve Jobs, a rich gadget freak who happens to have a decent taste.
I've found that seasoned programmers, even so-called "agile" ones, often miss the big picture when it comes to changing business needs, shifting priorities, budget cuts, politics, etc. Some programmers exhibit the same attitude as Dante Hicks in "Clerks": "You know, this job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers". Others listen to the customer too much, when it should be clear that the customer doesn't really know (yet) what he wants. Programmers may not have the aptitude, remit or time to deal with all this, or (more often than not) they simply aren't interested.
And that is fine: that's where the team lead or project manager comes in. If some manager is being an arse about requirements or timelines, make sure he talks to you instead of your team. And also make sure that you know how to handle that manager. Can you convince him he's wrong, can you find someone who can, or can you discuss this with the project's steering committee or sponsor? Many, many incorrect decisions and false assumptions will be made. As a techie with a bit of business experience, you stand a fair chance of spotting these. And as a project lead, it is your job to steer the ship away from disaster and back on course. That's where your added value lies.
In my opinion the Parent's statement quoted above is only half right. If you have a team of seasoned and competent programmers, your challenges will indeed not arise from your team, but from the business side. Which means you are anything but redundant.
Indeed. Besides, the whole "building vs. programming" analogy is silly. If designing buildings was like programming, architects would have to deal with all new materials every few months (can't use the old ones), they'd have customers insisting that walls are best placed leaning 10 degrees out of true, and the foundation under the building would (magically) be changed every few years, with the building having to remain upright on whatever it was standing on. And if the construction crews put a doorknop on wrong, the whole building might come crashing down when someone opened the wrong window.
Re:"soon-to-be Leader of the Free World"
on
Obama's "ZuneGate"
·
· Score: 1
As a Dutch citizen I have the perfect freedom to: [...] So I second that motion. Obama will be president of the USA. Calling him "Leader of the Free World" pisses me off too since he sure as shit don't rule my country.
You mean we still have those freedoms. But right now we are ruled by an unholy coalition of moralist christians and meddlesome left-wingers (funny, in the US it seems to be a choice between these two, but we get them both at the same time). All the freedoms on your list have already been under attack by the current government. And the scary thing is that nobody is protesting.
Judging from here, Americans may have a messed up sense of morality, but I'll say this for them: if they feel that their liberty is threatened they are much more inclined to take action. We, we just moan a little and then carry on. What have you done to defend these freedoms you enjoy?
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A mobile phone is a device that most people will have on them pretty much all the time. And if you are carrying it around anyway, why not use it:
- to make pictures (you don't carry a camera around all the time, do you? neither do I, but I use my phone all the time to make snaps of notes on whiteboards and such).
- to manage your agenda and to-do list (instead of having to carry around a separate organiser or diary).
- to look up stuff on the internet (The apps with the Dutch train schedule and road conditions are ones that I use pretty much every day, on the go).
- to find directions? (we're men; god forbid that we should have to *ask* someone).
Come to think of it, I don't actually make that many calls on my iPhone. But even that functionality is there when I need it, and for all that I have to carry around just one tiny, lightweight device. I for one am glad that the functionality of phones has been expanded, the latest meaningful change (to me) being always-on internet that is actually usable.
I imagine the future after mankind has passed away, where some alien race stumbles upon one of these libraries with the collective wisdom of humanity preserved on it, and upon trying to make sense of the contents, instead see a message: "We cannot verify you rights to access this material; the DRM server that can validate your license appears to be down. Please try again later".
...it's when companies start abusing their monopoly that watchdogs should (potentially) step in.
Microsoft has had a few clear cases where it abused its monopoly. Google? I am not so sure, though of course any monopoly bears keeping a close eye on.
Exactly. Also, do not forget that the best way to ensure you will never be promoted, is to make yourself indispensable at your current position. As all career counsellors will say: on any job, you should be training your replacement from day one.
Not really, if running an MMO is what your company does. Keeping such logs is key to analysing game balance, tweaking the environment to optimise fun and game challenge, banning exploiters, and in general understanding the weak and strong points of your game, and fixing the weak ones. If you think those decisions are made solely on the basis of whiny posts on the forum, you have another think coming.
The interesting part is that this data is now being analysed in a different way, to study social interaction and behaviour... an area still somewhat poorly understood by MMO operators but in the end rather important to the success of their game. I can see why Sony was happy to allow their data to be used for this.
Oh, I am a huge fan of road pricing, insofar it means making the people who use the road pay for it.
There are two arguments against this:
1) Privacy. If they implement this on all roads, the government or whomever owns the road has a nice log of where you've driven, day to day. Has your government ever given any indication that they are trustworthy enough to gain this information?
2) As others have pointed out: this offers even better ways to milk motorists. And don't think people will protest too much if they gradually raise prices, that's what they've done over here. Motorists in the Netherlands already bring in 3 times the yearly road and public transport expenditure (for example: VAT + a special tax on new cars add as much as 66% to the sticker price); the rest is blown on other useless stuff. Once this system is in place, you can bet that prices will go up, a few points over inflation, every single year.
Oh, and they get a free 100% accurate speed trap out of this. They've implemented such a system for just that reason around a few of our cities. At least that old system is anonymous (it turns the picture of your license plate into a "signature", which is compared against the signatures read at the end of the stretch of road being monitored. Only if a speeding violation is detected will it perform an OCR on the plate and send you the ticket. But for road pricing they need proof that you've used the road at the time you are billed for).
That was my first thought as well; even the first-generation (and insanely expensive) Iliad does better in this regard. This is a book reader, lose the damn keyboard already. (I know, some people might find it handy, but I am one of those persons who prefer a phone/pda with an on-screen keyboard instead of a physical one).
Exactly. Recently scammers and spammers have achieved a step change in their approach, which greatly increases the danger they pose even to alert citizens:
They have learnt how to spell.
Be afraid...
I thought the gameplay itself was ok. Not brilliant, but enjoyable.
What I miss though is a story. Many (MMO)RPGs these days have an overarching quest series to guide you through the main story in a linear fashion, with a bunch of little subplots or miniquests to earn you weapons or abilities. Far Cry 2 felt like it was just the miniquests, with the main storyline missing. The game is fun but there's not a lot to keep you going, not even the urge to discover what's over the next hill or in the next hamlet. Because you already know what you'll find there: corrugated steel buildings with a lot of pissed-off locals in them.
I had hoped to get some good multiplayer action out of this game as well... but online play eats. Especially the server selection screen, due to its absence. Most good multiplayer games give us a list of servers that we can filter on game type or nr of players, and sort on ping time and whatnot. Usually it lets you track favourite servers and opponents, so that you can find a good game quickly. Far Cry 2 has none of that... you pick the type of game you prefer, then you are connected to the first outgoing server with that game type starting.
Which in itself would not be so bad. After a few games you'll find a good server with nice people on it, and you have a great round of shooting each other. And then... the game ends. That's right, after the match the server does not start a new round, but kicks everyone out. Fun. This is the sort of crap I expect from console multiplayer games (and in fact the PC version looks like it was a straight console port), not from PC games where decent server selection screens have been the norm for years. Very disappointing.
Perhaps the trick is to run a thick steel cable up a bell tower and wait for a thunderstorm. A lightning strike delivers its 1.21GW for 1/6th of a second, you'll get 50kWH and your car is charged. Come on people, we've seen this work...
Curtailed, sure. If by that you mean educating children and parents about the risks of making such pictures and sharing them with friends. But we do not need any damn law against children photographing themselves. The judge should think of the children, these children, and throw the case out. Prosecuting and punishing this will mess up the rest of their lives more than the average internet perv ever would.
In general, I am suspicious about anyone who wants to "get tough" on child pornographers. Sure, exploiting children like this is and should be a crime, a despicable one, and it should be punished. But let's not get carried away here. Already in my own country it is illegal to make or own stuff that looks like child porn, even if they're computer renderings with no actual children involved. A politician here got done for having a whopping 2 images of suspected (not proven or glaringly obvious) child porn in his considerable but otherwise vanilla porn pile. Suspected child molesters are treated like Hitler, Stalin and Satan all rolled into one, and yes, I do think we're getting carried away there. And I do suspect the people who are egging us on for having some hidden agenda. People like that always start with the easy, universally disliked enemy. And then they move on to the next.
Just so, at least in my case. And I hope that music and movie publishers will come to this sensible conclusion as well. I'd love to be able to download a legal "zero day" copy of movies direct from the studios... or go see the movie in the week of its release. Not wait until they finally get around releasing it in my country. As for music... the not-really-legal AllOfMP3 should be an example to the music industry. A wide selection of music, and more importantly, a wide selection of formats, from MP3, WAV, to OGG. Now there's "plays for sure" for you... And you could choose the bitrate as well, from small files to files without compression.
If publishers stop punishing their legit customers with crippled products and late releases, those customers might decide to not turn to piracy.
But of course it is, and of course they'll use that defense: "Yes I did it, your honour, but it was someone else's fault". Society itself would probably not accept the fact that even more or less sane people sometimes shoot each other in a fit of rage. That smacks too much of accidents, and things that society cannot control. Pointing fingers (at games, the gun lobby, failing education, jink food, etc) is so much more comforting.
Don't! Like this blogger probably already discovered to his detriment, they could put you down for Customs Schedule 405 (mandatory cavity search) or the dreaded Schedule 209 (loud rock music, salad oil, night stick) just for making fun of them on the Internet.
Seriously, these guys need no excuse nor justification to make any traveler's life a living hell. I'm just wondering if they do that in certain cases, just because they can.
Those are good reasons, but the most important reason I think is that the user interface just works so damn well. It does for me... I am no Apple fanboy (the only other Apple device I own is an iPod, the rest is all Windows stuff), but I bought one, despite
- no out-of-the-box todo lists
- no notepad that is actually useful (and syncs)
- no cut & paste (a major omission), and poor (if any) communication between apps
- crippled Bluetooth (only works with headsets, can't use it to hook up a Bluetooth keyboard or other peripherals).
- locked down OS (can't replace the standard keyboard with a custom one, for instance).
- rumours of poor battery life and poor reception (I haven't noticed any of these. Tip to increase battery life: turn off location services; the GPS chip is power hungry... like it is on any other cell phone).
So why are people buying despite all this? I don't think having a built-in iPod and some amusing apps make up for this. The following, however, does:
- Form factor. It's small. And I thank Apple for not putting a damn physical keybord inside, which would make it considerably bulkier.
- Ease of use. The UI is simple and responsive certainly compared to WME.
- The multi-touch screen: brilliant not because of the cute "pinch" zoom gesture, but because I can operate it with my fat fingers. Whereas my other smart phones required me to use a fingernail or the stylus, I can operate the iPhone 1-handed using my thumb.
Typing messages is actually pretty good on the iPhone. As you'd expect, typing speed is somewhere between the on-screen keyboard & stylus of WME phones, and phones with a physical keyboard. But that's not what Apple needs to work on to capture the business market. Apple needs to address security by offering a mandatory PIN login that cannot be disabled by the user, and a remote wipe function. Without those two, you can forget about corporations allowing these things to VPN in and access the Exchange server.
On a device of that size, they can afford to have more processing power (and battery capacity to match), so perhaps they can extend the GUI allowing these apps to run windowed, in parallel. That would make sense on a device with a screen of that size.
<3 Hmm... "Dwarf in a pointy hat mooning you" That was my first of many guesses. It took me a while too before I understood that it is a heart, and I didn't infer it from the context or by looking at it; I had to be told as well. Oh well, maybe I am getting old.
I don't know about Swype, but when using Shapewriter, an iPhone notepad application that works (suspiciously) similar as other have pointed out, you just ignore double letters. I just tried "William Wallace" on ShapeWriter by tracing "Wiliam Walace" and it came out just fine. If there is an ambiguity between two valid words ("planner" and "planer"), they'll both be shown in a pick list from which you just select the right one.
The technology relies on a dictionary, so it won't recognise words such as your username until you add it manually.
Someone else mentioned looping around a letter to make it a double, which beats waiting. I seriously detest any input method that makes me wait, like the Multitap input on old pre-T9 cell phones, where you'd have to wait a second before hitting the "3" key again to type a double "e" (else you'd just get an "f")
What if those drug laws also made it illegal to buy Aspirin? That's the thing: P2P and filesharing in themselves are not evil, and have legitimate applications. For instance, updates for a number of games are distributed via Torrents.
Making laws should work like this: you define what's immoral, dangerous or otherwise undesirable, then you make laws to prevent that, and only that, from happening. If you feel that software piracy is immoral, outlaw it. If you can come up with something that would prevent piracy and nothing else, implement that. But the many legit activities that would suffer from this proposal are not acceptable collateral damage.
A couple of .44 magnum rounds will "obscure its vision" nicely. Ok, that doesn't happen all that often here due to firearms regulations, but these cameras are often broken, burnt, even blown up. Every now and then someone driving a 4WD will notice that he has been photographed, drive back, sling a chain around the camera, rip it out and take it with him.
I disapprove, of course...
True: these things are not separate, but they are not the same thing either. What functionality is there on the iPhone is wonderfully easy to use. But some functionality is simply missing. Especially in light of the remark that Apple is after a slice of the corporate (i.e. Blackberry) market:
- No to-do list
- Notepad functionality that looks like prototype leftovers added as an afterthought (with no sync options).
- Zero syncing options for Windows 2000 (which is still a staple OS in the corporate environment).
All of these functions are available on Windows Mobile or Blackberry phones. They're crap to use, but they are there.
The fact that a lot of people buy a MacBook Air despite its ridiculous price/performance ratio and solely for its form factor, is saying a lot about the importance of the package technology comes in. Same for the iPhone: from a pure functional point of view it's not a very good phone, and it has a few issues that we would not accept from any other manufacturer, but still people are literally lining up to get their hands on one. Despite some important areas where the iPhone performs poorly, there are other things like the form factor, design and ease-of-use where it outshines the competition.
And it's precisely design, form factor and ease-of-use where Steve Jobs has a lot of influence. Perhaps not directly as a designer, but as a (purportedly) insanely demanding critic. Someone ascribed Apple's success as a trendsetter in design to this; where other companies design for an identified or assumed market segment, Apple designs for Steve Jobs, a rich gadget freak who happens to have a decent taste.
I've found that seasoned programmers, even so-called "agile" ones, often miss the big picture when it comes to changing business needs, shifting priorities, budget cuts, politics, etc. Some programmers exhibit the same attitude as Dante Hicks in "Clerks": "You know, this job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers". Others listen to the customer too much, when it should be clear that the customer doesn't really know (yet) what he wants. Programmers may not have the aptitude, remit or time to deal with all this, or (more often than not) they simply aren't interested.
And that is fine: that's where the team lead or project manager comes in. If some manager is being an arse about requirements or timelines, make sure he talks to you instead of your team. And also make sure that you know how to handle that manager. Can you convince him he's wrong, can you find someone who can, or can you discuss this with the project's steering committee or sponsor? Many, many incorrect decisions and false assumptions will be made. As a techie with a bit of business experience, you stand a fair chance of spotting these. And as a project lead, it is your job to steer the ship away from disaster and back on course. That's where your added value lies.
In my opinion the Parent's statement quoted above is only half right. If you have a team of seasoned and competent programmers, your challenges will indeed not arise from your team, but from the business side. Which means you are anything but redundant.
Indeed. Besides, the whole "building vs. programming" analogy is silly. If designing buildings was like programming, architects would have to deal with all new materials every few months (can't use the old ones), they'd have customers insisting that walls are best placed leaning 10 degrees out of true, and the foundation under the building would (magically) be changed every few years, with the building having to remain upright on whatever it was standing on. And if the construction crews put a doorknop on wrong, the whole building might come crashing down when someone opened the wrong window.
You mean we still have those freedoms. But right now we are ruled by an unholy coalition of moralist christians and meddlesome left-wingers (funny, in the US it seems to be a choice between these two, but we get them both at the same time). All the freedoms on your list have already been under attack by the current government. And the scary thing is that nobody is protesting.
Judging from here, Americans may have a messed up sense of morality, but I'll say this for them: if they feel that their liberty is threatened they are much more inclined to take action. We, we just moan a little and then carry on. What have you done to defend these freedoms you enjoy?