Where the current manufacturers, frankly, suck. Especially at marrying hardware and software. Like the phone market before iPhone. (Notice that the one competing OS was made by a software-ish company, and not any manufacturers). I don't see this problem in the console market. If anything, I don't see what apple could bring to the table there.
If there is one line of attack, perhaps it would be via Apple TV for the very casual market. You could give them their own lightweight controllers that double as remotes, and also make iPhones the controllers using their accelerometers like iPad does and an app.
It certainly won't be for the hardcore gamers, but that wouldn't really be something economical for Apple to crack nor their forte. On the upside, you could bring all the iPad games over to the TV.
I like Apple products a lot when I'm doing the norm on them, but when I connect them to another device or to Itunes on my computer, things just get counterintuitive. Adding music is not how I expected (this was a few years back, now I just buy it directly on the phone to avoid it). I also learned that syncing it on a foreign (up to then) computer can also cause it to lose all it's stuff.
I'm guess I like the PC's treat-everything-as-a-file-system philosophy although many non-computer people can't quite grasp it. I have the opposite problem, can't quite grasp when they aren't treated as a straight thru filesystem.
A spokesman for Braehead said: "Staff at an ice cream stall in Braehead became suspicious after they saw a male shopper taking photographs at their counter.
My god, wtf has happened to our society? Would this be any different if it were a female? Imagine they replace "male" with "black" or "Arabic". Retards gone wild. Guy is taking pics of his kid, that should have been obvious to the counter staff. I seriously doubt his daughter paid for her ice cream herself and he just all of a sudden approached her.
The biggest problem is that those of us who want to move to Google+ can't convince enough of our less techy friends to move over. People go where people are. It isn't the best tech that wins but the largest market share. Had Google launched Plus before "everyone and their grandmother" were on Facebook, they would have had a shot, but it's sort of too late.
I don't have a large circle and it wouldn't be difficult to convince mine to move. But I'm stopped by the real name thing. Until that changes, I'm staying with FB.
Or, you need the opposing party to pick a lunatic. With the Tea Party and the religious conservatives in the GOP trying to smash Romney to bits at every opportunity, the possibility that the Republicans may in fact deliver Obama is victory cannot be discounted.
Romney wants to add 100k troops to the military. The man is a lunatic too. Most national politicians are these days. They reflect the electorate that votes for them, and America is a country, by and large, that can't get its spending under control, either at home or in W DC.
And call me old fashioned, but wasn't politics supposed to be about politicians spelling out their policies and views
I would say, that for the period I've been alive, that the less politicians show of their beliefs, the more advantageous it is for them. They can be amiable and pretend to agree with you and be just as nice to the next guy with completely different viewpoints. The less they show their cards, the less people can pick out something to pick a fight with.
With the exception of Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, you'll have very few politicians spelling out where they stand and more just dance around it. Listen to debates or townhalls these days, or even past ones - they're an embarrassment. These people should be publicly bitch slapped every time they dance around the question, outright ignore it, or some other scheme where they pander to the electorate without actually really addressing the question. But they get away with it, people reward them with votes, and then bitch afterwards, which is meaningless.
1. By the time you're learning a foreign language, your brain is significantly different than it was when you were learning your native language. You physically can not learn the same way as you did when you were an infant.
Perhaps not, but I play a lot of strategy games and I notice that if I just play the games I will grok it 100x faster than if I sit down and learn the theory behind it (the rules books as they used to have). A lot of school is like learning chess by reading the rule book. The rule book is great, once you know the game, just to clear up a few areas and misunderstandings, as well as new ideas but it shouldn't be the approach from the beginning.
The nice thing about children's books is that they assume very little and like many games, the essentials can be derived from the context. And it's usually the essential that's needs emphasis, not the special cases (by that point, a foreigner will understand what you mean, and for most 2nd language learners, that's enough progress).
Unlike games though, children's books aren't 2 way (and neither is most classroom time). I heard one teacher using Khan Academy so kids get the lectures at home, and then using her class time to go over practice problems. That's a step closer to what I'm thinking of but still not there.
I just wish computers and programs would come along that would allow much greater playing and feedback loop than is currently possible with just 1 teacher vs many students in the classroom.
2. Learning a language beyond the mechanics requires real immersion, the type that you can't get in an hour a day. Want to really learn a second language? Go live somewhere where everyone you interact with only speaks that language, and you'll learn it. Pretending that you can replace that experience with an hour of unsupervised language use every day is just that, pretending.
I mostly agree with you. I'm bilingual, and my father learned English the same way from nothing. But a lot of Europeans know English pretty well despite never having set foot in America. Most aren't fluent, but they're at the "good enough" level above.
Maybe it's that english is the lingua franca and just exported overseas, Idk, or maybe their classes are different. I know many places start in 4th/5th grade as well.
Yet everything about school is so rigid and factory-like. I still fail to see the need for homeroom other than the daily "Pledge to the Flag" indoctrination and to waste 15-20 minutes.
And there is so little play. (Heck, in 5th grade, at recess, we were told by teachers to not run in the yard as we were "too old for that type of behavior" like playing tag) At least in my experience. Imo, lectures are the absolute worst way to learn, but that's what most schools subject kids to most of the time. And it gets increasingly worse in the higher grades.
Many people just don't learn by someone droning on and on, but that's what we accustomed to. I've seen this in foreign languages (and almost everyone I met, where they load up the student with a bunch of grammar rules up front and throughout, vocabulary is almost supplemental in many cases. Rules and rules taught for special cases when the students can barely utter basic sentences. And there is very little play in the classroom. No one learns their native language this way, but for some reason that's how foreign languages are taught.
I would love to see childrens book and childrens films in foreign language classes just as a beginning.
Separate lines for lunch? Who could ever think this was a good idea. Sure, let the students doing well get some perks, just don't go around printing "Dumb" on the lesser achieving kids' foreheads. At least they wised up, even if it did take some external pressure to scrap the idea.
I don't see anything wrong with the idea. We're protecting these kids from "humiliation" but it's better to embarass them a bit then to let them fail their way into life where they'll get smacked really hard, no? I like the idea of rewarding people that actually do well.
When i go into geek circles, they go on and on about specs and junk when yammering about the iPad or iPhone. All I know is that my nearly 70 y/o dad who is absolutely allergic to computers in general can operate one without much fuss. Even normal macs are too much for him.
Perhaps it's different now, but when I looked into android phones last year I immediately noticed that they had 4 buttons on the bottom, and for many people that's 3 too many. I was looking at an android tablet a couple weeks ago and it's UI was similiar to one of those 2.5D linux UIs hat I used to play with for a day or two before going back to my plain jane 2D UI.
There'll always be power users but they are the minority. Places like/. and other tech sites can really skew reality. I remember before the first IPad was launched how every story here about it or Apple had many comments seething with impending doom and gloom about its prospects.
And there are still a myriad of people who still haven't learned feature lists with many checkmarks != all-encompassing reality. That said, the competition excites me.
In any case, being on the other side of the peak is a scary thing. Demand keeps going up, as people in China and India get cars, but you have this downward supply.
I'm not sure there is much to improve. For years, the ever-changing (and oft confusing ways) to show/hide comments drove me nuts. But the current iteration of the slider bar works well.
Often, I type a comment just to find I'm not signed in (/. seems to like signing one out rather quickly). The old way I could have signed on at my post without losing my post. If I click log on at the top, I often lose my post. I have to remember to right click->new tab it. I greatly preferred the old way. I often lose posts and really don't bother retyping them.
I would also like to see/. get more story volume like Reddit but w/o losing IQ. I still come here because the posts are still more intelligent than most of the net, many social media sites included. Plus, unlike reddit, I like how the moderation often tells me why something was upvoted (I sometimes don't get humor of everything because I don't keep up with the latest trends/games/books/series/etc).
Great generals usually make sure less of their men die than would otherwise.
Great business leaders allow so many more people be employed than otherwise.
We're human and can only remember a few things. Are you going to really remember thousands of people, or one person that basically comes to symbolize their efforts?
That said, I think most CEOs get overpaid and overcredited for mediocrity or just going with inertia. SJ probably was one of the few who wasn't.
Just attach a whistle. Much cheaper (construction and energy-wise) than loudspeakers. Not a referee whistle though, something designed with a low, smooth tone, so if a million of these are on the road, it won't drive everyone else nuts.
While I agree with you in general, there are some type of stocks I would never invest in, like, say, airlines. They always seem to be going out of business, and yet the brand lives on and on (most of the time).
Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.
Bullshit. Then that would mean Joe Blow could open a company on Monday and have it be worth $300B by Friday's IPO.
Sorry, things don't work that way. A company's value is based on the information that is out there, how well people analyze, how well that corresponds to reality, plus hype or lack of.
So yeah, there can be a HUGE fudge factor in any stock price not to mention fraud. Hell, the future is also unpredictable which causes one guy to value stock differently than another, as well as their understanding of the industry/markets. But to say there is 0 correlation is the type of head-in-the-sand cynicism as well, demanding nothing less than utter perfection in order for a metric to prove it's worth.
It's the same type of absolutism that will say spedometers are worthless because the tires can sometimes spin, giving a wrong value, and that it won't tell you anything at all about your vertical velocity if the car were to drop into a 100ft sinkhole all of a sudden. Therefore it should be tossed out.
In videogames, developers have long depended on the hits for both profit and paying for the other titles. Each title is a calculated gamble, and if you lose, well, you just move on to the next one.
It's sad for the small developer who puts heart, soul, and savings into a single title, but they should be told that going in, they only have a 1 in 5 chance of just breaking even, let alone squeezing out a profit for all their trouble.
I switched when Firefox was particularly buggy on my computer and would crash all too often. I stuck with it just due to the url/search being combined and it doesn't nag me when I don't type in an address perfectly.
Adblock works on it now without jumping through hoops. Only thing I liked better on FF was recalling the "last tab closed" but now I see it's on chrome's home screen (hardly ever look at that.)
It seems faster rendering than the firefox I remember and that was my first impression as well.
I think the only killer feature I personally stuck by chrome is the smart url/search bar. I like not having to distinguish the two. At the time I switched, ad block was still not as easy to install as it was on Firefox although that changed.
The speed/memory is nice. Sure would like to has a "last tab closed" option. It may be there, didn't see it and didn't search for answers yet.
"Something with a lot of fat in it - like yogurt or milk - is going to dissolve the compound and wash it away," says Mark Peacock, a plant scientist from the University of Sydney, who this year helped to cultivate the world's hottest chilli, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T. "My favourite remedy is olive oil," he says, "but it's not the most pleasant."
That has to do with our geography more than anything else. Germany is about 3/4 the area of the state of California but has over double the population. Countries like Germany are basically filled with people. There are people everywhere, which means everything to fill your necessities are always nearby.
But this goes back to suburbanization which occurred mostly post-WWII. America has the geography, but there is no reason to have a large portion of the population spread out across most of it, Just like Canada is HUGE, but 90% of the population lives 100 miles from the US border (for various reasons, much of it temperature). Have it as farm land or what not.
I mean, it's probably too late now, way too much of our economy is still invested in the idea of ever-increasing real-estate... but think for a moment if America remained more urbanized. We'd have better mass transit, and our demand for fuel would be lower, which in turn wouldn't have us station our armed forces in outposts throughout the world so much to ensure steady supply (more than world peace). An armed force, which btw, is uses the same amount of oil as a decent sized nation just by itself.
When politicians talk about us "maintaining our way of life", I wonder how much of that is maintaining our freedoms, or if they simply mean that Suzy Homemaker can commute her SUV an hour each day 20 miles to and fro from work? Nationally, It's an expensive lifestyle to keep, yet people don't see that.
As far as houses go, good insulation adds maybe 5% to the overall cost (something that contractors often skimp on as it cuts into their margin) but would save the homeowner that amount many times over. And planning would go down close to 0 if it became the norm.
Slashdot Mirror
Where the current manufacturers, frankly, suck. Especially at marrying hardware and software. Like the phone market before iPhone. (Notice that the one competing OS was made by a software-ish company, and not any manufacturers). I don't see this problem in the console market. If anything, I don't see what apple could bring to the table there.
If there is one line of attack, perhaps it would be via Apple TV for the very casual market. You could give them their own lightweight controllers that double as remotes, and also make iPhones the controllers using their accelerometers like iPad does and an app.
It certainly won't be for the hardcore gamers, but that wouldn't really be something economical for Apple to crack nor their forte. On the upside, you could bring all the iPad games over to the TV.
I like Apple products a lot when I'm doing the norm on them, but when I connect them to another device or to Itunes on my computer, things just get counterintuitive. Adding music is not how I expected (this was a few years back, now I just buy it directly on the phone to avoid it). I also learned that syncing it on a foreign (up to then) computer can also cause it to lose all it's stuff.
I'm guess I like the PC's treat-everything-as-a-file-system philosophy although many non-computer people can't quite grasp it. I have the opposite problem, can't quite grasp when they aren't treated as a straight thru filesystem.
Especially since the advent of 24 hour news networks. It existed before then, but not with the same voracious, unrelenting appetite.
It's a case of people being retards.
FTFA:
My god, wtf has happened to our society? Would this be any different if it were a female? Imagine they replace "male" with "black" or "Arabic". Retards gone wild. Guy is taking pics of his kid, that should have been obvious to the counter staff. I seriously doubt his daughter paid for her ice cream herself and he just all of a sudden approached her.
I don't have a large circle and it wouldn't be difficult to convince mine to move. But I'm stopped by the real name thing. Until that changes, I'm staying with FB.
Romney wants to add 100k troops to the military. The man is a lunatic too. Most national politicians are these days. They reflect the electorate that votes for them, and America is a country, by and large, that can't get its spending under control, either at home or in W DC.
I would say, that for the period I've been alive, that the less politicians show of their beliefs, the more advantageous it is for them. They can be amiable and pretend to agree with you and be just as nice to the next guy with completely different viewpoints. The less they show their cards, the less people can pick out something to pick a fight with.
With the exception of Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, you'll have very few politicians spelling out where they stand and more just dance around it. Listen to debates or townhalls these days, or even past ones - they're an embarrassment. These people should be publicly bitch slapped every time they dance around the question, outright ignore it, or some other scheme where they pander to the electorate without actually really addressing the question. But they get away with it, people reward them with votes, and then bitch afterwards, which is meaningless.
Perhaps not, but I play a lot of strategy games and I notice that if I just play the games I will grok it 100x faster than if I sit down and learn the theory behind it (the rules books as they used to have). A lot of school is like learning chess by reading the rule book. The rule book is great, once you know the game, just to clear up a few areas and misunderstandings, as well as new ideas but it shouldn't be the approach from the beginning.
The nice thing about children's books is that they assume very little and like many games, the essentials can be derived from the context. And it's usually the essential that's needs emphasis, not the special cases (by that point, a foreigner will understand what you mean, and for most 2nd language learners, that's enough progress).
Unlike games though, children's books aren't 2 way (and neither is most classroom time). I heard one teacher using Khan Academy so kids get the lectures at home, and then using her class time to go over practice problems. That's a step closer to what I'm thinking of but still not there.
I thought this blog entry was interesting enough:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/
I just wish computers and programs would come along that would allow much greater playing and feedback loop than is currently possible with just 1 teacher vs many students in the classroom.
I mostly agree with you. I'm bilingual, and my father learned English the same way from nothing. But a lot of Europeans know English pretty well despite never having set foot in America. Most aren't fluent, but they're at the "good enough" level above.
Maybe it's that english is the lingua franca and just exported overseas, Idk, or maybe their classes are different. I know many places start in 4th/5th grade as well.
Nah, he's already posting to /., anonymously too:)
Yet everything about school is so rigid and factory-like. I still fail to see the need for homeroom other than the daily "Pledge to the Flag" indoctrination and to waste 15-20 minutes.
And there is so little play. (Heck, in 5th grade, at recess, we were told by teachers to not run in the yard as we were "too old for that type of behavior" like playing tag) At least in my experience. Imo, lectures are the absolute worst way to learn, but that's what most schools subject kids to most of the time. And it gets increasingly worse in the higher grades.
Many people just don't learn by someone droning on and on, but that's what we accustomed to. I've seen this in foreign languages (and almost everyone I met, where they load up the student with a bunch of grammar rules up front and throughout, vocabulary is almost supplemental in many cases. Rules and rules taught for special cases when the students can barely utter basic sentences. And there is very little play in the classroom. No one learns their native language this way, but for some reason that's how foreign languages are taught.
I would love to see childrens book and childrens films in foreign language classes just as a beginning.
I don't see anything wrong with the idea. We're protecting these kids from "humiliation" but it's better to embarass them a bit then to let them fail their way into life where they'll get smacked really hard, no? I like the idea of rewarding people that actually do well.
Thank you.
When i go into geek circles, they go on and on about specs and junk when yammering about the iPad or iPhone. All I know is that my nearly 70 y/o dad who is absolutely allergic to computers in general can operate one without much fuss. Even normal macs are too much for him.
Perhaps it's different now, but when I looked into android phones last year I immediately noticed that they had 4 buttons on the bottom, and for many people that's 3 too many. I was looking at an android tablet a couple weeks ago and it's UI was similiar to one of those 2.5D linux UIs hat I used to play with for a day or two before going back to my plain jane 2D UI.
There'll always be power users but they are the minority. Places like /. and other tech sites can really skew reality. I remember before the first IPad was launched how every story here about it or Apple had many comments seething with impending doom and gloom about its prospects.
And there are still a myriad of people who still haven't learned feature lists with many checkmarks != all-encompassing reality. That said, the competition excites me.
This is M. Hubbert's Curve from 1956 for world peak oil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_peak_oil_plot.svg
Here is his estimate for US peak oil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_US_high.svg
Here is Alaska's production:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_Crude_Oil_Production.PNG
He seems to have done well on the US side of things. Now, perhaps the peak of world oil has shifted by a decade or so (although, by what I'm reading perhaps we're at it):
http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/appl5en/worldoilreservesevol.html
In any case, being on the other side of the peak is a scary thing. Demand keeps going up, as people in China and India get cars, but you have this downward supply.
I'm not sure there is much to improve. For years, the ever-changing (and oft confusing ways) to show/hide comments drove me nuts. But the current iteration of the slider bar works well.
Often, I type a comment just to find I'm not signed in (/. seems to like signing one out rather quickly). The old way I could have signed on at my post without losing my post. If I click log on at the top, I often lose my post. I have to remember to right click->new tab it. I greatly preferred the old way. I often lose posts and really don't bother retyping them.
I would also like to see /. get more story volume like Reddit but w/o losing IQ. I still come here because the posts are still more intelligent than most of the net, many social media sites included. Plus, unlike reddit, I like how the moderation often tells me why something was upvoted (I sometimes don't get humor of everything because I don't keep up with the latest trends/games/books/series/etc).
Great generals usually make sure less of their men die than would otherwise.
Great business leaders allow so many more people be employed than otherwise.
We're human and can only remember a few things. Are you going to really remember thousands of people, or one person that basically comes to symbolize their efforts?
That said, I think most CEOs get overpaid and overcredited for mediocrity or just going with inertia. SJ probably was one of the few who wasn't.
Almost monochrome screen? Are you at all grounded in reality?
Just attach a whistle. Much cheaper (construction and energy-wise) than loudspeakers. Not a referee whistle though, something designed with a low, smooth tone, so if a million of these are on the road, it won't drive everyone else nuts.
While I agree with you in general, there are some type of stocks I would never invest in, like, say, airlines. They always seem to be going out of business, and yet the brand lives on and on (most of the time).
Bullshit. Then that would mean Joe Blow could open a company on Monday and have it be worth $300B by Friday's IPO.
Sorry, things don't work that way. A company's value is based on the information that is out there, how well people analyze, how well that corresponds to reality, plus hype or lack of.
So yeah, there can be a HUGE fudge factor in any stock price not to mention fraud. Hell, the future is also unpredictable which causes one guy to value stock differently than another, as well as their understanding of the industry/markets. But to say there is 0 correlation is the type of head-in-the-sand cynicism as well, demanding nothing less than utter perfection in order for a metric to prove it's worth.
It's the same type of absolutism that will say spedometers are worthless because the tires can sometimes spin, giving a wrong value, and that it won't tell you anything at all about your vertical velocity if the car were to drop into a 100ft sinkhole all of a sudden. Therefore it should be tossed out.
In videogames, developers have long depended on the hits for both profit and paying for the other titles. Each title is a calculated gamble, and if you lose, well, you just move on to the next one.
It's sad for the small developer who puts heart, soul, and savings into a single title, but they should be told that going in, they only have a 1 in 5 chance of just breaking even, let alone squeezing out a profit for all their trouble.
I switched when Firefox was particularly buggy on my computer and would crash all too often. I stuck with it just due to the url/search being combined and it doesn't nag me when I don't type in an address perfectly.
Adblock works on it now without jumping through hoops. Only thing I liked better on FF was recalling the "last tab closed" but now I see it's on chrome's home screen (hardly ever look at that.)
It seems faster rendering than the firefox I remember and that was my first impression as well.
I think the only killer feature I personally stuck by chrome is the smart url/search bar. I like not having to distinguish the two. At the time I switched, ad block was still not as easy to install as it was on Firefox although that changed.
The speed/memory is nice. Sure would like to has a "last tab closed" option. It may be there, didn't see it and didn't search for answers yet.
FTFA:
God forbid services cater to their users' needs.
But this goes back to suburbanization which occurred mostly post-WWII. America has the geography, but there is no reason to have a large portion of the population spread out across most of it, Just like Canada is HUGE, but 90% of the population lives 100 miles from the US border (for various reasons, much of it temperature). Have it as farm land or what not.
I mean, it's probably too late now, way too much of our economy is still invested in the idea of ever-increasing real-estate... but think for a moment if America remained more urbanized. We'd have better mass transit, and our demand for fuel would be lower, which in turn wouldn't have us station our armed forces in outposts throughout the world so much to ensure steady supply (more than world peace). An armed force, which btw, is uses the same amount of oil as a decent sized nation just by itself.
When politicians talk about us "maintaining our way of life", I wonder how much of that is maintaining our freedoms, or if they simply mean that Suzy Homemaker can commute her SUV an hour each day 20 miles to and fro from work? Nationally, It's an expensive lifestyle to keep, yet people don't see that.
As far as houses go, good insulation adds maybe 5% to the overall cost (something that contractors often skimp on as it cuts into their margin) but would save the homeowner that amount many times over. And planning would go down close to 0 if it became the norm.