Android OS already has a standard interface for accessing gyroscopes. I don't know if any phones use it yet but if developers want to they can support it in their code today.
That's kinda the thing with nonstandard hardware, developers often default to the lowest common denominator (standard hardware) and if they think of it or have time, they add the extra devices. I'm thinking of consoles -- how many games supported the super scope or power glove? If the Wii didn't come with its special controller but just a standard one with the wiimote as optional hardware, would all games support accelerometers and the like? Even the Wii Fit isn't universally supported although it's obvious this console generation that optional hardware is finally making a big dent.
iTunes does it? You mean the phone can't update itself? Hardly sounds like an advantage. For the last Android update that was released, I was able to update my phone as soon as it came out while sitting in a coffee shop away from my computer.
Okay, you have a point there. When someone says to update flash, I'm thinking restarting PC hardware and doing it before the OS bootstraps itself.
Sturgeon's Law, this is nothing new. But there are high quality Android phones if that's what you want. I'm a little lost with your criticism of the 4 buttons though. Does this really confuse you, or do you just think that 4 buttons are too confusing for the average person? The average mouse comes with 3 buttons, and I have yet to meet a person who couldn't figure one of them out, and the icons on the Android buttons are also standardized and clearly depict their functions so it's even less confusing then a mouse.
Yes, I'm talking about the typical older user. I work with people just starting on computers and even a 2 button mouse hangs them for a loop,:-/. Something like a Microsoft Laser Mouse 5000, with the side buttons drives them totally nuts because of spurious inputs on their part.
I would like to see a good quality build android phone, preferable with a glass screen (I'm liable to scratch plastic), so if you can point me to a model, I will check it out.
They're already in a world of hurt with so many vendors ramping to release Android portable devices of all sorts form factors, now they have to compete in the CPU arena too?
WTF are you smoking and why won't you share it with the rest of us?
World of hurt? The iPhone 4 is probably going to break all previous sale's records. This is like saying that Apple is a world of hurt because Gateway/Dell/Sony/Toshiba offer more models and sell more quantity than Apple. Yeah, Apple is hurting there too, with their margins and what not.
The truth is that it's inevitable Apple will be sold out in sheer quantity by the Android. But the strengths of their competition are also Apple's strengths:
-Android runs on anything. Which means when android phones add things like gyroscope, most apps will likely be ignore it for the first year since they can't rely on certain features being present. The innovation in this aspect will have lag behind if Apple stays determined. The interface I'm sure isn't as reliable from model to model, and I never heard iPhone users tell each other to download and install the latest firmware (yes, iTunes does it automatically).
-Build quality. For having dozens of models, every goddamn android phone looks like the same basic heap of cheap plastic with the 4 confusing buttons in front. This is just my impression from looking at them quickly at best buy -- but I get the same impression of the PC notebooks vs Mac Book Pros (to be fair, there is the Adamo which I never seen at a store).
I think the Android is great that it is around, the competition is needed because Apple definitely has bad tendencies with no competition, but Apple is definitely not in a "world of hurt" over the Android. More like that it lit a fire under their ass.
As far as the A4, it's likely to be based on an arm processor with their in-house team adding improvements they need. They are definitely not making entire chips from scratch. Little hubris involved. And Atom simply is not going to be touching Arm in low-power performance any time soon.
It would suck if Sony's game division actually did get destroyed because Nintendo (and everyone, really) needs the competition to get off their behinds. Article was really interesting, thanks for pointing that out! The first thing I noticed while reading is the user happiness vs. featuritis curve made me think of Apple immediately. They seem to think on the same level as Nintendo in this sense.
Makes me wonder if the two will cooperate on the patents and Apple will have a 3D phone next year? The one person technology seems to make phones a perfect application, and I can say that the iPhone is no real competitor to the DS in any real sense unless the DS will become a phone in short order (mostly because every iPhone game I has no real depth and they all suck the battery life out of the phone within 2 hours or so). I guess I have to see it action, 3d might screw with a touchscreen input.
An iPad only costs $500 (no clue in Australia but since we were talking Amazon's US price). So you get pricing for a "top of the line" one and it surprises you it goes up? A 25k Honda Odyssey also turns into a 40k car when you're adding features.
Really, if it doesn't do what you need at a reasonable pricepoint in your opinion -- don't get it!
Why should Apple be doing this? They aren't doing this anywhere else. My first thought is dishonest retailers or dishonest salespeople being paid on commission but only for higher-margin (for the store) accessories.
has 1024x600 resolution. iPad has 1024x768. So, out of date by nearly a decade... for what? A big screen TV? Also, the IPS screen is rather nicer than the ordinary screen. The rest of your points, someone else may debate, buy it or not, it's no matter to me.
As nice a yarn you spin about unions, a real problem about them is that they have special protections from the state and the big ones are operated like a mafia (or by the mafia). Oftentimes, union members become a protected class, earning way more than their un-unionized peers -- which sounds like a dream come true until you see town like Detroit and realize that once they priced themselves out of the market, the companies stop expanding in that area and move elsewhere. But unions are often self-destructive and don't stand down until they killed the goose that layed the eggs. This is often because union management =/= company worker in the big cases.
A few years back, friends of mine were trying to book a convention center for a political rally. The cost in the big city was 100k and they weren't allowed to wipe their own asses, union workers had to do it for them for $100 or $120 an "hour" (not that 1 hours worth of work was even done, just billed). OTOH, in a major commercial center outside town which wasn't so unionized, with excellent location/parking/etcetera would have cost 10k+.
Also years and years back, my UPS man lamented about an upcoming strike because he was getting paid enough by his reckoning and it only meant that he would have to work a year longer for his pension or something like that -- don't remember the details. None of his colleagues wanted the strike but management was pushing for it.
Unions served a purpose once, but if you're not careful, it's a poisonous antidote that will cure your ailments but give you others that are just as bad.
You talk about companies not having to worry as long as competing companies have to pay the same costs. But this is wrong. Say you have all car companies held hostage by sudden strikes and the pay goes up 50% and the price of cars go up 20% across the board. Well, the customers aren't made of money and will jump ship - some will go toward the used car market, making the jalopies longer, some will seek more sources of transit whether it's motorcycle, moped, mass transit like bus or train, and some will just travel less in general. The market may compensate in other ways I can't forsee.
The point is you can't forsake free market principles forever. I don't mind the ideas of unions because that's just free association but the laws protecting them are ridiculous. If management can find cheaper labor elsewhere, well, that is the free market at work. However, I do think standards and regulations are necessary to protect the worker -- unfortunately most union aren't about that anymore. Which makes me think that there should be one union that is protected that lobbies for worker safety and standards and one unprotected union that deals with worker's pay and the two shall always stay seperate.
When they were building the local electrical unions major headquarters for the fat cats around here, I know they weren't using unionized contractors for any of it except the electrical. There have been reports of a major worker's union in Germany hiring only ununionized workers and treating them badly. The unions don't even like their own dogfood, how do they expect anyone else to?
Maybe the reason it didn't work for them is, from your description, it seems that they felt compelled to use it every time in place of phone conversation instead of when it makes sense. Eat pizza at absolutely every meal, whether lunch, dinner, breakfast - and you'd get sick of it too.
Video Calls will make sense on the holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, birthday, etcetera. They'll also make sense on other occasions perhaps when the boss wants to talk to you and be assured he has your full attention.
But a complete replacement for a phone call it is not. But then most people don't know what a phone call is either, so it's no surprise they failed at video calls.
* though:/o/ as in toe; (other examples: dough)
* tough:/f/ as in cuff; (other examples: rough, enough)
* cough:/f/ as in off; (other examples: Gough (name))
* hiccough (a now uncommon variant of hiccup):/p/ as in up; (unique)
* plough:/a/ as in cow; (other examples: sough, drought, and the name Doughty)
* through:/u/ as in threw;
* nought:// as in caught. (other examples: ought, sought, thought, brought
As a native English speaker, I still have enough problems with ie and ei and words and have to think when I spell words like receive and something like ancient. Mostly spelled correctly because of my spelling correction. And words like tongue have their origins where?
So many borrowed words, whether it's from German, Welsh, France, etcetera should have reconfigured spelling to follow English pronunciation. You point out Japanese but because they don't have latin alphabet, everything they borrow is put into Katakana (following pronunciation) and "japanized" rather than their language make an exception for the spelling of a borrowed word.
Although German is getting rather bastardized with borrowed terms (team imo should be germanized into Tiem), it does have a more consistency in spelling overall.
Actually, in this type of situation, going with Windows would be better. If students already have Mac laptops, they could run Windows using bootcamp on them, and they'd only have to buy a copy of Windows, not a whole new laptop. By going with Mac laptops it forces parents of students who already have a Windows laptop to either need a loaner, or buy a second laptop.
Basically, Windows works better here because it's more open in the sense you can install it on any supported hardware. Mac OSX can only legally be installed on Mac hardware, making it less open. Linux would also work since Linux can run on both Wintel and Mac hardware.
Have you seen the cost of a windows license lately?
I have seen computers used in schools. I NEVER thought, "Wow! The kids are learning so much, what great payoff!" Usually they are toys. But I have had enough of the government requiring me to run specific OSes. It goes beyond cross-platform and just requiring assignments to be in a standard and if workable, open format.
Like George Carlin said, teach students to think. Not to program them and this sounds an awful lot like programming them into "Mac Good, Windows Bad" or the other way around. If it's to cut down on costs I can understand why they choose a mac, but ideally then, they should go for an OLPC in that case. Standard as hell and can run anything plus it's cheap.
But I never understood the whole "you HAVE TO run this OS" thing.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Morality "I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
* Bertrand Russell, in Why I Am Not a Christian; this has often been misquoted as "The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
Hacker is not a term that means you are the bad guy although it conjures the fear in the ignorant (i.e. the general public). It just meant someone who hacks.
I don't care about tinkering with my phone and I do own an iPhone. One of the first things I look at is build quality. To this day, it still gets me that almost none of the PC manufacturers even attempts to catch up to Apple in this - the first impression of an apple computer is extremely nice while most PC desktops you still have a behemoth tower that hasn't changed much since the early-mid 90s and the notebooks are hunks of plastic. Well, Dell tried with the Adamo but it's not really available in store and is freakn ugly.
The same thing with phones. The iphone edge to edge glass gives an extremely good impression and it has a single, intuitive button. OTOH, for there being a ton of android models, the ones I have seen have that cheap plastic look and cheap plastic buttons (plastic does not have to look cheap but these do) - 4 of which which are pretty confusing to an iPhone user (iPhone also has multiple buttons in reality but the rest are hidden on the side and manipulate the device itself, not the programs). It also has that sunken plastic screen that Apple did away with around 2007 with the iPhone and I don't know when edge to edge glass appear on its Mac models although it makes the sunken plastic screen appear dated.
That said there would be one important thing for me and that is having an unlocked phone. I'm an international traveler but with only select countries. AT&T rapes me for international roaming calls and triply so for international roaming data. We're not talking about esoteric countries like Nigeria either, but Germany, France, etcetera. In my old razrs, I just popped out my american sim and put in a prepaid sim of that country. It worked like a charm. I heard that even unlocked iPhone from other countries are locked to those countries sim cards making them useless. I don't know what Apple is thinking, but it's current policies are extremely stupid and for a phone that should be your assistant, it seems AT&T owns my phone more than me. I could understand if I WANTED a subsidized phone, but I'm willing to pay the unsubsidized but they won't offer it. Once I'm off my contract, I'm probably going to look for an android if it hasn't changed, I'm sure there are enough manufacturers willing to sell me an unlocked phone.
Kanji are asinine. Have always been. You don't know the kanji, you'll have no way to figure it out in most writing because there are no clues how to sound it out. Which is why so many manga have kana above the kanji.
Western languages have many flaws, english grammar is inconsistent and english spelling is horribly inconsistent in some cases, but Kanji is such a pain that the Chinese even thought of dropping their own system decades back in favor of pinyin (romanization).
Once you get beyond the mysticism that cause people to get kanji tattoos, it's a little like writing roman numerals in some ways (which can be added and subtracted easily, but a pain to multiply and divide by hand).
Get Grandma an iPad with a white pages app. That way she'll thank you for not being a cheap fuck trying to pawn off your 3rd rate, 10 year old massive desktop computer with a 50 ton CRT she can't hope to move without a crane on her while indoctrinating her in the ways of Linux as if she cared or understood and she might actually leave you in her will.
On some movies, like the DVD of a certain franchise, Amazon now includes reviews from all the other seasons or even completely different titles, going so far as to calculate the star ratings based on these seperate products.
This doesn't seem to be across the board and may be up to the individual seller of the product, but it has turned movies that were rated 2 stars 2 years later into 5 star products -- without having an additional actual reviews pertinent to the title added, rather than reviews of better movies in the franchise lumped together into it.
That's analogy makes no sense. All your shit is still in the place whether you're there or not. Your rent is based on two things - location and space ("amount used"). If you want a 5 bedroom house, 4 baths, etcetera, it's going to be a damn sight more expensive than 1 room studio. To make your analogy work, hotel rooms would have to be used and it still breaks down.
I think the A&TT change sucks. If you're work and home have wifi, you'll likely be below 200MB per month... but if not, you'll seriously need the 2GB plan. But there are still people who want unlimited. Unlimited doesn't mean unlimited data like someone posted comparing it to an unlimited electric plan. Unlimited in this case means you could download 24/7 on the limited bandwith on the phone. In analogy to electricity, you could easily have an "unlimited" plan, because even the 100/200 amp wire into your house has a "bandwidth" limit of the amount of electricity it can pull at any one time. From there, the electric company just has to figure the average people on unlimited plans actually pull down and adjust their rates to profit from that.
It's not unfeasible, although it will incentivize everyone to switch to electric heat and leave the AC running 24/7 as well as the lights and TV. Of course, if the unlimited electric plan was $499 per month, most people would opt per kwh. OTOH, I dont see that much of a big deal about having a data pipe open 24/7.
Just figure the weekend 2x15 hours, and that means only 18 hours to disperse among the week 3.5 hours at the end of the day. It's doable although I wouldn't want to sit there and be the one doing it.
OTOH, I can see a lot more people doing the internet for more than 48 hours a week, and wasting job hours at it. It's a bit harder to play actual games on the job, unless you're a game programmer or something (not their own games, more like WoW or Starcraft or something).
Adobe makes available a partial specification of SWF.[7] The document is claimed to be missing "huge amounts" of information needed to completely implement SWF, omitting specifications for RTMP and Sorenson Spark.[8] However, the RTMP specification[9] was released publicly in June 2009, and the Sorenson Spark codec is not Adobe's property. Until May 1, 2008, implementing software that plays SWF was disallowed by the specification's license.[10] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats.
is because it's only as good as Adobe implementation on your platform, and they and they alone decide whether your platform is worth sticking money/time into to make a better flash player. It's not a standard. Unlike a browser, no one else can go out and decide to make a better flash player (gnash ignored).
My 1.67Ghz G4 Powerbook to this day can only play flash videos extremely choppy and games hardly at all. It can play downloaded video or DVDs just fine.
My local Community College library has an even more retarded system than all this... when you check out, you write your name and student ID# on a sheet. The problem is that the first letter, last name, and last four digits of your school id# is your username and the student id# is the default password (no prompt to change it either) into the school system (blackboard, registering/dropping/withdrawing classes, looking at GPA and past grades, viewing and requesting transcipt...).
This sheet is in complete view and what's worse is the library houses the computer lab and has like 50 computers. I tried telling the librarians what they are doing is completely retarded and got the response "We always did it this way". Which is strange because most librarians I know are forward thinking and security minded. I would have demonstrated with a random name but I didn't feel like getting accusations of hacking, even with my own name so I left it alone. To this day they still do it like this.
Macs are only more susceptible to spearfishing because the monitor and body are one. Ram a spear through that and the whole machine is gone. With most windows machines, spearfishers go for the bright monitor but since the real guts of the machine is in a seperate body, it just requires replacing an ever-cheaper monitor.
I would take that route if is saved me time. I would also be cautious and watch for traffic. People walk along highways all the time without incident, she was either inattentive or unlucky.
Without common sense and so are you, apparently. Saving time is not the end all, be all of goals. Compared to Europe, sidewalk/walkway consistency and layout in America is atrocious as it is, but the problem with a highway is the drivers don't expect pedestrians at all (and many highways rightfully illegalize pedestrian activity). Maybe they should from broken down cars and the like, but the principle is nothing worth gambling your life with.
The supermarkt is 1/2 a mile from my house on a normal and straight (no curves) 45mph road with no sidewalk but a reasonable shoulder space. I tried walking once, but the amount of honks I got by idiots dissauded me from trying that ever again. Unlike Europe, I'm not keen trying transportation under a car (motorcycle, moped, cub cadet style thing, bicycle) because I had to many friends get hit or killed by clueless automobile drivers.
should go beyond people granting their permission. Especially with people who hold your data. As far as I see, ISPs and webmail and other such entities hold as many of people's secrets as a lawyer/doctor and should be almost treated as such. Not quite perhaps, but close to it.
I don't see blind fishing expeditions of thousands of people at a time isn't unreasonable search.
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That's kinda the thing with nonstandard hardware, developers often default to the lowest common denominator (standard hardware) and if they think of it or have time, they add the extra devices. I'm thinking of consoles -- how many games supported the super scope or power glove? If the Wii didn't come with its special controller but just a standard one with the wiimote as optional hardware, would all games support accelerometers and the like? Even the Wii Fit isn't universally supported although it's obvious this console generation that optional hardware is finally making a big dent.
Okay, you have a point there. When someone says to update flash, I'm thinking restarting PC hardware and doing it before the OS bootstraps itself.
Yes, I'm talking about the typical older user. I work with people just starting on computers and even a 2 button mouse hangs them for a loop, :-/. Something like a Microsoft Laser Mouse 5000, with the side buttons drives them totally nuts because of spurious inputs on their part.
I would like to see a good quality build android phone, preferable with a glass screen (I'm liable to scratch plastic), so if you can point me to a model, I will check it out.
WTF are you smoking and why won't you share it with the rest of us?
World of hurt? The iPhone 4 is probably going to break all previous sale's records. This is like saying that Apple is a world of hurt because Gateway/Dell/Sony/Toshiba offer more models and sell more quantity than Apple. Yeah, Apple is hurting there too, with their margins and what not.
The truth is that it's inevitable Apple will be sold out in sheer quantity by the Android. But the strengths of their competition are also Apple's strengths:
-Android runs on anything. Which means when android phones add things like gyroscope, most apps will likely be ignore it for the first year since they can't rely on certain features being present. The innovation in this aspect will have lag behind if Apple stays determined. The interface I'm sure isn't as reliable from model to model, and I never heard iPhone users tell each other to download and install the latest firmware (yes, iTunes does it automatically).
-Build quality. For having dozens of models, every goddamn android phone looks like the same basic heap of cheap plastic with the 4 confusing buttons in front. This is just my impression from looking at them quickly at best buy -- but I get the same impression of the PC notebooks vs Mac Book Pros (to be fair, there is the Adamo which I never seen at a store).
I think the Android is great that it is around, the competition is needed because Apple definitely has bad tendencies with no competition, but Apple is definitely not in a "world of hurt" over the Android. More like that it lit a fire under their ass.
As far as the A4, it's likely to be based on an arm processor with their in-house team adding improvements they need. They are definitely not making entire chips from scratch. Little hubris involved. And Atom simply is not going to be touching Arm in low-power performance any time soon.
It would suck if Sony's game division actually did get destroyed because Nintendo (and everyone, really) needs the competition to get off their behinds. Article was really interesting, thanks for pointing that out! The first thing I noticed while reading is the user happiness vs. featuritis curve made me think of Apple immediately. They seem to think on the same level as Nintendo in this sense.
Makes me wonder if the two will cooperate on the patents and Apple will have a 3D phone next year? The one person technology seems to make phones a perfect application, and I can say that the iPhone is no real competitor to the DS in any real sense unless the DS will become a phone in short order (mostly because every iPhone game I has no real depth and they all suck the battery life out of the phone within 2 hours or so). I guess I have to see it action, 3d might screw with a touchscreen input.
An iPad only costs $500 (no clue in Australia but since we were talking Amazon's US price). So you get pricing for a "top of the line" one and it surprises you it goes up? A 25k Honda Odyssey also turns into a 40k car when you're adding features.
Really, if it doesn't do what you need at a reasonable pricepoint in your opinion -- don't get it!
Why should Apple be doing this? They aren't doing this anywhere else. My first thought is dishonest retailers or dishonest salespeople being paid on commission but only for higher-margin (for the store) accessories.
However you got up to +5 insightful is beyond me. The big iPod Touch criticism has been out there since the beginning and your first point:
is extremely dubious. This current netbook
http://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Eee-PC-1005PE-Seashell/dp/B00322PYZO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1276424549&sr=8-1
has 1024x600 resolution. iPad has 1024x768. So, out of date by nearly a decade... for what? A big screen TV? Also, the IPS screen is rather nicer than the ordinary screen. The rest of your points, someone else may debate, buy it or not, it's no matter to me.
As nice a yarn you spin about unions, a real problem about them is that they have special protections from the state and the big ones are operated like a mafia (or by the mafia). Oftentimes, union members become a protected class, earning way more than their un-unionized peers -- which sounds like a dream come true until you see town like Detroit and realize that once they priced themselves out of the market, the companies stop expanding in that area and move elsewhere. But unions are often self-destructive and don't stand down until they killed the goose that layed the eggs. This is often because union management =/= company worker in the big cases.
A few years back, friends of mine were trying to book a convention center for a political rally. The cost in the big city was 100k and they weren't allowed to wipe their own asses, union workers had to do it for them for $100 or $120 an "hour" (not that 1 hours worth of work was even done, just billed). OTOH, in a major commercial center outside town which wasn't so unionized, with excellent location/parking/etcetera would have cost 10k+.
Also years and years back, my UPS man lamented about an upcoming strike because he was getting paid enough by his reckoning and it only meant that he would have to work a year longer for his pension or something like that -- don't remember the details. None of his colleagues wanted the strike but management was pushing for it.
Unions served a purpose once, but if you're not careful, it's a poisonous antidote that will cure your ailments but give you others that are just as bad.
You talk about companies not having to worry as long as competing companies have to pay the same costs. But this is wrong. Say you have all car companies held hostage by sudden strikes and the pay goes up 50% and the price of cars go up 20% across the board. Well, the customers aren't made of money and will jump ship - some will go toward the used car market, making the jalopies longer, some will seek more sources of transit whether it's motorcycle, moped, mass transit like bus or train, and some will just travel less in general. The market may compensate in other ways I can't forsee.
The point is you can't forsake free market principles forever. I don't mind the ideas of unions because that's just free association but the laws protecting them are ridiculous. If management can find cheaper labor elsewhere, well, that is the free market at work. However, I do think standards and regulations are necessary to protect the worker -- unfortunately most union aren't about that anymore. Which makes me think that there should be one union that is protected that lobbies for worker safety and standards and one unprotected union that deals with worker's pay and the two shall always stay seperate.
When they were building the local electrical unions major headquarters for the fat cats around here, I know they weren't using unionized contractors for any of it except the electrical. There have been reports of a major worker's union in Germany hiring only ununionized workers and treating them badly. The unions don't even like their own dogfood, how do they expect anyone else to?
Maybe the reason it didn't work for them is, from your description, it seems that they felt compelled to use it every time in place of phone conversation instead of when it makes sense. Eat pizza at absolutely every meal, whether lunch, dinner, breakfast - and you'd get sick of it too.
Video Calls will make sense on the holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, birthday, etcetera. They'll also make sense on other occasions perhaps when the boss wants to talk to you and be assured he has your full attention.
But a complete replacement for a phone call it is not. But then most people don't know what a phone call is either, so it's no surprise they failed at video calls.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrBtSz5RReM
English being borrowed is more a problem when it comes it inconsistent spellings and pronunciations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#.22Ough.22_words
* though: /o/ as in toe; (other examples: dough) /f/ as in cuff; (other examples: rough, enough) /f/ as in off; (other examples: Gough (name)) /p/ as in up; (unique) /a/ as in cow; (other examples: sough, drought, and the name Doughty) /u/ as in threw; // as in caught. (other examples: ought, sought, thought, brought
* tough:
* cough:
* hiccough (a now uncommon variant of hiccup):
* plough:
* through:
* nought:
As a native English speaker, I still have enough problems with ie and ei and words and have to think when I spell words like receive and something like ancient. Mostly spelled correctly because of my spelling correction. And words like tongue have their origins where?
So many borrowed words, whether it's from German, Welsh, France, etcetera should have reconfigured spelling to follow English pronunciation. You point out Japanese but because they don't have latin alphabet, everything they borrow is put into Katakana (following pronunciation) and "japanized" rather than their language make an exception for the spelling of a borrowed word.
Although German is getting rather bastardized with borrowed terms (team imo should be germanized into Tiem), it does have a more consistency in spelling overall.
Have you seen the cost of a windows license lately?
I have seen computers used in schools. I NEVER thought, "Wow! The kids are learning so much, what great payoff!" Usually they are toys. But I have had enough of the government requiring me to run specific OSes. It goes beyond cross-platform and just requiring assignments to be in a standard and if workable, open format.
Like George Carlin said, teach students to think. Not to program them and this sounds an awful lot like programming them into "Mac Good, Windows Bad" or the other way around. If it's to cut down on costs I can understand why they choose a mac, but ideally then, they should go for an OLPC in that case. Standard as hell and can run anything plus it's cheap.
But I never understood the whole "you HAVE TO run this OS" thing.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Morality
"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
* Bertrand Russell, in Why I Am Not a Christian; this has often been misquoted as "The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
Hacker is not a term that means you are the bad guy although it conjures the fear in the ignorant (i.e. the general public). It just meant someone who hacks.
This was a hack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(technology)
But when you send anything under such an email address, would it get through any spam filters?
I don't care about tinkering with my phone and I do own an iPhone. One of the first things I look at is build quality. To this day, it still gets me that almost none of the PC manufacturers even attempts to catch up to Apple in this - the first impression of an apple computer is extremely nice while most PC desktops you still have a behemoth tower that hasn't changed much since the early-mid 90s and the notebooks are hunks of plastic. Well, Dell tried with the Adamo but it's not really available in store and is freakn ugly.
The same thing with phones. The iphone edge to edge glass gives an extremely good impression and it has a single, intuitive button. OTOH, for there being a ton of android models, the ones I have seen have that cheap plastic look and cheap plastic buttons (plastic does not have to look cheap but these do) - 4 of which which are pretty confusing to an iPhone user (iPhone also has multiple buttons in reality but the rest are hidden on the side and manipulate the device itself, not the programs). It also has that sunken plastic screen that Apple did away with around 2007 with the iPhone and I don't know when edge to edge glass appear on its Mac models although it makes the sunken plastic screen appear dated.
That said there would be one important thing for me and that is having an unlocked phone. I'm an international traveler but with only select countries. AT&T rapes me for international roaming calls and triply so for international roaming data. We're not talking about esoteric countries like Nigeria either, but Germany, France, etcetera. In my old razrs, I just popped out my american sim and put in a prepaid sim of that country. It worked like a charm. I heard that even unlocked iPhone from other countries are locked to those countries sim cards making them useless. I don't know what Apple is thinking, but it's current policies are extremely stupid and for a phone that should be your assistant, it seems AT&T owns my phone more than me. I could understand if I WANTED a subsidized phone, but I'm willing to pay the unsubsidized but they won't offer it. Once I'm off my contract, I'm probably going to look for an android if it hasn't changed, I'm sure there are enough manufacturers willing to sell me an unlocked phone.
Kanji are asinine. Have always been. You don't know the kanji, you'll have no way to figure it out in most writing because there are no clues how to sound it out. Which is why so many manga have kana above the kanji.
Western languages have many flaws, english grammar is inconsistent and english spelling is horribly inconsistent in some cases, but Kanji is such a pain that the Chinese even thought of dropping their own system decades back in favor of pinyin (romanization).
Once you get beyond the mysticism that cause people to get kanji tattoos, it's a little like writing roman numerals in some ways (which can be added and subtracted easily, but a pain to multiply and divide by hand).
Get Grandma an iPad with a white pages app. That way she'll thank you for not being a cheap fuck trying to pawn off your 3rd rate, 10 year old massive desktop computer with a 50 ton CRT she can't hope to move without a crane on her while indoctrinating her in the ways of Linux as if she cared or understood and she might actually leave you in her will.
On some movies, like the DVD of a certain franchise, Amazon now includes reviews from all the other seasons or even completely different titles, going so far as to calculate the star ratings based on these seperate products.
This doesn't seem to be across the board and may be up to the individual seller of the product, but it has turned movies that were rated 2 stars 2 years later into 5 star products -- without having an additional actual reviews pertinent to the title added, rather than reviews of better movies in the franchise lumped together into it.
Really destroys their credibility.
That's analogy makes no sense. All your shit is still in the place whether you're there or not. Your rent is based on two things - location and space ("amount used"). If you want a 5 bedroom house, 4 baths, etcetera, it's going to be a damn sight more expensive than 1 room studio. To make your analogy work, hotel rooms would have to be used and it still breaks down.
I think the A&TT change sucks. If you're work and home have wifi, you'll likely be below 200MB per month... but if not, you'll seriously need the 2GB plan. But there are still people who want unlimited. Unlimited doesn't mean unlimited data like someone posted comparing it to an unlimited electric plan. Unlimited in this case means you could download 24/7 on the limited bandwith on the phone. In analogy to electricity, you could easily have an "unlimited" plan, because even the 100/200 amp wire into your house has a "bandwidth" limit of the amount of electricity it can pull at any one time. From there, the electric company just has to figure the average people on unlimited plans actually pull down and adjust their rates to profit from that.
It's not unfeasible, although it will incentivize everyone to switch to electric heat and leave the AC running 24/7 as well as the lights and TV. Of course, if the unlimited electric plan was $499 per month, most people would opt per kwh. OTOH, I dont see that much of a big deal about having a data pipe open 24/7.
Just figure the weekend 2x15 hours, and that means only 18 hours to disperse among the week 3.5 hours at the end of the day. It's doable although I wouldn't want to sit there and be the one doing it.
OTOH, I can see a lot more people doing the internet for more than 48 hours a week, and wasting job hours at it. It's a bit harder to play actual games on the job, unless you're a game programmer or something (not their own games, more like WoW or Starcraft or something).
I view Gnash as a mixture of being written to spec and being reversed engineered like wine.
As far as that SWF spec.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Licensing
is because it's only as good as Adobe implementation on your platform, and they and they alone decide whether your platform is worth sticking money/time into to make a better flash player. It's not a standard. Unlike a browser, no one else can go out and decide to make a better flash player (gnash ignored).
My 1.67Ghz G4 Powerbook to this day can only play flash videos extremely choppy and games hardly at all. It can play downloaded video or DVDs just fine.
My local Community College library has an even more retarded system than all this... when you check out, you write your name and student ID# on a sheet. The problem is that the first letter, last name, and last four digits of your school id# is your username and the student id# is the default password (no prompt to change it either) into the school system (blackboard, registering/dropping/withdrawing classes, looking at GPA and past grades, viewing and requesting transcipt...).
This sheet is in complete view and what's worse is the library houses the computer lab and has like 50 computers. I tried telling the librarians what they are doing is completely retarded and got the response "We always did it this way". Which is strange because most librarians I know are forward thinking and security minded. I would have demonstrated with a random name but I didn't feel like getting accusations of hacking, even with my own name so I left it alone. To this day they still do it like this.
Macs are only more susceptible to spearfishing because the monitor and body are one. Ram a spear through that and the whole machine is gone. With most windows machines, spearfishers go for the bright monitor but since the real guts of the machine is in a seperate body, it just requires replacing an ever-cheaper monitor.
Without common sense and so are you, apparently. Saving time is not the end all, be all of goals. Compared to Europe, sidewalk/walkway consistency and layout in America is atrocious as it is, but the problem with a highway is the drivers don't expect pedestrians at all (and many highways rightfully illegalize pedestrian activity). Maybe they should from broken down cars and the like, but the principle is nothing worth gambling your life with.
The supermarkt is 1/2 a mile from my house on a normal and straight (no curves) 45mph road with no sidewalk but a reasonable shoulder space. I tried walking once, but the amount of honks I got by idiots dissauded me from trying that ever again. Unlike Europe, I'm not keen trying transportation under a car (motorcycle, moped, cub cadet style thing, bicycle) because I had to many friends get hit or killed by clueless automobile drivers.
should go beyond people granting their permission. Especially with people who hold your data. As far as I see, ISPs and webmail and other such entities hold as many of people's secrets as a lawyer/doctor and should be almost treated as such. Not quite perhaps, but close to it.
I don't see blind fishing expeditions of thousands of people at a time isn't unreasonable search.