Of course, they have been using Goog-411 to improve it, and Google Voice will only accelerate that (on the plus side, I don't need a landline at all anymore with cheap international calls).... but Google's voice search on the iphone is much better than I could ask of it.
If they came out with a voice recognition product, the field currently dominated by the mediocre Dragon Naturally Speaking, I'm sure they could completely kill the competition.
That's the problem with exercise and diet: it's like a job that pays $1 per hour: a lot of work and sacrifice for tiny results. Diet food tastes like shit. The box it comes in is tastier than the contents in my opinion. Repeated studies show that even fairly intense diet and exercise result in only about a 15 pound reduction over the longer run. People then think, "Why should I bust my ass chasing that 15 lbs? I'm still overweight. Fuck it, I want a donut!"
I think the results of the study probably show that people overestimate their exercise and/or decide to reward themselves with a small snack afterward that more than makes up the calories burnt.
"Personally" is a redundant word anyway and such useless clutter infects most writing today, usually in direct proportion to the person's education level, unfortunately.
Intel® or AMD® processor 2.0 GHz or greater 512 MB minimum, 2 GB recommended. 900 MB free disk space (which includes the 400 MB install footprint for a complete installation) Graphics card supported by DirectX 9.0c. 256 MB of video RAM or higher is recommended. Eyes (Ears optional but recommended) 2 Hands (Opposable Thumbs optional but recommended)
Clearly, he should probably be suing the hardware manufacturer. Let's hope his mom has some cash.
Well, yeah, most TV shows are a waste of time -- even "educational" channel often have shows that stretch what should be a 5 minute concept into an hour long show -- it's the only way for many people to get high-speed internet - if they are too for from their CO for DSL and Verizon Fios isn't coming to their area any time soon.
As an aside, why can't Cable start laying fiber to improve thoughput? Verizon does lays fiber and delivers TV through it. Maybe Comcast should plan a transistion slowly.
I read this analogy yesterday, where you can think of level of intelligence like the brightness of a flashlight, what you choose to aim it at is another matter.
Fits rather will with Sagan's candle in the dark illustration.
If you love your dog or cat, keep it on a leash outdoors. Being able to track it down when it's road kill, or frozen to death and chewed up by a snowblower, isn't being a good owner.
Just because bad things can and do happen, doesn't mean we should keep animals on a leash. I have had plenty of cats, I did get them shots and neutered/spade, but besides not declawing them (for defense purposes), I let them have free run outdoors. Yes, I was on the main road and some got run over, but the vast majority were okay. I never had one freeze to death, but I did provide a small, waterproof dog house for them to stay in if the weather got bad and no one was there to let them in. They weren't stupid creatures although they often did stupid things. I figured the few losses were worth their freedom - they weren't bored animals tethered against their will to a small radius. (And yes, I had to shoot one with my.22 because of injuries sustained against a bigger animal it fought -- something the leash doesn't prevent -- but consider it a similiar to having to do that because it was hit by a car and not killed. Wasn't happy about it, but it had a decent life otherwise).
Although I would refuse to adopt cats from other places, the insiders always got into trouble and did stupid things.
Putting a cat on a leash is no less practical than putting a dog on a leash;
The cats I have had would first fight against the leash and try to pull it off any which way, then try to choke themselves going around corners or through underbrush getting it off, or run in circles entangling themselves and the leash. They'd be thouroughly neurotic within a week, and if ever let loose, probably choose to adopt a different household to cohabit.
But then I had only outdoor cats (housebroken, would sleep the cold nights inside, but the rest of the time outside).
A good analogy would be ordinary bank records vs. the contents of a safe-deposit box. The first the bank has access to, and the customer has limited expectation of privacy regarding them. The second the bank does not have access to, their key physically can't open the box alone, and the customer has a higher expectation of privacy about the contents.
Up until the 1970s, you're bankrecords were, in fact, confidential and the customer had as much expectation to privacy there as with his health records entrusted to his doctor.
Then this was assaulted by the "Right to Financial Privacy Act" in 1978, which "let federal agents write their own search warrants, but limited the subjects of those warrants to financial institutions." http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/napolitano2.html (I don't respect Lew Rockwell so much, but Judge Napolitano seems to know what he is talking about, and this was in a speech of his as well here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QwTKKSvR8)
I heard various things about Government unwarranted snooping and seizure on safety deposit boxes, but I can't find a credible link about that at the moment.
Yes, but once erased, they'll keep on spying on email in secret, landing us back to step 1 and this will be the perpetual cycle. The best spot we can hope for is step 1, unfortunately, secret, court unsanctioned spying.
As reported days ago, the biggest opponent to the three strikes rule in britain were the spooks, because they fear a rise in encryption use. That is what people should start using to defend themselves because the formal set of rules won't help here, but at least the court shouldn't ever sanction and admit it. Even if sucessfully challenged this time, there will come a time in the repeating cycle where it doesn't get erased, doesn't get overturned, and then we're stuck at the worst possible case.
If this stupid decision goes through, it makes all unwarranted searches of email admissible in court. The government tortured in Guantanamo, since we all "know" that is happening, should we all go "Oh well" and then when a court legalizes it say "This decision only frmalizes what already happens, whoopey doo!"
As an aside, when I give my car to service, the employees of the dealership/repairshop can conceivably search through my glovebox. I guess cars shouldn't need warrants. And when I have a plumber/electrician fix my house, he can snoop, so might as well strike houses from the list of things needing warrants.
Its pretty evident I have no expectation of privacy on my email, that's why it has no password, and if it did, I give it to everyone, Mr. Idiot Judge.
I can second this - it did nothing but be a phone and had a half-assed contacts list. There might as well have been no other software in it because it was so piss poor. My father keeps his out to save cash in the current economy and plain inertia. He doesn't like it though, he can't answer half the time because it went to silent mode in his pocket, due to the poorly implemented side buttons controlling ringtone.
We only bought ours at the time because smartphones (Jan 2007) didn't seem that useful at the time, like a glorified PDA, had keyboards, and we wanted a clamshell design to negate accidental input. I don't think we would have changed our decision, there simply wasn't that much on the market, though we all recognized "There has to be something better than this crap."
My gmail account isn't really portable. Sure, I can back it up, but the email is really the least of it. If google decided to lock me out of it tomorrow, I'd be fubared.
Websites provided specialized services is nothing new. The app store isn't a new concept, consoles had it longer.
I utterly and completely agree with you - particularly in rural areas, GPS needing 3G or Edge connection isn't going to cut it.
But, this will impact sales. I don't know about TomTom, but my experience with Garmin is that it's routing is shit. I have several units and there are a ton of spots where it will consistently take you via a route that takes much longer, it wants to exit from the fast highway usually one exit too early in order to go the roads beridden with stop signs and lights, and in some cases, it would take nonsensical detours from an otherwise straight road as if Garmin wanted you in a sight-seeing tour of the countryside, doubling not only time of a short trip, but the distance. Garmin has some seriously fucked up routing that even a non-native with just a map would ever pick, and I ran into this in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Washington State, and even in Europe. It's not a localized issue. I love my Garmins in areas I don't know, but that is about it.
OTOH, Google Maps has some of the best routing I have seen, consistently, and in my native areas which I know well, it takes the routes I usually would as well. So, with the limitations in mind, it's perfect for urban/suburban dwellers. I only wish Google would make a standale GPS unit with no internet connection required and cheap updates - I would snap it up in a heartbeat.
It's not a stealth thing at all. The low power SoC market has always been ARMs. It's AMD (Geode... and then Intel's Atom) who decided to bring x86 to the low power market.
Yeah, but they're still not really low power and neither are their boards. They're not competing with Arm yet, in that sense.
I'll say they might be in trouble when I see first see a decent cell phone running intel.
Driving will continue to being dangerous until we take the human component out of driving. We could probably make it today, but the underlying infrastructure just isn't there yet and there is no push for it. Maybe in 50 years.
We have had flying cars for some time, now. At least two decades.
But to alow regular people access to those vehicles would cause far more problems than it's worth. They can barely stay on a road, you think they're going to fare better in the air?
It would be far easier for a computer to safely control a flying car than a ground-based car in traffic. In the air, you can have a strict protocol and lack any weird topology that makes ground-based driving so arbitrary and ambiguous at times.
The dream of a flying car isn't simply one of an airplane that can drive, but something that would take off in your driveway and land at the local shopping center or at work. And I don't count Moller's bling in as something functional.
I either saw it at the theater or I saw it on TV later. This is, of course, before I got into foreign films.
Redbox was the first time I actually really started watching things on DVD regularly. I hated Blockbuster, and DVDs cost more than the movie theater for one person, so that was often the cheaper option as well as the instant gratification that netflix didn't have at the time. It's also due to the low cost and convenience. I don't think there is anything that would make me want to own DVDs, like CDs, it's yet another clunky medium that I don't need collecting dust somewhere (I like being mobile in my living situation and that means desiring less shit to move) and the extras I don't ever watch.
If Hollywood wanted more of my money, perhaps they should just offer downloads in an AVI file or something standard. DRM-less. Please don't abuse me with mandatory ads/previews like you did your DVD customers. I'm okay with variable pricing, will pay $5-9. That should reflect the lack of physical media to ship and produce, less middlemen, and be competitive with a movie theater.
However, Redbox still would beat it with price, and honestly, most movies are only worth watching once, if that.
in my everyday desktop are working fine since January, and they are the most used drives of the system, the smaller one being used to boot the system and store programs, the other storing program data and some DBs.
But believe me, I owned a kindle 2 roughly six months ago - there is no overlap with a netbook yet. Other than wikipedia (where the 6" screen sucked worse than an iPhone, now, I can't speak for the DX with a 9.7" screen size), you don't want to begin to browse with this, it is painful, even on wifi. The browser is primitive and nearly useless.
It can purchase and read books. That is it for the core competencies. I'm not saying this is bad, it's great if that is what you need it for. But don't buy it for the browser.
That's 26 times the price. Sure SSDs are getting cheaper every day but so are hard drives. I am sure they will get so close that the price gap becomes less important than all the other features which separate them. Some time after that, SSDs may even become cheaper, or both SSDs and hard drives will be supplanted by some other technology. It just won't happen right away.
I took the sweetspot price of both HDD and flash for 2002:
A 128mb flash module cost $147 making it $1176 per GB. A 60GB harddrive cost $275 making it $4.58 per GB.
$X/GB, the flash price was 256.8 times the price of hard drive. So it dropped an entire order of a magnitude since then in 7 years. Assuming everything goes along as in the past, that another magnitude of an order drop would occur by 2016/2017. That would leave flash 2.5x that of a 3.5" HDD. Of course, that would make it a comparable price for a higher-capacity 2.5" notebook, which is the size of all SSDs as well.
I don't think the wait will be until 2020. There will always be desktop computers and servers. But the growth market are small devices now. Unlike a decade ago, a notebook can be the primary machine for a great many people without much performance penalty on normal tasks, and that's what many people are buying in lieu of a desktop machine. The previous decade saw digital cameras, GPS systems, and iPods really grow the flash market, iPhone/smartphones are adding cellphones to that list. Who knows what will be next?
I do computer service/repair for a "living" right now. The average user - which, I take it, at least contains the subset of users who are my clients - are using less than 10Gb on average - with many using a couple dozen megabytes, and one or two using 20-30Gb. I've yet to run into a client where I could not simply back up their existing data + OEM install data on a 120G external disk array.
Not to be rude, but the person who knows more about computers won't be coming to you since they could do it mostly themselves or look it up and those are the types to fill up their drives. They also are probably the market that buy the more expensive drives/CPUs/etc (actually spend money on components up front).
voltages. You know, without lugging various plugs along and all that.
The closest to this is the humble car charger, but as far as I can tell, sadly airports and hotels I've been at don't have 12v sockets handy (maybe I didn't look hard enough and be wrong). There isn't always access to a car and in a lot of places, you don't exactly want to leave expensive electronics in one.
The "try before you buy" excuse that people give as a reason to pirate (very popular here at Slashdot) has always been a steaming pile of bullshit, as is the tale that PirateBay is primarily used for legitimate torrent downloads. Pure bullshit. Honestly, it's difficult to take people that say these things seriously.
But of course, information wants to be free as in beer at a frat party. Stallman says so.
I have problems with copyright, fundamental ones with how it has been handled and extended the last 100 years. But since you mention Stallman, I would like to think that the free software people respect copyright. Afterall, GPL and other licenses is built on the power of copyright. And someone who is running Linux and Gimp are running legitimate software with the blessing of its creators, they could easily go the pirate route and be running Windows/Photoshop for free (which MS/Adobe prefers over FSF gaining popularity.)
I fully agree that most people who pirate put up BS reasons. A game can't make money from "support" or other types of deals. Try before you buy, for me that is watching youtube videos of the games by other players, not playing the game till I'm bored with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, they have been using Goog-411 to improve it, and Google Voice will only accelerate that (on the plus side, I don't need a landline at all anymore with cheap international calls).... but Google's voice search on the iphone is much better than I could ask of it.
If they came out with a voice recognition product, the field currently dominated by the mediocre Dragon Naturally Speaking, I'm sure they could completely kill the competition.
"Personally" is a redundant word anyway and such useless clutter infects most writing today, usually in direct proportion to the person's education level, unfortunately.
http://www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/general/sources/zinsser.htm
The software requirements clearly stated:
Clearly, he should probably be suing the hardware manufacturer. Let's hope his mom has some cash.
Hydrogen Peroxide in your ears is a way to remove ear wax buildup.
Idk what is so worrying about that.
Well, yeah, most TV shows are a waste of time -- even "educational" channel often have shows that stretch what should be a 5 minute concept into an hour long show -- it's the only way for many people to get high-speed internet - if they are too for from their CO for DSL and Verizon Fios isn't coming to their area any time soon.
As an aside, why can't Cable start laying fiber to improve thoughput? Verizon does lays fiber and delivers TV through it. Maybe Comcast should plan a transistion slowly.
I read this analogy yesterday, where you can think of level of intelligence like the brightness of a flashlight, what you choose to aim it at is another matter.
Fits rather will with Sagan's candle in the dark illustration.
Just because bad things can and do happen, doesn't mean we should keep animals on a leash. I have had plenty of cats, I did get them shots and neutered/spade, but besides not declawing them (for defense purposes), I let them have free run outdoors. Yes, I was on the main road and some got run over, but the vast majority were okay. I never had one freeze to death, but I did provide a small, waterproof dog house for them to stay in if the weather got bad and no one was there to let them in. They weren't stupid creatures although they often did stupid things. I figured the few losses were worth their freedom - they weren't bored animals tethered against their will to a small radius. (And yes, I had to shoot one with my .22 because of injuries sustained against a bigger animal it fought -- something the leash doesn't prevent -- but consider it a similiar to having to do that because it was hit by a car and not killed. Wasn't happy about it, but it had a decent life otherwise).
Although I would refuse to adopt cats from other places, the insiders always got into trouble and did stupid things.
The cats I have had would first fight against the leash and try to pull it off any which way, then try to choke themselves going around corners or through underbrush getting it off, or run in circles entangling themselves and the leash. They'd be thouroughly neurotic within a week, and if ever let loose, probably choose to adopt a different household to cohabit.
But then I had only outdoor cats (housebroken, would sleep the cold nights inside, but the rest of the time outside).
Up until the 1970s, you're bankrecords were, in fact, confidential and the customer had as much expectation to privacy there as with his health records entrusted to his doctor.
Then this was assaulted by the "Right to Financial Privacy Act" in 1978, which "let federal agents write their own search warrants, but limited the subjects of those warrants to financial institutions."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/napolitano2.html (I don't respect Lew Rockwell so much, but Judge Napolitano seems to know what he is talking about, and this was in a speech of his as well here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QwTKKSvR8)
I heard various things about Government unwarranted snooping and seizure on safety deposit boxes, but I can't find a credible link about that at the moment.
Yes, but once erased, they'll keep on spying on email in secret, landing us back to step 1 and this will be the perpetual cycle. The best spot we can hope for is step 1, unfortunately, secret, court unsanctioned spying.
As reported days ago, the biggest opponent to the three strikes rule in britain were the spooks, because they fear a rise in encryption use. That is what people should start using to defend themselves because the formal set of rules won't help here, but at least the court shouldn't ever sanction and admit it. Even if sucessfully challenged this time, there will come a time in the repeating cycle where it doesn't get erased, doesn't get overturned, and then we're stuck at the worst possible case.
If this stupid decision goes through, it makes all unwarranted searches of email admissible in court. The government tortured in Guantanamo, since we all "know" that is happening, should we all go "Oh well" and then when a court legalizes it say "This decision only frmalizes what already happens, whoopey doo!"
As an aside, when I give my car to service, the employees of the dealership/repairshop can conceivably search through my glovebox. I guess cars shouldn't need warrants. And when I have a plumber/electrician fix my house, he can snoop, so might as well strike houses from the list of things needing warrants.
Its pretty evident I have no expectation of privacy on my email, that's why it has no password, and if it did, I give it to everyone, Mr. Idiot Judge.
I can second this - it did nothing but be a phone and had a half-assed contacts list. There might as well have been no other software in it because it was so piss poor. My father keeps his out to save cash in the current economy and plain inertia. He doesn't like it though, he can't answer half the time because it went to silent mode in his pocket, due to the poorly implemented side buttons controlling ringtone.
We only bought ours at the time because smartphones (Jan 2007) didn't seem that useful at the time, like a glorified PDA, had keyboards, and we wanted a clamshell design to negate accidental input. I don't think we would have changed our decision, there simply wasn't that much on the market, though we all recognized "There has to be something better than this crap."
My gmail account isn't really portable. Sure, I can back it up, but the email is really the least of it. If google decided to lock me out of it tomorrow, I'd be fubared.
Websites provided specialized services is nothing new. The app store isn't a new concept, consoles had it longer.
I utterly and completely agree with you - particularly in rural areas, GPS needing 3G or Edge connection isn't going to cut it.
But, this will impact sales. I don't know about TomTom, but my experience with Garmin is that it's routing is shit. I have several units and there are a ton of spots where it will consistently take you via a route that takes much longer, it wants to exit from the fast highway usually one exit too early in order to go the roads beridden with stop signs and lights, and in some cases, it would take nonsensical detours from an otherwise straight road as if Garmin wanted you in a sight-seeing tour of the countryside, doubling not only time of a short trip, but the distance. Garmin has some seriously fucked up routing that even a non-native with just a map would ever pick, and I ran into this in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Washington State, and even in Europe. It's not a localized issue. I love my Garmins in areas I don't know, but that is about it.
OTOH, Google Maps has some of the best routing I have seen, consistently, and in my native areas which I know well, it takes the routes I usually would as well. So, with the limitations in mind, it's perfect for urban/suburban dwellers. I only wish Google would make a standale GPS unit with no internet connection required and cheap updates - I would snap it up in a heartbeat.
They went into the sending money business. (And yet, they never saw Paypal coming).
Yeah, but they're still not really low power and neither are their boards. They're not competing with Arm yet, in that sense.
I'll say they might be in trouble when I see first see a decent cell phone running intel.
Driving will continue to being dangerous until we take the human component out of driving. We could probably make it today, but the underlying infrastructure just isn't there yet and there is no push for it. Maybe in 50 years.
It would be far easier for a computer to safely control a flying car than a ground-based car in traffic. In the air, you can have a strict protocol and lack any weird topology that makes ground-based driving so arbitrary and ambiguous at times.
The dream of a flying car isn't simply one of an airplane that can drive, but something that would take off in your driveway and land at the local shopping center or at work. And I don't count Moller's bling in as something functional.
I either saw it at the theater or I saw it on TV later. This is, of course, before I got into foreign films.
Redbox was the first time I actually really started watching things on DVD regularly. I hated Blockbuster, and DVDs cost more than the movie theater for one person, so that was often the cheaper option as well as the instant gratification that netflix didn't have at the time. It's also due to the low cost and convenience. I don't think there is anything that would make me want to own DVDs, like CDs, it's yet another clunky medium that I don't need collecting dust somewhere (I like being mobile in my living situation and that means desiring less shit to move) and the extras I don't ever watch.
If Hollywood wanted more of my money, perhaps they should just offer downloads in an AVI file or something standard. DRM-less. Please don't abuse me with mandatory ads/previews like you did your DVD customers. I'm okay with variable pricing, will pay $5-9. That should reflect the lack of physical media to ship and produce, less middlemen, and be competitive with a movie theater.
However, Redbox still would beat it with price, and honestly, most movies are only worth watching once, if that.
in my everyday desktop are working fine since January, and they are the most used drives of the system, the smaller one being used to boot the system and store programs, the other storing program data and some DBs.
There is an international version with 3g connectivity:
http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Reading-Display-International-Generation/dp/B0015T963C
But believe me, I owned a kindle 2 roughly six months ago - there is no overlap with a netbook yet. Other than wikipedia (where the 6" screen sucked worse than an iPhone, now, I can't speak for the DX with a 9.7" screen size), you don't want to begin to browse with this, it is painful, even on wifi. The browser is primitive and nearly useless.
It can purchase and read books. That is it for the core competencies. I'm not saying this is bad, it's great if that is what you need it for. But don't buy it for the browser.
Going by this website:
http://lab-notes.blogspot.com/2007/05/historical-storage-prices-raw-data.html
and harddrive prices verified here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.html
I took the sweetspot price of both HDD and flash for 2002:
A 128mb flash module cost $147 making it $1176 per GB.
A 60GB harddrive cost $275 making it $4.58 per GB.
$X/GB, the flash price was 256.8 times the price of hard drive. So it dropped an entire order of a magnitude since then in 7 years. Assuming everything goes along as in the past, that another magnitude of an order drop would occur by 2016/2017. That would leave flash 2.5x that of a 3.5" HDD. Of course, that would make it a comparable price for a higher-capacity 2.5" notebook, which is the size of all SSDs as well.
I don't think the wait will be until 2020. There will always be desktop computers and servers. But the growth market are small devices now. Unlike a decade ago, a notebook can be the primary machine for a great many people without much performance penalty on normal tasks, and that's what many people are buying in lieu of a desktop machine. The previous decade saw digital cameras, GPS systems, and iPods really grow the flash market, iPhone/smartphones are adding cellphones to that list. Who knows what will be next?
Not to be rude, but the person who knows more about computers won't be coming to you since they could do it mostly themselves or look it up and those are the types to fill up their drives. They also are probably the market that buy the more expensive drives/CPUs/etc (actually spend money on components up front).
voltages. You know, without lugging various plugs along and all that.
The closest to this is the humble car charger, but as far as I can tell, sadly airports and hotels I've been at don't have 12v sockets handy (maybe I didn't look hard enough and be wrong). There isn't always access to a car and in a lot of places, you don't exactly want to leave expensive electronics in one.
I have problems with copyright, fundamental ones with how it has been handled and extended the last 100 years. But since you mention Stallman, I would like to think that the free software people respect copyright. Afterall, GPL and other licenses is built on the power of copyright. And someone who is running Linux and Gimp are running legitimate software with the blessing of its creators, they could easily go the pirate route and be running Windows/Photoshop for free (which MS/Adobe prefers over FSF gaining popularity.)
I fully agree that most people who pirate put up BS reasons. A game can't make money from "support" or other types of deals. Try before you buy, for me that is watching youtube videos of the games by other players, not playing the game till I'm bored with it.