All of these apps let you to see where your driver is while en-route
So do regular taxi cab apps from the taxi company. If uberX is cheaper, that's all well and good, but if they're not, doing the same thing as a normal taxi company isn't an advantage.
Uber and similar apps commit them to picking up the fare as booked, and they find this annoying because they don't get optimum road miles.
Traditional taxi company apps do this... You place your order in the app, it reserves a cab for you (by number), and you watch him drive to you. How is Uber's booking any different?
This is a complete paradigm shift (and I use that phrase very infrequently) in how one books a taxi. It disrupts entirely an establised method of dispatcching taxis
How so? Uber does not do anything that the local major cab company doesn't do with their smartphone app. As far as I can tell, the only real differences are that Uber uses fancier cars, and charges a lot more (they don't service my city, but their policy is a markup on normal taxi fares).
Assuming cab companies in other cities have similar apps, Uber just seems to be a case of "pay more to get a fancier cab", which isn't a paradigm shift, it's just dramatically restricting your market to people who care about paying more for fancier looking cabs.
Are you sure? Because as far as I can tell, the MediaTek MT6592 is the first mobile SoC to feature eight homogeneous ARM cores (all A7s, in that case). Some googling shows some Chinese SoCs that use the term "8-core" to refer to their GPU rather than their CPU, but that's all I could find.
People realize that the Exynos Octo they're talking about isn't usable as an 8-core CPU, right?
The thing has four A15 cores, and four A7 cores. Only one of those groups can be used at a time. If you're using one or more A15 cores, the A7s are disabled, and vice versa.
I'm not actually sure what the point of what Samsung is doing is. The A15s can presumably be power gated, so switching to the "low power" option only makes sense if it can use less power than a single A15 core in a lower power state. Do the four A7 cores use less power than a single A15?
It seems to me like pairing up a single A7 with four A15s in a 4+1 solution (similar to what nVidia does with Tegra, except not using the same type of core as the +1) makes more sense.
If you get a headache looking at something a couple of metres away, you've got more serious issues to worry about than how comfortable the rift is. The control over convergence is based on the fact that the content is being generated dynamically, allowing the camera positions to be adjusted to match the user's Interpupillary distance.
I own a rift, and I can tell you that while it's an amazing experience, there are much bigger problems with it than headaches. I've never gotten a headache. I have gotten motion sick, and there is no combination of glasses and lenses that lets me see through the thing without either the center being optically too close for my eyes to focus, or everything but the center being a blurry mess from myopia. But then, it's a dev kit, not a consumer product.
It's a 7" display, maybe two or three inches from your face; the calculator you link to reports an 8K display is retina at 3 inches, but the lenses likely throw typical calculations off anyhow; pixels in some areas will appear bigger than others, and since displays can't have variable pixel density, the whole density has to go up to match.
The Rift is a 16:10 display. My previous calculation of 10,800 (which ignores lens distortion issues) would be a 10800x6750 display, which the calculator reports is retina at 2 inches... So it seems that (ignoring lens distortion), 8k+ is required for retina on the rift.
My calculation was basically just to take the horizontal FoV of the Rift (90 per eye) and multiply it by the generally accepted human eye resolution (1 arcminute), which gives 90 * 60 = 5400 per eye. The screen is divided in two, so that 5400 needs to be doubled for the full panel resolution, which gives you 10,800 pixels wide.
The reason why this figure may not be accurate is because of the way the rift warps things. In effect, it's zooming stuff at the center of the lens, so even the pixel density I described might not be enough at the exact center of vision.
The optical distance of the display with the default lenses is very large (enough that myopic people like myself just see a big blur), so that's not causing your headache...
Devices like the Oculus Rift need resolution to go way higher. I once calculated (perhaps completely incorrectly) that an 11K display was the threshold of "retina" for the Rift, although I'd imagine 8K would be close enough. This is a 5-7" display we're talking about here.
The Mac Air and the Surface Pro are similar in cost ($999 for the 128GB model of each, but the Pro has a 64GB model for $899). It's hard to break down the Mac Air sales, because Apple doesn't always break mac sales down, but Apple typically sells about 4 million macs per quarter, and the Mac Air is probably the largest portion of that since it's the entry-level portable. I found some figures from previous years indicating quarterly Air sales in the 1.x million range, but I can't find anything more recent. NDP also said this month that the Mac Air has a 56% marketshare in the US thin-and-light laptop category, but I couldn't find any overall sales figures to back that up either.
How Apple is priced compared to the competition really depends on market segment. In some segments they cost a great deal more, in others they don't. The iPad tends to go for a premium over the comparable competitors, but the MacAir tends to cost the same as the competition.
The company (Pegatron) isn't Chinese. They're Taiwanese. The factories, however, are in China.
Pegatron used to be the manufacturing division of ASUS. They spun them off, but still do a lot of manufacturing for ASUS and just about everybody else. This isn't really an Apple problem: everybody uses these companies for manufacturing, it's an industry-wide problem.
How is $35 more affordable than the $0 I'd pay to use the existing media services that came built in to my HDTV?
My parents have a Samsung SmartTV, and a Samsung smart BluRay player (they run the same software). They use the "smart" software for one thing: watching Netflix. It sucks. Streaming works fine, but pages and images in the Netflix interface take forever to load (20-30 seconds), and searching for stuff with a remote control is painful. As a result, my parents search for content on the iPad Netflix app, and when they find what they want, they directly type in the name of the content on the TV (avoid browsing content in the super slow Smart TV interface).
With this thing, they could spend $35, and cut out a whole bunch of steps. Browse and find content on the much easier to use touchscreen Netflix interface (faster, more fluid, more responsive, on-screen QWERTY keyboard), then hit a single button to get it on the TV. For them, this could be a cheap way to substantially improve the experience. They don't want to spend a hundred bucks just to watch Netflix, but thirty five might be something they can stomach.
For my part, when I do Netflix on my projector, I use my PS3. While it's a great streaming box, typing in search terms with a remote control isn't that great on it either...
Europeans call them car parks. North Americans call them parking lots/garages/spaces. I don't think I've ever heard an American call anything a "car park" in casual conversation.
Well, a better reason might be that nobody in North America calls it a "car park", and if you've got Siri set to US/Canadian, you're not using the right terminology.
I'd argue that the problem does exist. My iPhone is still using the dock connector, and it's pretty common for me to try to put it in the wrong way (gotta look for the hard to see icon on the plug that is normally hidden by your thumb to know which way to plug it in). Not having to care which way the plug goes in would be helpful. MicroUSB are even worse, because they don't have that thing, and I'm always plugging those things in the wrong way (or more often, stopping to visually match up the right direction based on the shape of the tiny plug).
As for the USB end, that's still a problem, true (although USB really ought to have been designed to go in either way), but there's not much we can do about that, since it has to work with the generic ports found on PCs. Few people would frequently plug/unplug the cord from the back of their PC anyhow, since laptops have ports on the sides these days, and pretty much all computers have front-mounted USB ports.
The first-generation iPod did not use the 30-pin dock connector, the first few had a firewire port on them. The 30-pin dock connector was introduced several years later in 2003.
I'd argue that Win7 is pretty good with memory management (as is OS X), and both run fine on machines with 2GB of RAM. Running major applications, on the other hand, might be a concern if they're using a gig or more each. VMWare, though, has a variety of solutions that would help your problem. Memory ballooning (free memory is pooled), memory compression (faster to compress seldom-used RAM than to page it) and memory sharing (dedup on the memory-page level) all help. Particularly that last one.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.taxidiamond.com/en/
All of these apps let you to see where your driver is while en-route
So do regular taxi cab apps from the taxi company. If uberX is cheaper, that's all well and good, but if they're not, doing the same thing as a normal taxi company isn't an advantage.
Uber and similar apps commit them to picking up the fare as booked, and they find this annoying because they don't get optimum road miles.
Traditional taxi company apps do this... You place your order in the app, it reserves a cab for you (by number), and you watch him drive to you. How is Uber's booking any different?
This is a complete paradigm shift (and I use that phrase very infrequently) in how one books a taxi. It disrupts entirely an establised method of dispatcching taxis
How so? Uber does not do anything that the local major cab company doesn't do with their smartphone app. As far as I can tell, the only real differences are that Uber uses fancier cars, and charges a lot more (they don't service my city, but their policy is a markup on normal taxi fares).
Assuming cab companies in other cities have similar apps, Uber just seems to be a case of "pay more to get a fancier cab", which isn't a paradigm shift, it's just dramatically restricting your market to people who care about paying more for fancier looking cabs.
Are you sure? Because as far as I can tell, the MediaTek MT6592 is the first mobile SoC to feature eight homogeneous ARM cores (all A7s, in that case). Some googling shows some Chinese SoCs that use the term "8-core" to refer to their GPU rather than their CPU, but that's all I could find.
I think you mixed some 15s and 7s in that comment...?
I realize that the A7 can be used most of the time, the question is do four A7s simultaneously active use less power than a single A15?
People realize that the Exynos Octo they're talking about isn't usable as an 8-core CPU, right?
The thing has four A15 cores, and four A7 cores. Only one of those groups can be used at a time. If you're using one or more A15 cores, the A7s are disabled, and vice versa.
I'm not actually sure what the point of what Samsung is doing is. The A15s can presumably be power gated, so switching to the "low power" option only makes sense if it can use less power than a single A15 core in a lower power state. Do the four A7 cores use less power than a single A15?
It seems to me like pairing up a single A7 with four A15s in a 4+1 solution (similar to what nVidia does with Tegra, except not using the same type of core as the +1) makes more sense.
If you get a headache looking at something a couple of metres away, you've got more serious issues to worry about than how comfortable the rift is. The control over convergence is based on the fact that the content is being generated dynamically, allowing the camera positions to be adjusted to match the user's Interpupillary distance.
I own a rift, and I can tell you that while it's an amazing experience, there are much bigger problems with it than headaches. I've never gotten a headache. I have gotten motion sick, and there is no combination of glasses and lenses that lets me see through the thing without either the center being optically too close for my eyes to focus, or everything but the center being a blurry mess from myopia. But then, it's a dev kit, not a consumer product.
It's a 7" display, maybe two or three inches from your face; the calculator you link to reports an 8K display is retina at 3 inches, but the lenses likely throw typical calculations off anyhow; pixels in some areas will appear bigger than others, and since displays can't have variable pixel density, the whole density has to go up to match.
The Rift is a 16:10 display. My previous calculation of 10,800 (which ignores lens distortion issues) would be a 10800x6750 display, which the calculator reports is retina at 2 inches... So it seems that (ignoring lens distortion), 8k+ is required for retina on the rift.
My calculation was basically just to take the horizontal FoV of the Rift (90 per eye) and multiply it by the generally accepted human eye resolution (1 arcminute), which gives 90 * 60 = 5400 per eye. The screen is divided in two, so that 5400 needs to be doubled for the full panel resolution, which gives you 10,800 pixels wide.
The reason why this figure may not be accurate is because of the way the rift warps things. In effect, it's zooming stuff at the center of the lens, so even the pixel density I described might not be enough at the exact center of vision.
The optical distance of the display with the default lenses is very large (enough that myopic people like myself just see a big blur), so that's not causing your headache...
Devices like the Oculus Rift need resolution to go way higher. I once calculated (perhaps completely incorrectly) that an 11K display was the threshold of "retina" for the Rift, although I'd imagine 8K would be close enough. This is a 5-7" display we're talking about here.
ByteLight, ByteLight, turn on the magical flashing lights...
The Mac Air and the Surface Pro are similar in cost ($999 for the 128GB model of each, but the Pro has a 64GB model for $899). It's hard to break down the Mac Air sales, because Apple doesn't always break mac sales down, but Apple typically sells about 4 million macs per quarter, and the Mac Air is probably the largest portion of that since it's the entry-level portable. I found some figures from previous years indicating quarterly Air sales in the 1.x million range, but I can't find anything more recent. NDP also said this month that the Mac Air has a 56% marketshare in the US thin-and-light laptop category, but I couldn't find any overall sales figures to back that up either.
How Apple is priced compared to the competition really depends on market segment. In some segments they cost a great deal more, in others they don't. The iPad tends to go for a premium over the comparable competitors, but the MacAir tends to cost the same as the competition.
LocalTalk file sharing, AIFF files, 8-bit audio support.
The company (Pegatron) isn't Chinese. They're Taiwanese. The factories, however, are in China.
Pegatron used to be the manufacturing division of ASUS. They spun them off, but still do a lot of manufacturing for ASUS and just about everybody else. This isn't really an Apple problem: everybody uses these companies for manufacturing, it's an industry-wide problem.
How is $35 more affordable than the $0 I'd pay to use the existing media services that came built in to my HDTV?
My parents have a Samsung SmartTV, and a Samsung smart BluRay player (they run the same software). They use the "smart" software for one thing: watching Netflix. It sucks. Streaming works fine, but pages and images in the Netflix interface take forever to load (20-30 seconds), and searching for stuff with a remote control is painful. As a result, my parents search for content on the iPad Netflix app, and when they find what they want, they directly type in the name of the content on the TV (avoid browsing content in the super slow Smart TV interface).
With this thing, they could spend $35, and cut out a whole bunch of steps. Browse and find content on the much easier to use touchscreen Netflix interface (faster, more fluid, more responsive, on-screen QWERTY keyboard), then hit a single button to get it on the TV. For them, this could be a cheap way to substantially improve the experience. They don't want to spend a hundred bucks just to watch Netflix, but thirty five might be something they can stomach.
For my part, when I do Netflix on my projector, I use my PS3. While it's a great streaming box, typing in search terms with a remote control isn't that great on it either...
Europeans call them car parks. North Americans call them parking lots/garages/spaces. I don't think I've ever heard an American call anything a "car park" in casual conversation.
Apple has done in-house voice recognition in the past, although that was twenty years ago.
Well, a better reason might be that nobody in North America calls it a "car park", and if you've got Siri set to US/Canadian, you're not using the right terminology.
I'd argue that the problem does exist. My iPhone is still using the dock connector, and it's pretty common for me to try to put it in the wrong way (gotta look for the hard to see icon on the plug that is normally hidden by your thumb to know which way to plug it in). Not having to care which way the plug goes in would be helpful. MicroUSB are even worse, because they don't have that thing, and I'm always plugging those things in the wrong way (or more often, stopping to visually match up the right direction based on the shape of the tiny plug).
As for the USB end, that's still a problem, true (although USB really ought to have been designed to go in either way), but there's not much we can do about that, since it has to work with the generic ports found on PCs. Few people would frequently plug/unplug the cord from the back of their PC anyhow, since laptops have ports on the sides these days, and pretty much all computers have front-mounted USB ports.
The first-generation iPod did not use the 30-pin dock connector, the first few had a firewire port on them. The 30-pin dock connector was introduced several years later in 2003.
The lightning cable has advantages over micro USB (it's a lot easier to plug in, for one thing), and while not as cheap as micro USB, you can get Lightning cables at Monoprice start at twelve bucks: http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=112&cp_id=11213&cs_id=1083101&p_id=10375&seq=1&format=2
I'd argue that Win7 is pretty good with memory management (as is OS X), and both run fine on machines with 2GB of RAM. Running major applications, on the other hand, might be a concern if they're using a gig or more each. VMWare, though, has a variety of solutions that would help your problem. Memory ballooning (free memory is pooled), memory compression (faster to compress seldom-used RAM than to page it) and memory sharing (dedup on the memory-page level) all help. Particularly that last one.
So you agree that you're wrong, then. Good. Clearly if 56% of consumers are buying the Mac Air instead of an Ultrabook, they're selling a lot of them.