The question: is it enough to save BlackBerry in the consumer market, or is it too little, too late?
How long has it been since BlackBerry has had more than a negligible share of the consumer market? These days, they seem to be almost exclusively enterprise. Seriously, the last time I can think of that anybody I know who bought their own BlackBerry was like 7 years ago. Who is using BlackBerry for personal use?
I bought a BlackBerry (Q10) for personal use -- I can enter text with a physical keyboard far faster than I can with any virtual keyboard. All of the current Android phones with physical keyboards are junk, so the BlackBerry was my best bet.
Incidentally, I've already been using the Amazon Appstore on BlackBerry for quite a while. One can simply download the APK from Amazon and install it on the BlackBerry -- no rooting required.
However, the biggest thing that I miss on BlackBerry is a good Maps app, and the Amazon Appstore doesn't really help here because Amazon doesn't have any good map and navigation apps either (or at least none that will work on small screen sizes).
Three years used to be a complete tech cycle in the consumer realm -- back in the 90s and early 2000s -- but the average consumer no longer upgrades their computer nearly that often. Most of my friends are still using 5-7 year old hardware, because the hardware from that era is still perfectly capable of running today's software. Your techie friends may upgrade every three years, but nobody else does.
The vast majority of consumers only upgrade their OS when they buy a new system. The lack of uptake of Windows 8 is simply because not that many people have replaced their computer in the last few years. Unfortunately, a lot of the hardware from the 2004-2005 era (the first generation of systems to take DDR2 RAM) is still floating around. Because these systems shipped with XP, they are still running XP, and we now have a problem on our hands.
Compare the Windows 8 growth curve to XP? That 9-year-old hardware from 2005 is still perfectly adequate for most tasks. On the other hand, using a PC from 1992 when XP came out in 2001 would have been impossible (unless you were rich, that computer would have had a 386 CPU and a hard drive with less than 100MB!)
Although much R package code is written in R, many of the important bits are living in FORTRAN libraries (many of which date back to the 1980s) which are linked into the packages.
If that's what your're looking for, check out the Samsung Ativ Tab 3. It runs full Windows 8 (x86), it has a touchscreen and Wacom stylus, and it's great for reading PDFs. You can find it for well under $400 if you look around, and even better, it's *lighter* than the Surface Pro.
I would expect Computer Science degrees as a percentage of BA degrees to be low, as almost all Computer Science degrees are of the BS (or Bachelors of Science, if you will) variety.
The original article doesn't even have "BA" anywhere in it, though, so I have no idea where the submitter got that detail.
Agreed -- I also grew up in the country, in an area which was traditionally dependent on manufacturing jobs. Not only did we have the full gamut of shop classes, but we also had access to a nearby vocational high school where most of your junior and senior year would be spent learning a trade. Many large metro areas also have such vocational schools, but most people (most non-lower-income people, at least) never hear about them because they're un-trendy and poorly publicized.
On the other hand, my high school had no AP or computer programming classes, which kind of sucked for me.
This surprises me. If the cable companies used to do this, then why do they pay royalties to the networks nowadays? Why is Aereo getting sued if they're doing the same thing the cable companies can do?
From a legal basis Aereo's business model seems sound to me -- all they're doing is helping me receive a broadcast TV transmission which I'm entitled to receive over the airwaves anyway.
On the other hand, a ruling in Aereo's favor would be a boon for the cable companies and could kill the concept of free, broadcast TV altogether. As things stand, the cable companies pay the networks to retransmit feeds of their programming. If Aereo wins, the cable companies would be able to save money by erecting Aereo-style antenna arrays for their cable feeds, bypassing payments to the networks.
As things stand, cable customers are getting screwed because they're paying the broadcasters for the same programming twice -- once in the form of advertisements, and again by paying for the network broadcast feeds. On the other hand, by using my own antenna, I'm receiving dozens of free channels which are being subsidized by the cable customers. If Aereo prevails, broadcasters may terminate over-the-air broadcasts altogether to avoid losing their lucrative royalties from the cable companies, leaving me out in the cold.
I don't see it -- the summary was taken word-for-word from a podcast? As in, someone transcripted and submitted it, including the quotes?
That podcast certainly wasn't the first source to report on the Citicorp Center design flaw -- there was article in the New Yorker in 1995 about it ( http://www.newyorker.com/archi... ).
According to the article, they are outsourcing the work to an offshore IT firm. This IT firm, in turn, will give the work to a US location, which staffs itself with H-1B workers. The effect is that US-based workers are being laid off and indirectly replaced with H-1Bs.
In 2005, Newsweek published a false report that American soldiers had desecrated copies of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison. The report was proven false, and Newsweek retracted it, but it was too late -- the report had already sparked riots which injured over 100 people.
My Blackberry Q10 has a removable battery, and it reboots itself whenever I set it down on a desk too hard. Most or all smartphones with removable batteries that I've used in the past did the same thing.
If we can't even engineer a phone so a non-soldered battery stays connected on a mild shock, how are we going to allow for users to replace every component of their phones?
Aha -- you beat me to the punch. Yes, this is one thing (the only thing?) that Windows 8 tablets really excel at, as Windows has long-standing (since XP) and mature support for pen digitizers.
If you limit yourself to e-ink readers, I predict that you will suffer from endless problems with finding software that does what you want. You may have to bite the bullet and get a general-purpose tablet PC.
Go for a lightweight tablet with a Wacom stylus (digitizer), as this kind of stylus will give you a far better user experience for highlighting and handwriting than an ordinary capacitive stylus would. The Surface Pro has a Wacom stylus, but is too heavy for comfortable one-handed use. I would recommend looking into the Samsung Galaxy Note Tablet (running Android), or the Samsung Ativ or Thinkpad tablets (running Windows 8).
In the Windows world, Qiqqa is a cloud-synced reference and citation manager that will sync annotations, although you can't export the altered document like you wanted. It's likely that both Windows 8 and Android have numerous PDF annotation applications which will suit your needs. You may have better luck in the Windows than the Android world, because you will want your application to have native Wacom digitizer support (distinguishing between finger and pen presses, allowing you to scroll with your finger and highlight with your pen). There may be a PDF annotation application in Android that does this, but Wacom digitizers have historically been far more common in Windows than Android, and the good Wacom support in Windows applications reflects this.
Cool, so that explains why massive numbers of IBM employees are dropping WordPro in favor of Microsoft Word when they get the chance.?(Remember, IBM owns Lotus.)
Have you even used a recent version of WordPro? In this case, "ease of use" really goes with Word.
The product you describe has already been created by several companies. For example:
http://www.onbase.com/products/onbasemodules/inp ut modules/ocr.html
Also, why should Google market this product? It's not like they're the only ones who can search OCR documents (if you've used Amazon.com's book searching feature, you'll see the same thing.) Also, it's not like they're going to use PageRank to help them search, because these aren't web pages.
Haha, I only got about 40% through without a hintbook. I got lost around the part where you had to open the door on Mars using the code from Africa. It was way too easy to burn useful objects and prevent yourself from winning. I was only like 10 years old though.
The cans come in a box, not your typical vending machine.
We used to load many of our vending machines with drinks from regular 24-packs bought at stores that sell in bulk (GFS, Sam's Club, etc.) That might not have been the "official" way of doing it, but it avoids the hassle of going through a distributor. There's nothing magical about vending machines -- the Coke inside very well may have come from boxes that were on sale.
In many companies, a bonus is paid out to each person listed on a submitted patent. For this reason, people often list their names on patents in which they provided only minor assistance in the writeup. This may very well be a case of that.
Can I use AvantGo to download and read Slashdot now? I tried to do it last year, but I kept getting "Your IP is blocked" messages because the Slashdot admins were under the impression that the AvantGo proxy was a real person...!
Slashdot Mirror
How long has it been since BlackBerry has had more than a negligible share of the consumer market? These days, they seem to be almost exclusively enterprise. Seriously, the last time I can think of that anybody I know who bought their own BlackBerry was like 7 years ago. Who is using BlackBerry for personal use?
I bought a BlackBerry (Q10) for personal use -- I can enter text with a physical keyboard far faster than I can with any virtual keyboard. All of the current Android phones with physical keyboards are junk, so the BlackBerry was my best bet.
Incidentally, I've already been using the Amazon Appstore on BlackBerry for quite a while. One can simply download the APK from Amazon and install it on the BlackBerry -- no rooting required.
However, the biggest thing that I miss on BlackBerry is a good Maps app, and the Amazon Appstore doesn't really help here because Amazon doesn't have any good map and navigation apps either (or at least none that will work on small screen sizes).
You're 15 years late with that joke, but thanks for playing:
http://www.niebank.com/madcow....
Three years used to be a complete tech cycle in the consumer realm -- back in the 90s and early 2000s -- but the average consumer no longer upgrades their computer nearly that often. Most of my friends are still using 5-7 year old hardware, because the hardware from that era is still perfectly capable of running today's software. Your techie friends may upgrade every three years, but nobody else does.
The vast majority of consumers only upgrade their OS when they buy a new system. The lack of uptake of Windows 8 is simply because not that many people have replaced their computer in the last few years. Unfortunately, a lot of the hardware from the 2004-2005 era (the first generation of systems to take DDR2 RAM) is still floating around. Because these systems shipped with XP, they are still running XP, and we now have a problem on our hands.
Compare the Windows 8 growth curve to XP? That 9-year-old hardware from 2005 is still perfectly adequate for most tasks. On the other hand, using a PC from 1992 when XP came out in 2001 would have been impossible (unless you were rich, that computer would have had a 386 CPU and a hard drive with less than 100MB!)
Although much R package code is written in R, many of the important bits are living in FORTRAN libraries (many of which date back to the 1980s) which are linked into the packages.
If that's what your're looking for, check out the Samsung Ativ Tab 3. It runs full Windows 8 (x86), it has a touchscreen and Wacom stylus, and it's great for reading PDFs. You can find it for well under $400 if you look around, and even better, it's *lighter* than the Surface Pro.
I would expect Computer Science degrees as a percentage of BA degrees to be low, as almost all Computer Science degrees are of the BS (or Bachelors of Science, if you will) variety.
The original article doesn't even have "BA" anywhere in it, though, so I have no idea where the submitter got that detail.
Agreed -- I also grew up in the country, in an area which was traditionally dependent on manufacturing jobs. Not only did we have the full gamut of shop classes, but we also had access to a nearby vocational high school where most of your junior and senior year would be spent learning a trade. Many large metro areas also have such vocational schools, but most people (most non-lower-income people, at least) never hear about them because they're un-trendy and poorly publicized.
On the other hand, my high school had no AP or computer programming classes, which kind of sucked for me.
This surprises me. If the cable companies used to do this, then why do they pay royalties to the networks nowadays? Why is Aereo getting sued if they're doing the same thing the cable companies can do?
From a legal basis Aereo's business model seems sound to me -- all they're doing is helping me receive a broadcast TV transmission which I'm entitled to receive over the airwaves anyway.
On the other hand, a ruling in Aereo's favor would be a boon for the cable companies and could kill the concept of free, broadcast TV altogether. As things stand, the cable companies pay the networks to retransmit feeds of their programming. If Aereo wins, the cable companies would be able to save money by erecting Aereo-style antenna arrays for their cable feeds, bypassing payments to the networks.
As things stand, cable customers are getting screwed because they're paying the broadcasters for the same programming twice -- once in the form of advertisements, and again by paying for the network broadcast feeds. On the other hand, by using my own antenna, I'm receiving dozens of free channels which are being subsidized by the cable customers. If Aereo prevails, broadcasters may terminate over-the-air broadcasts altogether to avoid losing their lucrative royalties from the cable companies, leaving me out in the cold.
I don't see it -- the summary was taken word-for-word from a podcast? As in, someone transcripted and submitted it, including the quotes?
That podcast certainly wasn't the first source to report on the Citicorp Center design flaw -- there was article in the New Yorker in 1995 about it ( http://www.newyorker.com/archi... ).
According to the article, they are outsourcing the work to an offshore IT firm. This IT firm, in turn, will give the work to a US location, which staffs itself with H-1B workers. The effect is that US-based workers are being laid off and indirectly replaced with H-1Bs.
In 2005, Newsweek published a false report that American soldiers had desecrated copies of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison. The report was proven false, and Newsweek retracted it, but it was too late -- the report had already sparked riots which injured over 100 people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q...
Was the Bitcoin report written with the "same high editorial standards" that Newsweek had followed in the past? It looks like it.
Imagine being a subscriber of AOL, PC-Link, Compuserve, Prodigy, Delphi, or GEnie, and not being able to send messages to customers of other services.
It has already happened once, and we are repeating it.
"who could help cure cancer"
PhDs in the life sciences are more likely to be unemployed than employed at the time of graduation, and the trend is only getting worse
Why would a medical research lab hire some random coder to cure cancer, when PhDs in biology can't even find jobs?
My Blackberry Q10 has a removable battery, and it reboots itself whenever I set it down on a desk too hard. Most or all smartphones with removable batteries that I've used in the past did the same thing.
If we can't even engineer a phone so a non-soldered battery stays connected on a mild shock, how are we going to allow for users to replace every component of their phones?
Aha -- you beat me to the punch. Yes, this is one thing (the only thing?) that Windows 8 tablets really excel at, as Windows has long-standing (since XP) and mature support for pen digitizers.
If you limit yourself to e-ink readers, I predict that you will suffer from endless problems with finding software that does what you want. You may have to bite the bullet and get a general-purpose tablet PC.
Go for a lightweight tablet with a Wacom stylus (digitizer), as this kind of stylus will give you a far better user experience for highlighting and handwriting than an ordinary capacitive stylus would. The Surface Pro has a Wacom stylus, but is too heavy for comfortable one-handed use. I would recommend looking into the Samsung Galaxy Note Tablet (running Android), or the Samsung Ativ or Thinkpad tablets (running Windows 8).
In the Windows world, Qiqqa is a cloud-synced reference and citation manager that will sync annotations, although you can't export the altered document like you wanted. It's likely that both Windows 8 and Android have numerous PDF annotation applications which will suit your needs. You may have better luck in the Windows than the Android world, because you will want your application to have native Wacom digitizer support (distinguishing between finger and pen presses, allowing you to scroll with your finger and highlight with your pen). There may be a PDF annotation application in Android that does this, but Wacom digitizers have historically been far more common in Windows than Android, and the good Wacom support in Windows applications reflects this.
Cool, so that explains why massive numbers of IBM employees are dropping WordPro in favor of Microsoft Word when they get the chance.?(Remember, IBM owns Lotus.)
Have you even used a recent version of WordPro? In this case, "ease of use" really goes with Word.
The product you describe has already been created by several companies. For example:
p ut modules/ocr.html
http://www.onbase.com/products/onbasemodules/in
Also, why should Google market this product? It's not like they're the only ones who can search OCR documents (if you've used Amazon.com's book searching feature, you'll see the same thing.) Also, it's not like they're going to use PageRank to help them search, because these aren't web pages.
Haha, I only got about 40% through without a hintbook. I got lost around the part where you had to open the door on Mars using the code from Africa. It was way too easy to burn useful objects and prevent yourself from winning. I was only like 10 years old though.
The cans come in a box, not your typical vending machine.
We used to load many of our vending machines with drinks from regular 24-packs bought at stores that sell in bulk (GFS, Sam's Club, etc.) That might not have been the "official" way of doing it, but it avoids the hassle of going through a distributor. There's nothing magical about vending machines -- the Coke inside very well may have come from boxes that were on sale.
Oops, I see that the cheapest one is closer to $4,520.00. It's still much more expensive than GPS though.
If detecting an ADF signal is so simple, then why do ADF systems start at $5970?. Even a GPS system starts at less than half the price.
In many companies, a bonus is paid out to each person listed on a submitted patent. For this reason, people often list their names on patents in which they provided only minor assistance in the writeup. This may very well be a case of that.
Can I use AvantGo to download and read Slashdot now? I tried to do it last year, but I kept getting "Your IP is blocked" messages because the Slashdot admins were under the impression that the AvantGo proxy was a real person...!