Oh? Can you point to another ebook reader that supports a good reflowable book format like epub and also a page layout format (for textbooks, etc.) like PDF?
Flips have pretty small lenses too, but a lot of people have decided that the form factor and convenience make up for that. Most of those people may decide that the additional convenience of going with the phone that's already in their pocket more than makes up for the small additional quality loss.
Let's see - would you rather have graphics heavy ads that come from a variety of sources, vary greatly in quality, design, size and compression quality, or ads from one source that will likely do a good job both of quality and limiting things to reasonable sizes and may well do some local caching?
Maybe. Everything we've heard is that Apple and AT&T have a contract for another couple of years. Could be Apple broke it and AT&T is ticked, but AT&T might have just gone out on a limb too.
I think it's a little unlikely that Apple would be featuring AT&T at the iPad launch if they knew they were going to be ditching them.
I don't think I'm the one with problems making logically sound arguments, although perhaps you should work on "organized" and "coherent" first.
You are right about one thing, experience isn't the same thing as likelihood. Rather, it is the only method we have to estimate likelihood. If you take a stats course they call experience "sampling."
As for your ill-constructed example about Africa, since we're actually talking about the laws of physics we're pretty sure that we didn't suddenly switch universes. We may have, and our experience may be a biased sample, but to make progress we assume it is not unless presented with evidence to the contrary.
I don't understand what you're talking about oversimplification. I said that our experience indicates the simplest explanation (and note the restricted definition of "simplest") that explains the observations is more likely to be correct. No, you can't oversimplify, because an overly simple explanation would not explain all the observations. Hence, "oversimplified."
I'm not sure what software developers or Clippy have to do with physics. Have you had your coffee this morning?
Steve must be royally ticked off. Looks like the US will finally be getting a second iPhone carrier. This would be a fantastic time for another carrier to announce iPad support too.
That's why the concept of "peak" as opposed to "oops, we're out."
Oil is very much like the minerals you talk about - as the price goes up we find more oil that is worth extracting. The oil sands of Canada and Venezuela are now worth mining and there is more than three times as much oil there as there is in all the world's known reserves of liquid oil combined. We haven't even gotten to 1/6 of the proven oil reserves on the planet yet, never mind getting close to exhausting them.
The point of peak oil or peak anything else is that as you use up the easy to get reserves it gets harder and harder to produce. At some point you're producing as fast as you can and, as production gets harder and harder, your production drops off from there. The concept is applicable, at least in principle, to pretty much any resource. Once you've used up the forests and have to start planting your own, production is more difficult. Once you've used up all the iron ore sitting on the surface you have to start digging, etc.
The reason they normally don't allow any devices, not even headphones, on takeoff and landing has very much to do with safety. It's so in a crash there aren't any random gizmos flying around the cabin, you're paying attention in the event of a problem, you're not tied up in cords, and you can hear instructions.
When the Treo was out smartphones were a microscopic fraction of the mobile phone market. It's still not very big (10-15% I think), but it's enough that the carriers are worried about the bigger players threatening their business model. More importantly, smartphones are within reach of most of their customers (obsolete iPhones are the free-with-the-contract phone in many places) and the cell companies would really like everyone to get one so they can charge for both voice and data service. They're not going to be at all happy about only charging for data.
If Sprint is so great then why do they charge to add a phone to your account? The wired phone company finally got broken of that habit years ago through regulation.
Admittedly, Sprint charges LESS than the other companies to do things like that, but that makes them less anti-customer. It does not make them pro-customer.
PDF is a pain to do anything but display. It's basically a series of drawing commands, in no particular order. Want to know what the first line is? Forget it. That makes PDF nearly impossible to reflow.
In our experience nature also prefers simplicity. Note that simplicity has a special meaning in this case. It is more likely, based on all our experiience, that a theory that manages to explain more with fewer rules is correct.
What kind of journal publishes an article like that with no statistical test? Funny, Current Science looks like the leading light of Indian journals, not a bunk journal. Worse, the authors say "significantly" without a p-value to back it up. Very shoddy. And suspicious.
Absolutely, but you're wrong to blame it on AT&T and Apple. ALL cell phone companies are greedy and have gotten away with too much. If your Treo was as common as iPhones are and the 3G VOIP app was as easy to get and use, you can bet Sprint would have acted to protect their lucrative voice calling service.
I didn't say knowing the jargon isn't a gap in knowledge. Not knowing the buzz words (and the example sure sounds like a buzz word rather than a useful term - you can probably explain the problem in plain language using fewer syllables) is probably an asset though.
Also, not knowing the jargon, or all of the jargon, is very different from not having the actual knowledge. The former can be fixed more or less by osmosis in a short period of time. The latter might takes years of experience or good education to remedy.
Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, we weren't talking about experience but about knowledge of the subject. If I were teaching that particular subject (as I was taught it), or interviewing a potential employee, I wouldn't care a bit about whether the student/applicant knew that stupid term or not. What I care about is whether he or she knows what the problem is and what to do about it.
Here's an example of the way the test (or interview) used to go:
"Describe some common problems constructing an object oriented interface for data stored in a relational database, and general strategies for solving each problem."
Now:
Object-relational impedance mismatch is:
a) the cognitive dissonance that occurs when your mother makes you take out the garbage b) the complex-valued equivalent of electrical resistance c) an almost correct answer d) the correct answer"
Most of my CS profs probably would have just given a simple database schema and told us to write an OO interface for it. If you run into trouble, solve it. Who cares what you call that particular sticky patch.
See the difference? Not knowing the term has no bearing on whether the student or applicant actually has useful knowledge. In particular, students may well not be taught the latest buzz words making the rounds in industry.
We didn't use terms like "object-relational impedance mismatch."
I guess we tried to use electrical engineering terms in electrical engineering and not in computer science. Interfacing an object-oriented programming model to a relational database is an example of a pretty standard translation problem between systems (or languages, or any number of other things) that crops up all the time in CS.
It might be hard to convince the Europeans that breaking up an exclusive agreement between the record companies and Amazon makes Apple guilty of collusion.
"has no idea what, for example, the term 'object-relational impedance mismatch' might mean."
I have to say, having gone through a real CS program (quite a while ago now) that covered everything from assembler to algorithm analysis and theoretical proofs, "object-relational impedance mismatch" set off the buzzword warnings.
A Google search confirmed my impression. The problem it describes is (sort of) real, but the term is idiotic. The kind of thing they'd put on one of these newfangled multiple guess CS exams.
The GP may have put it badly, but he does have a point: you don't go out looking for something to do to "make a significant discovery." You try a few things, find something you like, and do it. If you do it really well, maybe you'll find something novel.
The amateur planet and supernova finders didn't go out and buy a telescope because they wanted to find planets and get their names in journals, they were already accomplished amateur astronomers and started looking for planets or supernovae for the challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh? Can you point to another ebook reader that supports a good reflowable book format like epub and also a page layout format (for textbooks, etc.) like PDF?
Flips have pretty small lenses too, but a lot of people have decided that the form factor and convenience make up for that. Most of those people may decide that the additional convenience of going with the phone that's already in their pocket more than makes up for the small additional quality loss.
Let's see - would you rather have graphics heavy ads that come from a variety of sources, vary greatly in quality, design, size and compression quality, or ads from one source that will likely do a good job both of quality and limiting things to reasonable sizes and may well do some local caching?
Maybe. Everything we've heard is that Apple and AT&T have a contract for another couple of years. Could be Apple broke it and AT&T is ticked, but AT&T might have just gone out on a limb too.
I think it's a little unlikely that Apple would be featuring AT&T at the iPad launch if they knew they were going to be ditching them.
I don't think I'm the one with problems making logically sound arguments, although perhaps you should work on "organized" and "coherent" first.
You are right about one thing, experience isn't the same thing as likelihood. Rather, it is the only method we have to estimate likelihood. If you take a stats course they call experience "sampling."
As for your ill-constructed example about Africa, since we're actually talking about the laws of physics we're pretty sure that we didn't suddenly switch universes. We may have, and our experience may be a biased sample, but to make progress we assume it is not unless presented with evidence to the contrary.
I don't understand what you're talking about oversimplification. I said that our experience indicates the simplest explanation (and note the restricted definition of "simplest") that explains the observations is more likely to be correct. No, you can't oversimplify, because an overly simple explanation would not explain all the observations. Hence, "oversimplified."
I'm not sure what software developers or Clippy have to do with physics. Have you had your coffee this morning?
Neither is the iPad.
Steve must be royally ticked off. Looks like the US will finally be getting a second iPhone carrier. This would be a fantastic time for another carrier to announce iPad support too.
That's why the concept of "peak" as opposed to "oops, we're out."
Oil is very much like the minerals you talk about - as the price goes up we find more oil that is worth extracting. The oil sands of Canada and Venezuela are now worth mining and there is more than three times as much oil there as there is in all the world's known reserves of liquid oil combined. We haven't even gotten to 1/6 of the proven oil reserves on the planet yet, never mind getting close to exhausting them.
The point of peak oil or peak anything else is that as you use up the easy to get reserves it gets harder and harder to produce. At some point you're producing as fast as you can and, as production gets harder and harder, your production drops off from there. The concept is applicable, at least in principle, to pretty much any resource. Once you've used up the forests and have to start planting your own, production is more difficult. Once you've used up all the iron ore sitting on the surface you have to start digging, etc.
The reason they normally don't allow any devices, not even headphones, on takeoff and landing has very much to do with safety. It's so in a crash there aren't any random gizmos flying around the cabin, you're paying attention in the event of a problem, you're not tied up in cords, and you can hear instructions.
When the Treo was out smartphones were a microscopic fraction of the mobile phone market. It's still not very big (10-15% I think), but it's enough that the carriers are worried about the bigger players threatening their business model. More importantly, smartphones are within reach of most of their customers (obsolete iPhones are the free-with-the-contract phone in many places) and the cell companies would really like everyone to get one so they can charge for both voice and data service. They're not going to be at all happy about only charging for data.
If Sprint is so great then why do they charge to add a phone to your account? The wired phone company finally got broken of that habit years ago through regulation.
Admittedly, Sprint charges LESS than the other companies to do things like that, but that makes them less anti-customer. It does not make them pro-customer.
All cell companies are very much pro-consumer.
PDF is a pain to do anything but display. It's basically a series of drawing commands, in no particular order. Want to know what the first line is? Forget it. That makes PDF nearly impossible to reflow.
The summary is wrong. They don't want a universal e-book format, they want a universal DRM scheme.
In our experience nature also prefers simplicity. Note that simplicity has a special meaning in this case. It is more likely, based on all our experiience, that a theory that manages to explain more with fewer rules is correct.
What kind of journal publishes an article like that with no statistical test? Funny, Current Science looks like the leading light of Indian journals, not a bunk journal. Worse, the authors say "significantly" without a p-value to back it up. Very shoddy. And suspicious.
Absolutely, but you're wrong to blame it on AT&T and Apple. ALL cell phone companies are greedy and have gotten away with too much. If your Treo was as common as iPhones are and the 3G VOIP app was as easy to get and use, you can bet Sprint would have acted to protect their lucrative voice calling service.
I didn't say knowing the jargon isn't a gap in knowledge. Not knowing the buzz words (and the example sure sounds like a buzz word rather than a useful term - you can probably explain the problem in plain language using fewer syllables) is probably an asset though.
Also, not knowing the jargon, or all of the jargon, is very different from not having the actual knowledge. The former can be fixed more or less by osmosis in a short period of time. The latter might takes years of experience or good education to remedy.
Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, we weren't talking about experience but about knowledge of the subject. If I were teaching that particular subject (as I was taught it), or interviewing a potential employee, I wouldn't care a bit about whether the student/applicant knew that stupid term or not. What I care about is whether he or she knows what the problem is and what to do about it.
Here's an example of the way the test (or interview) used to go:
"Describe some common problems constructing an object oriented interface for data stored in a relational database, and general strategies for solving each problem."
Now:
Most of my CS profs probably would have just given a simple database schema and told us to write an OO interface for it. If you run into trouble, solve it. Who cares what you call that particular sticky patch.
See the difference? Not knowing the term has no bearing on whether the student or applicant actually has useful knowledge. In particular, students may well not be taught the latest buzz words making the rounds in industry.
I think you replied to the wrong post. You've made my exact point with a little more emphasis though.
We didn't use terms like "object-relational impedance mismatch."
I guess we tried to use electrical engineering terms in electrical engineering and not in computer science. Interfacing an object-oriented programming model to a relational database is an example of a pretty standard translation problem between systems (or languages, or any number of other things) that crops up all the time in CS.
Well, for one thing, the Amazon MP3 store doesn't work so well outside of the US. The iTMS, no problem.
The real question is how Apple can be accused of anti-competitive behaviour for breaking up an exclusivity agreement.
It might be hard to convince the Europeans that breaking up an exclusive agreement between the record companies and Amazon makes Apple guilty of collusion.
"has no idea what, for example, the term 'object-relational impedance mismatch' might mean."
I have to say, having gone through a real CS program (quite a while ago now) that covered everything from assembler to algorithm analysis and theoretical proofs, "object-relational impedance mismatch" set off the buzzword warnings.
A Google search confirmed my impression. The problem it describes is (sort of) real, but the term is idiotic. The kind of thing they'd put on one of these newfangled multiple guess CS exams.
More importantly, their profit has been growing consistently, even during the recession, and routinely outperforms forecasts.
The market cap reflects how much investors think the company is going to be worth in the future, not how much it's worth now.
A few hundred, actually. There have been ongoing attempts to locate Copernicus' grave. The goal wasn't to find him so they could rebury him though.
I guess if you consider giving a university team permission to poke around in your cathedral, this is an example of the church being right up to date.
The GP may have put it badly, but he does have a point: you don't go out looking for something to do to "make a significant discovery." You try a few things, find something you like, and do it. If you do it really well, maybe you'll find something novel.
The amateur planet and supernova finders didn't go out and buy a telescope because they wanted to find planets and get their names in journals, they were already accomplished amateur astronomers and started looking for planets or supernovae for the challenge.