Storage space is hardly a technical spec at this point. It's not like more RAM or a faster CPU or GPU where having less just means the phone is less snappy but you can still do pretty much everything you want. Lack of storage can really limit what kind of things you can do with the device. Most games or apps will run on some pretty simple phones. You don't need a lot of horsepower to run most of the stuff being released. But having such a small amount of storage means you can't do simple things like keep a bunch of photos and music on your phone.
The reason the 16GB configuration is so popular is because there's a lot of people who feel they have to have the iPhone even if they can't really afford the model they want. Paying the extra $100 for the next level up is simply too much for their budget.
It's not the apps that generally take up a lot of space, but rather things like pictures, videos, music, and other content. According to this page, the iPhone only has 11.8 GB free out of the box. By the time you subtract the space that the OS takes up, you really aren't left with much room for the rest of your stuff. My current phone only has 8 GB on board, with 4.8 Free. However, this is no problem because I can easily put in an SD card where I can install apps, as well as have it store all my pictures, music, and videos there. If iPhone just let people put an SD card in, then the 16GB configuration wouldn't be so bad.
I don't know where in Canada you've been visiting, but in Ontario, that is definitely not the case. It's very common for bars to serve micro-brews and other non-major brands. There's also a lot of brew pubs that brew their own beer. There's already an oligopoly with Molson, Labatt, and Sleeman controlling the majority of all retail sales, so I would think they would be in a heap of trouble if they tried to strong-arm their way into getting bars to only serve certain kinds of beer.
This is my biggest problem with self driving cars at the moment. They still aren't good enough that you can take a sleep or watch a movie while they drive you around. You are still expected to be ready to take over at any moment. I really don't see too many advantages of such a feature. I'm much more likely to be paying attention if I'm actively engaged in controlling the car. I think that many people would try to watch a movie or read a book anyway, which would make the self driving car more dangerous than if they were just driving it themselves.
Exactly. I really don't know what they expected. Trademark law requires you to defend your trademark or you risk losing it. It would have made much more sense to just make a game that copied the style of the original game without making an outright copy. Konami is still selling games using the Metal Gear Solid name. So I could see why they would want to shut down this project to get rid of any confusion between the fan-made game and official releases from Konami.
I guess it depends how close you live to a major US City. There's no way somebody in Edmonton is going to pick up ABC over the air. Compare that with Windsor where there's always been a problem getting people to pay for cable because of all the freely available US networks. I'm in Ottawa and most people can't get any US networks unless you get a lot of extra equipment.
Let's not forget that they can take their sweet time fixing problems when it's not one of their customers. Last I heard, the only way for the resellers to communicate with Rogers to fix an issue was to send them an email. There was no tracking system set up, and problems would often take over a week to resolve if it had something to do with the lines. If they really want to shake things up and make things fair, they should force service requirements and deadlines for resolving problems.
Exactly. There's no reason for every student in highschool to be learning calculus, algebra, or statistics. When I went to school in Ontario about 20 years ago. We only needed 2 or 3 math courses in total. Same goes for science. There's little point in learning basic science and math if you aren't going to be using them in your future career.
Here's the current requirements for graduating school in Ontario
4 English (1 credit per grade) *
1 French as a second language
3 mathematics (1 at the Senior Level)
2 science
1 Canadian geography (Grade 9)
1 Canadian history (Grade 10)
1 Arts credit (any of visual arts, music, drama, dance)
1 health and physical education
0.5 credit in civics
0.5 credit in career studies
1 English, French second language, or Co-Op 1 in PE, Arts, Business, or Co-Op 1 in science, computers, tech (auto, wood, etc.), or Co-Op Max 2 Co-Op
12 Other Credits in whatever you want 40 hours of community involvement activities
Basically, we make sure the students are very literate, that they can read and write at a good level in the English Language. Then they get some basic science and math education. And they have a lot of other credits they can use to pursue their interests. If you actually want to go to university to take engineering, you're still going to have to take calculus, algebra, and a bunch of science courses. But for those that want to become accountants, science isn't going to be high up on their course list, and for those that want to do car mechanics, algebra and calculus aren't going to get in their way. We have a good graduation rate, and the students seem to be doing quite well when they get out into the real world.
The amount of a language you'd learn in a single class, or even taking a single course every year in high school isn't enough to get you be fluent, or even passable in a second language. There are millions of Canadians as hard data that show you can put students in plenty of classes in a second language without actually learning anything. Unless you have an immersion program where people are forced to use the language, then people aren't going to learn the language at all.
I think that Apple is just doing all they can to make buying a $700 phone enticing. In a world where a $100 phone is easily obtained, a $200 phone will fulfill most people's needs, and a $300 phone will get you something that would be good enough for 99.9% of people's needs, asking people to pay $700 for a phone either up front or with installments isn't going to last much longer.
I paid $200 for my current phone, and I have zero problems with the performance or quality of this phone. It's a Windows Phone, so there's the lack of apps, but there's no way I'm going to ever spend $700 on a phone. In 2-3 years I'm sure the $100 phones will be all I need. Eventually a $200 phone will fulfill 99.9% of people's requirements. At that point Apple has to come up with a really compelling story about why people should still be paying $700 for a phone.
If the CEO is making 10 million, and there are 10,000 employees, then he is only making $1000 per employee. Even if you paid the CEO nothing, it wouldn't make a huge difference to the employees. Also, assuming the employees made $40,000 each a tear, decreasing the CEOs salary to zero would only allow 250 more employees, or 2.5% more employees. And that's a pretty low salary for skilled workers. At $60,000 salaries, that's only 166 more workers, or 1.66% more employees.
This sounds like why there are also so many bugs in software. I find that the more I learn about software development, the more difficult everything becomes. Once you start thinking about all the edge cases, and how many ways there are for something to break, every project becomes more difficult. Designing software is like designing a bridge, except you have to worry about how your bridge performs when people decide drive over it backwards. Somehow it will end up being the designer's fault when something goes terribly wrong. If I could just design a web application without worrying about how people are going to try to find security holes and steal all the data I would be a happy man. Does the guy who designs bridges have to make considerations to ensure it can't be attacked by terrorists?
Actually, if you're a power user on stack overflow, or any sites on the stack exchange network, then they cut down the number of ads they show you. When I go to their sites, I never see any ads. I just see links to other sites on the network or "careers" ads. I don't see any links to any third party sites.
I personally don't use an ad blocker on my machine. I do use flash block. Most of the sites I visit just don't have that many ads. If a site has so many ads that it becomes annoying, I don't go back to that site so much.
Who says it's going to be a video? What about if it's a canvas element where they are using javascript to create an animate. Throw in some WebGL or other fancy stuff and you can have some pretty slick animations without using the video tag.
Exactly. This is going to bring forth a whole new level of annoying advertisements. Personally, I would be much happier if they limited advertisements to jpg or png images. No animations, relatively low impact on the loading of the web page.
I think that the problem can be easily worked around by better designing the DVRs. Put 16 GB of RAM in there and buffer to that. You only need to write it out to the hard disk when you actually want to be recording a show. 16 GB should be enough for buffering the HD streams and allowing you to rewind shows as you're watching them.
But Google Owned Motorola when I bought my phone. So I did pay Google for the phone and the OS that came with it. There's also the Nexus phones that you can order from Google's website. Sure, some other company makes them, but I'm sure that Google gets a cut of sales.
because the stupid webheads can't manage auth without cookies
The only alternative for managing sessions without cookies is to maintain the session key in the links. This is fraught with problems. As soon as you leave, or open a new tab window on the same domain without the key in the URL, you start a completely new session. Also, when bookmarking a url with a session key, people will often send URLs to a friend giving them access to their session. What method do you have for session management that doesn't require the use of cookies?
Yeah, I ran into that when looking for drivers. The problem is is that the software is $40 (currently there's a sale) and I could probably go purchase a current model scanner for close to the same price. That might be a good idea for somebody who has a bunch of old scanners that they want to keep working but isn't a good value for me who only uses the scanner once every year or so.
I have a scanner that I recently needed to get working again. It's a 15 year old scanner. First step I tried just plugging it in to my Windows 10 machine. It didn't work. Wasn't much surprised there. Then I remembered that I used to have it working on Linux. So I booted up a virtual machine with Ubuntu. The scanner was detected but trying to scan an image with XSane just caused it to crash. I might possibly be able to get it working, but didn't want to spend too much time messing around with it. I installed Windows XP in a different VM, and installed the drivers from the manufacturer's site. Everything worked perfectly. I don't think that Linux is any better than windows for keeping old hardware working. Some stuff will only work in Windows, and some stuff will only work in Linux. I'm pretty sure there's nobody testing old scanners every time they update the kernel or make changes to SANE. Sometimes you just have to run the same old software stack that you were running 15 years ago to get things working properly.
Yeah, I'm not a mechanical engineer, so I didn't want to chime in too early, but 14 PSI sounds like a pretty small pressure difference. If a thin bicycle tire can withstand a 100 PSI differential, then I'm sure they can make steel hold a partial vacuum. My bigger question isn't the tube itself, but rather the train. The train itself has to have an atmosphere so the people inside can breath. How do they prevent the air in the train from emptying into the tube.
I don't see why more people aren't just opting for mini desktop like the Intel NUC machines. You can tote that back and forth to work a lot easier than a laptop. Most people I know with work laptops only use them at work and at home. They already have a monitor keyboard and mouse in both places. There's no reason to carry those things back and forth between work. Even those that travel for work would probably be better off buying a separate portable screen and keyboard to set up in the hotel room. For those that really need a full portable computer, I'd rather have the screen and keyboard be separate from the computing unit so that they can be upgraded and fixed independantly.
Exactly. Apple can only go so long asking $700 for a phone with only 16 GB of non-upgradable storage. You can easily go out and and buy something like the newest Moto G with 16 GB + Micro SD slot for a little over $200, one has to wonder how Apple gets away with charging $700 for a phone. Even the more high end stuff with Android like the Nexus 6p is $600, but at least it comes with 32 GB of storage. I don't see why anybody buys these super high end phones. You could easily just buy a new $200 phone every year to ensure that you always have the newest OS, and have a phone with reasonably cutting edge features.
I kind of think it's odd that they are even having a conversation about this. There is no future for cable television or set top boxes. TV over the internet is the future. There's no need to stream hundreds of channels to every house and then filter them with a set top box. Netflix and other streaming providers are proof that you can deliver TV content and the only thing the customer needs is a web browser.
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Storage space is hardly a technical spec at this point. It's not like more RAM or a faster CPU or GPU where having less just means the phone is less snappy but you can still do pretty much everything you want. Lack of storage can really limit what kind of things you can do with the device. Most games or apps will run on some pretty simple phones. You don't need a lot of horsepower to run most of the stuff being released. But having such a small amount of storage means you can't do simple things like keep a bunch of photos and music on your phone.
The reason the 16GB configuration is so popular is because there's a lot of people who feel they have to have the iPhone even if they can't really afford the model they want. Paying the extra $100 for the next level up is simply too much for their budget.
It's not the apps that generally take up a lot of space, but rather things like pictures, videos, music, and other content. According to this page, the iPhone only has 11.8 GB free out of the box. By the time you subtract the space that the OS takes up, you really aren't left with much room for the rest of your stuff. My current phone only has 8 GB on board, with 4.8 Free. However, this is no problem because I can easily put in an SD card where I can install apps, as well as have it store all my pictures, music, and videos there. If iPhone just let people put an SD card in, then the 16GB configuration wouldn't be so bad.
I don't know where in Canada you've been visiting, but in Ontario, that is definitely not the case. It's very common for bars to serve micro-brews and other non-major brands. There's also a lot of brew pubs that brew their own beer. There's already an oligopoly with Molson, Labatt, and Sleeman controlling the majority of all retail sales, so I would think they would be in a heap of trouble if they tried to strong-arm their way into getting bars to only serve certain kinds of beer.
This is my biggest problem with self driving cars at the moment. They still aren't good enough that you can take a sleep or watch a movie while they drive you around. You are still expected to be ready to take over at any moment. I really don't see too many advantages of such a feature. I'm much more likely to be paying attention if I'm actively engaged in controlling the car. I think that many people would try to watch a movie or read a book anyway, which would make the self driving car more dangerous than if they were just driving it themselves.
Exactly. I really don't know what they expected. Trademark law requires you to defend your trademark or you risk losing it. It would have made much more sense to just make a game that copied the style of the original game without making an outright copy. Konami is still selling games using the Metal Gear Solid name. So I could see why they would want to shut down this project to get rid of any confusion between the fan-made game and official releases from Konami.
I guess it depends how close you live to a major US City. There's no way somebody in Edmonton is going to pick up ABC over the air. Compare that with Windsor where there's always been a problem getting people to pay for cable because of all the freely available US networks. I'm in Ottawa and most people can't get any US networks unless you get a lot of extra equipment.
Let's not forget that they can take their sweet time fixing problems when it's not one of their customers. Last I heard, the only way for the resellers to communicate with Rogers to fix an issue was to send them an email. There was no tracking system set up, and problems would often take over a week to resolve if it had something to do with the lines. If they really want to shake things up and make things fair, they should force service requirements and deadlines for resolving problems.
Exactly. There's no reason for every student in highschool to be learning calculus, algebra, or statistics. When I went to school in Ontario about 20 years ago. We only needed 2 or 3 math courses in total. Same goes for science. There's little point in learning basic science and math if you aren't going to be using them in your future career.
Here's the current requirements for graduating school in Ontario
4 English (1 credit per grade) *
1 French as a second language
3 mathematics (1 at the Senior Level)
2 science
1 Canadian geography (Grade 9)
1 Canadian history (Grade 10)
1 Arts credit (any of visual arts, music, drama, dance)
1 health and physical education
0.5 credit in civics
0.5 credit in career studies
1 English, French second language, or Co-Op
1 in PE, Arts, Business, or Co-Op
1 in science, computers, tech (auto, wood, etc.), or Co-Op
Max 2 Co-Op
12 Other Credits in whatever you want
40 hours of community involvement activities
Basically, we make sure the students are very literate, that they can read and write at a good level in the English Language. Then they get some basic science and math education. And they have a lot of other credits they can use to pursue their interests. If you actually want to go to university to take engineering, you're still going to have to take calculus, algebra, and a bunch of science courses. But for those that want to become accountants, science isn't going to be high up on their course list, and for those that want to do car mechanics, algebra and calculus aren't going to get in their way. We have a good graduation rate, and the students seem to be doing quite well when they get out into the real world.
The amount of a language you'd learn in a single class, or even taking a single course every year in high school isn't enough to get you be fluent, or even passable in a second language. There are millions of Canadians as hard data that show you can put students in plenty of classes in a second language without actually learning anything. Unless you have an immersion program where people are forced to use the language, then people aren't going to learn the language at all.
I think that Apple is just doing all they can to make buying a $700 phone enticing. In a world where a $100 phone is easily obtained, a $200 phone will fulfill most people's needs, and a $300 phone will get you something that would be good enough for 99.9% of people's needs, asking people to pay $700 for a phone either up front or with installments isn't going to last much longer.
I paid $200 for my current phone, and I have zero problems with the performance or quality of this phone. It's a Windows Phone, so there's the lack of apps, but there's no way I'm going to ever spend $700 on a phone. In 2-3 years I'm sure the $100 phones will be all I need. Eventually a $200 phone will fulfill 99.9% of people's requirements. At that point Apple has to come up with a really compelling story about why people should still be paying $700 for a phone.
If the CEO is making 10 million, and there are 10,000 employees, then he is only making $1000 per employee. Even if you paid the CEO nothing, it wouldn't make a huge difference to the employees. Also, assuming the employees made $40,000 each a tear, decreasing the CEOs salary to zero would only allow 250 more employees, or 2.5% more employees. And that's a pretty low salary for skilled workers. At $60,000 salaries, that's only 166 more workers, or 1.66% more employees.
This sounds like why there are also so many bugs in software. I find that the more I learn about software development, the more difficult everything becomes. Once you start thinking about all the edge cases, and how many ways there are for something to break, every project becomes more difficult. Designing software is like designing a bridge, except you have to worry about how your bridge performs when people decide drive over it backwards. Somehow it will end up being the designer's fault when something goes terribly wrong. If I could just design a web application without worrying about how people are going to try to find security holes and steal all the data I would be a happy man. Does the guy who designs bridges have to make considerations to ensure it can't be attacked by terrorists?
Actually, if you're a power user on stack overflow, or any sites on the stack exchange network, then they cut down the number of ads they show you. When I go to their sites, I never see any ads. I just see links to other sites on the network or "careers" ads. I don't see any links to any third party sites.
I personally don't use an ad blocker on my machine. I do use flash block. Most of the sites I visit just don't have that many ads. If a site has so many ads that it becomes annoying, I don't go back to that site so much.
Who says it's going to be a video? What about if it's a canvas element where they are using javascript to create an animate. Throw in some WebGL or other fancy stuff and you can have some pretty slick animations without using the video tag.
Exactly. This is going to bring forth a whole new level of annoying advertisements. Personally, I would be much happier if they limited advertisements to jpg or png images. No animations, relatively low impact on the loading of the web page.
I think that the problem can be easily worked around by better designing the DVRs. Put 16 GB of RAM in there and buffer to that. You only need to write it out to the hard disk when you actually want to be recording a show. 16 GB should be enough for buffering the HD streams and allowing you to rewind shows as you're watching them.
But Google Owned Motorola when I bought my phone. So I did pay Google for the phone and the OS that came with it. There's also the Nexus phones that you can order from Google's website. Sure, some other company makes them, but I'm sure that Google gets a cut of sales.
The only alternative for managing sessions without cookies is to maintain the session key in the links. This is fraught with problems. As soon as you leave, or open a new tab window on the same domain without the key in the URL, you start a completely new session. Also, when bookmarking a url with a session key, people will often send URLs to a friend giving them access to their session. What method do you have for session management that doesn't require the use of cookies?
Yeah, I ran into that when looking for drivers. The problem is is that the software is $40 (currently there's a sale) and I could probably go purchase a current model scanner for close to the same price. That might be a good idea for somebody who has a bunch of old scanners that they want to keep working but isn't a good value for me who only uses the scanner once every year or so.
I have a scanner that I recently needed to get working again. It's a 15 year old scanner. First step I tried just plugging it in to my Windows 10 machine. It didn't work. Wasn't much surprised there. Then I remembered that I used to have it working on Linux. So I booted up a virtual machine with Ubuntu. The scanner was detected but trying to scan an image with XSane just caused it to crash. I might possibly be able to get it working, but didn't want to spend too much time messing around with it. I installed Windows XP in a different VM, and installed the drivers from the manufacturer's site. Everything worked perfectly. I don't think that Linux is any better than windows for keeping old hardware working. Some stuff will only work in Windows, and some stuff will only work in Linux. I'm pretty sure there's nobody testing old scanners every time they update the kernel or make changes to SANE. Sometimes you just have to run the same old software stack that you were running 15 years ago to get things working properly.
Yeah, I'm not a mechanical engineer, so I didn't want to chime in too early, but 14 PSI sounds like a pretty small pressure difference. If a thin bicycle tire can withstand a 100 PSI differential, then I'm sure they can make steel hold a partial vacuum. My bigger question isn't the tube itself, but rather the train. The train itself has to have an atmosphere so the people inside can breath. How do they prevent the air in the train from emptying into the tube.
I don't see why more people aren't just opting for mini desktop like the Intel NUC machines. You can tote that back and forth to work a lot easier than a laptop. Most people I know with work laptops only use them at work and at home. They already have a monitor keyboard and mouse in both places. There's no reason to carry those things back and forth between work. Even those that travel for work would probably be better off buying a separate portable screen and keyboard to set up in the hotel room. For those that really need a full portable computer, I'd rather have the screen and keyboard be separate from the computing unit so that they can be upgraded and fixed independantly.
Exactly. Apple can only go so long asking $700 for a phone with only 16 GB of non-upgradable storage. You can easily go out and and buy something like the newest Moto G with 16 GB + Micro SD slot for a little over $200, one has to wonder how Apple gets away with charging $700 for a phone. Even the more high end stuff with Android like the Nexus 6p is $600, but at least it comes with 32 GB of storage. I don't see why anybody buys these super high end phones. You could easily just buy a new $200 phone every year to ensure that you always have the newest OS, and have a phone with reasonably cutting edge features.
I kind of think it's odd that they are even having a conversation about this. There is no future for cable television or set top boxes. TV over the internet is the future. There's no need to stream hundreds of channels to every house and then filter them with a set top box. Netflix and other streaming providers are proof that you can deliver TV content and the only thing the customer needs is a web browser.