The nice thing about PCs is that you can update the software yourself. I like the selection that you get with Android, but 99.9% of the handsets are a terrible choice. When I get a laptop or desktop, I can put Windows, Linux, or even BSD on it if I want to, and nobody tries to stop me. I can update the software whenever I want. I've been running the same desktop for 9 years, and it still works fine because I control the software that runs on it.
Similarly here. Except I switched to Windows Phone. Apple phones, while well supported and good quality, are just a little too pricey for me. Samsung and LG are not without their faults either. Maybe on a few select flagship phones they have updates but the majority of their handsets have just as few updates as all the other manufacturers. My previous LG phone was released 6 months before Android 4 came out, and I never saw a single software update to that phone, so I was stuck with Android 2.3
On a side note, I'm loving my Windows Phone. The interface is great. And the battery life was amazing. Been off the charger since I woke up 5 hours ago and the battery still reads 97%. granted, it's a low use day for my phone, but I'm often left with 70% of my battery by the end of the day. Even recording bike rides using the GPS seems to have little-to-no effect on battery usage. There's not quite as many apps as Android and iOS, but it does everything I want a phone to do, and more.
If this paper shows anything to me, it is not so much about Android, it is more about how we have to force carriers to stop requiring this goddamn nonsense useless "carrier certification" so that Google can push device manufacturers to allow more direct and timely software updates.
This is basically the reason the new phone I got it not Android. They have a long track record of not being able to get updates onto phones. It is simply unacceptable to not receive any updates on a phone that I paid good money for.
Chrome is known to be a hog. There are numerous complaints about it even for those using the Surface Pro tablets with i3/i5/i7 processors. It doesn't get jittery, because the processor can handle it, but the battery life is severely reduced when using Chrome. You should probably switch to Firefox or IE for your browsing needs. Look into Metro IE. It's actually really nice when you're using the device as a tablet. Best touch browser I've ever used.
Exactly. I see no point in spending large amounts of money on the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S phones. In 2 years you will have to get a new one, either because it's obsolete, or they stop sending software updates, or the battery has stopped holding a full charge, or something has broken like the screen or one of the buttons (power, volume, etc). It's not really any fault of the device, it's just the reality of something you carry around with you all the time. Something is going to happen to the phone no matter how careful you are with it. I just got a new phone, and it was $200 US. I think that's a pretty decent price for a phone. I really can't justify spending much more than that on a device that has a lifespan of 2 years. The experience you get from a $200 phone isn't much different than a $700 phone in the current market. The only thing the $700 phone gets you is bragging rights.
At 2 GB of RAM, and a 2.3 GHz Atom Processor it has similar specs to the HP Stream 7. No idea how much storage is on it, but I don't really see any reason you couldn't run the full version of Windows if you wanted to. I think the only reason you couldn't is that Windows doesn't actually have software connecting to the GSM radio and making phone calls. Also, Android and Windows Phone OS have much better handling of low power modes. I don't think the battery would last very long running full Windows or Linux as the phone would probably be using a lot more battery. Perhaps Windows could work using something like its connected standby functionality.
Even 480 Euros ($533 US) is an insane price to ask for a phone. Especially one that currently has zero apps. I just got a Windows Phone (Blu Win HD LTE) which is currently priced at $200 US and I find it to be an amazing phone. Windows Phone is quite a good OS, and it's due for an update to Windows 10 when it comes out. Open source may be a nice idea, but I don't think a lot of people are going to want to pay that kind of premuim just to get it. I think the days of $500+ phones are numbered. I still don't know how people justify the $650+ price tag of the iPhone.
we all use the roads. even if we don't use them directly
Sure, we all use the roads, but we don't all use them equally. Somebody who never or very rarely use the roads directly get a whole lot less out of them than people who drive hundreds of kilometers every day.
I get what you're saying. It's just like schools. We all benefit from having a well educated society, so we should all pay for schools. But I think that things like roads, or water systems should have some kind of pay-per-use factor built in to prevent people from over using the resource. If you tax those who do use the roads the same as those who don't use the roads, there's very little reason to limit how much you use them.
The minimum wage for students in Ontario is $10.30. The minimum wage for non-students is $11.00. That $0.70 difference doesn't make a huge difference in what type of jobs exist. They generally don't care whether you're a youth or not when they are looking at hiring you, because the wage difference is so small.
Even waiters are still required to be paid $10.00 an hour, and then still expect that 18% tip that is common in the USA. The waiters are able to make a ton of money this way because they get a decent wage to start out with, and still get huge tips
Maybe at places like Starbucks. They can make up the difference selling premium goods like coffee milkshakes and fancy coffee mugs. But at Tim Horton's in Canada, every time they raise the minimum wage, the price of coffee and doughnuts increases.
People say it doesn't do that, but there's a whole lot less service jobs than we used to have. There used to be kids who would wheel your groceries out to your car for you. This service basically doesn't exist any more. Most grocery stores don't even have a second person bagging the groceries like they used to. It's actually quite difficult finding a full service gas station unless you live in one of those states where you aren't allowed to pump your own gas. That's just two easy examples. There's a lot more jobs that aren't getting done, or people are expected to do for themselves. If the minimum wage keeps rising, it won't be long before I have to enter my own order at every McDonald's. They are already testing it out at certain locations. When you don't have any of your own expenses to pay for, then $7 an hour can be plenty of money. The problem is that people think that every job should earn a living wage. I tend very much to disagree. People shouldn't expect to be able to support themselves off a menial job. They should be setting their sights higher. Increase their skills and get a better job instead of complaining that a job that could be done by a 14 year old isn't enough to support your family.
I blame Apple and the iPad at least in part for stuff like this. In the iPad world, if you remove an app, then your files associated with that app will indeed disappear and cease to exist. They've done a lot of work to try to make it appear like there is no file system. This creates huge problems when you want to share a file between 2 apps..
I think a lot of the productivity gains came from the lack of WYSIWYG support. When you can't actually see what the output is going to look like on paper, you spend a lot less time futzing around with the layout and a lot more time just typing up the document. The fact that it's so simple is what allows you to just get to work and get your job done. Also, there was no other programs running in the background. Which meant that there wasn't emails, chat messages, and other distractions constantly drawing your attention away from what you're really supposed to be doing.
I guess I'm advantaged over today's kids because I grew up using WordPerfect 5.1, and we learned that using shortcut keys was basically the only way to get things done. The WordPerfect Keyboard Map sat at the top of every keyboard in my highschool. Sure you could do stuff with menus, but we learned on the first day of class that you should do as much as possible using hotkeys.
I don't think a mind meld with computers will even be the desired input method ever. The QWERTY layout has been around for 140 years. I don't think there's any reason for it to change. There are other input methods, but nothing that matches the speed and consistency of a skilled typist. Remember, the keyboard is not simply a tool for entering English words. It let's us communicate all types of information with the computer. Simple key combinations can be used to express many different things to the computer. Also, I can type while looking out the window at the trees blowing in the wind and still get the correct output to the computer. I think that a computer trying to read our brain signals would get very confused with all the "noise" in our heads. They have enough trouble just trying to get speech recognition working in a quiet room.
Very much agree. When I went to school, it was all WordPerfect and Quattro Pro. For programming we did QBasic and HTML/Javascript. But it was using Netscape Navigator where people frequently used frames and document.layers. I basically had to forget a whole bunch of stuff to be able to relearn the current way to do things. I was lucky in the sense that the teachers at my highschool taught us how to figure out how to do stuff on our own by telling us to read the documentation or search around the menus to find the functionality we needed. Whatever they learn will be wrong by the time they get out into the work force. The best you can do is try to teach them how to figure things out for themselves.
Most of the art classes I've taken in school really didn't allow any free expression. Most of there were something along the lines of create a copy of what the teacher does. Music class is the same. We just played sheet music. We didn't actually get to create any music. One time in highschool I got to do some art that was actually expressing myself. We had an artist come in, and they taught us how to do sculptures. We were told to do whatever we wanted. I think that was the only time we were actually allowed to do something original.
Even as somebody who has kids, I think this is fair. Why should someone be entitled to more leave than somebody else just because they chose to have children. My dad took a few months off between jobs once, because he had savings and was looking for a particularly good, high paying position, and he really enjoyed it. Got a lot of stuff done, and went into his new job very well rested. Even a week off here and there isn't enough for most people to really relax. We spend our entire working life without a chance to truly rest.
We have paternity/parental leave in Canada. and I don't think it helps much. I know very few men who have taken more than 2 weeks when their kid was born. I think I know exactly one guy who took the full leave (35 weeks here), but his wife was a doctor, so it made much more financial sense for him to take the reduced pay for. The mom took a few months off when the kid was born, and then he took time off after she had recovered. In the name of equal opportunity, parents should be able to split the allotted time off and benefits, but it's not going to change things that drastically.
While I agree that this type of discrimination exists, you have to admit, it many STEM jobs, having somebody leave for a few months would be a pretty big concern. For many other jobs, it's not a huge problem to replace somebody when they need to take time off. For science and engineering, you are paying somebody for their knowledge. And in particular, you want to keep people around because they have gained a lot of specific knowledge about what goes on at your company. You can't just bring somebody in and transfer over that knowledge quickly. By the time the replacement catches up, a few months will have passed. And once the person gets back to work, it will probably take them a couple months to catch up on what's been going on.
This thing has way more power and way better connectivity than an ARM SBC. Try finding an ARM SBC with USB 3, DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet, and M.2 SSD support. This thing is small enough that you could substitute it for a laptop if you just wanted a machine to bring between work and home. I know a lot of people who have work laptops who never use them except at a fixed desk anyway. Just plug in the peripherals at home or work. Not than I'm a big fan of working from home, but for some people this might actually work quite well for the task.
For brick and mortar stores, you are absolutely right. I think chip and PIN is a pretty decent authentication method. But for it to really work, we need to get to the point that there's no mag stripe, and no number on the card. We should completely get rid of the legacy payment by mag stripe, or simply knowing the card number and expiration date. There shouldn't be an insecure alternative. Payments should either be authenticated through the chip, or through the card issuer's website. There should be ability for the retailer, online or otherwise, to obtain information that would allow fraudulent transactions to be made.
This is what's wrong with online payments. To make a credit card payment, the website should just direct me to the website of visa/mc/amex and have me verify myself, and transfer money to the merchant, very similar to how PayPal works. With phones being so ubiquitous, a similar thing could be done for brick and mortar stores. Pop up a QR code at the register, scan it with a visa app, enter your credentials, and the payment is done. We need to fix the system and get rid of these antiquated payment methods.
Zealotry is probably the main issue. By and large, sports fans aren't that bad of people. But it doesn't take much searching to find evidence of riots and destruction from hard core sports fans, or people using sports as excuse to be terrible people.
I think that most religions are good and that very few of them condone these acts. It's just that you won't see it on the evening news. Because it's not exciting. I go to a baptist church, and I cringe that the Westboro Baptist Church uses the name "Baptist". It's basically the complete opposite of what they teach at my church. Everybody I have met there is very accepting of and they don't judge people. It's a nice change from the Catholic church I grew up in. They make a huge effort to apply the teachings in the bible to how to live your life as a better person. While I don't think that religion is required to be a good person, I think there are plenty of churches out there helping people to be better people in all aspects of life.
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The nice thing about PCs is that you can update the software yourself. I like the selection that you get with Android, but 99.9% of the handsets are a terrible choice. When I get a laptop or desktop, I can put Windows, Linux, or even BSD on it if I want to, and nobody tries to stop me. I can update the software whenever I want. I've been running the same desktop for 9 years, and it still works fine because I control the software that runs on it.
Similarly here. Except I switched to Windows Phone. Apple phones, while well supported and good quality, are just a little too pricey for me. Samsung and LG are not without their faults either. Maybe on a few select flagship phones they have updates but the majority of their handsets have just as few updates as all the other manufacturers. My previous LG phone was released 6 months before Android 4 came out, and I never saw a single software update to that phone, so I was stuck with Android 2.3
On a side note, I'm loving my Windows Phone. The interface is great. And the battery life was amazing. Been off the charger since I woke up 5 hours ago and the battery still reads 97%. granted, it's a low use day for my phone, but I'm often left with 70% of my battery by the end of the day. Even recording bike rides using the GPS seems to have little-to-no effect on battery usage. There's not quite as many apps as Android and iOS, but it does everything I want a phone to do, and more.
This is basically the reason the new phone I got it not Android. They have a long track record of not being able to get updates onto phones. It is simply unacceptable to not receive any updates on a phone that I paid good money for.
Chrome is known to be a hog. There are numerous complaints about it even for those using the Surface Pro tablets with i3/i5/i7 processors. It doesn't get jittery, because the processor can handle it, but the battery life is severely reduced when using Chrome. You should probably switch to Firefox or IE for your browsing needs. Look into Metro IE. It's actually really nice when you're using the device as a tablet. Best touch browser I've ever used.
Exactly. I see no point in spending large amounts of money on the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S phones. In 2 years you will have to get a new one, either because it's obsolete, or they stop sending software updates, or the battery has stopped holding a full charge, or something has broken like the screen or one of the buttons (power, volume, etc). It's not really any fault of the device, it's just the reality of something you carry around with you all the time. Something is going to happen to the phone no matter how careful you are with it. I just got a new phone, and it was $200 US. I think that's a pretty decent price for a phone. I really can't justify spending much more than that on a device that has a lifespan of 2 years. The experience you get from a $200 phone isn't much different than a $700 phone in the current market. The only thing the $700 phone gets you is bragging rights.
At 2 GB of RAM, and a 2.3 GHz Atom Processor it has similar specs to the HP Stream 7. No idea how much storage is on it, but I don't really see any reason you couldn't run the full version of Windows if you wanted to. I think the only reason you couldn't is that Windows doesn't actually have software connecting to the GSM radio and making phone calls. Also, Android and Windows Phone OS have much better handling of low power modes. I don't think the battery would last very long running full Windows or Linux as the phone would probably be using a lot more battery. Perhaps Windows could work using something like its connected standby functionality.
Even 480 Euros ($533 US) is an insane price to ask for a phone. Especially one that currently has zero apps. I just got a Windows Phone (Blu Win HD LTE) which is currently priced at $200 US and I find it to be an amazing phone. Windows Phone is quite a good OS, and it's due for an update to Windows 10 when it comes out. Open source may be a nice idea, but I don't think a lot of people are going to want to pay that kind of premuim just to get it. I think the days of $500+ phones are numbered. I still don't know how people justify the $650+ price tag of the iPhone.
Sure, we all use the roads, but we don't all use them equally. Somebody who never or very rarely use the roads directly get a whole lot less out of them than people who drive hundreds of kilometers every day.
I get what you're saying. It's just like schools. We all benefit from having a well educated society, so we should all pay for schools. But I think that things like roads, or water systems should have some kind of pay-per-use factor built in to prevent people from over using the resource. If you tax those who do use the roads the same as those who don't use the roads, there's very little reason to limit how much you use them.
The minimum wage for students in Ontario is $10.30. The minimum wage for non-students is $11.00. That $0.70 difference doesn't make a huge difference in what type of jobs exist. They generally don't care whether you're a youth or not when they are looking at hiring you, because the wage difference is so small.
Even waiters are still required to be paid $10.00 an hour, and then still expect that 18% tip that is common in the USA. The waiters are able to make a ton of money this way because they get a decent wage to start out with, and still get huge tips
Maybe at places like Starbucks. They can make up the difference selling premium goods like coffee milkshakes and fancy coffee mugs. But at Tim Horton's in Canada, every time they raise the minimum wage, the price of coffee and doughnuts increases.
People say it doesn't do that, but there's a whole lot less service jobs than we used to have. There used to be kids who would wheel your groceries out to your car for you. This service basically doesn't exist any more. Most grocery stores don't even have a second person bagging the groceries like they used to. It's actually quite difficult finding a full service gas station unless you live in one of those states where you aren't allowed to pump your own gas. That's just two easy examples. There's a lot more jobs that aren't getting done, or people are expected to do for themselves. If the minimum wage keeps rising, it won't be long before I have to enter my own order at every McDonald's. They are already testing it out at certain locations. When you don't have any of your own expenses to pay for, then $7 an hour can be plenty of money. The problem is that people think that every job should earn a living wage. I tend very much to disagree. People shouldn't expect to be able to support themselves off a menial job. They should be setting their sights higher. Increase their skills and get a better job instead of complaining that a job that could be done by a 14 year old isn't enough to support your family.
I blame Apple and the iPad at least in part for stuff like this. In the iPad world, if you remove an app, then your files associated with that app will indeed disappear and cease to exist. They've done a lot of work to try to make it appear like there is no file system. This creates huge problems when you want to share a file between 2 apps..
I think a lot of the productivity gains came from the lack of WYSIWYG support. When you can't actually see what the output is going to look like on paper, you spend a lot less time futzing around with the layout and a lot more time just typing up the document. The fact that it's so simple is what allows you to just get to work and get your job done. Also, there was no other programs running in the background. Which meant that there wasn't emails, chat messages, and other distractions constantly drawing your attention away from what you're really supposed to be doing.
I guess I'm advantaged over today's kids because I grew up using WordPerfect 5.1, and we learned that using shortcut keys was basically the only way to get things done. The WordPerfect Keyboard Map sat at the top of every keyboard in my highschool. Sure you could do stuff with menus, but we learned on the first day of class that you should do as much as possible using hotkeys.
I don't think a mind meld with computers will even be the desired input method ever. The QWERTY layout has been around for 140 years. I don't think there's any reason for it to change. There are other input methods, but nothing that matches the speed and consistency of a skilled typist. Remember, the keyboard is not simply a tool for entering English words. It let's us communicate all types of information with the computer. Simple key combinations can be used to express many different things to the computer. Also, I can type while looking out the window at the trees blowing in the wind and still get the correct output to the computer. I think that a computer trying to read our brain signals would get very confused with all the "noise" in our heads. They have enough trouble just trying to get speech recognition working in a quiet room.
Very much agree. When I went to school, it was all WordPerfect and Quattro Pro. For programming we did QBasic and HTML/Javascript. But it was using Netscape Navigator where people frequently used frames and document.layers. I basically had to forget a whole bunch of stuff to be able to relearn the current way to do things. I was lucky in the sense that the teachers at my highschool taught us how to figure out how to do stuff on our own by telling us to read the documentation or search around the menus to find the functionality we needed. Whatever they learn will be wrong by the time they get out into the work force. The best you can do is try to teach them how to figure things out for themselves.
Most of the art classes I've taken in school really didn't allow any free expression. Most of there were something along the lines of create a copy of what the teacher does. Music class is the same. We just played sheet music. We didn't actually get to create any music. One time in highschool I got to do some art that was actually expressing myself. We had an artist come in, and they taught us how to do sculptures. We were told to do whatever we wanted. I think that was the only time we were actually allowed to do something original.
Even as somebody who has kids, I think this is fair. Why should someone be entitled to more leave than somebody else just because they chose to have children. My dad took a few months off between jobs once, because he had savings and was looking for a particularly good, high paying position, and he really enjoyed it. Got a lot of stuff done, and went into his new job very well rested. Even a week off here and there isn't enough for most people to really relax. We spend our entire working life without a chance to truly rest.
We have paternity/parental leave in Canada. and I don't think it helps much. I know very few men who have taken more than 2 weeks when their kid was born. I think I know exactly one guy who took the full leave (35 weeks here), but his wife was a doctor, so it made much more financial sense for him to take the reduced pay for. The mom took a few months off when the kid was born, and then he took time off after she had recovered. In the name of equal opportunity, parents should be able to split the allotted time off and benefits, but it's not going to change things that drastically.
While I agree that this type of discrimination exists, you have to admit, it many STEM jobs, having somebody leave for a few months would be a pretty big concern. For many other jobs, it's not a huge problem to replace somebody when they need to take time off. For science and engineering, you are paying somebody for their knowledge. And in particular, you want to keep people around because they have gained a lot of specific knowledge about what goes on at your company. You can't just bring somebody in and transfer over that knowledge quickly. By the time the replacement catches up, a few months will have passed. And once the person gets back to work, it will probably take them a couple months to catch up on what's been going on.
This thing has way more power and way better connectivity than an ARM SBC. Try finding an ARM SBC with USB 3, DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet, and M.2 SSD support. This thing is small enough that you could substitute it for a laptop if you just wanted a machine to bring between work and home. I know a lot of people who have work laptops who never use them except at a fixed desk anyway. Just plug in the peripherals at home or work. Not than I'm a big fan of working from home, but for some people this might actually work quite well for the task.
For brick and mortar stores, you are absolutely right. I think chip and PIN is a pretty decent authentication method. But for it to really work, we need to get to the point that there's no mag stripe, and no number on the card. We should completely get rid of the legacy payment by mag stripe, or simply knowing the card number and expiration date. There shouldn't be an insecure alternative. Payments should either be authenticated through the chip, or through the card issuer's website. There should be ability for the retailer, online or otherwise, to obtain information that would allow fraudulent transactions to be made.
This is what's wrong with online payments. To make a credit card payment, the website should just direct me to the website of visa/mc/amex and have me verify myself, and transfer money to the merchant, very similar to how PayPal works. With phones being so ubiquitous, a similar thing could be done for brick and mortar stores. Pop up a QR code at the register, scan it with a visa app, enter your credentials, and the payment is done. We need to fix the system and get rid of these antiquated payment methods.
Zealotry is probably the main issue. By and large, sports fans aren't that bad of people. But it doesn't take much searching to find evidence of riots and destruction from hard core sports fans, or people using sports as excuse to be terrible people.
I think that most religions are good and that very few of them condone these acts. It's just that you won't see it on the evening news. Because it's not exciting. I go to a baptist church, and I cringe that the Westboro Baptist Church uses the name "Baptist". It's basically the complete opposite of what they teach at my church. Everybody I have met there is very accepting of and they don't judge people. It's a nice change from the Catholic church I grew up in. They make a huge effort to apply the teachings in the bible to how to live your life as a better person. While I don't think that religion is required to be a good person, I think there are plenty of churches out there helping people to be better people in all aspects of life.