Android and iOS both have problems with updates, but at least Apple has some level of updates for their devices. Even 2 years for an iPad is 2 years longer than I got with my last phone. From the day I bought it, there was not a single update for my phone. And there hadn't been a single update since it shipped from the factory. I was able to force and update by using firmware from another phone carrier in another country, which happened to work ok, but it was st ill kind of buggy, and I was still stuck on Gingerbread, even though ICS came up 6 months after the phone was released.
This is why I hate the Android model of updates. I don't have to wait for HP, Dell, Lenovo, and others for my desktop to get updated. There's no reason I should have to wait on Samsung, LG, HTC, or even worse AT&T or Verizon to get an update for my phone. If my phone is running Android OS, then I should be able to get updates straight from Google. I like Android in every other aspect except their update strategy. I am due for a new phone soon, and I really don't want to get screwed over (again) with a phone that doesn't get a single OS update after I buy it. I'm kind of leaning towards Windows Phone at this point. I could consider iOS, but their phones are much too expensive for my tastes.
But to set up a dealership in each state, all they need to do is have a single car in each state, if that. The standard dealerships don't have a demo model for every make and model that they sell, why should Tesla be required to? A dealership could be as simple as a small office space with a single car in it. They only have a few different models anyway. Are there minimum hours to be considered a dealership? Maybe have a single dealership in each state that you really want to sell cars in, and keep it open for about 40 hours a week so it could be staffed by 1 or 2 people. Put a single car in the shop. Call it a dealership. Done and done. I can understand why Tesla doesn't want to require dealerships in every state, but it would be dead simple to set up a single dealership in each state just to adhere to regulations.
Because your battery is much smaller and your running an old inefficient processor. There's a large variety of laptops out there that can run for 10+ hours on a single charge.
I wonder how much of this is due to Firefox switching the default search engine. I figured it would only change for new machines, but it actually changed the search engine on existing installs, at least for my machines.
The "problem" with HTML and browsers is that they have always worked with, and will always be expected to work with invalid code. Feed invalid code into a C compiler, a Java compiler, or XML interpreter, and if the syntax is incorrect, it will return an error and refuse to process anything. Browsers on the other hand are supposed to take invalid HTML and try to do something useful with it. If browser developers didn't have to spend so much time trying to make their code interpret invalid syntax, they could probably fix a lot of the other bugs that actually affect valid code.
The simple solution is to completely unbundle everything and you only pay for the shows you want to watch. For examples, there's not reason someone should have to pay for Discovery channel for an entire year or even an entire month if the only for the channel is to watch a few hours of TV on Shark Week. The reason unbundling is expensive for the consumer is that they are left subscribing to channel just because they may want to watch it for a couple hours a month. If they unbundled it down to individual episodes, then people would pay only for what they actually want to see. There would be a large decrease in the amount of content available, as right now, there's a lot of junk content being subsidized by the popular content, but I personally think that's for the better.
Point number 1 is the most important. There's very little reason to enable SSH from the general internet. Set up a VPN, Limit the list of allowed IPs, do something to limit who can connect to your server.
You still end up with problems like when is 1:30 AM when you switch off DST. Is it the 1:30 AM before or after the clocks changed? 1:45 AM EDT is actually before 1:30 AM EST. Also, systems probably have to deal with this kind of junk all the time. Very few computers have an extremely accurate clock, so they have to be adjusted every so often anyway. If your system can't handle the time getting set back by a second or two, then you are going to run into problems whenever you recalibrate your clock. At least if you don't have unexpected things like 23:59:60 happening, then it will work for the majority of situations. Systems the really need to care about the leap second can account for it, and to the rest of the systems that really don't care about it, it will just look like a clock recalibration.
How about instead of setting the time to 23:59:60, the value 23:59:59 happens twice. When we have DST, and the time falls back an hour, we don't switch to some odd non-existant number for an hour so that we don't have overlap. We just set the clocks back to 1 AM. So all the times between 1 AM and 2 AM happen twice when switching off daylight savings. This might cause some problems. but at least it's fault tolerant in the sense that it's not going to crash because the date format wasn't as expected when dealing with older systems or systems that were naively programmed.
But can they target which phones connect to their rogue cell phone tower? What if you are in a private residence next to where they have it deployed. Wouldn't every cell phone in the vicinity latch onto the rogue cell tower? If they don't need a warrant, then they could just set them up in really busy places and get a large number of cell phones to connect and start recording conversations.
But if 99% of your trips don't require an engine, then why tote it around on a daily basis. Maybe a trailer with a gas generator would be a better idea. For long trips, bring the trailer/generator and you have extended range. For the in-city commutes which constitute the vast majority of your trips you don't have to carry around the heavy gas engine. If this was the case, the battery pack could be much smaller, maybe only enough for 200 miles, because that's all that's needed for in-city driving. Currently the battery is a little oversized because it needs to be able to go quite far, because there is no other option for powering it. Maybe you only go on 1 or 2 such long trips a year and you could just rent the trailer/generator.
I'm not so sure about that. Tesla just announced and upgrade to the Tesla Roadster that gives it a range of 400 miles. That's 643 km for those using metric. That's a pretty good range if you ask me. Sure it won't be for everybody, but there's maybe only 2 or 3 times a year that I'd need to drive a car further than that in a single day. For those situations it might be better to just rent a gas car. Gas is low now, but it has nowhere to go but up over the long term. When the price of gas gets high enough, and electric car technology gets cheap enough, there will be a tipping point where people will choose electric over gas. And electric cars are much lower maintenance than gas cars. That will be a the major advantage.
It only has 8 hours of play time, so that's a major downside right there. I remember my old minidisc and portable cassette players getting 20+ hours of play time in a single AA battery. It's kind of sad that people think of 8 hours as acceptable.
The buttons on mine crapped out a few years after I bought mine. If it wasn't for that, I might possibly still be using the thing. I definitely wouldn't have bought the iPod nano i used to replace it. It was quite convenient once you got the discs recorded. Being able to bring a few different discs with you was pretty nice. The fact that you could expand the storage for so cheap was a big plus at the time. Now you can get 16 GB SD cards for quite cheap, so I don't think I would buy a new one. But for the time between 2002 when it came out an for at least 5 years it was the best thing going in affordable portable music players.
Provided they don't screw it up with DRM, I think they could sell quite a few of them. I had a NetMD player when mp3 players were first starting to get really popular. That thing was awesome in that you could spend $5 and get a rewritable disc that would store 1-4 CDs (depending on compression rate). At the time, 64 MB SD cards were over $100. So being able to bring 100+ songs with you was kind of a non-option with MP3 players. There were some hard drive based players, but they were much more expensive.
The big downfall of the Minidisc player was that it came with ridiculously bad software that limited the number of copies of a particular song you could write to Minidisc, and you had to check-in/check-out songs to make sure you didn't run out of licenses. The software was also really slow and would crash all the time too. They had a great technology that was miles ahead of the competition in portable audio but they screwed it up by messing up the software in the name of DRM. They would have lost out to flash based MP3 players eventually, but the Minidisc could have ruled the market for 5-10 years had they not screwed up the implementation.
Sure, but how much will you spend building up a good vinyl collection? Spending $10 a month on a subscription service, I get access to everything from day 1 of the subscription. If I spent the same amount on Vinyl, and assuming a low price of $10 an album, after the first year, I'd only have 12 albums to choose from. After 20 years I'd still only be up to 240 albums, assuming none of them broke. With streaming you would most certainly pay less and have access to more. Sure, if the shit hit the fat as you put it, and I couldn't pay my bills, then I wouldn't have access to any music, but I'm sure I could survive for a few months. If I don't have any income, there's going to be a lot of other priorities that come before listening to music. And vinyl still doesn't let you make play lists. It's nice when you want to listen to the entire album, but even then you have to manually flip it over. Vinyl doesn't have a shuffle option. Having a subscription service that includes just about everything allows you to find new music a lot easier with actually increasing your spending.
All (or most) of those hardware faults you mentioned are all done to get a certain aesthetic from the hardware. This is where all their decisions come from. Every iPhone has to be thinner than the last. I'm not sure who they're consulting, but most people I know don't care if their phone is 0.05 centimeters thinner than last year. Once phone makers got to around 1.0 - 0.8 cm, I think that most people really stopped caring how thin their phone was. Now they want more battery life, stronger glass, more storage, and other non-aesthetic features. Then again, people keep on buying the phones they make, so there must be a large number of people who want them. Maybe it's just a self perpetuating cycle, where people buy Apple because they had Apple last time, and they have so much invested in the ecosystem. If they switched to Android or Windows phone, there's a lot of stuff they spent money on that just plain won't work with the other devices. I'm due for a new phone soon, and I have an Android phone. I know it's something I think about when considering whether or not I should change to iOS or Windows Phones, and I've maybe invested $30 in apps. Somebody who's spent money on iTunes music, movies, books, and apps would be very tied into the Apple platform than I am to Android.
For $30 I would probably be happy with the thing as long as it could make calls, send text messages, and act as a wireless hotspot. For my next phone, I think that's basically what I'm looking for. I'm tired of cell phones that cost so much. I'd much rather spend the equivalent on a tablet or laptop where you can get much more value for your money and stop spending so much trying to cram so much functionality into such a small device where I won't really be able to take full advantage of the features because the screen is so small. And no, having a 6 inch phone is now an answer because there are many places where I definitely want a phone but definitely don't want to lug a 6 inch device with me, such as the ski hill or on a bike ride.
I'm surprised that.Net doesn't have more popularity in other countries. It has full Unicode support for strings and identifiers. Here's an example in Hindi. Java also supports Unicode variable names. I guess they aren't completely open source/free, but if having multilingual identifiers is as important as you state, then you'd expect these languages to be highly used over thing like PHP which seem to have very little Unicode support.
I often wonder how a language that used different symbols for every word lasted so long and became so popular. I know there's some logic to it because they can't make up symbols for absolutely everything. For instance volcano is literally just fire mountain. I guess if English speakers can remember the sounds of thousands of words, then remembering the glyphs for thousands of words is also possible, but it just seems different in a way. How do you look up words in a dictionary, and how do you know how to pronounce a new symbol you've never seen before.
My biggest gripe with movie theatres is that every movie is priced exactly the same. So I want to got see a romantic comedy which cost almost nothing to make, it costs the same price as going to see the must see blockbuster of the year that took tens of millions of dollar and years of effort to put together. In my mind they should make the movies that require less effort and investment cheaper to see at the theatre. I also think they should reduce the price after it's been out for a while. Charge $20 on opening night for big blockbusters because they know they are going to fill the seats either way, and then as the weeks go on and crowds dwindle, bring the price gradually down to $5 or so to keep the seats full. For $5 there's probably a decent amount of people that would go see it a second time, but not if they had to pay full price.
For the most part you are right. There's still a couple movies a year that come out that are worth seeing on the big screen, but for the most part, I enjoy watching movies a lot more at home.
Another thought that comes up though, is that maybe that's just a sign of growing up and me owning the TV. When I was in highschool and university, I used to go to the theatre all the time because it was the only place to watch a movie on good equipment. When I was in highschool, the good TV belonged to my parents and they had it monopolized a lot of the time. I very rarely remember my parents going out to the movies as they could just watch whatever they want to at home. In university, I didn't have a good TV of my own.
Mostly agree with this. Most of the companies mentioned are too big and entrenched to be displaced in is little as 10 years. I think Microsoft still has a chance in the phone and tablet market. The Surface is really the best tablet out there if you want to get some work done and have the money to spend on it. There's some other low end offerings like the HP stream tablets that look promising. Running full Windows on a $100-$150 device seems like it would have some big advantages. If it isn't powerful enough to give a good experience, a few years of Moore's law will take care of that. As the owner of a Surface 2, I find Windows 8 to be the best OS for large tablets. iOS and Android are too focused on one-app-at-a-time and work better for small screen devices like phones. On large tablets you end up missing out on a lot of functionality that a large screen can bring.
Since it runs in the browser, what does it matter if it is open source? You'll have to check the code each time you visit the web page to ensure that the code which they say you are running is what you are actually running. The browser is a terrible place for trying to run secure code. Browser extensions can basically do whatever they want, and you'll have to check every browser extension you're using to verify that they aren't listening in on what you are doing. Why not just make a chat client that communicates in a secure way. I really don't see much advantage of having the application run in the browser. Sure, it almost automatically makes it cross platform, but also makes it quite difficult to secure properly.
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Android and iOS both have problems with updates, but at least Apple has some level of updates for their devices. Even 2 years for an iPad is 2 years longer than I got with my last phone. From the day I bought it, there was not a single update for my phone. And there hadn't been a single update since it shipped from the factory. I was able to force and update by using firmware from another phone carrier in another country, which happened to work ok, but it was st ill kind of buggy, and I was still stuck on Gingerbread, even though ICS came up 6 months after the phone was released.
This is why I hate the Android model of updates. I don't have to wait for HP, Dell, Lenovo, and others for my desktop to get updated. There's no reason I should have to wait on Samsung, LG, HTC, or even worse AT&T or Verizon to get an update for my phone. If my phone is running Android OS, then I should be able to get updates straight from Google. I like Android in every other aspect except their update strategy. I am due for a new phone soon, and I really don't want to get screwed over (again) with a phone that doesn't get a single OS update after I buy it. I'm kind of leaning towards Windows Phone at this point. I could consider iOS, but their phones are much too expensive for my tastes.
But to set up a dealership in each state, all they need to do is have a single car in each state, if that. The standard dealerships don't have a demo model for every make and model that they sell, why should Tesla be required to? A dealership could be as simple as a small office space with a single car in it. They only have a few different models anyway. Are there minimum hours to be considered a dealership? Maybe have a single dealership in each state that you really want to sell cars in, and keep it open for about 40 hours a week so it could be staffed by 1 or 2 people. Put a single car in the shop. Call it a dealership. Done and done. I can understand why Tesla doesn't want to require dealerships in every state, but it would be dead simple to set up a single dealership in each state just to adhere to regulations.
Because your battery is much smaller and your running an old inefficient processor. There's a large variety of laptops out there that can run for 10+ hours on a single charge.
I wonder how much of this is due to Firefox switching the default search engine. I figured it would only change for new machines, but it actually changed the search engine on existing installs, at least for my machines.
The "problem" with HTML and browsers is that they have always worked with, and will always be expected to work with invalid code. Feed invalid code into a C compiler, a Java compiler, or XML interpreter, and if the syntax is incorrect, it will return an error and refuse to process anything. Browsers on the other hand are supposed to take invalid HTML and try to do something useful with it. If browser developers didn't have to spend so much time trying to make their code interpret invalid syntax, they could probably fix a lot of the other bugs that actually affect valid code.
The simple solution is to completely unbundle everything and you only pay for the shows you want to watch. For examples, there's not reason someone should have to pay for Discovery channel for an entire year or even an entire month if the only for the channel is to watch a few hours of TV on Shark Week. The reason unbundling is expensive for the consumer is that they are left subscribing to channel just because they may want to watch it for a couple hours a month. If they unbundled it down to individual episodes, then people would pay only for what they actually want to see. There would be a large decrease in the amount of content available, as right now, there's a lot of junk content being subsidized by the popular content, but I personally think that's for the better.
Point number 1 is the most important. There's very little reason to enable SSH from the general internet. Set up a VPN, Limit the list of allowed IPs, do something to limit who can connect to your server.
You still end up with problems like when is 1:30 AM when you switch off DST. Is it the 1:30 AM before or after the clocks changed? 1:45 AM EDT is actually before 1:30 AM EST. Also, systems probably have to deal with this kind of junk all the time. Very few computers have an extremely accurate clock, so they have to be adjusted every so often anyway. If your system can't handle the time getting set back by a second or two, then you are going to run into problems whenever you recalibrate your clock. At least if you don't have unexpected things like 23:59:60 happening, then it will work for the majority of situations. Systems the really need to care about the leap second can account for it, and to the rest of the systems that really don't care about it, it will just look like a clock recalibration.
How about instead of setting the time to 23:59:60, the value 23:59:59 happens twice. When we have DST, and the time falls back an hour, we don't switch to some odd non-existant number for an hour so that we don't have overlap. We just set the clocks back to 1 AM. So all the times between 1 AM and 2 AM happen twice when switching off daylight savings. This might cause some problems. but at least it's fault tolerant in the sense that it's not going to crash because the date format wasn't as expected when dealing with older systems or systems that were naively programmed.
But can they target which phones connect to their rogue cell phone tower? What if you are in a private residence next to where they have it deployed. Wouldn't every cell phone in the vicinity latch onto the rogue cell tower? If they don't need a warrant, then they could just set them up in really busy places and get a large number of cell phones to connect and start recording conversations.
But if 99% of your trips don't require an engine, then why tote it around on a daily basis. Maybe a trailer with a gas generator would be a better idea. For long trips, bring the trailer/generator and you have extended range. For the in-city commutes which constitute the vast majority of your trips you don't have to carry around the heavy gas engine. If this was the case, the battery pack could be much smaller, maybe only enough for 200 miles, because that's all that's needed for in-city driving. Currently the battery is a little oversized because it needs to be able to go quite far, because there is no other option for powering it. Maybe you only go on 1 or 2 such long trips a year and you could just rent the trailer/generator.
I'm not so sure about that. Tesla just announced and upgrade to the Tesla Roadster that gives it a range of 400 miles. That's 643 km for those using metric. That's a pretty good range if you ask me. Sure it won't be for everybody, but there's maybe only 2 or 3 times a year that I'd need to drive a car further than that in a single day. For those situations it might be better to just rent a gas car. Gas is low now, but it has nowhere to go but up over the long term. When the price of gas gets high enough, and electric car technology gets cheap enough, there will be a tipping point where people will choose electric over gas. And electric cars are much lower maintenance than gas cars. That will be a the major advantage.
It only has 8 hours of play time, so that's a major downside right there. I remember my old minidisc and portable cassette players getting 20+ hours of play time in a single AA battery. It's kind of sad that people think of 8 hours as acceptable.
The buttons on mine crapped out a few years after I bought mine. If it wasn't for that, I might possibly still be using the thing. I definitely wouldn't have bought the iPod nano i used to replace it. It was quite convenient once you got the discs recorded. Being able to bring a few different discs with you was pretty nice. The fact that you could expand the storage for so cheap was a big plus at the time. Now you can get 16 GB SD cards for quite cheap, so I don't think I would buy a new one. But for the time between 2002 when it came out an for at least 5 years it was the best thing going in affordable portable music players.
Provided they don't screw it up with DRM, I think they could sell quite a few of them. I had a NetMD player when mp3 players were first starting to get really popular. That thing was awesome in that you could spend $5 and get a rewritable disc that would store 1-4 CDs (depending on compression rate). At the time, 64 MB SD cards were over $100. So being able to bring 100+ songs with you was kind of a non-option with MP3 players. There were some hard drive based players, but they were much more expensive.
The big downfall of the Minidisc player was that it came with ridiculously bad software that limited the number of copies of a particular song you could write to Minidisc, and you had to check-in/check-out songs to make sure you didn't run out of licenses. The software was also really slow and would crash all the time too. They had a great technology that was miles ahead of the competition in portable audio but they screwed it up by messing up the software in the name of DRM. They would have lost out to flash based MP3 players eventually, but the Minidisc could have ruled the market for 5-10 years had they not screwed up the implementation.
Sure, but how much will you spend building up a good vinyl collection? Spending $10 a month on a subscription service, I get access to everything from day 1 of the subscription. If I spent the same amount on Vinyl, and assuming a low price of $10 an album, after the first year, I'd only have 12 albums to choose from. After 20 years I'd still only be up to 240 albums, assuming none of them broke. With streaming you would most certainly pay less and have access to more. Sure, if the shit hit the fat as you put it, and I couldn't pay my bills, then I wouldn't have access to any music, but I'm sure I could survive for a few months. If I don't have any income, there's going to be a lot of other priorities that come before listening to music. And vinyl still doesn't let you make play lists. It's nice when you want to listen to the entire album, but even then you have to manually flip it over. Vinyl doesn't have a shuffle option. Having a subscription service that includes just about everything allows you to find new music a lot easier with actually increasing your spending.
All (or most) of those hardware faults you mentioned are all done to get a certain aesthetic from the hardware. This is where all their decisions come from. Every iPhone has to be thinner than the last. I'm not sure who they're consulting, but most people I know don't care if their phone is 0.05 centimeters thinner than last year. Once phone makers got to around 1.0 - 0.8 cm, I think that most people really stopped caring how thin their phone was. Now they want more battery life, stronger glass, more storage, and other non-aesthetic features. Then again, people keep on buying the phones they make, so there must be a large number of people who want them. Maybe it's just a self perpetuating cycle, where people buy Apple because they had Apple last time, and they have so much invested in the ecosystem. If they switched to Android or Windows phone, there's a lot of stuff they spent money on that just plain won't work with the other devices. I'm due for a new phone soon, and I have an Android phone. I know it's something I think about when considering whether or not I should change to iOS or Windows Phones, and I've maybe invested $30 in apps. Somebody who's spent money on iTunes music, movies, books, and apps would be very tied into the Apple platform than I am to Android.
For $30 I would probably be happy with the thing as long as it could make calls, send text messages, and act as a wireless hotspot. For my next phone, I think that's basically what I'm looking for. I'm tired of cell phones that cost so much. I'd much rather spend the equivalent on a tablet or laptop where you can get much more value for your money and stop spending so much trying to cram so much functionality into such a small device where I won't really be able to take full advantage of the features because the screen is so small. And no, having a 6 inch phone is now an answer because there are many places where I definitely want a phone but definitely don't want to lug a 6 inch device with me, such as the ski hill or on a bike ride.
I'm surprised that .Net doesn't have more popularity in other countries. It has full Unicode support for strings and identifiers. Here's an example in Hindi. Java also supports Unicode variable names. I guess they aren't completely open source/free, but if having multilingual identifiers is as important as you state, then you'd expect these languages to be highly used over thing like PHP which seem to have very little Unicode support.
I often wonder how a language that used different symbols for every word lasted so long and became so popular. I know there's some logic to it because they can't make up symbols for absolutely everything. For instance volcano is literally just fire mountain. I guess if English speakers can remember the sounds of thousands of words, then remembering the glyphs for thousands of words is also possible, but it just seems different in a way. How do you look up words in a dictionary, and how do you know how to pronounce a new symbol you've never seen before.
My biggest gripe with movie theatres is that every movie is priced exactly the same. So I want to got see a romantic comedy which cost almost nothing to make, it costs the same price as going to see the must see blockbuster of the year that took tens of millions of dollar and years of effort to put together. In my mind they should make the movies that require less effort and investment cheaper to see at the theatre. I also think they should reduce the price after it's been out for a while. Charge $20 on opening night for big blockbusters because they know they are going to fill the seats either way, and then as the weeks go on and crowds dwindle, bring the price gradually down to $5 or so to keep the seats full. For $5 there's probably a decent amount of people that would go see it a second time, but not if they had to pay full price.
For the most part you are right. There's still a couple movies a year that come out that are worth seeing on the big screen, but for the most part, I enjoy watching movies a lot more at home.
Another thought that comes up though, is that maybe that's just a sign of growing up and me owning the TV. When I was in highschool and university, I used to go to the theatre all the time because it was the only place to watch a movie on good equipment. When I was in highschool, the good TV belonged to my parents and they had it monopolized a lot of the time. I very rarely remember my parents going out to the movies as they could just watch whatever they want to at home. In university, I didn't have a good TV of my own.
Mostly agree with this. Most of the companies mentioned are too big and entrenched to be displaced in is little as 10 years. I think Microsoft still has a chance in the phone and tablet market. The Surface is really the best tablet out there if you want to get some work done and have the money to spend on it. There's some other low end offerings like the HP stream tablets that look promising. Running full Windows on a $100-$150 device seems like it would have some big advantages. If it isn't powerful enough to give a good experience, a few years of Moore's law will take care of that. As the owner of a Surface 2, I find Windows 8 to be the best OS for large tablets. iOS and Android are too focused on one-app-at-a-time and work better for small screen devices like phones. On large tablets you end up missing out on a lot of functionality that a large screen can bring.
Since it runs in the browser, what does it matter if it is open source? You'll have to check the code each time you visit the web page to ensure that the code which they say you are running is what you are actually running. The browser is a terrible place for trying to run secure code. Browser extensions can basically do whatever they want, and you'll have to check every browser extension you're using to verify that they aren't listening in on what you are doing. Why not just make a chat client that communicates in a secure way. I really don't see much advantage of having the application run in the browser. Sure, it almost automatically makes it cross platform, but also makes it quite difficult to secure properly.