Which is why my next phone won't be Android. I'm not sure what OS it's going to be running, but Android seems to be the worst at getting updates. Many phones don't even get a single update after they are shipped. Also, the updates from many phones are carrier specific because they had carrier specific firmware when they were originally sold, So there might be an update for your phone, but you can't easily install it because it's not for your carrier. If you go with a smaller carrier, you are often out of luck. After being burned by this type of situation with Android on my first real smart phone, I will not go with Android again.
Well, at $15 a month savings for 24 months, you saved $360 on your bill but paid $300 extra for the phone, so you only saved $60. They're not really giving that bad of a deal. It's certainly less than had you bought the phone on a credit card and paid it off over 3 years.
THIS. I loved Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 on the PC so much more than XBox because of this. On the PC I could remap the controls on my gamepad so that you could reach the ollie and jump buttons at the same time. On the XBox, they make it quite difficult to press these two buttons at the same time. They should seriously just make all the controls re-mappable. Many other games I've found have been made less than stellar simply because I was unable to remap the controls to what I felt comfortable with.
The kind of idiot who's has to get to work, who's worried about whether he will get fired for being late. He doesn't have the money to fix it either, so he's going to be driving like that until the end of the month, Of course, it's going to cost him more in the long run as running with a single empty tire can damage the rim as well as the tire, whereas a patch would have worked had he fixed it right away.
The thing is, we are talking about phones. So, in the form factor of a phone, a hardware keyboard would be at best adequate. Typing with 2 thumbs on a hardware keyboard is only marginally better than typing on a screen. And don't forget that the keyboard takes up valuable space. Either you end up with a smaller screen so the keyboard can be always accessible, or you end up with a thicker phone so that the keyboard can be hidden when not in use. Also, and maybe I've just had bad phones in the past, but the keys are always the first things to go. Especially when they are accompanied by mechanisms that let them fold or slide out. The current phone I have is the only one that hasn't broke, and it's because it only has 3 buttons, power, volume up, and volume down. Everything including the android buttons (menu, home, back, search) is input using the screen. Screens crack if you are careless, but that's going to happen regardless of whether or not you have a physical keyboard. Having no physical buttons means that it's ones less thing to worry about breaking.
Google's ultimate goal isn't to build self-driving cars. Their goal is to get the technology off the ground and convince other auto manufacturers that it is possible so that people can browse the web on their way to work, and look at ads on the Google search engine. They didn't build a phone operating system because they thought they could do a better job than Apple or because Apple was doing a bad job. They did it to built up market share and mind share around their search engine. Google wants us to have self driving cars so that we have more leisure time in order to see more ads, or possibly to buy apps, games, books, and movies off their app store. This is where the real money is. Not in selling physical objects that take money to produce, but in generating revenue from a product that costs nothing to produce, and can generate obscene amounts of money.
Also, how well maintained are the cars, and do they complete a safety checklist before every drive? Because I can pretty much guarantee that if you put these cars out in the general population, that they will not be maintained and not checked before every drive to ensure that things are working properly.
I would say that driving in the city is way more complicated than flying in the air. There are a lot more unexpected problems that can happen in the city than in the air. A child isn't likely to run into the path of an aircraft. The aircraft in the sky tend to stay quite far apart from each other as well. Cars tend to be quite close together, as while you still have humans driving some of the cars, and other traffic like cyclist and pedestrians to deal with, there will be unpredictable movements made by them.
Perhaps people would just learn to be on time more often. I'm sure there are cases where something unexpected comes up, but many people I know are late all the time, and when something comes up, they are even later.
Personally I don't care if somebody is late, I don't want taxi's performing dangerous and/or illegal maneuvers. Also, when you hold up a bus or train, you could be making more than one person late.
All that being said, having autonomous cars would probably make things go a lot smoother, and we wouldn't have to worry about being late so much because of traffic jams.
Also worth pointing out that the votes are counted so fast, that they had to enact a law so that the results from the east coast weren't reported before the polls on the west coast had closed to prevent the results from influencing voters on the other side of the country. These laws were often ignored (not by the big media companies), and were hard to enforce, and I think they've been eliminated because of this, but the idea made sense.
I think that Nintendo seems to not care so much because they actually make money (or don't lose as much) on the hardware. I've even soft-modded my Wii but didn't actually pirate any games. I just used to to enhance the capabilities such as enable it to be a media player. It almost seems like they built functionality into the Wii specifically for the sake of encouraging piracy. The biggest reason that I soft-modded my Wii was because it allowed me to hook up a USB hard disk to my Wii and play games from there. This is very convenient as I don't have to switch discs, and I can keep them in a safe place so they don't get scratched. This type of functionality even being possible could only be explained by being helpful for testing, or being helpful for piracy.
Personally, If they really wanted to fight piracy, they could do a lot better job. All controllers are wireless, so I don't see why they should even have USB ports on the consoles anymore. I think the only real use of the USB slots was for the network dongle, and they could have put an actual Ethernet port in there for the same price. I think all the softmods were a result of corrupting save game files, so if they got rid of the SD Card slot, and synced your save games to the cloud, so people wouldn't complain about not being able to back up, they would remove pretty much all the software accessible attack vectors. Many people shy away from doing mod chips as they require soldering, and they don't want to mess up a $400 piece of hardware to play a few free games.
Bamboo bikes seem to be more likely. Although I don't see how its more environmentally friendly than a steel frame. Well cared for, it will last decades, and then it can become recycled and made into a new bike.
You know what else increases fuel economy? Not driving everywhere. OK, I understand it doesn't really increase the fuel economy, but I find it odd that people drive absolutely everywhere. Just about everyone I know who owns a car refuses to walk or take the bus, even if that would actually be an easier/cheaper option.
Yeah, I worked at McDonald's in high school, and as a member of the kitchen staff, we didn't have to wear gloves. Basically, wash your hands before you start, and after breaks, as well as any other time you feel your hands need a washing. Probably works better than continuously wearing gloves, as most people would use the same gloves for the entire shift. Some ill-managed places where the staff have to constantly move between cash and food prep should probably require gloves, but those places tend to be terrible anyway.
Also, let's see how it deals with a bi-directional bike lane where one of the lanes is against traffic. These exist in Montreal, as well as other places I'm sure. Instead of putting 1 bike lane on each side, they put them both on one side of the street. When turning across the bike lane, you have to watch out for cyclists coming from both directions.
Also, let's test in snow. I'm tired of these things that only work in sunny California. It's bad enough that cell phones don't work with gloves on. I would hate it if my car failed to operate when there was a little bit of snow falling.
Yeah, I definitely don't think it was possible to do self-referencing in the editor, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could do it by editing the internal level code. I think part of what made it so fun to make levels is that it was so simple. Just cubes connected to cubes. I remember trying to use the Descent 3 editor, and found it too confusion to get started. I'm sure you could do more powerful stuff, but it was quite difficult to get started. The orignal Descent editor (DEVIL) was quite simple and you could learn all the basics and build a decent level in an afternoon.
The original Descent had some interesting stuff if you were into making your own maps. You could build rooms inside of other rooms but where you couldn't see one from the other. I built a room with a cube in the middle. When you opened a door on the side of the cube, you went into a room that was larger than the cube itself (much larger). I built a hallway that looped around on itself, but when you were going though the hallway you wouldn't see the intersection. There was lot of interesting levels you could make because of the flaws.
I would probably buy a gaming PC if they brought back Descent. I loved that game. Even just single player, it was awesome. I think that a complicated controller might have helped, but even on a simple Gravis joystick I found I could control it pretty well. Use the joystick in your right hand, left hand on numeric pad. Index finger is on + to go forward, thumb is on "enter" to go backward. Other 3 fingers are on 4,5,6. 8 strafes up, 2 strafes down, 4 strafes left and 6 strafes right. 7 and 9 to cycle weapons. 1 and 3 adjust roll. The rest of the keys on the Numpad can be used for the headlight toggle, flares, and other functionality. I still use a similar style of control in FPS games, substituting a mouse for the joystick. 8 becomes jump, and 2 becomes duck.Always found this worked better for me than WASD.
How do you think they sailed across the sea and circumnavigated the globe hundreds of years ago? They were able to look at the position of the stars, and calculate quite accurately where they were on the earth. The sextant was often used for sailors to determine their position out at sea. It could be accurate within a few nautical miles. which is pretty good considering the technology at the time.
GPS specifically refers to the system created by the US military for tracking your position using a bunch of satellites they put up there. Just because the acronym expands out to something rather generic doesn't mean it doesn't mean a specific implementation. FTP expands out to File Transfer Protocol. That doesn't mean that bittorrent is FTP because it's also a protocol for transferring files. There are other systems like GLONASS that help you determine you position, and also use satellites. But it would be confusing to call them both GPS, because GPS refers to a specific implementation. If you're going to call things that aren't GPS as GPS, then you might as well call navigating by the stars GPS.
The question is, how much would you pay to access Google without ads? If they started offering a solution without ads for $2 a month would it be worth it to you? Sure, they probably don't make $2 worth of ad clicks off most people, but arranging the billing system for millions for users would make the system much more costly to run. So, now we got Google without ads. That's $2 a month. Then add Slashdot. Maybe they only charge $0.50 a month. Add on facebook, that's another $2 a month. Reddit might be $1 a month. New York Times, there's another $1. Pretty soon the number start to add up and you're easily paying $20 a month just to access websites without ads. Maybe somebody gets a whole bunch of sites together so you can pay 1 fee to access all the sites that use this service ad free. But there's sites still not using this service so you end up paying others to be ad-free.
To make any of the above work, you have to be logged in any time you are accessing the ad-free sites you are paying for, so they have a flawless way of tracking all the pages you are visiting on their site. Currently I can go to Google in Incognito mode, do some searches, and then next time I come back, I'm a completely different person, so tracking is limited. With a service you pay for, you are logged in, so they are able to accumulate a lot of information about you.
The problem is it's getting harder and harder to find a dumb TV. I bought a TV a few months back, and almost everything in the size range I was looking for was a smart TV. Even fewer dumb TVs were available once you add on a few extra requirements like "3 or more HDMI ports" and "reputable manufacturer". In the end, I ended up getting a smart TV. I really like some of the features on it. I can watch Netflix, play movies PLEX, wirelessly stream from my tablet. Sure I could do all that if I hooked up a computer to the HDMI port, but then I would have to get another computer for my living room, and the remote wouldn't be integrated like the one on my TV.
You can get turn by turn navigation in a bike specific GPS for way less than the price of Google Glass. And you load the maps right on the device so you don't have to worry about data plans or losing cell reception. Personally, I would love it if my cell phone could do everything, but GPS seems to be one of those things where a dedicated device just works so much better. The GPS on my phone will work ok in a pinch, but for things like cycling and hiking, there's no comparison to using a real GPS.
We are pretty much getting to this point without the help of super capacitors. With new batteries, solid state drives, and low power (not low speed) chips, it's possible to make a laptop last 20 hours. It's not mainstream, but give it another 2 or 3 years and it won't be uncommon that you'll only have to plug in you laptop at night, just like you do with your phone.
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Which is why my next phone won't be Android. I'm not sure what OS it's going to be running, but Android seems to be the worst at getting updates. Many phones don't even get a single update after they are shipped. Also, the updates from many phones are carrier specific because they had carrier specific firmware when they were originally sold, So there might be an update for your phone, but you can't easily install it because it's not for your carrier. If you go with a smaller carrier, you are often out of luck. After being burned by this type of situation with Android on my first real smart phone, I will not go with Android again.
Well, at $15 a month savings for 24 months, you saved $360 on your bill but paid $300 extra for the phone, so you only saved $60. They're not really giving that bad of a deal. It's certainly less than had you bought the phone on a credit card and paid it off over 3 years.
I'm the original
THIS. I loved Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 on the PC so much more than XBox because of this. On the PC I could remap the controls on my gamepad so that you could reach the ollie and jump buttons at the same time. On the XBox, they make it quite difficult to press these two buttons at the same time. They should seriously just make all the controls re-mappable. Many other games I've found have been made less than stellar simply because I was unable to remap the controls to what I felt comfortable with.
The kind of idiot who's has to get to work, who's worried about whether he will get fired for being late. He doesn't have the money to fix it either, so he's going to be driving like that until the end of the month, Of course, it's going to cost him more in the long run as running with a single empty tire can damage the rim as well as the tire, whereas a patch would have worked had he fixed it right away.
The thing is, we are talking about phones. So, in the form factor of a phone, a hardware keyboard would be at best adequate. Typing with 2 thumbs on a hardware keyboard is only marginally better than typing on a screen. And don't forget that the keyboard takes up valuable space. Either you end up with a smaller screen so the keyboard can be always accessible, or you end up with a thicker phone so that the keyboard can be hidden when not in use. Also, and maybe I've just had bad phones in the past, but the keys are always the first things to go. Especially when they are accompanied by mechanisms that let them fold or slide out. The current phone I have is the only one that hasn't broke, and it's because it only has 3 buttons, power, volume up, and volume down. Everything including the android buttons (menu, home, back, search) is input using the screen. Screens crack if you are careless, but that's going to happen regardless of whether or not you have a physical keyboard. Having no physical buttons means that it's ones less thing to worry about breaking.
Google's ultimate goal isn't to build self-driving cars. Their goal is to get the technology off the ground and convince other auto manufacturers that it is possible so that people can browse the web on their way to work, and look at ads on the Google search engine. They didn't build a phone operating system because they thought they could do a better job than Apple or because Apple was doing a bad job. They did it to built up market share and mind share around their search engine. Google wants us to have self driving cars so that we have more leisure time in order to see more ads, or possibly to buy apps, games, books, and movies off their app store. This is where the real money is. Not in selling physical objects that take money to produce, but in generating revenue from a product that costs nothing to produce, and can generate obscene amounts of money.
Also, how well maintained are the cars, and do they complete a safety checklist before every drive? Because I can pretty much guarantee that if you put these cars out in the general population, that they will not be maintained and not checked before every drive to ensure that things are working properly.
I would say that driving in the city is way more complicated than flying in the air. There are a lot more unexpected problems that can happen in the city than in the air. A child isn't likely to run into the path of an aircraft. The aircraft in the sky tend to stay quite far apart from each other as well. Cars tend to be quite close together, as while you still have humans driving some of the cars, and other traffic like cyclist and pedestrians to deal with, there will be unpredictable movements made by them.
Perhaps people would just learn to be on time more often. I'm sure there are cases where something unexpected comes up, but many people I know are late all the time, and when something comes up, they are even later.
Personally I don't care if somebody is late, I don't want taxi's performing dangerous and/or illegal maneuvers. Also, when you hold up a bus or train, you could be making more than one person late.
All that being said, having autonomous cars would probably make things go a lot smoother, and we wouldn't have to worry about being late so much because of traffic jams.
Also worth pointing out that the votes are counted so fast, that they had to enact a law so that the results from the east coast weren't reported before the polls on the west coast had closed to prevent the results from influencing voters on the other side of the country. These laws were often ignored (not by the big media companies), and were hard to enforce, and I think they've been eliminated because of this, but the idea made sense.
I think that Nintendo seems to not care so much because they actually make money (or don't lose as much) on the hardware. I've even soft-modded my Wii but didn't actually pirate any games. I just used to to enhance the capabilities such as enable it to be a media player. It almost seems like they built functionality into the Wii specifically for the sake of encouraging piracy. The biggest reason that I soft-modded my Wii was because it allowed me to hook up a USB hard disk to my Wii and play games from there. This is very convenient as I don't have to switch discs, and I can keep them in a safe place so they don't get scratched. This type of functionality even being possible could only be explained by being helpful for testing, or being helpful for piracy.
Personally, If they really wanted to fight piracy, they could do a lot better job. All controllers are wireless, so I don't see why they should even have USB ports on the consoles anymore. I think the only real use of the USB slots was for the network dongle, and they could have put an actual Ethernet port in there for the same price. I think all the softmods were a result of corrupting save game files, so if they got rid of the SD Card slot, and synced your save games to the cloud, so people wouldn't complain about not being able to back up, they would remove pretty much all the software accessible attack vectors. Many people shy away from doing mod chips as they require soldering, and they don't want to mess up a $400 piece of hardware to play a few free games.
Bamboo bikes seem to be more likely. Although I don't see how its more environmentally friendly than a steel frame. Well cared for, it will last decades, and then it can become recycled and made into a new bike.
You know what else increases fuel economy? Not driving everywhere. OK, I understand it doesn't really increase the fuel economy, but I find it odd that people drive absolutely everywhere. Just about everyone I know who owns a car refuses to walk or take the bus, even if that would actually be an easier/cheaper option.
Yeah, I worked at McDonald's in high school, and as a member of the kitchen staff, we didn't have to wear gloves. Basically, wash your hands before you start, and after breaks, as well as any other time you feel your hands need a washing. Probably works better than continuously wearing gloves, as most people would use the same gloves for the entire shift. Some ill-managed places where the staff have to constantly move between cash and food prep should probably require gloves, but those places tend to be terrible anyway.
Also, let's see how it deals with a bi-directional bike lane where one of the lanes is against traffic. These exist in Montreal, as well as other places I'm sure. Instead of putting 1 bike lane on each side, they put them both on one side of the street. When turning across the bike lane, you have to watch out for cyclists coming from both directions.
Also, let's test in snow. I'm tired of these things that only work in sunny California. It's bad enough that cell phones don't work with gloves on. I would hate it if my car failed to operate when there was a little bit of snow falling.
Yeah, I definitely don't think it was possible to do self-referencing in the editor, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could do it by editing the internal level code. I think part of what made it so fun to make levels is that it was so simple. Just cubes connected to cubes. I remember trying to use the Descent 3 editor, and found it too confusion to get started. I'm sure you could do more powerful stuff, but it was quite difficult to get started. The orignal Descent editor (DEVIL) was quite simple and you could learn all the basics and build a decent level in an afternoon.
The original Descent had some interesting stuff if you were into making your own maps. You could build rooms inside of other rooms but where you couldn't see one from the other. I built a room with a cube in the middle. When you opened a door on the side of the cube, you went into a room that was larger than the cube itself (much larger). I built a hallway that looped around on itself, but when you were going though the hallway you wouldn't see the intersection. There was lot of interesting levels you could make because of the flaws.
I would probably buy a gaming PC if they brought back Descent. I loved that game. Even just single player, it was awesome. I think that a complicated controller might have helped, but even on a simple Gravis joystick I found I could control it pretty well. Use the joystick in your right hand, left hand on numeric pad. Index finger is on + to go forward, thumb is on "enter" to go backward. Other 3 fingers are on 4,5,6. 8 strafes up, 2 strafes down, 4 strafes left and 6 strafes right. 7 and 9 to cycle weapons. 1 and 3 adjust roll. The rest of the keys on the Numpad can be used for the headlight toggle, flares, and other functionality. I still use a similar style of control in FPS games, substituting a mouse for the joystick. 8 becomes jump, and 2 becomes duck.Always found this worked better for me than WASD.
How do you think they sailed across the sea and circumnavigated the globe hundreds of years ago? They were able to look at the position of the stars, and calculate quite accurately where they were on the earth. The sextant was often used for sailors to determine their position out at sea. It could be accurate within a few nautical miles. which is pretty good considering the technology at the time.
GPS specifically refers to the system created by the US military for tracking your position using a bunch of satellites they put up there. Just because the acronym expands out to something rather generic doesn't mean it doesn't mean a specific implementation. FTP expands out to File Transfer Protocol. That doesn't mean that bittorrent is FTP because it's also a protocol for transferring files. There are other systems like GLONASS that help you determine you position, and also use satellites. But it would be confusing to call them both GPS, because GPS refers to a specific implementation. If you're going to call things that aren't GPS as GPS, then you might as well call navigating by the stars GPS.
The question is, how much would you pay to access Google without ads? If they started offering a solution without ads for $2 a month would it be worth it to you? Sure, they probably don't make $2 worth of ad clicks off most people, but arranging the billing system for millions for users would make the system much more costly to run. So, now we got Google without ads. That's $2 a month. Then add Slashdot. Maybe they only charge $0.50 a month. Add on facebook, that's another $2 a month. Reddit might be $1 a month. New York Times, there's another $1. Pretty soon the number start to add up and you're easily paying $20 a month just to access websites without ads. Maybe somebody gets a whole bunch of sites together so you can pay 1 fee to access all the sites that use this service ad free. But there's sites still not using this service so you end up paying others to be ad-free.
To make any of the above work, you have to be logged in any time you are accessing the ad-free sites you are paying for, so they have a flawless way of tracking all the pages you are visiting on their site. Currently I can go to Google in Incognito mode, do some searches, and then next time I come back, I'm a completely different person, so tracking is limited. With a service you pay for, you are logged in, so they are able to accumulate a lot of information about you.
The problem is it's getting harder and harder to find a dumb TV. I bought a TV a few months back, and almost everything in the size range I was looking for was a smart TV. Even fewer dumb TVs were available once you add on a few extra requirements like "3 or more HDMI ports" and "reputable manufacturer". In the end, I ended up getting a smart TV. I really like some of the features on it. I can watch Netflix, play movies PLEX, wirelessly stream from my tablet. Sure I could do all that if I hooked up a computer to the HDMI port, but then I would have to get another computer for my living room, and the remote wouldn't be integrated like the one on my TV.
You can get turn by turn navigation in a bike specific GPS for way less than the price of Google Glass. And you load the maps right on the device so you don't have to worry about data plans or losing cell reception. Personally, I would love it if my cell phone could do everything, but GPS seems to be one of those things where a dedicated device just works so much better. The GPS on my phone will work ok in a pinch, but for things like cycling and hiking, there's no comparison to using a real GPS.
We are pretty much getting to this point without the help of super capacitors. With new batteries, solid state drives, and low power (not low speed) chips, it's possible to make a laptop last 20 hours. It's not mainstream, but give it another 2 or 3 years and it won't be uncommon that you'll only have to plug in you laptop at night, just like you do with your phone.