After all as a tool the iPad is rather expensive since there are few tasks a tablet is truly well suited for. Most tasks, there are other devices that do a better job, other devices people usually own.
Typical checkbox thinking. For reading through the 1,000+ technical papers I have in Papers, plus the dozen books I have in PDF, browsing the web, handling most email, getting most of my news, looking at photos, anything to do with maps and directions, etc, etc, etc, the iPad wins hands-down. A tablet is a radically different form factor, IF it is properly designed and not just a port of a desktop OS and apps to a keyboardless netbook. And it is WAY nicer to interface with for those and more tasks, and is WAY easier to share and collaborate with than the welded-together-hence-restricted-in-aspect laptop or netbook alternative.
Call it "fashion" if you want. Makes me wonder if you wear garbage bags instead of clothes -- cheaper, stain-proof, water-proof -- and drive the butt-ugliest and most inconveniently-designed car -- cheaper, works just fine, more room for customization -- you can find, and live in a shipping container in back of the Piggly Wiggly, etc. No "fashion premium" for you, no sir.
You sound pretty smug in your assessment. I bow to your superiority.
At the same time, I use about half of the gas you do -- even less if we're both stuck in a traffic jam and your car's running the engine, because, well, because that's what cars did in 1920 -- I get to drive a high-tech car with a gasoline engine and two electric motor-generators, with regenerative braking, complete silence at a stop (unless the electric A/C is running hard, in which case you might hear the A/C unit), drive-by-wire, and a whole host of fun displays that make city/commute driving fun and reduce overall maintenance costs.
You also need to learn a bit about facts. First, the 2010 Prius is definitely a mainstream car, not the acquired-taste of previous generations. Second, even back when it was an acquired taste, 43% of buyers were not primarily concerned with making a statement. Only a fool makes blanket statements about something that doesn't apply to 43% of the people they're trying to blanket.
Good points. And they also only account for gasoline costs. Hybrids have additional parts, but on the whole, this allows everything to operate optimally and with less strain: most braking is regenerative, the "transmission" is dramatically simpler, the gasoline engine runs cooler and for considerably less time, etc, etc. There are more savings than just gas.
First, you can't really average MPG's together like that. You have to convert to gallons used for some distance, average that, then convert back to MPG, or you'll be wrong.
Second, Notice the the HUGE difference in city mileage. Your improper average assumes an equal measure of city and highway driving. Further, traffic jams throw everything out the window: the Prius uses zero gas while at a stop, while the Corolla uses gas continuously (if you expect to have AC or heat, etc).
So basically, you'd have to drive 195,000 miles in a Prius to break even compared to the price of a Corolla. Until you surpass 195,000 miles the Corolla would have saved money.
You also miss other factors. For example, Prius brake pads last nearly forever because the majority of braking is done with regenerative braking (i.e. spinning the electric motor backwards, recovering energy and slowing the car), not mechanical braking. In fact, the Prius gasoline engine is not even running much of the time when you're driving, saving on engine wear-n-tear. And the Prius has a converter that works like a continuously-variable transmission with a fraction of the complexity of the Corolla's automatic transmission, yielding two more wins: 1) more reliable, and 2) the gasoline engine, when it does run, runs in its optimal rpm range. Not to mention that the gasoline/electric mix lets each piece do what it does best: electric engine for low-end torque, gasoline engine for highway speeds.
How do you figure the cost savings from these features? To be honest, I don't have a clue... it's pretty complex. But there are definite savings and greater reliability involved in the Prius than in the Corolla.
In summary, the new Corolla will always be better than the new Prius. Of course this is assuming you're deciding between the two cars comparing gas prices only, not size of vehicle, status, smugness, etc.
Um, no. The Corolla is inferior to the Prius in most every respect. The Corolla's only advantage is up-front cash expended.
On top of of that, how do you even begin to value the quietness of a Prius at a stoplight? The fun from driving a vehicle with a gasoline engine, two electric motor-generators, and with a huge battery in the back? How about running your AC with the engine off? How about the engine not starting when you decide to pull the car up a bit more into the parking space after turning it off?
You certainly lose your Geek Cred when you reject a car that you push a button to put it in Ready mode, not even starting the gasoline engine (one of three motors in the car).
I think the "healthy competition" model applies when the companies in competition are competing over market share directly. "Oh, people seem to like feature X, so let's add MORE of feature X to our product", etc. But Apple has consistently shot for doing "insanely great" stuff, which they believe will sell well because it is great. They're even willing to go so far as to do things that customers would not say they want at this time, which has worked well for them, but has also gotten them labelled "paternalistic" and worse.
I don't think that Apple needs "healthy competition" to cause it to innovate in the same way that Microsoft (as an example of a share-driven company) needs it.
Not that competition isn't an overall good thing. But a Windows 7 slate won't provide meaningful competition, and until Android 3 is out, neither will Android. Certainly, Ballmer has no clue as to how to compete in the slate space: his solution is netbooks running Windows 7, perhaps with a pen instead of a keyboard.
but Apple fanboys(girls) are rabid on a level that is just plain scary.
Scarier for me are Windows fanboys. They'll say "I'm a PC" without even thinking what they're really saying. Even the most rabid football fan would not say, "I'm a football", and I love pizza but would never say, "I'm a Pizza!". When a fanboy is so rabid that they instinctively dehumanize themselves, that's scary.
(Yes, some people say this because Microsoft advertising says it, and Microsoft says it because they could not understand that "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" were two ACTORS playing anthropomorphic computers. I guess they're mostly harmless.)
Well yeah, considering that, for most of them (judging by the iPhone users and other macfans), that consists of "it's shiny and makes me look hip."
Sometimes I think these people would pay a grand for an Etch-A-Sketch if it was white and smoothly-rounded.
Sometimes, the product I'm using is simply an outlet for my geeking, like when I fire up Linux in VirtualBox. Other times, I need a tool like R, which has few if any limitations (though it has a corresponding complexity). Most times, though, I simply need a tool that elegantly and straightforwardly does the job. In no case does "it's shiny" or "it makes me look hip" have any bearing on the matter. And I think I'm not alone in this.
Of course, a sense of style and elegance of operation is important... for you as well as me. Unless you simply wear trash bags instead of clothes, because trash bags are stainproof, waterproof, and cheap, I imagine you actually wear clothes that are comfortable and look good. And I doubt that you make all of your own clothes because you insist on pockets being a specific width and lined with a specific material.
Similarly, when I need a computer, I have choices of multiple languages, multiple OS's, and multiple IDE's on my MacBook. When I want to read a book, or get the news, or check the weather, or follow a flight's arrival status, or check my stocks, or monitor tasks, or organize my thoughts, or handle most email..., I use my iPad or iPhone or other convenient form factor. And I don't need to use a half-baked interface designed by a geek instead of a designer in order to do so.
Android seems to be losing its focus, since it's becoming a lot like Windows Mobile in its execution. The ONLY phone shipping the "Google Experience" (i.e. Android as intended, more or less) was the Nexus One, every other phone out there has some sort of skin FORCEFULLY installed on it (HTC Sense, MOTOBLUR, TouchWiz, etc). To further feed the fire, many of those phones have tons of applications that are completely unnecessary and only seem to help the carrier --- COMPLETELY like the carrier-provided smart (and dumb!) phones that came before the smartphone explosion.
Apple's customer is the consumer, and they will fight the carriers to create the experience they believe the consumer will want. They may not deliver an experience you (or I) want, but they are trying to deliver an experience for an end user.
Google's customers are the carriers. They only want to keep the smartphone market segmented and open to their ad/search control. As long as they can sell your eyes and your personal information, they really don't care what your personal experience is. (Except it can't get SO bad that you can't stand to use any Android phone/carrier at all, robbing them of their real income.)
The only thing holding carriers back from totally ruining handsets again is the iPhone and a fanatical Steve Jobs who simply will not allow carriers to mess with things. Other carriers have seen how successful the iPhone is, and so have to at least make as if they care about customers and good design now. If Android trounced the iPhone and Apple went broke next year, we'd soon be back to the worst-of-all-possible-worlds ideas of addware-ladened PCs combined with carrier-controlled designs and restrictions.
Microsoft, since day one, has been all about share: market share, mind share, destroying competitors (and allies), having a stake in every market and every market segment in case it begins to grow and become a meaningful share,... SHARE, SHARE, SHARE! (In fact, I remember seeing MS Powerpoint presentations where the entire presentation was on their mind share. I thought they invented the concept.)
Apple, since day one, has been all about making an incredible user experience.
You may disagree with what Apple holds as its exemplar "incredible user experience", but it does clearly have ideas that involve elegance, beauty, quality, simplicity, etc. And it believes that if it can make those products -- and keep competitors (and allies) from muddying the waters -- it will be profitable. Microsoft has innovated where they've focused: using the power of controlling the OS, bundling products into a suite, using cash cows to wear enemies down, etc.
I'll be called an Apple Fanboi, but I think Ballmer's just the guy left standing when the music stopped. MS has never been innovative technology-wise, and has never had a vision for a user experience. As the old play review says, "What was original was not good, and what was good was not original". And now with a resurgent Apple doing obviously innovative things, with other competitors (Google, etc) nipping at their heels, MS is revealed so clearly for what it is that even the "I'm a PC" crowd has had to find a scapegoat, and, well, Ballmer's it. Occasionally, some innovative ideas break out at MS (perhaps even Windows 7 Mobile), but the culture kills them. Not Ballmer, but the culture. Ballmer's just the leader who is trying to figure out the modern context in which this culture might once again dominate SHARE.
Emphasis mine. Bringing the conversation all the way back around: no bloatware on the iPhone. And part of the reason is the dread "walled garden". It keeps the carrier out, too, you know.
Fact is, Apple showed how Blackberry HTC, and Samsung phones all dropped from 4 or 5 bars to 1 or 0 bars, just by holding it differently.
IN MARGINAL CONDITIONS. Just like the iPhone. If you've got a good signal, the iPhone 4 rocks. If you have a marginal signal, it's still better than its predecessor... unless you have a marginal signal and you hold it in a particular -- and not necessarily unnatural -- way.
It's the way all smartphones work. It's the laws of physics.
We now have 623 Boatloads of Internet Hysteria that were manufactured for the iPhone 4 and Apple and we're not sure what to do with it now. Maybe there's a future in "I'm an Android" t-shirts? Or "Your wimpy iPhone's a Walled Garden, but my Droid's unwalled-but-landmined", or something like that.
Yes, it is a growing phenomenon that you see here on slashdot a lot: anarchy --> freedom/creativity. An artist realizes that there is positive and negative space in all their creations, and another word for the negative space is "limits" or "constraints". Of course, we're not talking Nazis here -- though slashdot will always eventually go there -- but the vehement hatred of any and all constraints that poops up here on slashdot seems like it has more to do with widespread daddy issues than anything else.
Slashdot would not be complete without someone blaming "authoritarianism" for our ills. Truth is, we're far less authoritarian than we've ever been.
Why not blame real issues, like parents being less involved in children's lives (daycare, TV babysitting, games babysitting) in terms of a personal touch, while at the same time often refusing to discipline their own children and even fighting and dropping lawsuits on schools who might try to point out that their child is having behavorial issues. (Or the opposite: dropping drugs on their children to make them behave.) too many parents today want to be their children's friend rather than their parent, perhaps?
Much easier to blame The Man rather than look for root causes, I guess. (Not that this "test" is authoritative, but I've seen the issues I've described and they do lead to less research and creativity.)
Most computer games do not require creativity. They require quick reflexes and/or the ability to do mindless actions repeatedly for little reward.
Depends on the game. Yes, leveling your fifth WOW character involves a lot of repetition. On the other hand, fighting against an opposing team in Team Forterss 2 involves a lot of learning and being clever.
The main problem, I think, is time on task and focus. You need to spend time on a task to get good at it, and if you spend that time on TV and games, you won't master other, more important tasks. And if you don't master any tasks, you won't have the freedom to be creative in them.
Also, I would posit that TV, games, the web, all reward short attention spans, and it takes deeper thinking to be creative. ("Eureaka" moments don't just happen: they are preceded by a lot of thinking.)
Last, free time allows boredom and the natural remedy to boredom is imagination and creativity. Which we often shirt-circuit today with TV and games.
Anandtech did some testing by enabling the now disabled fieldtest mode in IOS4 that allows you to see the actual signal strength in dBm and they managed to get -25dBm signal drops when gripping the phone. iPhone 3GS only suffered -15dBm drop and generally had much less signal attenuation when holding the phone optimally.
And the bottom line is that the iPhone 4 started at a higher level, so the greater drop left it still better off than the 3GS. They got reception in places the 3GS couldn't even make an attempt. This is a relative drop, not absolute: if I start with $100,000 and lose $20,000, I still have more than if you start with $50,000 and lose only $5,000.
Software patch cannot fix signal attenuation from a hand.
No, but it can eliminate the one thing that people are complaining about: bars dramatically dropping. Very few people are complaining about actually having more dropped calls than on their previous phone. In fact, several researchers have shown that the iPhone 4 is better than the 3GS even AFTER accounting for the larger drop. (That is, it starts out so much better that even with the drop, it is still better.)
The attenuation from the hand doesn't drop calls where other phones would maintain them. It is a display issue.
...if you're seeing lower signal or slower speeds on your iPhone 4 than your previous iPhone...
You're not. Every comment I've seen where people compare to their older phone finds that the iPhone 4 performs better in terms of data speeds and voice connections.
It may lose more strength when held "the wrong way", but it started out so much better that it still ends up ahead. The people who are screaming are basing it off of a youtube video or off of watching bars while they perform the necessary gymnastics. For them, there is no fix. They should return the phone immediately, but they'd rather push a class action lawsuit in the vain hope that they'll get some free stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash on Android is what now? It works fine for me (well, as fine as Flash can, which is to say slow and buggy but no different to on my desktop).
That about sums up one school of thought in the PC industry. I think I'll have to close my web browser for a while and take a walk outside.
After all as a tool the iPad is rather expensive since there are few tasks a tablet is truly well suited for. Most tasks, there are other devices that do a better job, other devices people usually own.
Typical checkbox thinking. For reading through the 1,000+ technical papers I have in Papers, plus the dozen books I have in PDF, browsing the web, handling most email, getting most of my news, looking at photos, anything to do with maps and directions, etc, etc, etc, the iPad wins hands-down. A tablet is a radically different form factor, IF it is properly designed and not just a port of a desktop OS and apps to a keyboardless netbook. And it is WAY nicer to interface with for those and more tasks, and is WAY easier to share and collaborate with than the welded-together-hence-restricted-in-aspect laptop or netbook alternative.
Call it "fashion" if you want. Makes me wonder if you wear garbage bags instead of clothes -- cheaper, stain-proof, water-proof -- and drive the butt-ugliest and most inconveniently-designed car -- cheaper, works just fine, more room for customization -- you can find, and live in a shipping container in back of the Piggly Wiggly, etc. No "fashion premium" for you, no sir.
You sound pretty smug in your assessment. I bow to your superiority.
At the same time, I use about half of the gas you do -- even less if we're both stuck in a traffic jam and your car's running the engine, because, well, because that's what cars did in 1920 -- I get to drive a high-tech car with a gasoline engine and two electric motor-generators, with regenerative braking, complete silence at a stop (unless the electric A/C is running hard, in which case you might hear the A/C unit), drive-by-wire, and a whole host of fun displays that make city/commute driving fun and reduce overall maintenance costs.
You also need to learn a bit about facts. First, the 2010 Prius is definitely a mainstream car, not the acquired-taste of previous generations. Second, even back when it was an acquired taste, 43% of buyers were not primarily concerned with making a statement. Only a fool makes blanket statements about something that doesn't apply to 43% of the people they're trying to blanket.
Good points. And they also only account for gasoline costs. Hybrids have additional parts, but on the whole, this allows everything to operate optimally and with less strain: most braking is regenerative, the "transmission" is dramatically simpler, the gasoline engine runs cooler and for considerably less time, etc, etc. There are more savings than just gas.
Same could be said about the Prius but look how well they're selling.
2010 Prius MSRP = $22800 to $28070
2010 Corolla MSRP = $15,450 to $20,150
Price difference = $7350 to $7920 = $7635 average
Prius mpg = 51/48 = 49.5 mpg average
Corolla mpg = 26/34 = 30 mpg average
First, you can't really average MPG's together like that. You have to convert to gallons used for some distance, average that, then convert back to MPG, or you'll be wrong.
Second, Notice the the HUGE difference in city mileage. Your improper average assumes an equal measure of city and highway driving. Further, traffic jams throw everything out the window: the Prius uses zero gas while at a stop, while the Corolla uses gas continuously (if you expect to have AC or heat, etc).
So basically, you'd have to drive 195,000 miles in a Prius to break even compared to the price of a Corolla. Until you surpass 195,000 miles the Corolla would have saved money.
You also miss other factors. For example, Prius brake pads last nearly forever because the majority of braking is done with regenerative braking (i.e. spinning the electric motor backwards, recovering energy and slowing the car), not mechanical braking. In fact, the Prius gasoline engine is not even running much of the time when you're driving, saving on engine wear-n-tear. And the Prius has a converter that works like a continuously-variable transmission with a fraction of the complexity of the Corolla's automatic transmission, yielding two more wins: 1) more reliable, and 2) the gasoline engine, when it does run, runs in its optimal rpm range. Not to mention that the gasoline/electric mix lets each piece do what it does best: electric engine for low-end torque, gasoline engine for highway speeds.
How do you figure the cost savings from these features? To be honest, I don't have a clue... it's pretty complex. But there are definite savings and greater reliability involved in the Prius than in the Corolla.
In summary, the new Corolla will always be better than the new Prius. Of course this is assuming you're deciding between the two cars comparing gas prices only, not size of vehicle, status, smugness, etc.
Um, no. The Corolla is inferior to the Prius in most every respect. The Corolla's only advantage is up-front cash expended.
On top of of that, how do you even begin to value the quietness of a Prius at a stoplight? The fun from driving a vehicle with a gasoline engine, two electric motor-generators, and with a huge battery in the back? How about running your AC with the engine off? How about the engine not starting when you decide to pull the car up a bit more into the parking space after turning it off?
You certainly lose your Geek Cred when you reject a car that you push a button to put it in Ready mode, not even starting the gasoline engine (one of three motors in the car).
I think the "healthy competition" model applies when the companies in competition are competing over market share directly. "Oh, people seem to like feature X, so let's add MORE of feature X to our product", etc. But Apple has consistently shot for doing "insanely great" stuff, which they believe will sell well because it is great. They're even willing to go so far as to do things that customers would not say they want at this time, which has worked well for them, but has also gotten them labelled "paternalistic" and worse.
I don't think that Apple needs "healthy competition" to cause it to innovate in the same way that Microsoft (as an example of a share-driven company) needs it.
Not that competition isn't an overall good thing. But a Windows 7 slate won't provide meaningful competition, and until Android 3 is out, neither will Android. Certainly, Ballmer has no clue as to how to compete in the slate space: his solution is netbooks running Windows 7, perhaps with a pen instead of a keyboard.
but Apple fanboys(girls) are rabid on a level that is just plain scary.
Scarier for me are Windows fanboys. They'll say "I'm a PC" without even thinking what they're really saying. Even the most rabid football fan would not say, "I'm a football", and I love pizza but would never say, "I'm a Pizza!". When a fanboy is so rabid that they instinctively dehumanize themselves, that's scary.
(Yes, some people say this because Microsoft advertising says it, and Microsoft says it because they could not understand that "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" were two ACTORS playing anthropomorphic computers. I guess they're mostly harmless.)
Well yeah, considering that, for most of them (judging by the iPhone users and other macfans), that consists of "it's shiny and makes me look hip."
Sometimes I think these people would pay a grand for an Etch-A-Sketch if it was white and smoothly-rounded.
Sometimes, the product I'm using is simply an outlet for my geeking, like when I fire up Linux in VirtualBox. Other times, I need a tool like R, which has few if any limitations (though it has a corresponding complexity). Most times, though, I simply need a tool that elegantly and straightforwardly does the job. In no case does "it's shiny" or "it makes me look hip" have any bearing on the matter. And I think I'm not alone in this.
Of course, a sense of style and elegance of operation is important... for you as well as me. Unless you simply wear trash bags instead of clothes, because trash bags are stainproof, waterproof, and cheap, I imagine you actually wear clothes that are comfortable and look good. And I doubt that you make all of your own clothes because you insist on pockets being a specific width and lined with a specific material.
Similarly, when I need a computer, I have choices of multiple languages, multiple OS's, and multiple IDE's on my MacBook. When I want to read a book, or get the news, or check the weather, or follow a flight's arrival status, or check my stocks, or monitor tasks, or organize my thoughts, or handle most email..., I use my iPad or iPhone or other convenient form factor. And I don't need to use a half-baked interface designed by a geek instead of a designer in order to do so.
Android seems to be losing its focus, since it's becoming a lot like Windows Mobile in its execution. The ONLY phone shipping the "Google Experience" (i.e. Android as intended, more or less) was the Nexus One, every other phone out there has some sort of skin FORCEFULLY installed on it (HTC Sense, MOTOBLUR, TouchWiz, etc). To further feed the fire, many of those phones have tons of applications that are completely unnecessary and only seem to help the carrier --- COMPLETELY like the carrier-provided smart (and dumb!) phones that came before the smartphone explosion.
Apple's customer is the consumer, and they will fight the carriers to create the experience they believe the consumer will want. They may not deliver an experience you (or I) want, but they are trying to deliver an experience for an end user.
Google's customers are the carriers. They only want to keep the smartphone market segmented and open to their ad/search control. As long as they can sell your eyes and your personal information, they really don't care what your personal experience is. (Except it can't get SO bad that you can't stand to use any Android phone/carrier at all, robbing them of their real income.)
The only thing holding carriers back from totally ruining handsets again is the iPhone and a fanatical Steve Jobs who simply will not allow carriers to mess with things. Other carriers have seen how successful the iPhone is, and so have to at least make as if they care about customers and good design now. If Android trounced the iPhone and Apple went broke next year, we'd soon be back to the worst-of-all-possible-worlds ideas of addware-ladened PCs combined with carrier-controlled designs and restrictions.
Microsoft, since day one, has been all about share: market share, mind share, destroying competitors (and allies), having a stake in every market and every market segment in case it begins to grow and become a meaningful share, ... SHARE, SHARE, SHARE! (In fact, I remember seeing MS Powerpoint presentations where the entire presentation was on their mind share. I thought they invented the concept.)
Apple, since day one, has been all about making an incredible user experience.
You may disagree with what Apple holds as its exemplar "incredible user experience", but it does clearly have ideas that involve elegance, beauty, quality, simplicity, etc. And it believes that if it can make those products -- and keep competitors (and allies) from muddying the waters -- it will be profitable. Microsoft has innovated where they've focused: using the power of controlling the OS, bundling products into a suite, using cash cows to wear enemies down, etc.
I'll be called an Apple Fanboi, but I think Ballmer's just the guy left standing when the music stopped. MS has never been innovative technology-wise, and has never had a vision for a user experience. As the old play review says, "What was original was not good, and what was good was not original". And now with a resurgent Apple doing obviously innovative things, with other competitors (Google, etc) nipping at their heels, MS is revealed so clearly for what it is that even the "I'm a PC" crowd has had to find a scapegoat, and, well, Ballmer's it. Occasionally, some innovative ideas break out at MS (perhaps even Windows 7 Mobile), but the culture kills them. Not Ballmer, but the culture. Ballmer's just the leader who is trying to figure out the modern context in which this culture might once again dominate SHARE.
This applies to most phones sold by carriers.
Emphasis mine. Bringing the conversation all the way back around: no bloatware on the iPhone. And part of the reason is the dread "walled garden". It keeps the carrier out, too, you know.
"Poorly designed" or "subject to the laws of physics"?
Fact is, Apple showed how Blackberry HTC, and Samsung phones all dropped from 4 or 5 bars to 1 or 0 bars, just by holding it differently.
IN MARGINAL CONDITIONS. Just like the iPhone. If you've got a good signal, the iPhone 4 rocks. If you have a marginal signal, it's still better than its predecessor... unless you have a marginal signal and you hold it in a particular -- and not necessarily unnatural -- way.
It's the way all smartphones work. It's the laws of physics.
We now have 623 Boatloads of Internet Hysteria that were manufactured for the iPhone 4 and Apple and we're not sure what to do with it now. Maybe there's a future in "I'm an Android" t-shirts? Or "Your wimpy iPhone's a Walled Garden, but my Droid's unwalled-but-landmined", or something like that.
Yes, it is a growing phenomenon that you see here on slashdot a lot: anarchy --> freedom/creativity. An artist realizes that there is positive and negative space in all their creations, and another word for the negative space is "limits" or "constraints". Of course, we're not talking Nazis here -- though slashdot will always eventually go there -- but the vehement hatred of any and all constraints that poops up here on slashdot seems like it has more to do with widespread daddy issues than anything else.
The "Android is free and therefore better than the iPhone" discussion is that way ---->
Slashdot would not be complete without someone blaming "authoritarianism" for our ills. Truth is, we're far less authoritarian than we've ever been.
Why not blame real issues, like parents being less involved in children's lives (daycare, TV babysitting, games babysitting) in terms of a personal touch, while at the same time often refusing to discipline their own children and even fighting and dropping lawsuits on schools who might try to point out that their child is having behavorial issues. (Or the opposite: dropping drugs on their children to make them behave.) too many parents today want to be their children's friend rather than their parent, perhaps?
Much easier to blame The Man rather than look for root causes, I guess. (Not that this "test" is authoritative, but I've seen the issues I've described and they do lead to less research and creativity.)
Most computer games do not require creativity. They require quick reflexes and/or the ability to do mindless actions repeatedly for little reward.
Depends on the game. Yes, leveling your fifth WOW character involves a lot of repetition. On the other hand, fighting against an opposing team in Team Forterss 2 involves a lot of learning and being clever.
The main problem, I think, is time on task and focus. You need to spend time on a task to get good at it, and if you spend that time on TV and games, you won't master other, more important tasks. And if you don't master any tasks, you won't have the freedom to be creative in them.
Also, I would posit that TV, games, the web, all reward short attention spans, and it takes deeper thinking to be creative. ("Eureaka" moments don't just happen: they are preceded by a lot of thinking.)
Last, free time allows boredom and the natural remedy to boredom is imagination and creativity. Which we often shirt-circuit today with TV and games.
anyone else get the impression that "Cryptochrome" should be the name of some time based encryption system when they first read it?
No, I thought this was the stuff that made you a Jedi.
Anandtech did some testing by enabling the now disabled fieldtest mode in IOS4 that allows you to see the actual signal strength in dBm and they managed to get -25dBm signal drops when gripping the phone. iPhone 3GS only suffered -15dBm drop and generally had much less signal attenuation when holding the phone optimally.
And the bottom line is that the iPhone 4 started at a higher level, so the greater drop left it still better off than the 3GS. They got reception in places the 3GS couldn't even make an attempt. This is a relative drop, not absolute: if I start with $100,000 and lose $20,000, I still have more than if you start with $50,000 and lose only $5,000.
Software patch cannot fix signal attenuation from a hand.
No, but it can eliminate the one thing that people are complaining about: bars dramatically dropping. Very few people are complaining about actually having more dropped calls than on their previous phone. In fact, several researchers have shown that the iPhone 4 is better than the 3GS even AFTER accounting for the larger drop. (That is, it starts out so much better that even with the drop, it is still better.)
The attenuation from the hand doesn't drop calls where other phones would maintain them. It is a display issue.
...if you're seeing lower signal or slower speeds on your iPhone 4 than your previous iPhone...
You're not. Every comment I've seen where people compare to their older phone finds that the iPhone 4 performs better in terms of data speeds and voice connections.
It may lose more strength when held "the wrong way", but it started out so much better that it still ends up ahead. The people who are screaming are basing it off of a youtube video or off of watching bars while they perform the necessary gymnastics. For them, there is no fix. They should return the phone immediately, but they'd rather push a class action lawsuit in the vain hope that they'll get some free stuff.
No, most reports out there talk about looking at bars and seeing them drop dramatically. NOT about actually having dropped calls.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2
Did you read
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2
Evidently so, but you missed the part about it getting BETTER reception and reception in areas that previous iPhones could not.
Read:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2
And learn something.