It's done this way (wiping the OS data) as part of the anti-theft measure, to force you (as the thief) to connect it to an active network connection to get it working again, at which point it can be identified by serial number etc and can be prevented from being re-activated if it has genuinely been stolen.
I suppose it should be more fine grained - ie, in the case of an Exchange server wipe, kill the data not the whole phone, but if it is no longer in your control (the company, either through loss or because the user no longer works for you), assume that the phone is stolen from a data perspective.
You can restore back with no problems. The data that is backed up is device independent - you don't even have to restore it to the same iPhone, so it's not going to care if a phone has been remote wiped, or connect the dots and assume that the backups need to be deleted too. The feature is entirely designed to neutralise the phone's data if it is out of your control. If you get it back, it's assumed to be safe again - although I guess if you re-sync to the Exchange server once you restore from the backup, since it will put those settings back in, there's nothing stopping that server from issuing a second remote wipe command. I would assume at this point you would just break that link in your phone settings before doing anything network related.
The accelerometers are pretty good (for such small units), but actually controlling them by hand is tricky.
There's a game called MB Lander that uses them in exactly the way you'd expect - you tilt and turn the iPhone to power the various thrusters and the main engine on a moon landing craft, with realistic physics affecting the craft. It is pretty difficult to control accurately, since tiny corrections can have a large impact. I can't imagine how hard it would be to control an FPS like this, unless you softened the controls enormously.
Lots of good talking points there, but it just doesn't add up. Taxing income is an effective and fair method of revenue collection - if it is too high, then correct the amounts (The UK has a 55% tax bracket, for example, which could be argued to be excessive, ore because it encourages tax dodging).
There's no need to implement something that is essentially regressive at its core - where do you draw the poverty line? Then what about those in the poverty gap, who are too well off to be below the cutoff, but not well off enough to be hit hard (and face a much higher portion of the tax burden, proportionally) compared to the rich?
If you push the line up high enough that only the seriously wealthy pay anything then you defeat the point.
The current "jacking up the tax rate" that is in the works is a reversal of a tax cut that affects 0.3% of the US population, or some other insignificantly small amount. Right now, 90% of the taxable income of the US is earned by the top 10%-ish of the population, and it's those tax revenues that need to increase. Doing so will increase revenue significantly, without hurting the 90% of the rest of the population at all.
Fair in the sense that "why is it fair that, I as a millionaire, pay proportionally equal share of my income [sometimes much less, even] than poorer people! We must only tax things that people buy, that way it is fair for all!"
Of course, it's not like purchases like food, heating, power, water make up a proportionally larger amount of a poor family's income compared to a rich person.
All the "fair tax" does is accelerate the wealth gap even further, increase the tax load so the bulk of it (proportional to income) is shouldered by the poor and reduce the total amount of tax collected by the government, forcing cuts to programs that help those same poor people, like welfare, medicare/medicaid and things like education. Of course, the military budget would be untouched.
They'll do nothing - the system exists right now on the iPhone for HTML5/css/javascript based apps. It was the original method designed for the iPhone, and it is still there, documented and ok'ed by Apple as an app delivery route.
Ah yes, the "reverse *this* is the year of Linux on the desktop" argument. If the data doesn't fit, just make a wild, unsupported accusation and call it fact, then rely on it as the crux of your argument.
If the Scandinavian countries are on borrowed time, they are certainly riding their luck - they show no signs of turning into Greece and have been stable and prosperous for a long time without having to cook any books to make it appear so. I think you are grasping at straws to attempt to discredit any data points that don't fit with your narrow, anti-welfare-program, anti-big government tea party talking points.
The ease of use and convenience is not only at the geek end - if you are keeping in touch with family members who think the internet is the big E, something they can use easily is a bonus.
When you grab a disk image or a disk in OS X, the trash can icon changes to an eject icon. I assume you're talking about OS X here, since you have joined this point with the restore button function. On OS 9 I can't remember exactly what the trashcan did when you grabbed a disk, since I tended to use the key combo for "put away" rather than using the mouse. I'd fire up the old 9600, but I can't remember where it is right now.
Plus means "bigger" so the window getting bigger seems like an accurate description of what the UI element does (maximise has never really been an Apple paradigm, so expecting it to do what it does on Windows and calling it bad UI is just a non-sequitur). A more salient criticism of that particular element, called the "restore" button is that it flips between two window states when you click it - so it can go from big to small, or small to big, all the while with a plus symbol that appears on hover. That is inconsistent/mislabelled UI and should be changed, but that's not what you were complaining about - your issue was that it got bigger when you clicked on it, and it is marked with a plus sign. I really can't see the issue here.
They are perfectly capable of putting a battery door on an mp3 player, and have given a sound engineering explanation for why they chose not to (using the extra space you save by not having a removal mechanism, battery bay, contacts, hinges and latches to increase the size of the battery itself, and to simplify the internal layout when you don;t have to consider where a battery would be inserted or removed). To simplify that down to "poor engineering because they can't figure it out" is a gross oversimplification and wilful ignorance of the design decisions behind the iPod and iPhone. You may not agree with it, but your conclusions about why they went that way just don't mesh with reality.
iTunes does need some rework. The fact that it is still a Carbon app in this day and age shows that is is hauling some cruft around with it. Not that it's worse than Cocoa, just that it has been technically deprecated by Apple themselves). I don't agree with the realignment of the window buttons - breaking Apple's own guidelines, and certain other UI elements in it.
It came from linear extrapolation of a set of figures taken at a key time:
1) the iPhone 4 was launching in a few months, so sales of the 3G and 3GS slumped 2) Verizon was doing a 2 for 1 deal on android handsets during that same period, so every purchase was counting double 3) the Android numbers then went above the iPhone numbers in that quarter. 4) people drew a straight line graph upwards based on those figures 5) profit?
I am not trying to downplay the rise in Android handsets or Android as a whole - I think it is exactly what the smartphone market needs, but the oft-touted casual remark on slashdot "well, with Android now outselling iPhone..." as the opening to a post is really all based on those stats.
Soon I figure it really will - especially since the hardware selection is much wider for Android, but downplaying the size of the iOS market is just silly (I have seen people call it a niche, which just baffles me. Hate it all you want, but underestimate your "enemy" at your peril - there is no conceivable way the iOS market could be described that way right now, or for the forseeable future [minimum 2 years, given the length of most phone contracts, plus a bit].)
The complaints about the RIAA et al, are because the figures are reversed - for every dollar spent, the lion's share goes to them for "promotion, distribution, A&R and recouping investment" while a tiny slice goes to the artist. Apple's cut is the small share, and covers hosting, distribution and a small fee. Apple aren't making hay on the app store in software sales - the cost covers the expenditure, with a little left over. The RIAA, on the other hand, takes the bulk and says "be happy for it".
Apple's profit on software sales from the app store (and similarly, profit on music/movie sales) is clearly stated in their financial statements, and you cannot lie on those (well, you can, but they're not Enron or WorldCon), so we can be reasonably sure they're not lying when they say "the 30% cut covers running the store" - the profit margin is pretty low. The real reason they do it is to drive sales of iPods and iPhones - which makes up an *enormous* amount of their overall profit (dwarfing even sales of laptops and desktops). The pittance from the app store software sales themselves are just a drop in the bucket.
Could they offer hosting and distribution for free? Sure, and it wouldn't hurt them in the grand scheme of things all that much, but it's still not a negligible figure - the store consumes a huge amount of bandwidth, and it's certainly not free to keep all those servers running all the time. I imagine they have weighed the cost of charging a nominal amount for taking the hassle out of distributing a developer's app (no server hassle, no hosting bills, no need for billing, no need for any of that - you just get a check in the mail, minus 30%) with offering the same deal for free and decided that enough people will see the 30% as reasonable.
I know which I would prefer (hosting and distributing my app myself, and keeping whatever profit was left after expenses, versus having apple do it and lose 30% of the total to them, but not have any of the expense or hassle of doing it in house), but then, convenience is high on my list of desires.
The only missing part is the ability to choose to do it all in house if you want, but given that the cut is not *too* severe, and that if you were going to do it yourself you would still have to pay for hosting, bandwidth, staff, billing expenses, server costs etc, I'm not sure too many people worry about it. Apple has economies of scale on its side to keep those costs low by averaging them out. I guess if you were big enough and had enough apps you could get your costs under 30c per dollar of revenue for all those things, but for indie developers who really just want to focus on writing apps, having that headache taken away from them is more than worth it.
A vast, vast, vast (repeat lots) number of people commute less than 100 miles per day, and from what I remember the last time I was in the states, most places have electricity. This thing requires electricity to recharge.
Drive it to work, plug it in there (assume a nice boss, or a metered hookup that you can pay for, perhaps you don;t even need to charge at work). Drive home, plug it in at home.
Repeat on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
Weekend, maybe take the gasoline car if you are going more than 100 miles. Otherwise, take the electric one.
Oh sorry, I was under the impression that people who aren't you might actually fit the target demographic. If it doesn't personally make sense to you, slashdot user netsavior, then it should be immediately cancelled.
I guess we now know why Firefly got canned. You mustn't have liked it.
VW's TDIs are pretty damn close, performance wise, to equivalent petrol engines of the same displacement, and they are more than a match for the lazy, inefficient petrol engines in most US cars that are 30% to 50% bigger, especially when they're mated to a horrible, horrible slushmatic.
The TDI in the car my father drives (a minivan) is 50mpg, 150bhp, 2.0 litre displacement, accelerates with a decent punch (0-60 in 8.9s, remember it is a minivan, not a sports car) and is as refined as the petrol model. It doesn't "scream at 4000rpm" at 70mph on the highway - it cruises quite nicely at 85 mph at about 2500-3000. The beauty of gear ratios, and a decent box (it has a 6 speed manual - we live in a society where we have the freedom to choose what gear we're in. Just kidding, but seriously, auto boxes are annoying.
So, to me, an "average person in Europe" a car that will do 0-60 in 8 to 9 seconds is not a sports car, it's a family diesel minivan. I know, because my father owns one. So do I, although it is not a 150hp version.
My own minivan, a Xsara Picasso, has the same displacement (2.0 litres) but the HDi it has is tuned a little differently - it has a mere 90 bhp, but it cruises like a liner. I didn't get it for performance. It does, however, accelerate nicely when I need it, since it has tons and tons of torque. The engine in my father's VW minivan has almost twice the power (for the same displacement) and barely suffers in the fuel economy compared to mine (I get 54 mpg with my normal driving style). Their engine is small and light too - a benefit of advanced materials tech these days. No longer do you have to build a massive lump to contain the high pressures. No longer do you have to choose a high boosting, but laggy turbo or a more responsive but lower power one. We have high pressure common rail injection now, lighter materials, better engine management, starting even in the very cold (the achilles heel of old diesels).
It's come a long way over here, in the part of the world where the government doesn't subsidise the gasoline prices. In the same time frame, US petrol engines have barely changed - hopeless lumps, masking their awfulness by throwing extra, unnecessary displacement as a cure for poor overall performance, and hopeless automatic boxes.
Build an engine well, and design it properly and you don;t need to make a 3.0 litre unit for a 4 door family sedan. Mitsubishi got 400 bhp from a 2 litre petrol engine (WRX World Rally Cars are limited to 2 litre displacement) which is clearly extreme and has compromises [the turbo lag really is ridiculous and the clutch is a nightmare], but you can get perfectly decent performance in the middle with a little... evolution.
No, I'm sure he has. I have used both, and the Android phone didn't have the same polish as the iPhone, but it *did* have some features I wish that the iPhone had (the finger-trace typing gesture thing being the biggest). That phone was almost comparable to the iPhone for me (it was nice, but the shape was a bit off). My other friend also has an Android-based phone, but it's a whole different kettle of fish. It's nowhere near as nice as the other one I tried, and nowhere near an iPhone. In my experience, it was a detriment to the Android "brand" as a whole. If I hadn't used the other phone first (I believe an HTC Desire of some description) I might have been inclined to think all 'droids were like the second example, but I know from merely reading/. and the experiences of other users that it couldn;t be a stellar example of the OS.
I don;t want to say "fragmentation is a problem" since that seems to be a sore point, but it really is - the iPhone avoids it entirely (or keeps it very narrow with a small number of iOS devices), and pays for that benefit with the downside that your selection is limited. There are a lot more Android phone types to choose from, and some of them (in my personal experience) are great, some are really not.
What I mean is that to spell "Hello" you trace the word "Hello" on the screen by touching each letter in order without lifting your finger off the screen. You can do this quite quickly.
I'm not sure if you've ever looked at a QWERTY key layout, but these letters have other letters of the alphabet between them (ie, ['that is', it's Latin] you cannot *just* touch the letters H, E, L and O when you want the word "Hello"). The phone works out what word you were writing in a predictive manner by the order of the letters you have touched, throwing out any that don't fit words in its dictionary.
It works better if you can spell, since you have to hit the letters *in the right order* so the phone knows what fucking word you are going for in the first place, and it is at least as fast as typing by hand on a non-feedback screen and having the phone correct for your mostly-accurate hits (at speed, you are going to miss a couple).
Given that I never use txt spk 4 wrtng sms mssgs and actually write out sentences and words in full, it allowed me to write messages quickly and accurately at least as quickly as manual typing on my iPhone - and this was only with a brief exposure to my friend's Android phone. I expect I could get much faster with more practice.
Where do they "brag" about "writing google maps" on the iPhone? From all the talk about how it was "obvious" that Youtube wouldn't work on an iPhone (because it doesn't have Flash), it seems that the general situation that many people are ignorant of just what apps the phone comes with, let alone who wrote them. Apple's entire stance on apps has been the promotion of third party developers rather than itself.
What is really missing from the iPhone that Android has (at least some Android handsets I have seen) is the single swipe trail typing method, where you trace over the letters you want in a single hand gesture and the phone picks the most likely spelling of the word, discarding junk letters you happened to touch while joining up your actual chosen word. I thought that was really cool.
Nice revisionist history there on why DRM was removed, but I expect nothing less on the internet's premier Apple-bashing site.
Either way, the reason they work on Linux (in the absence of DRM) is that they are encoded in AAC format, rather than some proprietary nonsense like realplayer or WMA.
Apple was *always* trying for DRM-free, but the music industry just would not go for it, and they were the content providers. At the earliest opportunity, Apple renegotiated that deal to remove the weakest possible DRM that they could get away with from the files they were selling.
You won;t believe it, since it was an interview with Steve Jobs in Rolling Stone, so you'll just assume he was lying or something. Either way Apple couldn;t have made it more plain how they felt about DRM - providing a built-in mechanism to strip it from the tracks, and strongly encouraging you to use it every time you downloaded, and the Rip, Mix, Burn adverts and campaign that they ran as a promotion for the iMac, celebrating fair use rights.
Contrast this to other DRM-encumbered music formats of the era - WMA and realplayer.
No, which is exactly why I mentioned that in the very next part of my post (and why I don't have any movies bought or rented from them - I most likely will if/when the DRM is dropped).
It definitely worked in 8.6, since I still remember being driven to distraction on our ancient (but at the time, top of the line!) Powermac 9600 running 8.6 with Media 100. I was trying to figure out why everything was a context+click for about 10 minutes until I noticed that my mug of tea had turned slightly and the handle was holding down the control key.
Slashdot Mirror
It's done this way (wiping the OS data) as part of the anti-theft measure, to force you (as the thief) to connect it to an active network connection to get it working again, at which point it can be identified by serial number etc and can be prevented from being re-activated if it has genuinely been stolen.
I suppose it should be more fine grained - ie, in the case of an Exchange server wipe, kill the data not the whole phone, but if it is no longer in your control (the company, either through loss or because the user no longer works for you), assume that the phone is stolen from a data perspective.
You can restore back with no problems. The data that is backed up is device independent - you don't even have to restore it to the same iPhone, so it's not going to care if a phone has been remote wiped, or connect the dots and assume that the backups need to be deleted too. The feature is entirely designed to neutralise the phone's data if it is out of your control. If you get it back, it's assumed to be safe again - although I guess if you re-sync to the Exchange server once you restore from the backup, since it will put those settings back in, there's nothing stopping that server from issuing a second remote wipe command. I would assume at this point you would just break that link in your phone settings before doing anything network related.
The accelerometers are pretty good (for such small units), but actually controlling them by hand is tricky.
There's a game called MB Lander that uses them in exactly the way you'd expect - you tilt and turn the iPhone to power the various thrusters and the main engine on a moon landing craft, with realistic physics affecting the craft. It is pretty difficult to control accurately, since tiny corrections can have a large impact. I can't imagine how hard it would be to control an FPS like this, unless you softened the controls enormously.
Lots of good talking points there, but it just doesn't add up. Taxing income is an effective and fair method of revenue collection - if it is too high, then correct the amounts (The UK has a 55% tax bracket, for example, which could be argued to be excessive, ore because it encourages tax dodging).
There's no need to implement something that is essentially regressive at its core - where do you draw the poverty line? Then what about those in the poverty gap, who are too well off to be below the cutoff, but not well off enough to be hit hard (and face a much higher portion of the tax burden, proportionally) compared to the rich?
If you push the line up high enough that only the seriously wealthy pay anything then you defeat the point.
The current "jacking up the tax rate" that is in the works is a reversal of a tax cut that affects 0.3% of the US population, or some other insignificantly small amount. Right now, 90% of the taxable income of the US is earned by the top 10%-ish of the population, and it's those tax revenues that need to increase. Doing so will increase revenue significantly, without hurting the 90% of the rest of the population at all.
This from someone promoting a joke in their sig.
The "Fair" Tax.
Fair in the sense that "why is it fair that, I as a millionaire, pay proportionally equal share of my income [sometimes much less, even] than poorer people! We must only tax things that people buy, that way it is fair for all!"
Of course, it's not like purchases like food, heating, power, water make up a proportionally larger amount of a poor family's income compared to a rich person.
All the "fair tax" does is accelerate the wealth gap even further, increase the tax load so the bulk of it (proportional to income) is shouldered by the poor and reduce the total amount of tax collected by the government, forcing cuts to programs that help those same poor people, like welfare, medicare/medicaid and things like education. Of course, the military budget would be untouched.
Probably USB related. Just a guess though, I have no idea - I thought it was a little odd too.
They'll do nothing - the system exists right now on the iPhone for HTML5/css/javascript based apps. It was the original method designed for the iPhone, and it is still there, documented and ok'ed by Apple as an app delivery route.
Ah yes, the "reverse *this* is the year of Linux on the desktop" argument. If the data doesn't fit, just make a wild, unsupported accusation and call it fact, then rely on it as the crux of your argument.
If the Scandinavian countries are on borrowed time, they are certainly riding their luck - they show no signs of turning into Greece and have been stable and prosperous for a long time without having to cook any books to make it appear so. I think you are grasping at straws to attempt to discredit any data points that don't fit with your narrow, anti-welfare-program, anti-big government tea party talking points.
The ease of use and convenience is not only at the geek end - if you are keeping in touch with family members who think the internet is the big E, something they can use easily is a bonus.
When you grab a disk image or a disk in OS X, the trash can icon changes to an eject icon. I assume you're talking about OS X here, since you have joined this point with the restore button function. On OS 9 I can't remember exactly what the trashcan did when you grabbed a disk, since I tended to use the key combo for "put away" rather than using the mouse. I'd fire up the old 9600, but I can't remember where it is right now.
Plus means "bigger" so the window getting bigger seems like an accurate description of what the UI element does (maximise has never really been an Apple paradigm, so expecting it to do what it does on Windows and calling it bad UI is just a non-sequitur). A more salient criticism of that particular element, called the "restore" button is that it flips between two window states when you click it - so it can go from big to small, or small to big, all the while with a plus symbol that appears on hover. That is inconsistent/mislabelled UI and should be changed, but that's not what you were complaining about - your issue was that it got bigger when you clicked on it, and it is marked with a plus sign. I really can't see the issue here.
They are perfectly capable of putting a battery door on an mp3 player, and have given a sound engineering explanation for why they chose not to (using the extra space you save by not having a removal mechanism, battery bay, contacts, hinges and latches to increase the size of the battery itself, and to simplify the internal layout when you don;t have to consider where a battery would be inserted or removed). To simplify that down to "poor engineering because they can't figure it out" is a gross oversimplification and wilful ignorance of the design decisions behind the iPod and iPhone. You may not agree with it, but your conclusions about why they went that way just don't mesh with reality.
iTunes does need some rework. The fact that it is still a Carbon app in this day and age shows that is is hauling some cruft around with it. Not that it's worse than Cocoa, just that it has been technically deprecated by Apple themselves). I don't agree with the realignment of the window buttons - breaking Apple's own guidelines, and certain other UI elements in it.
It came from linear extrapolation of a set of figures taken at a key time:
1) the iPhone 4 was launching in a few months, so sales of the 3G and 3GS slumped
2) Verizon was doing a 2 for 1 deal on android handsets during that same period, so every purchase was counting double
3) the Android numbers then went above the iPhone numbers in that quarter.
4) people drew a straight line graph upwards based on those figures
5) profit?
I am not trying to downplay the rise in Android handsets or Android as a whole - I think it is exactly what the smartphone market needs, but the oft-touted casual remark on slashdot "well, with Android now outselling iPhone..." as the opening to a post is really all based on those stats.
Soon I figure it really will - especially since the hardware selection is much wider for Android, but downplaying the size of the iOS market is just silly (I have seen people call it a niche, which just baffles me. Hate it all you want, but underestimate your "enemy" at your peril - there is no conceivable way the iOS market could be described that way right now, or for the forseeable future [minimum 2 years, given the length of most phone contracts, plus a bit].)
The complaints about the RIAA et al, are because the figures are reversed - for every dollar spent, the lion's share goes to them for "promotion, distribution, A&R and recouping investment" while a tiny slice goes to the artist. Apple's cut is the small share, and covers hosting, distribution and a small fee. Apple aren't making hay on the app store in software sales - the cost covers the expenditure, with a little left over. The RIAA, on the other hand, takes the bulk and says "be happy for it".
Apple's profit on software sales from the app store (and similarly, profit on music/movie sales) is clearly stated in their financial statements, and you cannot lie on those (well, you can, but they're not Enron or WorldCon), so we can be reasonably sure they're not lying when they say "the 30% cut covers running the store" - the profit margin is pretty low. The real reason they do it is to drive sales of iPods and iPhones - which makes up an *enormous* amount of their overall profit (dwarfing even sales of laptops and desktops). The pittance from the app store software sales themselves are just a drop in the bucket.
Could they offer hosting and distribution for free? Sure, and it wouldn't hurt them in the grand scheme of things all that much, but it's still not a negligible figure - the store consumes a huge amount of bandwidth, and it's certainly not free to keep all those servers running all the time. I imagine they have weighed the cost of charging a nominal amount for taking the hassle out of distributing a developer's app (no server hassle, no hosting bills, no need for billing, no need for any of that - you just get a check in the mail, minus 30%) with offering the same deal for free and decided that enough people will see the 30% as reasonable.
I know which I would prefer (hosting and distributing my app myself, and keeping whatever profit was left after expenses, versus having apple do it and lose 30% of the total to them, but not have any of the expense or hassle of doing it in house), but then, convenience is high on my list of desires.
The only missing part is the ability to choose to do it all in house if you want, but given that the cut is not *too* severe, and that if you were going to do it yourself you would still have to pay for hosting, bandwidth, staff, billing expenses, server costs etc, I'm not sure too many people worry about it. Apple has economies of scale on its side to keep those costs low by averaging them out. I guess if you were big enough and had enough apps you could get your costs under 30c per dollar of revenue for all those things, but for indie developers who really just want to focus on writing apps, having that headache taken away from them is more than worth it.
A vast, vast, vast (repeat lots) number of people commute less than 100 miles per day, and from what I remember the last time I was in the states, most places have electricity. This thing requires electricity to recharge.
Drive it to work, plug it in there (assume a nice boss, or a metered hookup that you can pay for, perhaps you don;t even need to charge at work). Drive home, plug it in at home.
Repeat on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
Weekend, maybe take the gasoline car if you are going more than 100 miles. Otherwise, take the electric one.
Oh sorry, I was under the impression that people who aren't you might actually fit the target demographic. If it doesn't personally make sense to you, slashdot user netsavior, then it should be immediately cancelled.
I guess we now know why Firefly got canned. You mustn't have liked it.
VW's TDIs are pretty damn close, performance wise, to equivalent petrol engines of the same displacement, and they are more than a match for the lazy, inefficient petrol engines in most US cars that are 30% to 50% bigger, especially when they're mated to a horrible, horrible slushmatic.
The TDI in the car my father drives (a minivan) is 50mpg, 150bhp, 2.0 litre displacement, accelerates with a decent punch (0-60 in 8.9s, remember it is a minivan, not a sports car) and is as refined as the petrol model. It doesn't "scream at 4000rpm" at 70mph on the highway - it cruises quite nicely at 85 mph at about 2500-3000. The beauty of gear ratios, and a decent box (it has a 6 speed manual - we live in a society where we have the freedom to choose what gear we're in. Just kidding, but seriously, auto boxes are annoying.
So, to me, an "average person in Europe" a car that will do 0-60 in 8 to 9 seconds is not a sports car, it's a family diesel minivan. I know, because my father owns one. So do I, although it is not a 150hp version.
My own minivan, a Xsara Picasso, has the same displacement (2.0 litres) but the HDi it has is tuned a little differently - it has a mere 90 bhp, but it cruises like a liner. I didn't get it for performance. It does, however, accelerate nicely when I need it, since it has tons and tons of torque. The engine in my father's VW minivan has almost twice the power (for the same displacement) and barely suffers in the fuel economy compared to mine (I get 54 mpg with my normal driving style). Their engine is small and light too - a benefit of advanced materials tech these days. No longer do you have to build a massive lump to contain the high pressures. No longer do you have to choose a high boosting, but laggy turbo or a more responsive but lower power one. We have high pressure common rail injection now, lighter materials, better engine management, starting even in the very cold (the achilles heel of old diesels).
It's come a long way over here, in the part of the world where the government doesn't subsidise the gasoline prices. In the same time frame, US petrol engines have barely changed - hopeless lumps, masking their awfulness by throwing extra, unnecessary displacement as a cure for poor overall performance, and hopeless automatic boxes.
Build an engine well, and design it properly and you don;t need to make a 3.0 litre unit for a 4 door family sedan. Mitsubishi got 400 bhp from a 2 litre petrol engine (WRX World Rally Cars are limited to 2 litre displacement) which is clearly extreme and has compromises [the turbo lag really is ridiculous and the clutch is a nightmare], but you can get perfectly decent performance in the middle with a little... evolution.
No, I'm sure he has. I have used both, and the Android phone didn't have the same polish as the iPhone, but it *did* have some features I wish that the iPhone had (the finger-trace typing gesture thing being the biggest). That phone was almost comparable to the iPhone for me (it was nice, but the shape was a bit off). My other friend also has an Android-based phone, but it's a whole different kettle of fish. It's nowhere near as nice as the other one I tried, and nowhere near an iPhone. In my experience, it was a detriment to the Android "brand" as a whole. If I hadn't used the other phone first (I believe an HTC Desire of some description) I might have been inclined to think all 'droids were like the second example, but I know from merely reading /. and the experiences of other users that it couldn;t be a stellar example of the OS.
I don;t want to say "fragmentation is a problem" since that seems to be a sore point, but it really is - the iPhone avoids it entirely (or keeps it very narrow with a small number of iOS devices), and pays for that benefit with the downside that your selection is limited. There are a lot more Android phone types to choose from, and some of them (in my personal experience) are great, some are really not.
What I mean is that to spell "Hello" you trace the word "Hello" on the screen by touching each letter in order without lifting your finger off the screen. You can do this quite quickly.
I'm not sure if you've ever looked at a QWERTY key layout, but these letters have other letters of the alphabet between them (ie, ['that is', it's Latin] you cannot *just* touch the letters H, E, L and O when you want the word "Hello"). The phone works out what word you were writing in a predictive manner by the order of the letters you have touched, throwing out any that don't fit words in its dictionary.
It works better if you can spell, since you have to hit the letters *in the right order* so the phone knows what fucking word you are going for in the first place, and it is at least as fast as typing by hand on a non-feedback screen and having the phone correct for your mostly-accurate hits (at speed, you are going to miss a couple).
Given that I never use txt spk 4 wrtng sms mssgs and actually write out sentences and words in full, it allowed me to write messages quickly and accurately at least as quickly as manual typing on my iPhone - and this was only with a brief exposure to my friend's Android phone. I expect I could get much faster with more practice.
By releasing US-only software. Yeah, right.
That would also be "millions of Euros in fines" if it were the case.
Where do they "brag" about "writing google maps" on the iPhone? From all the talk about how it was "obvious" that Youtube wouldn't work on an iPhone (because it doesn't have Flash), it seems that the general situation that many people are ignorant of just what apps the phone comes with, let alone who wrote them. Apple's entire stance on apps has been the promotion of third party developers rather than itself.
What is really missing from the iPhone that Android has (at least some Android handsets I have seen) is the single swipe trail typing method, where you trace over the letters you want in a single hand gesture and the phone picks the most likely spelling of the word, discarding junk letters you happened to touch while joining up your actual chosen word. I thought that was really cool.
The *actual* rest of us didn't think that was an attempt at rebranding at all, or have anything whatsoever to do with Apple.
It was the proposed original pronunciation.
That was part of the contract with the music industry - all the store's music had to be the same (DRM covered) or there was no deal.
I don;t think any amount of actual facts are going to change your mind one way or the other, but there it is.
Nice revisionist history there on why DRM was removed, but I expect nothing less on the internet's premier Apple-bashing site.
Either way, the reason they work on Linux (in the absence of DRM) is that they are encoded in AAC format, rather than some proprietary nonsense like realplayer or WMA.
Apple was *always* trying for DRM-free, but the music industry just would not go for it, and they were the content providers. At the earliest opportunity, Apple renegotiated that deal to remove the weakest possible DRM that they could get away with from the files they were selling.
You won;t believe it, since it was an interview with Steve Jobs in Rolling Stone, so you'll just assume he was lying or something. Either way Apple couldn;t have made it more plain how they felt about DRM - providing a built-in mechanism to strip it from the tracks, and strongly encouraging you to use it every time you downloaded, and the Rip, Mix, Burn adverts and campaign that they ran as a promotion for the iMac, celebrating fair use rights.
Contrast this to other DRM-encumbered music formats of the era - WMA and realplayer.
No, which is exactly why I mentioned that in the very next part of my post (and why I don't have any movies bought or rented from them - I most likely will if/when the DRM is dropped).
Bugger, I replied to the wrong post. Je suis desolé.
Sorry to be all Wikipedia, but [citation needed]
What legislation are we talking about here?
It definitely worked in 8.6, since I still remember being driven to distraction on our ancient (but at the time, top of the line!) Powermac 9600 running 8.6 with Media 100. I was trying to figure out why everything was a context+click for about 10 minutes until I noticed that my mug of tea had turned slightly and the handle was holding down the control key.
I felt like a muppet.