If it was human this is the first time DNA took a photo of itself. It took a few million years and much learning and understanding to realize the present capabilities, but finally we are there.
Just consider, if you leave hydrogen around for long enough it eventually becomes something that can work out what hydrogen is.
especially because "retina" is just assinine Apple marketing jingo. almost every LCD panel produced is purely off-the-shelf and available to any customer who wants it. in particular, there are lots of devices that have pixel densities as high or higher than the particular models Apple selected from the catalog...
"Retina" has a specific meaning, defined by a mathematical formula that accounts for the DPI of the display and the distance it is viewed from. No one is under any illusion that they are somehow "special" Apple panels, or that other manufacturers don't also have access to them.
For some reason, people seem to take umbrage with just Apple's marketing terms, while accepting other terms that allow for quick and accurate descriptions of a particular technology just fine.
Yes, that's the point. He's replying to the original troll who said that no one involved in Linux software development cared about high resolutions or Apple hardware.
I'm pretty sure Linus Torvalds had something to do with Linux software development;)
I really, really wish people would stop pretending the "retina" displays are high resolution. They're not. They're software-locked to be effectively half on each side, so that "2560x1600" display is exactly the same as a 1280x800 display. Unless you run Linux on it, I guess, then you can actually use the higher resolution to display more applications.
I have tried one of those "retina" MacBooks in a store, you know. You can't change the resolution, the slider has been flat-out removed from the settings app.
My goodness, you're just so full of misinformation! It's hilarious.
Were you running the polls for the GOP prior to the election too?
Changing the resolution to the full native source of the screen is trivially easy. They don't have it on the slider in the Preferences (it's been set to slide between more sensible ranges), but there's no "software lock" that prevents you from running at native res. If you do, the UI is absurdly tiny on a 15" (or 13") screen, but you can do it if you need to.
Pretty much everyone i know has a phone with a micro-usb connector, and I have yet to see a failure. This is not a huge sample size, but probably statistically significant. They're actually quite strong, even the very low priced ones. Although , I don't anyone who uses it as a structural element (not does anyone with an iPhone connector). The phone is always supported.
That's what I was talking about though - using it as a structural element, which is what the GPP was suggesting as a universal option for a structural port you could dock to.
USB ports can last a long time if you're reasonably normal in the way you treat them (even though I think the design of the standard port is poor), but it's just not suitable for load bearing.
I'm not trying to start a usb vs 30 pin dock connector flame war or anything.
Anyone who has a Ford Sync system knows it is completely useless brand new.
I'm second in here, since someone else has already mentioned they have had success with it, but I must also add that I found it to be pretty good. We rented a car with it installed and over the course of 2000-odd miles it had to contend with two different iPhones being hooked up to it for charging and music/podcast playing and it performed flawlessly the whole time. The voice control was also *much* better than I was expecting - I thought it would be a novelty at best, but it actually worked very smoothly and accurately for both driver and passenger, allowing us to bounce around our music libraries on a whim, rather than having to search by hand.
I used exactly those sorts of modules to hook up to my Citroen, which was nothing short of witchcraft since Citroen's electronics engineer appears to have been on acid when he designed the wiring loom and signalling system.
Even so, it was easy enough to plumb in a head unit, iPod controls and other stuff so that the car's built in controls on the steering wheel can operate anything I hook up the USB port that I put into the centre storage bin thing. An iPod touch with a smashed screen lives in there mainly, acting as a source of songs, but it can hook up to my phone or someone else's phone (if they have a USB cable) for charging and playing music.
The USB connector is an awful design. It's certainly not going to stand up to being a structural element for something the size and shape of a smartphone. It just about manages for smaller things like USB sticks.
Even the 30 pin iPod connector is not all that great - it really benefits from external support around it to help hold the phone/iPod.
By the way: Latour is a process engineer with particular expertise in thermodynamic control systems.
If I were in a room in which you challenged him over thermodynamics, I'd probably want to go outside to avoid the bloodbath.
Good luck with that whole argument. To say it's weak is just... well... weak.
Remind me to never be near any "thermodynamic process" he has had a hand in designing "expertly".
If he believes that objects selectively absorb radiation based on the the origin of said radiation like some sort of "radiation absorption door man" then I'm sorry, the only bloodbath would be the wails of the person who viva'ed his PhD.
Actually coal, or any carbon source, wouldn't be a usable energy source, since there's very little free oxygen on Mars.
Discovering free oxygen would be a very big deal, but extremely unlikely. The only reason there is free oxygen on Earth is because early life started some sort of photosynthesis and starting giving off oxygen as a waste product that had the side effect of poisoning all their bacterial competitors. That event is known as the "Oxygen Catastrophe".
Hi, my name is iron oxide, I'm all over mars (in fact I give the planet its characteristic red color) and make a great accelerator for thermite and other high-energy thermal reactions.
Free oxygen is everywhere. You just gotta get it from me, first.
He did not mean free as in beer. He meant free as in "not covalently bonded to other elements at the bottom of a huge thermodynamically stable well".
The songs played on the radios were regarded by the bands as adverts (see: payola), and as such they didn't want to play the whole album because they wanted people to have to buy it to listen to the whole thing. The individual songs played on the radio were regarded as previews, not as complete works in themselves. In contrast, a downloaded track is regarded as a complete work by the band. No one complains that film previews contain scenes out of order, or that book previews only contain the first chapter, but the creators of both would strongly object to the idea of selling films by the scene[1] or books by the chapter.
[1] Certain Hollywood companies, however, would be very much in favour of this if they thought that they could get people to pay more that way.
I'd argue they were almost there already. There's not enough story in the last Twilight to justify splitting it up into two films. There's only one motivation behind that.
Next you're going to tell me Ferrari or Mercedes are irrelevant in the auto world because Ford outsell them "21:1 (or more)"
How are they "relevant"? Ferrari or Mercedes could stop making passenger cars tomorrow and almost nobody would care. Have they contributed any innovation in recent years anybody cares about?
Most of the safety systems and "home comforts" in modern cars trickle down from the top end of the market. Mercedes were the first to use (and develop) ABS, for example.
The development that goes into high performance vehicles almost always finds its way down - the technology that saves fuel by shutting off certain cylinders on large performance engines was the basis for similar systems in consumer vehicles. There are a host of things that the top tier manufacturers are doing that end up in more mass market cars a few years down the line that regular makers are just not doing because it's too expensive or too much of a risk.
Big players like Mercedes, BMW etc who are traditionally "luxury" makers are vital to the market as a whole. If Mercedes stopped making passenger cars tomorrow then no one would care... for a little while... but the market down the line would suffer for it.
In the case of Apple being (as the OP is suggesting) "irrelevant" by some hilariously distorted view of reality, it's not quite the same - the market is much tighter than the auto market and the manufacturers involved don't have the same trickle down effect. In this case it's more like sideways movement of features between the big players (like retina screens, quad core chips, LTE support, NFC, etc that tend to be launched by one vendor that end up in everyone else's devices if they turn out to be a killer feature).
Apple has *never* done business in the way you suggest they should do it (ie, how every other vendor does it) but what hey do works for them.
The "only" have 10% of PC marketshare... but you conveniently leave out that this is 10% coming up from below - ie, they have been growing marketshare year on year in an overall market that is either stagnant or shrinking (one of the very, very few PC vendors to have continuous positive growth). They don't do this by following what everyone else is doing - their market has never been to race to the bottom and compete solely on price.
They follow the same model for smartphones - one flagship, and one or two previous gen phones (currently the 4S and 4). They are selling the 5 as fast as they can make it, so I'm not sure what else you want them to do? Make more of them? They thought of that already. They fundamentally cannot do more than they are right now to grow marketshare in the smartphone market *unless* they start selling cheap low end phones - a market segment that Apple are very happy to leave to low end Android vendors (disclaimer: I am nog calling Android "low end"). They sell three generations of the iPhone and that works for them.
They're not interested in a fight for the bottom of the market. Their history in the PC business shows that (and again, as one of the very few vendors making money and growing marketshare in that space despite their "only" 10% share, it works very well for them).
So do you think Apple's pricing is making them lose market share or not? That is the definition of overpriced even from a business perspective...
That's a very narrow definition, and doesn't take into account a market that is still growing.
Apple has sold more and more iPhones (in terms of units shipped) of each model every time it launches one, yet the percentage of the market that those larger number of units makes up has gone down, thanks to the expansion of the market as a whole (and the success of Android handsets).
Apple is selling them as fast as they can make them - that's the definition of "not overpriced" from a business perspective, regardless of what the marketshare figure is doing due to factors Apple has no control over (namely the increase in the size of the market).
You have just said that Apple and the S3 are of a similar price and that Apple make a lot more money. It seems to me that would suggest that Apple are giving you much less for the same price.
I think that is true.
That depends how you look at it. If you take the overly simplistic, child-like view, then you might say that.
However, things are much more complex than that. It is possible to make products of similar quality at different costs to the vendor - Apple is a master at brute-force supply chain management, and slimming down their product categories and models, and cross-product use of the same components and sheer volume of bulk ordering that give them an enormous advantage that drives down their single unit costs. This translates to higher profits. (The could undercut, but they rarely do).
When you compare the SIII and the iPhone side by side, the argument that Apple are giving you "less for the same price" doesn't really hold up. They're both excellent phones of almost identical quality (each with pros and cons).
and having multiple highly profitable product lines
Right. They have lots of cash because of their profits. But somehow you think that making lots of profits doesn't mean their stuff is overpriced.
I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but... yes?
Just because a company is profitable does not automatically mean their products are overpriced. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, as slashdot is often very quick to point out.
Somehow slashdot seems to have a mental break when it comes to Apple for some reason.
Slashdot Mirror
A million times this, play songs and get the fuck out of the way.
Preferences > Parental > Disable iTunes Store (check box), (click ok).
Wasn't so hard, was it?
There is no difference except in your head.
So, I can blame failings of the laptop I'm using on Linux?
Sweet. Wifi doesn't work properly, so it's Linux's fault.
In other news Linux users pay more than Windows and Mac users at humblebundle.com, but that's no shit I guess, so you're right.
Not that I think it's bad, but it must be nice to have those big front donations from single users skewing the average, eh?
Honestly I don't think there's much difference between the average users in terms of how much they spend, or their likelihood of buying something.
If it was human this is the first time DNA took a photo of itself. It took a few million years and much learning and understanding to realize the present capabilities, but finally we are there.
Just consider, if you leave hydrogen around for long enough it eventually becomes something that can work out what hydrogen is.
especially because "retina" is just assinine Apple marketing jingo. almost every LCD panel produced is purely off-the-shelf and available to any customer who wants it. in particular, there are lots of devices that have pixel densities as high or higher than the particular models Apple selected from the catalog...
"Retina" has a specific meaning, defined by a mathematical formula that accounts for the DPI of the display and the distance it is viewed from. No one is under any illusion that they are somehow "special" Apple panels, or that other manufacturers don't also have access to them.
For some reason, people seem to take umbrage with just Apple's marketing terms, while accepting other terms that allow for quick and accurate descriptions of a particular technology just fine.
Well, Linus Torvalds uses a Macbook Air...
With OSX replaced by Linux.
Yes, that's the point. He's replying to the original troll who said that no one involved in Linux software development cared about high resolutions or Apple hardware.
I'm pretty sure Linus Torvalds had something to do with Linux software development ;)
I really, really wish people would stop pretending the "retina" displays are high resolution. They're not. They're software-locked to be effectively half on each side, so that "2560x1600" display is exactly the same as a 1280x800 display. Unless you run Linux on it, I guess, then you can actually use the higher resolution to display more applications.
I have tried one of those "retina" MacBooks in a store, you know. You can't change the resolution, the slider has been flat-out removed from the settings app.
My goodness, you're just so full of misinformation! It's hilarious.
Were you running the polls for the GOP prior to the election too?
Changing the resolution to the full native source of the screen is trivially easy. They don't have it on the slider in the Preferences (it's been set to slide between more sensible ranges), but there's no "software lock" that prevents you from running at native res. If you do, the UI is absurdly tiny on a 15" (or 13") screen, but you can do it if you need to.
No one cares about Linux and Retina support because Retina is Apple and no one uses Linux that cares about Retina/Apple.
I care about Linux and high dpi/retina resolutions.
Are you saying I don't exist?
Pretty much everyone i know has a phone with a micro-usb connector, and I have yet to see a failure. This is not a huge sample size, but probably statistically significant. They're actually quite strong, even the very low priced ones. Although , I don't anyone who uses it as a structural element (not does anyone with an iPhone connector). The phone is always supported.
That's what I was talking about though - using it as a structural element, which is what the GPP was suggesting as a universal option for a structural port you could dock to.
USB ports can last a long time if you're reasonably normal in the way you treat them (even though I think the design of the standard port is poor), but it's just not suitable for load bearing.
I'm not trying to start a usb vs 30 pin dock connector flame war or anything.
Anyone who has a Ford Sync system knows it is completely useless brand new.
I'm second in here, since someone else has already mentioned they have had success with it, but I must also add that I found it to be pretty good. We rented a car with it installed and over the course of 2000-odd miles it had to contend with two different iPhones being hooked up to it for charging and music/podcast playing and it performed flawlessly the whole time. The voice control was also *much* better than I was expecting - I thought it would be a novelty at best, but it actually worked very smoothly and accurately for both driver and passenger, allowing us to bounce around our music libraries on a whim, rather than having to search by hand.
I used exactly those sorts of modules to hook up to my Citroen, which was nothing short of witchcraft since Citroen's electronics engineer appears to have been on acid when he designed the wiring loom and signalling system.
Even so, it was easy enough to plumb in a head unit, iPod controls and other stuff so that the car's built in controls on the steering wheel can operate anything I hook up the USB port that I put into the centre storage bin thing. An iPod touch with a smashed screen lives in there mainly, acting as a source of songs, but it can hook up to my phone or someone else's phone (if they have a USB cable) for charging and playing music.
usb?
The USB connector is an awful design. It's certainly not going to stand up to being a structural element for something the size and shape of a smartphone. It just about manages for smaller things like USB sticks.
Even the 30 pin iPod connector is not all that great - it really benefits from external support around it to help hold the phone/iPod.
What is the difference [between advertising and propaganda]?
One is up front about trying to sell you something.
stomping around the universe.
Best not to be underfoot during this battle.
So the question remains, which one is Samsung, and which Apple ?
Why does it matter which is which? That was the whole point of the Dawn of the Third Age. Both "parents" were just as bad as each other.
By the way: Latour is a process engineer with particular expertise in thermodynamic control systems.
If I were in a room in which you challenged him over thermodynamics, I'd probably want to go outside to avoid the bloodbath.
Good luck with that whole argument. To say it's weak is just... well... weak.
Remind me to never be near any "thermodynamic process" he has had a hand in designing "expertly".
If he believes that objects selectively absorb radiation based on the the origin of said radiation like some sort of "radiation absorption door man" then I'm sorry, the only bloodbath would be the wails of the person who viva'ed his PhD.
I really hope this isn't going to be like the faster-than-lightspeed-discovery that was an intrument error!
So feel free to double check the instruments!
And the spelling!
*ducks*
Actually coal, or any carbon source, wouldn't be a usable energy source, since there's very little free oxygen on Mars.
Discovering free oxygen would be a very big deal, but extremely unlikely. The only reason there is free oxygen on Earth is because early life started some sort of photosynthesis and starting giving off oxygen as a waste product that had the side effect of poisoning all their bacterial competitors. That event is known as the "Oxygen Catastrophe".
Hi, my name is iron oxide, I'm all over mars (in fact I give the planet its characteristic red color) and make a great accelerator for thermite and other high-energy thermal reactions.
Free oxygen is everywhere. You just gotta get it from me, first.
He did not mean free as in beer. He meant free as in "not covalently bonded to other elements at the bottom of a huge thermodynamically stable well".
The songs played on the radios were regarded by the bands as adverts (see: payola), and as such they didn't want to play the whole album because they wanted people to have to buy it to listen to the whole thing. The individual songs played on the radio were regarded as previews, not as complete works in themselves. In contrast, a downloaded track is regarded as a complete work by the band. No one complains that film previews contain scenes out of order, or that book previews only contain the first chapter, but the creators of both would strongly object to the idea of selling films by the scene[1] or books by the chapter.
[1] Certain Hollywood companies, however, would be very much in favour of this if they thought that they could get people to pay more that way.
I'd argue they were almost there already. There's not enough story in the last Twilight to justify splitting it up into two films. There's only one motivation behind that.
How are they "relevant"? Ferrari or Mercedes could stop making passenger cars tomorrow and almost nobody would care. Have they contributed any innovation in recent years anybody cares about?
Most of the safety systems and "home comforts" in modern cars trickle down from the top end of the market. Mercedes were the first to use (and develop) ABS, for example.
The development that goes into high performance vehicles almost always finds its way down - the technology that saves fuel by shutting off certain cylinders on large performance engines was the basis for similar systems in consumer vehicles. There are a host of things that the top tier manufacturers are doing that end up in more mass market cars a few years down the line that regular makers are just not doing because it's too expensive or too much of a risk.
Big players like Mercedes, BMW etc who are traditionally "luxury" makers are vital to the market as a whole. If Mercedes stopped making passenger cars tomorrow then no one would care... for a little while ... but the market down the line would suffer for it.
In the case of Apple being (as the OP is suggesting) "irrelevant" by some hilariously distorted view of reality, it's not quite the same - the market is much tighter than the auto market and the manufacturers involved don't have the same trickle down effect. In this case it's more like sideways movement of features between the big players (like retina screens, quad core chips, LTE support, NFC, etc that tend to be launched by one vendor that end up in everyone else's devices if they turn out to be a killer feature).
I'm not sure what it is you're smoking, but can I have some?
It's amusing to see that Apple fans are the ones who are accused of living under the reality distortion field in the face of comments like yours.
Next you're going to tell me Ferrari or Mercedes are irrelevant in the auto world because Ford outsell them "21:1 (or more)"
What on earth are you smoking?
Apple has *never* done business in the way you suggest they should do it (ie, how every other vendor does it) but what hey do works for them.
The "only" have 10% of PC marketshare... but you conveniently leave out that this is 10% coming up from below - ie, they have been growing marketshare year on year in an overall market that is either stagnant or shrinking (one of the very, very few PC vendors to have continuous positive growth). They don't do this by following what everyone else is doing - their market has never been to race to the bottom and compete solely on price.
They follow the same model for smartphones - one flagship, and one or two previous gen phones (currently the 4S and 4). They are selling the 5 as fast as they can make it, so I'm not sure what else you want them to do? Make more of them? They thought of that already. They fundamentally cannot do more than they are right now to grow marketshare in the smartphone market *unless* they start selling cheap low end phones - a market segment that Apple are very happy to leave to low end Android vendors (disclaimer: I am nog calling Android "low end"). They sell three generations of the iPhone and that works for them.
They're not interested in a fight for the bottom of the market. Their history in the PC business shows that (and again, as one of the very few vendors making money and growing marketshare in that space despite their "only" 10% share, it works very well for them).
Just who do you think Google is paying the money to?
So do you think Apple's pricing is making them lose market share or not? That is the definition of overpriced even from a business perspective...
That's a very narrow definition, and doesn't take into account a market that is still growing.
Apple has sold more and more iPhones (in terms of units shipped) of each model every time it launches one, yet the percentage of the market that those larger number of units makes up has gone down, thanks to the expansion of the market as a whole (and the success of Android handsets).
Apple is selling them as fast as they can make them - that's the definition of "not overpriced" from a business perspective, regardless of what the marketshare figure is doing due to factors Apple has no control over (namely the increase in the size of the market).
It's not rocket science.
You have just said that Apple and the S3 are of a similar price and that Apple make a lot more money. It seems to me that would suggest that Apple are giving you much less for the same price.
I think that is true.
That depends how you look at it. If you take the overly simplistic, child-like view, then you might say that.
However, things are much more complex than that. It is possible to make products of similar quality at different costs to the vendor - Apple is a master at brute-force supply chain management, and slimming down their product categories and models, and cross-product use of the same components and sheer volume of bulk ordering that give them an enormous advantage that drives down their single unit costs. This translates to higher profits. (The could undercut, but they rarely do).
When you compare the SIII and the iPhone side by side, the argument that Apple are giving you "less for the same price" doesn't really hold up. They're both excellent phones of almost identical quality (each with pros and cons).
and having multiple highly profitable product lines
Right. They have lots of cash because of their profits. But somehow you think that making lots of profits doesn't mean their stuff is overpriced.
I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but... yes?
Just because a company is profitable does not automatically mean their products are overpriced. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, as slashdot is often very quick to point out.
Somehow slashdot seems to have a mental break when it comes to Apple for some reason.