John Stewart made a (very graphic) point with a Mortal Kombat scene where two burly guys can grab a female opponent by the legs and violently rip her in half from the crotch on up, blood flying everywhere, and that was supposedly fine, but if there was even a bit of a pixelated "nip slip" it would be banned.
America's media masters have a very fucking twisted sense of what's "acceptable" and what's not.
Ubisoft. You probably haven't heard of them though, they're only the 4th largest video-game company in the world and make games like Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, Far Cry, and various Tom Clancy games.
Granted Ubisoft is actually headquartered in France, but their largest dev studio is in Montreal, Quebec, with 1600 employees.
If you're going through the trouble of mouse keys just to select menus, know that you can reach any menu item by hitting a top menu's Alt+key character, then arrowing down, right if there's a submenu, and finally enter to select. There's even faster ways if you continue using Alt keys once the menu is down.
You don't need to remember control-key shortcuts for this, just where the menu item you're looking for is (which you'd need to know for mouse keys too).
A little late to the party, but before you do a full re-install, try a "Reset all settings".
My iPhone 3GS had gotten unbelievably sluggish, touchscreen wouldn't always respond to the first one or two taps or swipes, take several seconds to exit or launch an app, push notifications didn't work if it had gone to sleep for more than 10 minutes, it would chug on many websites, etc. Memory-freeing apps didn't help. Rebooting didn't help.
Last week I was resigning myself to do a wipe-and-rebuild, not even restore from backup, but I figured if I was going to wipe the slate clean I may as well try just clearing the settings first.
Night and day. There's still moments where it doesn't respond right away, but even those pauses are usually less than a second now. Web browsing is actually pleasant again. And I somehow reclaimed almost 2 GB of space. My guess is a lot of useless cached files/settings got wiped at the same time. I had to reset my password, wallpaper, and other basic system and network prefs, but my various mail configurations came through intact.
That's not how my Cisco HD PVR works. If it's "off" (standby) it's not recording. I know this because the HDD usually spins up when I power it on, and I can't scrub the current channel back beyond that point in time.
But in standby, I can hear the HDD spin up for a minute or two, then back down for maybe 10 minutes, then the cycle repeats. I assume it's updating the program guide (they really should write this to flash memory).
I have it hooked up to a Kill-a-watt though, and the difference is negligible--powered on (or standby with HDD spun up), it's 28-30 W. Standby (and only if HDD is idle) is 22-25W. It's ridiculous that it needs that much juice on standby. It's like it's processing HD video and audio 100% of the time, even on standby when it's not outputting anything.
They could definitely take a page from the computer world, which figured out "sleep" mode two decades ago. My 42" LED TV uses less than 1 W on standby, why can't PVRs and STBs cut power to almost everything except RAM and remote receiver?
It can be argued Apple learned its lesson--the majority of people don't *want* machines that last forever. They need an excuse to buy an upgraded replacement. To their credit Apple gear still typically lasts longer than their competitors, but obsolescence takes the form of missing features in major software upgrades, and occasionally slowing down older models with them (e.g. iOS4 on iPhone 3G--no new features there except folders really, not even multitasking... but it made it so slow it's almost unusable).
Apple competitors, working the price angle, typically don't last as long on the hardware side. Personally, I'd rather my hardware last longer even if the gear is obsoleted in software--at least it's still *working* if I choose not to update it...
Why don't you just read it unplugged, and plug it in when you put it down and go to sleep? Is your laptop battery that far gone that it can't last however long you're reading in bed?
The Magsafe is sufficiently strong that pulling it straight out is a bit hard, but by design it disconnects easily from shearing action.
And if there are a million other safe-break designs, why aren't any other manufacturers using it? Considering another post where Apple prevents others using Magsafe-like connectors.
I assume you're joking, but I've had my MagSafe-equiped Macbook since 2006, with the original power brick, still runs fine. Not every Apple user buys the latest shiny every two years.
See posts higher up. Australia and New Zealand got rid of the penny years ago. Prices are still marked by the cent, you pay exact amount if using credit/debit or round up/down if paid by cash (buying things one at a time of course will round up; often you'll buy more than one item at once so rounding up/down averages out over time).
You don't typically pay $20 in $1 bills *or* coins, so I fail to see why stuffing that amount in small denominations in your wallet is relevant.
I have a coin pouch in my wallet, I usually carry up to $5 in various coins in it (occasionally closer to $10 if I get $2 coins back). No, it's not uncomfortably thick. If I'm paying more than $5, I add bills to the mix.
As for dropping the $1 bill from circulation, that's exactly what's needed to drive change. I am old enough to have handled $1 bills, was glad to get rid of them, and can't stand handling those stupid $1 bills when I visit the US. It's far easier to quickly count coins in your hand than the number of $1 bills, especially if they're mixed in with a US $5 or $10 since they're the same size and colour and you have to spread them out to see the actual denomination.
It was frustrating getting on a bus in Vegas, watching people pay the fare with dollar bills. Probably five seconds was wasted every time a bill was sucked in, rolled back out, and sucked in again--assuming it wasn't misfed and had to be realigned first. One stop, it took more than a minute to load five people.
Good grief it's not like you're verifying a $100 bill...
It's just there's not many of them, or the coin pocket is very small.
Tell me about it... I have a 15-year old wallet with a nice-sized coin pouch. It's falling apart, but it's nearly impossible to find a replacement I like. Pouches too small, or the overall wallet is too big (some are the same thickness, empty, as mine is when it's full of cards, cash and coins, seriously WTF?).
Can't speak for Denmark, but when I visited Australia in '03 the rounding is only done if paying by cash (which, admittedly is what this article is about). But, if you pay by credit or debit, the actual value is still paid.
Of course things were always priced so if you bought them singly, they would round up--but buy more than one thing, and you'd round down half the time, so it averaged out.
And in the dead of winter this year, with temperatures around -30C, a modern Audi spontaneously combusted in the parking lot of a local company. Electrical shorts are still an occasional problem.
Playbook couldn't find an ad-hoc wireless network, and couldn't connect manually to them. My 2-year old iPhone found and connected to them immediately.
If you have an iPhone 4, recentish firmware, and 1 GB or better plan on Rogers, you can activate Personal Hotspot and feed the Playbook that way. Works like a charm, albeit a large, clumsy charm.
I did try this with a co-worker's iPhone 4. The Playbook did see this wifi hotspot, but still failed to connect to it. I later read that this may have been due to the Playbook not liking the apostrophe in hotspot's name which was the default "(User)'s iPhone". Funny how the office laptops I tried and my own iPhone again had no problems connecting to it.
I've noticed that nobody has been talking about Android apps. One of the guys I know was raving about the ability to run apps from the Android store on their own Dalvik interpreter. Did that not ship?
Didn't get to downloading or trying any apps, so I can't say. When I mentioned Angry Birds wasn't available, my boss joked that this was almost as big a dealbreaker as not having mail/calendar/contacts apps:-)
We rented a Playbook to check it out and compare it against the iPad my boss already has. The objective was to see how intuitive it was to set up and use without relying on help files or Google, and how it handled our existing Flash-based content.
On the plus column, its app switching is pretty slick compared to iOS. The front-facing speakers are a definite plus over the iPad, which shoots sound out the side instead of at you. On the Flash front, it runs it fairly well, with the usual caveats about Flash content that assumes a mouse. Size-wise, it is more convenient to tote around than an iPad.
In the minus column things added up fast and immediately.
Playbook couldn't find an ad-hoc wireless network, and couldn't connect manually to them. My 2-year old iPhone found and connected to them immediately. I couldn't get past the setup screen until I brought it home.
Its touchscreen responsiveness is flaky. Input fields had to be tapped 2 or 3 times to bring up the keyboard. And scrolling was inconsistent--small movements wouldn't get picked up, but a small flick would scroll an entire page or two.
The Adobe Reader app was atrociously bad. Four Adobe Acrobat-generated PDFs, 0.5 to 1.6 MB in size, were slow to load and didn't render parts properly once scrolled on-screen. Several times it completely choked the Playbook--touchscreen wouldn't respond at all. Supposedly this thing is many times faster than my iPhone, which rendered those same PDFs immediately and properly.
Back to Flash: More than one Flash object on a webpage and it got choppy. Much as my boss thinks Apple was dead wrong on not supporting Flash, clearly Apple had a point about it being a huge drain on battery and poor user experience, even now but especially back in 2007 when iPhone came out.
The spreadsheet app: how the heck do you enter formulae references into the cells? Not by tapping the cells you want, that makes them the active selection. The most basic thing in a spreadsheet next to entering numbers, and I have to look up the help file to figure out how it works?
And finally, no mail, calendar or contacts apps. RIM couldn't have said "you don't have Blackberries in your company? We don't want your business" any clearer than this. Doesn't matter if it'll be out later this summer, first impressions are key, and my boss declared this a dealbreaker.
We're Canadian, we wanted to support a Canadian company, but Playbook rev 1 is not ready for prime time.
Exactly, and this is precisely why the moon landing conspiracy nuts are morons too. Forget all the scientific evidence, moon rocks, etc... did the Soviet Union, the mortal enemy of the United States of America, ever claim that Americans didn't land on the moon, that the Americans were lying through their teeth and made everything up?
No? Then they should STFU, case closed, and they shouldn't humiliate themselves further by suggesting the US and Soviet governments made a secret pact to tell the big lie to the world.
It's a major shame that this marvel is retired, but the real BAD THING is that there's apparently not a single politician left with any sort of vision for the future short of how much cash they can get in their pockets, so there's no follow-up. We've been up there, and, well, that's it. Let's go back into our caves and watch dementing television.
I guess it's up to China, now.
Much as I hate to defend politicians, but those with grand vision for something so beyond the scope of most people's daily lives are not elected by the current generation of voters, especially if they perceive little money or benefit to them personally. As it is, it's a hard sell to unemployed or minimum wage Joe Sixpack to have tax money keep rocket scientists employed.
Kennedy had it much easier--behind his grand vision was "The Soviets are beating us at every step into space so far, but we'll beat them to the moon!"
The Youth Criminal Justice Act applies federally, and defines a youth (for purposes of the Act) as being older than 12 but younger than 18.
But, provinces define age of majority--some are 18, others 19. Drinking and smoking ages also vary. Since this student wasn't charged with a criminal offence, and schools are provincial jurisdiction, the school board apparently doesn't see this student as an adult either.
I am not Canadian so I feel I have no right to say if your government is right or wrong. As a US citizen I have the greatest affection for Canada. They are the best neighbors we could ask for and I have enough respect for them to say your government is up to you.
I am Canadian. Feel free, as an American, to say whatever you wish about my country's government. Many of us in Canada and in other countries around the world have no qualms saying things about the American government, good or bad, so turnaround is fair play.
It's only in the last couple of years that they confirmed there was any water at all on the moon, and that's at its polar regions which gets scant amounts of sunlight.
It's possible what water remained on the lunar surface was vapourized by the sun and blown away by solar winds billions of years ago, so only sub-surface water remains for most of the moon.
The prevailing theory for some time now (guessing a decade, maybe two?) is that the very early Earth was hit by by a sizeable object, at an angle and speed that didn't outright shatter the Earth but blew enough of the combined masses away from each other to form the Earth and Moon as we more or less know them today.
Also, water on Earth is theorized to have come from comets bombarding the infant planet. In the amounts necessary to fill the oceans today, it only makes sense that a lot of water-rich comets hit the moon instead of Earth.
First, no other manufacturer has the clout. Apple's single phone was exclusive to one carrier (in the US) for over 3 years. Other makers may have one major model exclusive to a carrier, but they usually have other phones on other carriers, and are in a race to the bottom with others for lowest subsidy pricing, which limits their negotiation ability.
Android is also touted as free and open to tinkering by anyone, be it user or carrier. Carriers love creating their own Android builds for phones because it gives them back the control (read: get paid to shove unwanted apps to their customers) that Apple tore away from them. Android users gain one freedom (ability to install apps from non-approved sources), but lose another (freedom from shovelware) unless they have a root-able phone and are technically confident enough to replace the OS on it.
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John Stewart made a (very graphic) point with a Mortal Kombat scene where two burly guys can grab a female opponent by the legs and violently rip her in half from the crotch on up, blood flying everywhere, and that was supposedly fine, but if there was even a bit of a pixelated "nip slip" it would be banned.
America's media masters have a very fucking twisted sense of what's "acceptable" and what's not.
I'll do both at once.
Ubisoft. You probably haven't heard of them though, they're only the 4th largest video-game company in the world and make games like Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, Far Cry, and various Tom Clancy games.
Granted Ubisoft is actually headquartered in France, but their largest dev studio is in Montreal, Quebec, with 1600 employees.
If you're going through the trouble of mouse keys just to select menus, know that you can reach any menu item by hitting a top menu's Alt+key character, then arrowing down, right if there's a submenu, and finally enter to select. There's even faster ways if you continue using Alt keys once the menu is down.
You don't need to remember control-key shortcuts for this, just where the menu item you're looking for is (which you'd need to know for mouse keys too).
A little late to the party, but before you do a full re-install, try a "Reset all settings".
My iPhone 3GS had gotten unbelievably sluggish, touchscreen wouldn't always respond to the first one or two taps or swipes, take several seconds to exit or launch an app, push notifications didn't work if it had gone to sleep for more than 10 minutes, it would chug on many websites, etc. Memory-freeing apps didn't help. Rebooting didn't help.
Last week I was resigning myself to do a wipe-and-rebuild, not even restore from backup, but I figured if I was going to wipe the slate clean I may as well try just clearing the settings first.
Night and day. There's still moments where it doesn't respond right away, but even those pauses are usually less than a second now. Web browsing is actually pleasant again. And I somehow reclaimed almost 2 GB of space. My guess is a lot of useless cached files/settings got wiped at the same time. I had to reset my password, wallpaper, and other basic system and network prefs, but my various mail configurations came through intact.
That's not how my Cisco HD PVR works. If it's "off" (standby) it's not recording. I know this because the HDD usually spins up when I power it on, and I can't scrub the current channel back beyond that point in time.
But in standby, I can hear the HDD spin up for a minute or two, then back down for maybe 10 minutes, then the cycle repeats. I assume it's updating the program guide (they really should write this to flash memory).
I have it hooked up to a Kill-a-watt though, and the difference is negligible--powered on (or standby with HDD spun up), it's 28-30 W. Standby (and only if HDD is idle) is 22-25W. It's ridiculous that it needs that much juice on standby. It's like it's processing HD video and audio 100% of the time, even on standby when it's not outputting anything.
They could definitely take a page from the computer world, which figured out "sleep" mode two decades ago. My 42" LED TV uses less than 1 W on standby, why can't PVRs and STBs cut power to almost everything except RAM and remote receiver?
It can be argued Apple learned its lesson--the majority of people don't *want* machines that last forever. They need an excuse to buy an upgraded replacement. To their credit Apple gear still typically lasts longer than their competitors, but obsolescence takes the form of missing features in major software upgrades, and occasionally slowing down older models with them (e.g. iOS4 on iPhone 3G--no new features there except folders really, not even multitasking... but it made it so slow it's almost unusable).
Apple competitors, working the price angle, typically don't last as long on the hardware side. Personally, I'd rather my hardware last longer even if the gear is obsoleted in software--at least it's still *working* if I choose not to update it...
Why don't you just read it unplugged, and plug it in when you put it down and go to sleep? Is your laptop battery that far gone that it can't last however long you're reading in bed?
The Magsafe is sufficiently strong that pulling it straight out is a bit hard, but by design it disconnects easily from shearing action.
And if there are a million other safe-break designs, why aren't any other manufacturers using it? Considering another post where Apple prevents others using Magsafe-like connectors.
I assume you're joking, but I've had my MagSafe-equiped Macbook since 2006, with the original power brick, still runs fine. Not every Apple user buys the latest shiny every two years.
Excuse me, but what's the Apple tax in this context?
Certainly not the (subsidized) handset or the data plan--those are comparable to its competitors in the same class.
And not the walled garden, lack of Flash, etc. Those aren't monetary costs, which is your core point ("casual with how they spend money").
See posts higher up. Australia and New Zealand got rid of the penny years ago. Prices are still marked by the cent, you pay exact amount if using credit/debit or round up/down if paid by cash (buying things one at a time of course will round up; often you'll buy more than one item at once so rounding up/down averages out over time).
You don't typically pay $20 in $1 bills *or* coins, so I fail to see why stuffing that amount in small denominations in your wallet is relevant.
I have a coin pouch in my wallet, I usually carry up to $5 in various coins in it (occasionally closer to $10 if I get $2 coins back). No, it's not uncomfortably thick. If I'm paying more than $5, I add bills to the mix.
As for dropping the $1 bill from circulation, that's exactly what's needed to drive change. I am old enough to have handled $1 bills, was glad to get rid of them, and can't stand handling those stupid $1 bills when I visit the US. It's far easier to quickly count coins in your hand than the number of $1 bills, especially if they're mixed in with a US $5 or $10 since they're the same size and colour and you have to spread them out to see the actual denomination.
It was frustrating getting on a bus in Vegas, watching people pay the fare with dollar bills. Probably five seconds was wasted every time a bill was sucked in, rolled back out, and sucked in again--assuming it wasn't misfed and had to be realigned first. One stop, it took more than a minute to load five people.
Good grief it's not like you're verifying a $100 bill...
There are wallets that also have a coin section.
http://www.google.com/search?q=wallet+with+coin+pocket
It's just there's not many of them, or the coin pocket is very small.
Tell me about it... I have a 15-year old wallet with a nice-sized coin pouch. It's falling apart, but it's nearly impossible to find a replacement I like. Pouches too small, or the overall wallet is too big (some are the same thickness, empty, as mine is when it's full of cards, cash and coins, seriously WTF?).
Can't speak for Denmark, but when I visited Australia in '03 the rounding is only done if paying by cash (which, admittedly is what this article is about). But, if you pay by credit or debit, the actual value is still paid.
Of course things were always priced so if you bought them singly, they would round up--but buy more than one thing, and you'd round down half the time, so it averaged out.
And in the dead of winter this year, with temperatures around -30C, a modern Audi spontaneously combusted in the parking lot of a local company. Electrical shorts are still an occasional problem.
If you have an iPhone 4, recentish firmware, and 1 GB or better plan on Rogers, you can activate Personal Hotspot and feed the Playbook that way. Works like a charm, albeit a large, clumsy charm.
I did try this with a co-worker's iPhone 4. The Playbook did see this wifi hotspot, but still failed to connect to it. I later read that this may have been due to the Playbook not liking the apostrophe in hotspot's name which was the default "(User)'s iPhone". Funny how the office laptops I tried and my own iPhone again had no problems connecting to it.
I've noticed that nobody has been talking about Android apps. One of the guys I know was raving about the ability to run apps from the Android store on their own Dalvik interpreter. Did that not ship?
Didn't get to downloading or trying any apps, so I can't say. When I mentioned Angry Birds wasn't available, my boss joked that this was almost as big a dealbreaker as not having mail/calendar/contacts apps :-)
We rented a Playbook to check it out and compare it against the iPad my boss already has. The objective was to see how intuitive it was to set up and use without relying on help files or Google, and how it handled our existing Flash-based content.
On the plus column, its app switching is pretty slick compared to iOS. The front-facing speakers are a definite plus over the iPad, which shoots sound out the side instead of at you. On the Flash front, it runs it fairly well, with the usual caveats about Flash content that assumes a mouse. Size-wise, it is more convenient to tote around than an iPad.
In the minus column things added up fast and immediately.
Playbook couldn't find an ad-hoc wireless network, and couldn't connect manually to them. My 2-year old iPhone found and connected to them immediately. I couldn't get past the setup screen until I brought it home.
Its touchscreen responsiveness is flaky. Input fields had to be tapped 2 or 3 times to bring up the keyboard. And scrolling was inconsistent--small movements wouldn't get picked up, but a small flick would scroll an entire page or two.
The Adobe Reader app was atrociously bad. Four Adobe Acrobat-generated PDFs, 0.5 to 1.6 MB in size, were slow to load and didn't render parts properly once scrolled on-screen. Several times it completely choked the Playbook--touchscreen wouldn't respond at all. Supposedly this thing is many times faster than my iPhone, which rendered those same PDFs immediately and properly.
Back to Flash: More than one Flash object on a webpage and it got choppy. Much as my boss thinks Apple was dead wrong on not supporting Flash, clearly Apple had a point about it being a huge drain on battery and poor user experience, even now but especially back in 2007 when iPhone came out.
The spreadsheet app: how the heck do you enter formulae references into the cells? Not by tapping the cells you want, that makes them the active selection. The most basic thing in a spreadsheet next to entering numbers, and I have to look up the help file to figure out how it works?
And finally, no mail, calendar or contacts apps. RIM couldn't have said "you don't have Blackberries in your company? We don't want your business" any clearer than this. Doesn't matter if it'll be out later this summer, first impressions are key, and my boss declared this a dealbreaker.
We're Canadian, we wanted to support a Canadian company, but Playbook rev 1 is not ready for prime time.
Exactly, and this is precisely why the moon landing conspiracy nuts are morons too. Forget all the scientific evidence, moon rocks, etc... did the Soviet Union, the mortal enemy of the United States of America, ever claim that Americans didn't land on the moon, that the Americans were lying through their teeth and made everything up?
No? Then they should STFU, case closed, and they shouldn't humiliate themselves further by suggesting the US and Soviet governments made a secret pact to tell the big lie to the world.
Or for detecting positronic signals from a powered-down, disassembled android on the surface of a desert planet tens of light years away.
Ye gawds what a stupid movie Nemesis was...
It's a major shame that this marvel is retired, but the real BAD THING is that there's apparently not a single politician left with any sort of vision for the future short of how much cash they can get in their pockets, so there's no follow-up. We've been up there, and, well, that's it. Let's go back into our caves and watch dementing television.
I guess it's up to China, now.
Much as I hate to defend politicians, but those with grand vision for something so beyond the scope of most people's daily lives are not elected by the current generation of voters, especially if they perceive little money or benefit to them personally. As it is, it's a hard sell to unemployed or minimum wage Joe Sixpack to have tax money keep rocket scientists employed.
Kennedy had it much easier--behind his grand vision was "The Soviets are beating us at every step into space so far, but we'll beat them to the moon!"
The Youth Criminal Justice Act applies federally, and defines a youth (for purposes of the Act) as being older than 12 but younger than 18.
But, provinces define age of majority--some are 18, others 19. Drinking and smoking ages also vary. Since this student wasn't charged with a criminal offence, and schools are provincial jurisdiction, the school board apparently doesn't see this student as an adult either.
I am not Canadian so I feel I have no right to say if your government is right or wrong. As a US citizen I have the greatest affection for Canada. They are the best neighbors we could ask for and I have enough respect for them to say your government is up to you.
I am Canadian. Feel free, as an American, to say whatever you wish about my country's government. Many of us in Canada and in other countries around the world have no qualms saying things about the American government, good or bad, so turnaround is fair play.
It's only in the last couple of years that they confirmed there was any water at all on the moon, and that's at its polar regions which gets scant amounts of sunlight.
It's possible what water remained on the lunar surface was vapourized by the sun and blown away by solar winds billions of years ago, so only sub-surface water remains for most of the moon.
The prevailing theory for some time now (guessing a decade, maybe two?) is that the very early Earth was hit by by a sizeable object, at an angle and speed that didn't outright shatter the Earth but blew enough of the combined masses away from each other to form the Earth and Moon as we more or less know them today.
Also, water on Earth is theorized to have come from comets bombarding the infant planet. In the amounts necessary to fill the oceans today, it only makes sense that a lot of water-rich comets hit the moon instead of Earth.
First, no other manufacturer has the clout. Apple's single phone was exclusive to one carrier (in the US) for over 3 years. Other makers may have one major model exclusive to a carrier, but they usually have other phones on other carriers, and are in a race to the bottom with others for lowest subsidy pricing, which limits their negotiation ability.
Android is also touted as free and open to tinkering by anyone, be it user or carrier. Carriers love creating their own Android builds for phones because it gives them back the control (read: get paid to shove unwanted apps to their customers) that Apple tore away from them. Android users gain one freedom (ability to install apps from non-approved sources), but lose another (freedom from shovelware) unless they have a root-able phone and are technically confident enough to replace the OS on it.