The younger generation can be lazy wusses, physically. I include middle-age to retirement-age people in this. I can't believe the number of people who use the handicap button to open doors, who are perfectly fit, and aren't carrying any bags or babies. The *only* time I use those myself is if I'm carrying something unwieldy, like a mattress or a TV.
When so many people consider themselves handicapped or disabled, it's no wonder they think their elderly predecessors are even more helpless.
Remember that the iPod touch was introduced *after* the iPhone, because there was enough demand from those who didn't want a smartphone (or didn't want to pay the additional $30+/month for a data plan).
If anything, the iPod classic is suffering more from the iPhone/iPod introduction. The only thing the classic has going for it is the huge capacity for a digital player: 160 GB. Everything else--battery life, screensize (for video), apps, weight, etc is beaten by the iPod touch.
Deaths by hypothermia resulting from lack of power is not "caused" by the dam or coal generator system going offline. If the dam burst and flooded a town, or the coal plant exploded and chunks of plant crushed people, *that* is caused by the dam or coal system.
In the same vein you can say hypothermia deaths may have been caused by the reactor shutdown leaving people without power and heat, but implying (by omission) that the reactor itself caused these deaths is irresponsible sensationalism.
I can't imagine a wireless signal interfering with a hardwired display this badly, so is this more an issue with wifi interfering with various sensors that feed the display, causing the system to momentarily "blank" the screen rather than present spurious and inaccurate data?
I'm new to console gaming, got a PS3 after Christmas and GT5 a few weeks later. Right off the bat GT5 required an update. I suppose in the strictest sense it's "optional" but why wouldn't you want to start fresh with the current version?
The update was almost 650 MB, took over half an hour to download and install.
Then the first attempt at copying (caching) data to the hard drive failed after about 20 minutes. The second attempt, despite its laughably inaccurate "45 seconds remaining" estimate, took over an hour.
So all told, almost two hours to *start* playing, and subsequent updates to both system and games are required every third time I try kicking back for an hour or two of racing. The benefit of console gaming over PC gaming has decidedly blurred.
And this is why iPads don't come with USB ports... no port, no assuming that the printer/mouse/keyboard/flash drive/hard drive will work out of the box. Printers especially--many work out of the box on a Mac, but the preinstalled drivers take up hundreds of megabytes of disk space.
A price increase would've been out of the question. And if they only cut $50 off iPad 1, people who have the money would pay a bit more for iPad 2, while those with a little less might wait for the Playbook or Xoom. By cutting $100, they entice some fence sitters to jump now, before the Playbook or Xoom are ready.
To be honest I hadn't even thought of all this before, but still had a feeling before iPad 2 was announced that the old models would see a $100 price cut
Only while supplies last. I doubt they're manufacturing anymore original iPads.
I'm not 100% sure on that; there are new 8 GB iPhone 3GS being sold for $100. Yet, there *were* no 8 GB 3GS units until the iPhone 4 came out, and they don't seem to be refurbished units downgraded to 8 GB.
The price cut is arguably the most predictable element when a new iOS device comes out. If competitors *didn't* anticipate a $100 price cut, when Apple has traditionally cut its previous-generation iPhone costs by about the same amount (subsidized or not) after a new one is announced, the parent's rant against their CEOs still stands.
The Enterprise was *meant* to be refitted for spaceflight after atmospheric and landing trials; unfortunately some specs changed while building Columbia, and overhauling Enterprise would've meant a very expensive tear-down and rebuild, so they built Challenger around a test bed frame instead.
Really, so why did Apple allow mp3 support with the original iPod, instead of only supporting the obviously-superior AAC?
Sony used your exact same argument for some of their (failed) digital media players--ATRAC is superior in every way to mp3, they claimed, so they made the players incompatible with mp3 and forced foolish buyers to convert their music files to ATRAC before they could listen to them on the player. Even Microsoft wasn't stupid enough to make their zune play *only* wma.
Newsflash 1: most video files out there are *not* h264.
Newsflash 2: Doesn't matter if h264 is superior, converting existing lossy files to h264 automatically *degrades* the quality further (and/or the file is bigger to compensate for this).
The other "junk" video formats will never die, not during the lifespan of h264, and I refuse to buy an AppleTV because it ignores this reality. My PS3 plays most formats just fine, so Sony at least learned a lesson.
Try out CamScanner+ or its free/demo version. I've used it to capture whiteboards, it's smart enough to detect and adjust for the edges when taking the picture from an angle, and adjusting the colours and contrast to. It did a decent job on the few pages I've thrown its way, too.
As the farthest planet in our solar system, the sun won't have an appreciable effect on Neptune's moons, many of which are captured asteroids anyway.
I've since seen a graphic some people put together, speculating on the layout of the star system in Firefly, with multiple stars each with their own planetary systems. If someone at NASA or otherwise knowledgeable in orbital mechanics thinks that's plausible, then fine, until then I'm still skeptical.
I thought that a shuttle-like stack would require it being assembled and rolled out upright, otherwise there'd be too much weight on the fuel tank from the orbiter... but sure enough, the Soviet-era Buran was assembled horizontally.
There's a reason star systems and even galaxies tend to exist in roughly flat shapes (i.e. in a plane), even though space is of course 3 dimensions (at least;-) ).
Imagine you were a god and you changed Earth's moon to orbit 90 degrees from how it does now, like a giant wheel running along Earth's orbit, rather than along the same plane Earth uses to orbit the sun. The sun's gravity would immediately start pulling the moon out of the perpendicular plane, enough that by the time it starts swinging back towards Earth its orbit has already changed. Eventually it'll return to an orbit that's "flattened out" again.
Don't have time to check, but most planets and moons in our own solar system probably don't deviate from the solar system's plane more than a few degrees.
very small solar system? With a couple hundred planets?
I'm not sure they're all planets. I'm pretty sure a lot of them are moons.
And for a relatively small solar system, that's still doable. Our solar system's 8 planets have 168 natural satellites.
... the majority of which orbit gas giants, far from the light and heat of the sun, and incapable of supporting human life because their mass is too low to maintain an atmosphere.
Multiple earth-sized moons around a gas giant would suffer from severe tidal forces as they pass near each other in their respective orbits. There's a couple other possible problems involving the planet/moons being much closer to the star (since the amount of sunlight is always similar to our Earth's), but I admit those are gut feelings since I'm not *that* familiar with orbital mechanics.
A big problem I had with Serenity was their trying to explain this aspect of the show scientifically. Like the midichlorians in Star Wars Ep 1, the "explanation" caused more trouble than it was worth.
For all the flack Fox (justly) deserves for its handling of Firefly, one thing they may have done right was ordering the tone of the series much lighter.
A few years ago I introduced the series to a roommate, who didn't like the pilot, but ended up loving the series because Captain Mal Reynolds had a much lighter and humourous side which was completely absent in the pilot.
Fast forward, coincidentally, to tonight; I was talking with another friend who's seen the pilot and the movie, but not the regular episodes, and doesn't see why we're all so taken by the series. She's willing to give the series another go based on my assurance the series is much lighter in tone.
Now, I loved the original 2-hour pilot. But I also saw it last, after the rest of the episodes were broadcast, and had come to know and love all the main characters, and the show's lighter tone. I'm not sure we all would've liked it as much had it all been the darker tone from the pilot.
Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game... Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.
I think he'd be quite at home on Slashdot, except he would actually be very smart instead of just thinking he was very smart.
The funny thing is, his "never known the touch of a woman" quip doesn't apply to himself--he was already married with a son the first time he appeared on the show.
H.264 and HTML5 are closed, and require onerous patent licensing terms of pennies per unit, with a hard cap.
What royalty-bearing technology is included in HTML5 and WebM? If you're referring to the patent on the 2D canvas, Apple has agreed to license that without royalty, as has Google with respect to its VP8 patents.
Looks like Apple learned their lesson from the Firewire licensing fiasco, which lit a fire under the USB2 standard and pushed the decidedly superior technology into irrelevance.
Watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. I just re-watched it last week, and though it's a bit long and tedious compared to modern movies, the scenes aboard Discovery and its centrifuge living area are an incredible visual of what living in a rotating surface (and transferring to/from null-G sections) would be like. In one scene one of the astronauts climbs "down" the ladder, all while the other is sitting at his desk... on the other side, and therefore "upside-down" from our perspective.
FYI, you missed Blackberry, which currently has more marketshare than either WebOS or Windows Phone.
Other than that I agree with your other points. History will show this as the point where Nokia went from sliding down a slope, to falling off the edge of the cliff.
iPad's external display dongle isn't a persistent video-out, apps must be written to send video-out. Not sure what special thing Apple uses for Jobs' demos that show the home screen and everything on the screen, but we the public don't have access to it.
And let's not forget that Microsoft and Bill Gates, father of all modern computing (/sarcasm), missed the internet's true significance and didn't direct Microsoft's energy towards it until almost two full years after this show aired. The Road Ahead, published late 1995, declared the internet the precursor to the information highway, rather than the highway itself.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than that - he's not even a US citizen! ;)
Surely that's the worst crime of all--after all, who *doesn't* want to be a US citizen? ;-P
The younger generation can be lazy wusses, physically. I include middle-age to retirement-age people in this. I can't believe the number of people who use the handicap button to open doors, who are perfectly fit, and aren't carrying any bags or babies. The *only* time I use those myself is if I'm carrying something unwieldy, like a mattress or a TV.
When so many people consider themselves handicapped or disabled, it's no wonder they think their elderly predecessors are even more helpless.
Remember that the iPod touch was introduced *after* the iPhone, because there was enough demand from those who didn't want a smartphone (or didn't want to pay the additional $30+/month for a data plan).
If anything, the iPod classic is suffering more from the iPhone/iPod introduction. The only thing the classic has going for it is the huge capacity for a digital player: 160 GB. Everything else--battery life, screensize (for video), apps, weight, etc is beaten by the iPod touch.
Deaths by hypothermia resulting from lack of power is not "caused" by the dam or coal generator system going offline. If the dam burst and flooded a town, or the coal plant exploded and chunks of plant crushed people, *that* is caused by the dam or coal system.
In the same vein you can say hypothermia deaths may have been caused by the reactor shutdown leaving people without power and heat, but implying (by omission) that the reactor itself caused these deaths is irresponsible sensationalism.
I can't imagine a wireless signal interfering with a hardwired display this badly, so is this more an issue with wifi interfering with various sensors that feed the display, causing the system to momentarily "blank" the screen rather than present spurious and inaccurate data?
(Yes I did RTFA)
I'm new to console gaming, got a PS3 after Christmas and GT5 a few weeks later. Right off the bat GT5 required an update. I suppose in the strictest sense it's "optional" but why wouldn't you want to start fresh with the current version?
The update was almost 650 MB, took over half an hour to download and install.
Then the first attempt at copying (caching) data to the hard drive failed after about 20 minutes. The second attempt, despite its laughably inaccurate "45 seconds remaining" estimate, took over an hour.
So all told, almost two hours to *start* playing, and subsequent updates to both system and games are required every third time I try kicking back for an hour or two of racing. The benefit of console gaming over PC gaming has decidedly blurred.
And this is why iPads don't come with USB ports... no port, no assuming that the printer/mouse/keyboard/flash drive/hard drive will work out of the box. Printers especially--many work out of the box on a Mac, but the preinstalled drivers take up hundreds of megabytes of disk space.
A price increase would've been out of the question. And if they only cut $50 off iPad 1, people who have the money would pay a bit more for iPad 2, while those with a little less might wait for the Playbook or Xoom. By cutting $100, they entice some fence sitters to jump now, before the Playbook or Xoom are ready.
To be honest I hadn't even thought of all this before, but still had a feeling before iPad 2 was announced that the old models would see a $100 price cut
Only while supplies last. I doubt they're manufacturing anymore original iPads.
I'm not 100% sure on that; there are new 8 GB iPhone 3GS being sold for $100. Yet, there *were* no 8 GB 3GS units until the iPhone 4 came out, and they don't seem to be refurbished units downgraded to 8 GB.
The price cut is arguably the most predictable element when a new iOS device comes out. If competitors *didn't* anticipate a $100 price cut, when Apple has traditionally cut its previous-generation iPhone costs by about the same amount (subsidized or not) after a new one is announced, the parent's rant against their CEOs still stands.
The Enterprise was *meant* to be refitted for spaceflight after atmospheric and landing trials; unfortunately some specs changed while building Columbia, and overhauling Enterprise would've meant a very expensive tear-down and rebuild, so they built Challenger around a test bed frame instead.
Really, so why did Apple allow mp3 support with the original iPod, instead of only supporting the obviously-superior AAC?
Sony used your exact same argument for some of their (failed) digital media players--ATRAC is superior in every way to mp3, they claimed, so they made the players incompatible with mp3 and forced foolish buyers to convert their music files to ATRAC before they could listen to them on the player. Even Microsoft wasn't stupid enough to make their zune play *only* wma.
Newsflash 1: most video files out there are *not* h264.
Newsflash 2: Doesn't matter if h264 is superior, converting existing lossy files to h264 automatically *degrades* the quality further (and/or the file is bigger to compensate for this).
The other "junk" video formats will never die, not during the lifespan of h264, and I refuse to buy an AppleTV because it ignores this reality. My PS3 plays most formats just fine, so Sony at least learned a lesson.
Attitudes like yours stink to high heaven.
Try out CamScanner+ or its free/demo version. I've used it to capture whiteboards, it's smart enough to detect and adjust for the edges when taking the picture from an angle, and adjusting the colours and contrast to. It did a decent job on the few pages I've thrown its way, too.
As the farthest planet in our solar system, the sun won't have an appreciable effect on Neptune's moons, many of which are captured asteroids anyway.
I've since seen a graphic some people put together, speculating on the layout of the star system in Firefly, with multiple stars each with their own planetary systems. If someone at NASA or otherwise knowledgeable in orbital mechanics thinks that's plausible, then fine, until then I'm still skeptical.
I thought that a shuttle-like stack would require it being assembled and rolled out upright, otherwise there'd be too much weight on the fuel tank from the orbiter... but sure enough, the Soviet-era Buran was assembled horizontally.
There's a reason star systems and even galaxies tend to exist in roughly flat shapes (i.e. in a plane), even though space is of course 3 dimensions (at least ;-) ).
Imagine you were a god and you changed Earth's moon to orbit 90 degrees from how it does now, like a giant wheel running along Earth's orbit, rather than along the same plane Earth uses to orbit the sun. The sun's gravity would immediately start pulling the moon out of the perpendicular plane, enough that by the time it starts swinging back towards Earth its orbit has already changed. Eventually it'll return to an orbit that's "flattened out" again.
Don't have time to check, but most planets and moons in our own solar system probably don't deviate from the solar system's plane more than a few degrees.
I'm not sure they're all planets. I'm pretty sure a lot of them are moons.
And for a relatively small solar system, that's still doable. Our solar system's 8 planets have 168 natural satellites.
... the majority of which orbit gas giants, far from the light and heat of the sun, and incapable of supporting human life because their mass is too low to maintain an atmosphere.
Multiple earth-sized moons around a gas giant would suffer from severe tidal forces as they pass near each other in their respective orbits. There's a couple other possible problems involving the planet/moons being much closer to the star (since the amount of sunlight is always similar to our Earth's), but I admit those are gut feelings since I'm not *that* familiar with orbital mechanics.
A big problem I had with Serenity was their trying to explain this aspect of the show scientifically. Like the midichlorians in Star Wars Ep 1, the "explanation" caused more trouble than it was worth.
For all the flack Fox (justly) deserves for its handling of Firefly, one thing they may have done right was ordering the tone of the series much lighter.
A few years ago I introduced the series to a roommate, who didn't like the pilot, but ended up loving the series because Captain Mal Reynolds had a much lighter and humourous side which was completely absent in the pilot.
Fast forward, coincidentally, to tonight; I was talking with another friend who's seen the pilot and the movie, but not the regular episodes, and doesn't see why we're all so taken by the series. She's willing to give the series another go based on my assurance the series is much lighter in tone.
Now, I loved the original 2-hour pilot. But I also saw it last, after the rest of the episodes were broadcast, and had come to know and love all the main characters, and the show's lighter tone. I'm not sure we all would've liked it as much had it all been the darker tone from the pilot.
Jennings is hilarious:
I think he'd be quite at home on Slashdot, except he would actually be very smart instead of just thinking he was very smart.
The funny thing is, his "never known the touch of a woman" quip doesn't apply to himself--he was already married with a son the first time he appeared on the show.
H.264 and HTML5 are closed, and require onerous patent licensing terms of pennies per unit, with a hard cap.
What royalty-bearing technology is included in HTML5 and WebM? If you're referring to the patent on the 2D canvas, Apple has agreed to license that without royalty, as has Google with respect to its VP8 patents.
Looks like Apple learned their lesson from the Firewire licensing fiasco, which lit a fire under the USB2 standard and pushed the decidedly superior technology into irrelevance.
Watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. I just re-watched it last week, and though it's a bit long and tedious compared to modern movies, the scenes aboard Discovery and its centrifuge living area are an incredible visual of what living in a rotating surface (and transferring to/from null-G sections) would be like. In one scene one of the astronauts climbs "down" the ladder, all while the other is sitting at his desk... on the other side, and therefore "upside-down" from our perspective.
You gotta respect the Japanese... they know the way of the samurai.
Japanese? ROFL. Nokia is Finnish.
Pop culture reference fail. Another character catches the error right away.
FYI, you missed Blackberry, which currently has more marketshare than either WebOS or Windows Phone.
Other than that I agree with your other points. History will show this as the point where Nokia went from sliding down a slope, to falling off the edge of the cliff.
iPad's external display dongle isn't a persistent video-out, apps must be written to send video-out. Not sure what special thing Apple uses for Jobs' demos that show the home screen and everything on the screen, but we the public don't have access to it.
And let's not forget that Microsoft and Bill Gates, father of all modern computing (/sarcasm), missed the internet's true significance and didn't direct Microsoft's energy towards it until almost two full years after this show aired. The Road Ahead, published late 1995, declared the internet the precursor to the information highway, rather than the highway itself.