What I want to know is what other computers one can get for 349 pounds.
Most things on the first few pages here, if you want a reasonable idea of UK pricing. As far as I'm concerned, considering its specs (and the clearly problematic requirement of an entirely constant internet connection, making use on the move somewhere between uncertain and impossible) it costs at least twice what it would need to in order to be competitive.
That said, Google's product development seems to be pretty good; I know I made a good few complaints about Android when I first saw a G1, but a few years down the line I'm happily using a relatively cheap and capable HTC handset, so maybe the Chromebook Mk. 3 will manage to impress me.
Update latencies for Honeycomb devices are the lowest I've seen on average for any Android revision. No one seems to take more than 1-2 months to release an update.
I'm not entirely up to date with the tablet market, but I have to wonder whether this is due to a difference in customer expectation rather than in Google's strategy. The market for "tablets that aren't an iPad" is significantly more geek-oriented than the market for Android phones, not to mention that tablets fall much closer to "computer" (which even non-geeks expect to come with a level of upgradability and customisability) than "phone" (which, until fairly recently, didn't generally have customisable firmware or software of any kind). Couple that with the fact that phone companies have probably got you tied in for a few years anyway, and it seems like a company slow to update its tablets would be far worse of than one slow to update its phones.
There are 'buckets' based on resolution (small, normal, large, XL - roughly corresponding to 'old phone, newer phone, 7" tablet, 10" tablet) but for finer grained control you can also numerically specify screen widths in units of 'dp' (not 'dpi'), a figure based on the total number of pixels available at a given density. There's a good amount of info here, which was linked within TFA.
Push updates? Nothing beyond bugfixes, and even then probably with a clear 'opt out' button. There's a whole gulf of possibilities between over-the-air auto updates and the current practise of locking the bootloader to prevent customers from doing their own goddamn thing, should they so choose, though.
A fair point, but it doesn't explain the logic behind the far, far more annoying practise of installing carrier-branded firmware. It is (in my experience) invariably slower, buggier, and less frequently (often never) updated than the generic version. Thankfully it seems to be flagging a little as customers begin to understand what 'firmware' is, but it's by no means extinct. You've already signed a contract promising to continue giving them money for the next year or two, so it's not like the advertising impact of that shiny new theme in $Carrier'sColour is going to do much good to anyone - why on earth do they still insist on spending money on coders to produce these abominations?
Some of the mechanics were in the habit of using (pointy, sharp) tools to tap touch screens. So anything that could be peeled off and replaced without having to scrap an entire CRT was great.
There's always the BOFH solution - stick with integrated touchscreens, and explain to the mechanics that any one of your CRTs rendered useless will be dropped from a significant height onto one of their precision tools...
Totally impossible? No. That's why we have scientific tests and double-blind studies; until I see a paper published in a respected journal indicating a positive result (the case study alluded to by TFA is seriously short on details, and apparently disputed), however, I'm happy to write this off as a psychological issue.
I was thinking the same thing; although TFA does allude to a (apparently disputed) positive result from a double blind study, it doesn't provide a link to a published article, or even a name to look up.
Depends what your aspirations are - as soon as the mortgage is paid off, you can stop worrying about money, which would be a reasonable milestone for a lot of people. It might not be "never work again" territory, but a couple of hundred thousand to buy a decent place to live suddenly saves you a huge amount in long-term interest, allows a lot more of your monthly salary to go into savings, and basically buys you the freedom to do things like packing in your job and backpacking around Asia for a few months without worrying about returning to a bank auction going on on your front lawn. If you've got a million, that's the house paid off plus a good amount in the bank to cover food, fuel, and modest travel for as long as it would take you to get bored of not working - not lavish, sure, but comfortable and relaxed, and able to come and go from jobs and education without ever worrying about where the cash is coming from.
I wouldn't try to retire if I got a million handed to me, but it would be enough to change my life pretty drastically. The stability to live where I liked, take any job I liked without really worrying about salary or hours, and the security to quit any time without counting down until I couldn't pay rent any more, all make me go misty eyed with longing from my current position as an impoverished student.
I read that line more as "if I don't want to do it, I can tell the boss to suck it without worrying about where the next month's rent will come from"; in either case, I see where you're coming from, and I'm sure I'll get more blasé about money once I leave the "impoverished student" stage of my life and become a decently paid member of the evil corporate empire, I was just surprised at how dismissive people are of a lump sum almost the size of what a lot of people can expect to make in a lifetime.
Living without rent or a mortgage to worry about would give a vast amount of flexibility. Spending $300k-500k of that million on a nice house would still leave you with a very comfortable amount to live on, and outgoings that basically only need to cover food and fuel - it might not keep you in Ferraris and hookers for long, but for someone whose wishes simply stretch to a secure, relaxed life, an extra million would be plenty.
A high school grad can only expect to earn $1.2million in their lifetime, and even someone with a masters degree only averages $2.5m. When you consider the extra investment opportunities that come with a rapid influx of cash like that, rather than a lifetime trickle, and that the GP said it would be nice on top of their current salary, I'd say it'd be a fine way to retire.
There's no tax on lottery winnings in the UK, a country which is very similar to the US in many ways. I know the article is specifically about Massachusetts, but being so rude about what was, in fact, a quite reasonable assumption just makes you look like an asshat.
Whereas leaving BT just involves changing your DSL provider, which is a matter of a few phone calls, leaving Virgin involves setting up DSL at all, possibly including the installation of a new phone line - it's quite a bit more complicated and expensive.
I might be misreading, but to me TFA implies that isn't actually the case here; it seems to be talking about removing the underlying line from BT wholesale's control, not just changing from BT as an ISP. The wording is as follows: "BT’s results from today showed the company had lost around 125,000 active consumer line customers this quarter, compared to the previous three months. To run BT services, users need to have an active consumer line.". A few of the other companies (TalkTalk, possibly Sky) offer full line rental plus broadband packages now, and crappy as they tend to be, they are cheap and probably adequate for a lot of users, which I guess accounts for both Virgin and BT losing lines.
On the other hand "Company with generally good service locks multiple accounts for minor infraction on one product; generates bad press" is quite surprising. It's not a shock that they can do this, it's a shock that they did do so in a competitive market when they have a history of providing the better product - coming from a telecom company I'd say this kind of thing would be par for the course, coming from Google it's a surprise and a shame.
As I said further up, the far more damning thing is what they were spending on copy paper - you're quite right to say that many factors influence the total cost of a PC, and while I'm inclined to think they probably were getting ripped off, a comparison to a £200 piece of crap as made in the summary is disingenuous. Plain white office paper is a pretty standard commodity, though, and they were still paying nine times over the odds for it, which doesn't speak too well of their purchasing procedures in general, and casts significant doubt on whether the £3,500 desktops were worth it, support contract or not.
A fair point, but the fact they were overpaying by a factor of nine for the copier paper too, which I'm assuming didn't come with a support contract or licensing, seems to imply there was still significant waste going on.
To protect their interest, they are trying to enforce laws that are currently being broken. Seems reasonable to me.
The Cleanfeed infrastructure was sold to the public on the basis that it would be used to block child abuse content and nothing else; it was specifically said time and again that this kind of thing absolutely and categorically would not happen. Even ignoring that, Newzbin simply provides links, they don't host any infringing material - blocking them seems a stretch of copyright law at best. Saying "it's the law, so it's right" is also dubious - the sites blocked by the great firewall of China are illegal under Chinese law, for example; does that make it right to censor them?
Trivial to defeat or not, it'd be nice to make some attempt to resist this; Newzbin have already said they plan to take out Cleanfeed, but whether or not they'll manage it I don't know. In either case, that seems a poor way to mount a principled defence of our free speech.
What I'd rather see is a group of Slashdot types setting up our own censorship-free ISP, perhaps making it uncensorable in principle by deliberately obfuscating logs and so forth (to within the letter of the law on data retention, of course), and explaining loudly and publicly why we feel it important to do so.
You can use a planet's gravity to alter the motion of a craft relative to the sun, but not relative to the planet itself - it still needs to come in at a speed greater than the planet's escape velocity. The Wikipedia article has a decent explanation, actually, if you're interested.
Practicalities aside, nice as it would be to see it drift off into the sunset, I rather like the idea that I might be able to find a hunk of the ISS while diving one day, however slim the chances are of it actually happening.
I think the point was "Computing devices in total" (which includes smartphones and MP3 players like the iPod touch) compared to "Computing devices for which firewire is a necessity", which is a tiny fraction of the former, but still a subset of it, making the comparison apt. Cigarettes sold bears no relation to computers sold, so the comparison is meaningless.
They've put up a couple of fairly good articles (here and here) about this whole Pulitzer thing, too. I suppose we'll need to wait and see how astute those were.
It's a whole different league to the US, though - the British government having instituted a major change a little more softly than they might have done really just means it might take an extra generation to permeate fully (although I agree that miles on the road signs are silly); the US still has all the cost and difficulty ahead of them if they ever do decide to change. The places in UK industry where metric standardisation is economically important have all long since changed fully, so people using antiquated units for their weight is hardly doing that much harm - at some point pints will probably become half litres (even I can live with 68ml less beer), The Sun and The Daily Mail will have a field day with it (damn Europeans stealing the working man's beer), and everybody will still call them pints in the pub for a good 25 years afterwards, but the point is the change is happening under its own momentum now.
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What I want to know is what other computers one can get for 349 pounds.
Most things on the first few pages here, if you want a reasonable idea of UK pricing. As far as I'm concerned, considering its specs (and the clearly problematic requirement of an entirely constant internet connection, making use on the move somewhere between uncertain and impossible) it costs at least twice what it would need to in order to be competitive.
That said, Google's product development seems to be pretty good; I know I made a good few complaints about Android when I first saw a G1, but a few years down the line I'm happily using a relatively cheap and capable HTC handset, so maybe the Chromebook Mk. 3 will manage to impress me.
Update latencies for Honeycomb devices are the lowest I've seen on average for any Android revision. No one seems to take more than 1-2 months to release an update.
I'm not entirely up to date with the tablet market, but I have to wonder whether this is due to a difference in customer expectation rather than in Google's strategy. The market for "tablets that aren't an iPad" is significantly more geek-oriented than the market for Android phones, not to mention that tablets fall much closer to "computer" (which even non-geeks expect to come with a level of upgradability and customisability) than "phone" (which, until fairly recently, didn't generally have customisable firmware or software of any kind). Couple that with the fact that phone companies have probably got you tied in for a few years anyway, and it seems like a company slow to update its tablets would be far worse of than one slow to update its phones.
There are 'buckets' based on resolution (small, normal, large, XL - roughly corresponding to 'old phone, newer phone, 7" tablet, 10" tablet) but for finer grained control you can also numerically specify screen widths in units of 'dp' (not 'dpi'), a figure based on the total number of pixels available at a given density. There's a good amount of info here, which was linked within TFA.
Push updates? Nothing beyond bugfixes, and even then probably with a clear 'opt out' button. There's a whole gulf of possibilities between over-the-air auto updates and the current practise of locking the bootloader to prevent customers from doing their own goddamn thing, should they so choose, though.
A fair point, but it doesn't explain the logic behind the far, far more annoying practise of installing carrier-branded firmware. It is (in my experience) invariably slower, buggier, and less frequently (often never) updated than the generic version. Thankfully it seems to be flagging a little as customers begin to understand what 'firmware' is, but it's by no means extinct. You've already signed a contract promising to continue giving them money for the next year or two, so it's not like the advertising impact of that shiny new theme in $Carrier'sColour is going to do much good to anyone - why on earth do they still insist on spending money on coders to produce these abominations?
Some of the mechanics were in the habit of using (pointy, sharp) tools to tap touch screens. So anything that could be peeled off and replaced without having to scrap an entire CRT was great.
There's always the BOFH solution - stick with integrated touchscreens, and explain to the mechanics that any one of your CRTs rendered useless will be dropped from a significant height onto one of their precision tools...
Totally impossible? No. That's why we have scientific tests and double-blind studies; until I see a paper published in a respected journal indicating a positive result (the case study alluded to by TFA is seriously short on details, and apparently disputed), however, I'm happy to write this off as a psychological issue.
I was thinking the same thing; although TFA does allude to a (apparently disputed) positive result from a double blind study, it doesn't provide a link to a published article, or even a name to look up.
Too bad that the 'wireless quiet zone' only refers to a very narrow band of EM radiation.
If it's enough to quell their psychosomatic symptoms while keeping them out of the way of the rest of us, I'd say it's a win.
It's actually defined as more than twice the daily limit, but the rest of your point still stands.
Depends what your aspirations are - as soon as the mortgage is paid off, you can stop worrying about money, which would be a reasonable milestone for a lot of people. It might not be "never work again" territory, but a couple of hundred thousand to buy a decent place to live suddenly saves you a huge amount in long-term interest, allows a lot more of your monthly salary to go into savings, and basically buys you the freedom to do things like packing in your job and backpacking around Asia for a few months without worrying about returning to a bank auction going on on your front lawn. If you've got a million, that's the house paid off plus a good amount in the bank to cover food, fuel, and modest travel for as long as it would take you to get bored of not working - not lavish, sure, but comfortable and relaxed, and able to come and go from jobs and education without ever worrying about where the cash is coming from.
I wouldn't try to retire if I got a million handed to me, but it would be enough to change my life pretty drastically. The stability to live where I liked, take any job I liked without really worrying about salary or hours, and the security to quit any time without counting down until I couldn't pay rent any more, all make me go misty eyed with longing from my current position as an impoverished student.
I read that line more as "if I don't want to do it, I can tell the boss to suck it without worrying about where the next month's rent will come from"; in either case, I see where you're coming from, and I'm sure I'll get more blasé about money once I leave the "impoverished student" stage of my life and become a decently paid member of the evil corporate empire, I was just surprised at how dismissive people are of a lump sum almost the size of what a lot of people can expect to make in a lifetime.
Living without rent or a mortgage to worry about would give a vast amount of flexibility. Spending $300k-500k of that million on a nice house would still leave you with a very comfortable amount to live on, and outgoings that basically only need to cover food and fuel - it might not keep you in Ferraris and hookers for long, but for someone whose wishes simply stretch to a secure, relaxed life, an extra million would be plenty.
A high school grad can only expect to earn $1.2million in their lifetime, and even someone with a masters degree only averages $2.5m. When you consider the extra investment opportunities that come with a rapid influx of cash like that, rather than a lifetime trickle, and that the GP said it would be nice on top of their current salary, I'd say it'd be a fine way to retire.
There's no tax on lottery winnings in the UK, a country which is very similar to the US in many ways. I know the article is specifically about Massachusetts, but being so rude about what was, in fact, a quite reasonable assumption just makes you look like an asshat.
Whereas leaving BT just involves changing your DSL provider, which is a matter of a few phone calls, leaving Virgin involves setting up DSL at all, possibly including the installation of a new phone line - it's quite a bit more complicated and expensive.
I might be misreading, but to me TFA implies that isn't actually the case here; it seems to be talking about removing the underlying line from BT wholesale's control, not just changing from BT as an ISP. The wording is as follows: "BT’s results from today showed the company had lost around 125,000 active consumer line customers this quarter, compared to the previous three months. To run BT services, users need to have an active consumer line.". A few of the other companies (TalkTalk, possibly Sky) offer full line rental plus broadband packages now, and crappy as they tend to be, they are cheap and probably adequate for a lot of users, which I guess accounts for both Virgin and BT losing lines.
On the other hand "Company with generally good service locks multiple accounts for minor infraction on one product; generates bad press" is quite surprising. It's not a shock that they can do this, it's a shock that they did do so in a competitive market when they have a history of providing the better product - coming from a telecom company I'd say this kind of thing would be par for the course, coming from Google it's a surprise and a shame.
As I said further up, the far more damning thing is what they were spending on copy paper - you're quite right to say that many factors influence the total cost of a PC, and while I'm inclined to think they probably were getting ripped off, a comparison to a £200 piece of crap as made in the summary is disingenuous. Plain white office paper is a pretty standard commodity, though, and they were still paying nine times over the odds for it, which doesn't speak too well of their purchasing procedures in general, and casts significant doubt on whether the £3,500 desktops were worth it, support contract or not.
A fair point, but the fact they were overpaying by a factor of nine for the copier paper too, which I'm assuming didn't come with a support contract or licensing, seems to imply there was still significant waste going on.
To protect their interest, they are trying to enforce laws that are currently being broken. Seems reasonable to me.
The Cleanfeed infrastructure was sold to the public on the basis that it would be used to block child abuse content and nothing else; it was specifically said time and again that this kind of thing absolutely and categorically would not happen. Even ignoring that, Newzbin simply provides links, they don't host any infringing material - blocking them seems a stretch of copyright law at best. Saying "it's the law, so it's right" is also dubious - the sites blocked by the great firewall of China are illegal under Chinese law, for example; does that make it right to censor them?
Trivial to defeat or not, it'd be nice to make some attempt to resist this; Newzbin have already said they plan to take out Cleanfeed, but whether or not they'll manage it I don't know. In either case, that seems a poor way to mount a principled defence of our free speech.
What I'd rather see is a group of Slashdot types setting up our own censorship-free ISP, perhaps making it uncensorable in principle by deliberately obfuscating logs and so forth (to within the letter of the law on data retention, of course), and explaining loudly and publicly why we feel it important to do so.
You can use a planet's gravity to alter the motion of a craft relative to the sun, but not relative to the planet itself - it still needs to come in at a speed greater than the planet's escape velocity. The Wikipedia article has a decent explanation, actually, if you're interested.
Practicalities aside, nice as it would be to see it drift off into the sunset, I rather like the idea that I might be able to find a hunk of the ISS while diving one day, however slim the chances are of it actually happening.
I think the point was "Computing devices in total" (which includes smartphones and MP3 players like the iPod touch) compared to "Computing devices for which firewire is a necessity", which is a tiny fraction of the former, but still a subset of it, making the comparison apt. Cigarettes sold bears no relation to computers sold, so the comparison is meaningless.
They've put up a couple of fairly good articles (here and here) about this whole Pulitzer thing, too. I suppose we'll need to wait and see how astute those were.
It's a whole different league to the US, though - the British government having instituted a major change a little more softly than they might have done really just means it might take an extra generation to permeate fully (although I agree that miles on the road signs are silly); the US still has all the cost and difficulty ahead of them if they ever do decide to change. The places in UK industry where metric standardisation is economically important have all long since changed fully, so people using antiquated units for their weight is hardly doing that much harm - at some point pints will probably become half litres (even I can live with 68ml less beer), The Sun and The Daily Mail will have a field day with it (damn Europeans stealing the working man's beer), and everybody will still call them pints in the pub for a good 25 years afterwards, but the point is the change is happening under its own momentum now.
Even in the states, there's a fairly sharp change in a person's treatment if they piss off someone rich and (somewhat) powerful.