I don't think I'm terribly unusual in typing far faster than I write
Maybe it's psychological, but I only sometimes find that to be the case. If I'm typing a continuous stream of prose as I put it together in my mind, I find that typing is far faster. Transcribing or note taking from an external source, however, and I find handwriting to be more fluid, and easier to keep up with.
I'm sure my opinion has been swayed by the fact that I can easily go through a lecture with far more equations than actual words, a notoriously bad situation for the keyboard, but nonetheless my findings apply to words-only notes too.
My current theory is that it might be something to do with mistakes. Even as a fairly accurate typist, errors creep in and naturally I stop to correct them - this is fine when I'm typing free from external sources, my brain pauses for the half-second or so that it takes to make the correction. That brief pause, however, breaks the 'flow' in my head when listening to a lecture - it's not the time itself, but the loss of synchronisation with what I'm listening to. Handwriting, while not necessarily error free, doesn't have the same kind of problems with transposed letters and so on and thus keeps a continuous pace.
They are pretty cool! I have one myself, it's pleasantly geeky and damn useful for finding my keys in the dark. The fact I carry it in my pocket makes quite a good prop for explaining why people's "OMG NUKULAR!!" reaction to news stories is mistaken, too. I very much doubt there is any issue with shipping them. The radiation doesn't penetrate the outer casing, so (externally at least) they're basically nothing more than inert lumps of plastic.
There is some minor possibility that they could leak a minuscule amount more than background radiation, but certainly not enough to be of concern, or to be detectable. Even if you smashed one with a hammer, the Tritium would disperse harmlessly into the air.
The only thing that could be a problem is the legal side of matters. Say, for example, that (despite their harmlessness) possession of Tritium is technically illegal under your country's terrorism laws. How much do you trust your court system to show common sense if customs happens to Google what's in those glowy things you bought?
My mistake, I didn't do adequate research the first time.
Even so, there are (mixed) reports of simply using a standard E71 product code and firmware on an E71x. I'd be much more hesitant about recommending that route than I was initially, though.
I worked testing phones for a while, and I've seen first hand the crap that goes into most vendor-specific firmware (not to mention the fact that many of them will write their version once and never update it, despite the fact that Nokia often make significant improvements in the stock firmware's speed and stability over a product's lifetime). As such, completely nuking anything the network has put on there comes pretty high on my list of requirements.
Anyway, rant over, here's a link explaining how to do so on an E71. Basically you just change the device's product code so it identifies as Nokia generic rather than vendor specific. Once that's done Nokia's standard firmware update tools will do the work for you, no potentially dodgy hacks or cracked firmwares needed. Do make sure, however, that the product code you're using is for the generic version of your specific phone (i.e. correct transmission frequencies). Officially it voids the warranty, but it's easily reversible.
Yes in that stars release energy by nuclear fusion (although there are different types of fusion cycle depending on the temperature of the star), no in that stars are self-confining and self-perpetuating (for limited values of 'perpetual').
Although I'm sure we'll be swamped by sound bites from the media talking about how we've "created a star" or some such, there's not actually a huge amount that can be deduced based on that information. I don't mean to belittle your question at all - as I said it is a fairly apt comparison, but this is more the domain of particle physicists than astrophysicists.
While I absolutely agree with you that the prices above the base seem exorbitant in comparison to the 'extra' parts you're getting, you're thinking of the prices in terms of construction, not marketing.
It's an annoyance, of course, but the simple fact is that Apple will have put an awful lot of effort into setting these prices: they don't want to sell for under $600 but marketing tells them that launching at less than $500 will hook the customers. Simple solution is to sell a base model at that price which fewer people will buy, but many will decide that they want. Once people have decided they want it and rationalised that they can afford it, it's much easier to upsell to the one that Apple intended on making all along, at the price they intended all along, by adding an extra $20 of hardware. Make them look at a $630 base unit and many people will write it off out of hand.
Trite as it seems to quote XKCD (#397), it is appropriate as always: "Ideas are tested by experiment. That is the core of science. Everything else is bookkeeping."
It does sound like a fairly sensible idea, although the article doesn't appear (from my admittedly quick glance) to mention refresh rates or resolutions, which both become more significant issues in computer monitors than airport info displays.
I don't think that was quite the point being made. It's more a demonstration that even in places where terrorism has taken more lives, there can be far less of a knee-jerk reaction (and thus potentially far fewer arbitrary and ineffective restrictions on our activities in the name of safety).
You needn't necessarily be concerned about the acts of terrorism in Europe, but you may want to look to them to see an alternative method of dealing with attacks.
But the thing is, that he *can* surely copy the disc without breaking the DRM?
As I understand it, that's exactly what CSS is designed to prevent. From the Wikipedia article:
The purpose of CSS is twofold. First and foremost, it prevents byte-for-byte copies of an MPEG stream from being playable since such copies will not include the keys that are hidden on the lead-in area of the restricted DVD disk.
As I said in another post, biological systems are extremely complex; too complex to accurately copy, in many cases. A banana grown from seed in a lab will taste like a banana (obviously), but what about cells from a banana replicated on an artificial matrix? Reproducing the taste, texture, density, ripening characteristics and so on of the natural fruit takes more than just a mass of cells. When something as simple as an isomer of a chemical can alter how our senses react to it, keeping every factor identical to the natural system becomes very difficult.
The real question is not whether this will be identical to natural meat, but how much it will differ and how detrimental (or indeed beneficial) those differences will be to the finished product.
That aside, I wonder how much consumer acceptance this will have. I'm all for it (guilt free snow leopard sandwich here I come!), but people don't like 'fake' food.
It's a two sided thing: on the one hand people get irrational about anything new, which certainly doesn't help matters. On the other hand, however, natural systems are generally extremely complex and we tend to have trouble accurately replicating them - the taste of artificial orange flavouring vs. actual orange juice, or the feel of natural vs. man-made fibres in clothing, for example. Hell, we can even smell the difference between certain isomers.
I doubt that it'll ever be cost effective to replicate every property of real meat. The question is how different this product will be - it could easily be an adequate replacement, and it's not even beyond the realms of possibility that it could have superior qualities to natural meat. What it won't be, however, is identical.
The impression I get is that DPI is not a selling point, other than in particular (very expensive) niches like medical imaging. That's fairly understandable, I will admit, as I doubt it ever comes into most regular users' purchasing decisions.
What I find odd, however, is that I've never seen them selling standalone high-res LCDs even at a moderate markup. It'd be one thing if they weren't manufacturing the panels, but it's not too hard to find a laptop with a 17" screen at 1920x1200 - a very quick search shows full laptops (with those panels) selling at £700, so they're not exactly ultra-premium products. Replacement panels alone seem to show up in the $300-400 range (aplogies for mixing currencies, but it was easier to find a US supplier). Even so, nobody decides to wrap a plastic case around the screen and slot in a DVI port, rather sticking them on a laptop, and make a bit of cash from the people who do happen to consider high DPI desirable.
I think an intelligent, inquisitive student from a teaching method like this is likely to be a far more capable adult in terms of academic ability. The problem is that an average student may well not bother putting in the work. For the most intelligent people, formal schooling takes up a lot of time unnecessarily and still leaves them to spend their own time out of class reading around the subject to satisfy their curiosity, but for those in the middle it provides a framework to guide them. Basically, I don't think there is any 'one size fits all' solution - the potential problem is that once we start splitting on intelligence we risk creating a multi-tier system with little mobility.
Assuming methods like this are used academically, the main problem I've seen with many 'alternative' types of schooling is that they can't help but neglect the child's social development. I don't see this method being any different. It might be unpleasant, but being thrown into a class of vastly different children is an effective way to force some semblance of social ability upon us. I'd be inclined to believe there's a better way of doing so, but unfortunately I've yet to see it in practise.
As another poster mentioned, it's mainly the price of the handset that you're paying, not the bandwidth.
You can get "unlimited" (subject to all kinds of crap, but as good as you'll get from anyone else) data and messaging for £15/month - only comes with 75 minutes of voice, but you can always use Skype. That'll even get you a reasonably capable Nokia smartphone bundled in.
It's only if you want an expensive Android or Apple handset that it pushes the price up into the £30+ range; you still get the same pseudo-unlimited bandwidth that you would in the £15 contract.
I agree with you, and oddly enough that's exactly why I might consider using a Spotify app (assuming they release one for S60).
I like to have my 'proper' music collection in nicely ripped MP3s on my computer, but if I just want to check out an album or an artist I'll fire up Spotify. I use my phone in the same way: I keep a decent set of music on a 16GB MicroSD card, but I'd be happy enough to grab the odd track on Spotify while I was on the move.
Basically, Nokia's offering holds no interest as (so it seems) it tries to compete with ripped MP3s whereas Spotify tries to supplement them.
The lowest cost of an (apparently) comparable solution on their site is from Dell, at $826,000 per PB. That includes hardware and support but still requires hosting, cooling and so on at extra cost. To quote backup and redundancy as part of the cost seems misleading, since none of the solutions appear to include that.
Basically, in order to compare favourably to the Dell units simply requires that one can get support for less than $709,000. If you want to throw in backup and redundancy, then buy twice as many units - you've still got change from half a million compared to the single Dell unit in order to cover the extra power, support and cooling costs, not to mention that support costs don't necessarily scale linearly.
Although I completely understand where you're coming from, who are you to declare what should and should not offend someone?
I'm sure as hell pissed off that Facebook are trying to pull crap like this, but surely if I weren't then that'd just mean I had a slightly happier day today. What's so wrong with that?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's psychological, but I only sometimes find that to be the case. If I'm typing a continuous stream of prose as I put it together in my mind, I find that typing is far faster. Transcribing or note taking from an external source, however, and I find handwriting to be more fluid, and easier to keep up with.
I'm sure my opinion has been swayed by the fact that I can easily go through a lecture with far more equations than actual words, a notoriously bad situation for the keyboard, but nonetheless my findings apply to words-only notes too.
My current theory is that it might be something to do with mistakes. Even as a fairly accurate typist, errors creep in and naturally I stop to correct them - this is fine when I'm typing free from external sources, my brain pauses for the half-second or so that it takes to make the correction. That brief pause, however, breaks the 'flow' in my head when listening to a lecture - it's not the time itself, but the loss of synchronisation with what I'm listening to. Handwriting, while not necessarily error free, doesn't have the same kind of problems with transposed letters and so on and thus keeps a continuous pace.
They are pretty cool! I have one myself, it's pleasantly geeky and damn useful for finding my keys in the dark. The fact I carry it in my pocket makes quite a good prop for explaining why people's "OMG NUKULAR!!" reaction to news stories is mistaken, too. I very much doubt there is any issue with shipping them. The radiation doesn't penetrate the outer casing, so (externally at least) they're basically nothing more than inert lumps of plastic.
There is some minor possibility that they could leak a minuscule amount more than background radiation, but certainly not enough to be of concern, or to be detectable. Even if you smashed one with a hammer, the Tritium would disperse harmlessly into the air.
The only thing that could be a problem is the legal side of matters. Say, for example, that (despite their harmlessness) possession of Tritium is technically illegal under your country's terrorism laws. How much do you trust your court system to show common sense if customs happens to Google what's in those glowy things you bought?
I'm going to have to give you a [citation needed] for that one, on the basis that United Nuclear (a US company) are still selling them.
My mistake, I didn't do adequate research the first time.
Even so, there are (mixed) reports of simply using a standard E71 product code and firmware on an E71x. I'd be much more hesitant about recommending that route than I was initially, though.
I worked testing phones for a while, and I've seen first hand the crap that goes into most vendor-specific firmware (not to mention the fact that many of them will write their version once and never update it, despite the fact that Nokia often make significant improvements in the stock firmware's speed and stability over a product's lifetime). As such, completely nuking anything the network has put on there comes pretty high on my list of requirements.
Anyway, rant over, here's a link explaining how to do so on an E71. Basically you just change the device's product code so it identifies as Nokia generic rather than vendor specific. Once that's done Nokia's standard firmware update tools will do the work for you, no potentially dodgy hacks or cracked firmwares needed. Do make sure, however, that the product code you're using is for the generic version of your specific phone (i.e. correct transmission frequencies). Officially it voids the warranty, but it's easily reversible.
Yes in that stars release energy by nuclear fusion (although there are different types of fusion cycle depending on the temperature of the star), no in that stars are self-confining and self-perpetuating (for limited values of 'perpetual').
Although I'm sure we'll be swamped by sound bites from the media talking about how we've "created a star" or some such, there's not actually a huge amount that can be deduced based on that information. I don't mean to belittle your question at all - as I said it is a fairly apt comparison, but this is more the domain of particle physicists than astrophysicists.
While I absolutely agree with you that the prices above the base seem exorbitant in comparison to the 'extra' parts you're getting, you're thinking of the prices in terms of construction, not marketing.
It's an annoyance, of course, but the simple fact is that Apple will have put an awful lot of effort into setting these prices: they don't want to sell for under $600 but marketing tells them that launching at less than $500 will hook the customers. Simple solution is to sell a base model at that price which fewer people will buy, but many will decide that they want. Once people have decided they want it and rationalised that they can afford it, it's much easier to upsell to the one that Apple intended on making all along, at the price they intended all along, by adding an extra $20 of hardware. Make them look at a $630 base unit and many people will write it off out of hand.
It's LCD. IPS, to be specific.
OK, so UMA is useful when you're in range of a data connection but not in range of a voice connection. Makes sense.
Why, then, do you pay $0.10/min rather than using Skype, which (depending on who you're calling) is either free or costs about a quarter of that?
And for some reason my comment posted as AC. Odd.
Trite as it seems to quote XKCD (#397), it is appropriate as always: "Ideas are tested by experiment. That is the core of science. Everything else is bookkeeping."
It does sound like a fairly sensible idea, although the article doesn't appear (from my admittedly quick glance) to mention refresh rates or resolutions, which both become more significant issues in computer monitors than airport info displays.
I don't think that was quite the point being made. It's more a demonstration that even in places where terrorism has taken more lives, there can be far less of a knee-jerk reaction (and thus potentially far fewer arbitrary and ineffective restrictions on our activities in the name of safety).
You needn't necessarily be concerned about the acts of terrorism in Europe, but you may want to look to them to see an alternative method of dealing with attacks.
As I understand it, that's exactly what CSS is designed to prevent. From the Wikipedia article:
As I said in another post, biological systems are extremely complex; too complex to accurately copy, in many cases. A banana grown from seed in a lab will taste like a banana (obviously), but what about cells from a banana replicated on an artificial matrix? Reproducing the taste, texture, density, ripening characteristics and so on of the natural fruit takes more than just a mass of cells. When something as simple as an isomer of a chemical can alter how our senses react to it, keeping every factor identical to the natural system becomes very difficult.
The real question is not whether this will be identical to natural meat, but how much it will differ and how detrimental (or indeed beneficial) those differences will be to the finished product.
It's a two sided thing: on the one hand people get irrational about anything new, which certainly doesn't help matters. On the other hand, however, natural systems are generally extremely complex and we tend to have trouble accurately replicating them - the taste of artificial orange flavouring vs. actual orange juice, or the feel of natural vs. man-made fibres in clothing, for example. Hell, we can even smell the difference between certain isomers.
I doubt that it'll ever be cost effective to replicate every property of real meat. The question is how different this product will be - it could easily be an adequate replacement, and it's not even beyond the realms of possibility that it could have superior qualities to natural meat. What it won't be, however, is identical.
The impression I get is that DPI is not a selling point, other than in particular (very expensive) niches like medical imaging. That's fairly understandable, I will admit, as I doubt it ever comes into most regular users' purchasing decisions.
What I find odd, however, is that I've never seen them selling standalone high-res LCDs even at a moderate markup. It'd be one thing if they weren't manufacturing the panels, but it's not too hard to find a laptop with a 17" screen at 1920x1200 - a very quick search shows full laptops (with those panels) selling at £700, so they're not exactly ultra-premium products. Replacement panels alone seem to show up in the $300-400 range (aplogies for mixing currencies, but it was easier to find a US supplier). Even so, nobody decides to wrap a plastic case around the screen and slot in a DVI port, rather sticking them on a laptop, and make a bit of cash from the people who do happen to consider high DPI desirable.
I think an intelligent, inquisitive student from a teaching method like this is likely to be a far more capable adult in terms of academic ability. The problem is that an average student may well not bother putting in the work. For the most intelligent people, formal schooling takes up a lot of time unnecessarily and still leaves them to spend their own time out of class reading around the subject to satisfy their curiosity, but for those in the middle it provides a framework to guide them. Basically, I don't think there is any 'one size fits all' solution - the potential problem is that once we start splitting on intelligence we risk creating a multi-tier system with little mobility.
Assuming methods like this are used academically, the main problem I've seen with many 'alternative' types of schooling is that they can't help but neglect the child's social development. I don't see this method being any different. It might be unpleasant, but being thrown into a class of vastly different children is an effective way to force some semblance of social ability upon us. I'd be inclined to believe there's a better way of doing so, but unfortunately I've yet to see it in practise.
If so, I would've thought that the news should have come with a press release to that effect alongside it.
As another poster mentioned, it's mainly the price of the handset that you're paying, not the bandwidth.
You can get "unlimited" (subject to all kinds of crap, but as good as you'll get from anyone else) data and messaging for £15/month - only comes with 75 minutes of voice, but you can always use Skype. That'll even get you a reasonably capable Nokia smartphone bundled in.
It's only if you want an expensive Android or Apple handset that it pushes the price up into the £30+ range; you still get the same pseudo-unlimited bandwidth that you would in the £15 contract.
I agree with you, and oddly enough that's exactly why I might consider using a Spotify app (assuming they release one for S60).
I like to have my 'proper' music collection in nicely ripped MP3s on my computer, but if I just want to check out an album or an artist I'll fire up Spotify. I use my phone in the same way: I keep a decent set of music on a 16GB MicroSD card, but I'd be happy enough to grab the odd track on Spotify while I was on the move.
Basically, Nokia's offering holds no interest as (so it seems) it tries to compete with ripped MP3s whereas Spotify tries to supplement them.
The lowest cost of an (apparently) comparable solution on their site is from Dell, at $826,000 per PB. That includes hardware and support but still requires hosting, cooling and so on at extra cost. To quote backup and redundancy as part of the cost seems misleading, since none of the solutions appear to include that.
Basically, in order to compare favourably to the Dell units simply requires that one can get support for less than $709,000. If you want to throw in backup and redundancy, then buy twice as many units - you've still got change from half a million compared to the single Dell unit in order to cover the extra power, support and cooling costs, not to mention that support costs don't necessarily scale linearly.
Machinery is not a form of technological advancement now?
Levi might not be finding their next ad campaign on Facebook, but Virgin Mobile tried it on Flickr.
Sure, it was technically permissible under the license given, but to do so without even dropping in an email mentioning it is not exactly courteous.
Although I completely understand where you're coming from, who are you to declare what should and should not offend someone?
I'm sure as hell pissed off that Facebook are trying to pull crap like this, but surely if I weren't then that'd just mean I had a slightly happier day today. What's so wrong with that?