So what if I go into a store pick up the last copy of the latest release movie. I then wander around the store, carrying the disk, no one else can buy it. After this I get a phone call from my partner saying they've downloaded the film. So I go and put it back on the shelf, don't have to buy that now.
What's the difference? The store has deprived of the ability to sell that last copy of the movie for 90 minutes. So as you suggest I should pay a rental fee right? Everything is awesome right, no one has been deprived of anything that they rightfully deserved.
The difference is, the store permits you to carry around their copy as part of the cost of running a store. They take the (small) chance that items picked up won't actually be purchased. The cost to them of you carrying it around for 90 minutes it minimal (probably zero in most cases, since they have enough stock to "float" the supply while you stupidly carry it around). For the last item, you could potentially cost them a sale, but if it is a sell-out item, then they will probably sell it shortly after.
All of which is irrelevant, because they are willing to lend you the movie while in the store as part of their business cost. That is their choice. That in no way extrapolates to any conclusion that stealing a disc does not result in lost income, or that downloading a digital copy does not deprive anyone of their copy, or that digital piracy is not the equivalent to theft.
My post makes sense, because the point was to show that the calculations were not significant.
> It is 13% thicker, but has 33% more battery.
He lists both percentages side by side as if it means something. It doesn't. More importantly, the thinner the phone is, the less impressive it is to see an improvement for a "percent" increase in width. Significantly, if a phone is wider and taller (both of which the S3 is), the more space it adds by getting thicker.
I'm not saying Samsung didn't do a better job here--rather, that his was not the way to show it. My counter example demonstrates that a seemingly impressive statistic isn't, always, such as getting "100% more battery for a 50% increase in thickness." It sounds impressive at first, but it really isn't.
Your argument that 33% "more" battery was achieved with only 1mm is more useful, but still ignores the rest of the dimensions. Also, I don't know if you/he mean battery capacity or battery life. If it's life, links to studies testing the life would be important (typically, there will be several, and they will all disagree somewhat).
Again--I think the S3 is a fine phone and I'm not knocking it, just the comparison of two non-comparable percentages. Another counter example might have been, "I gained 100 lbs by only eating 5% of my body weight." Impressive, but I didn't mention how much I weighed before.
Oh, and the Windows phone OS design is ALSO an indication that you can build something that isn't anything close to the iOS design.
Well, what's interesting is the Apple phone looks more like Windows (or Windows Mobile/CE) than it does like a Windows Phone. So, maybe we can conclude that Microsoft went out of their way to avoid looking like an iPhone. Perhaps they did it to differentiate themselves in a saturated market, or perhaps they were trying to avoid a lawsuit. Either way, they aren't successful, so it's not really a good example.
Sure, you can make a phone that doesn't use a grid of icons, but why would you want to? After all, grids of icons satisfy the requirement of choosing what to run next, and most of us have years of experience using them.
(I realize grids of icons aren't exactly/only what Samsung was sued over, but Windows Phone's lack of said grid is what makes it look so different, IMO).
> The S3 is 1 mm thicker, not 1.2. It is 13% thicker, but has 33% more battery. > Samsung engineering win there.
That depends on how much thickness comes from the battery. For example if the battery were 50% of the thickness, then you could get 100% more battery by only increasing the width by 50%. Engineering win?
In other words, they have reduced the memory footprint not by tackling whatever process is hoarding memory like Scrat stacking acorns in his giant hollow tree, but by throwing away items that use memory but are otherwise static (images).
More to the point, they are throwing away data that might actually be useful, apparently in an attempt to cover for data that they can't figure out how to garbage collect.
As a long time Firefox user (since Phoenix 0.2), my frustration got to a boiling point last week and I switched to Chrome, despite 2 or 3 things that I really prefer about Firefox (type ahead find being one). I really don't care how much RAM is being used (I have 12GB)--what drives me crazy is the UI lag that inevitably occurs after using Firefox for a few days.
The electrolysis project being put on hold for the foreseeable future basically confirms we will never see a UI responsive Firefox. I appreciate the attempts to not waste memory (especially for lower mem devices), but if doubling the amount of RAM used would somehow speed things up, I'd gladly accept using 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately, with Firefox, the more RAM, the slower the UI goes.
With Chrome, the more RAM, the more...RAM. Nothing slows down. Chrome may not be a memory saver, but it is a time saver compared to Firefox.
As someone who works near the Solyndra plant (and at a firm that supplied Solyndra with products), and who knows a former employee of Solyndra, I can say there was more of an issue than the Chinese. Yes, the Chinese dumped on the market, and yes, this made it difficult for Solyndra to survive...but, there was a culture of incredible waste at Solyndra. Everything purchased had to be top dollar. As is often the case when a company has too much money, many things were bought that were unnecessary, and problems were usually fixed by throwing more money at it. My friend is an engineer and observed many times designs had to be reworked because of incompetence and lack of attention to detail. But this was accepted, because there was plenty of money. When the money ran out, it was too late to change.
Solyndra probably couldn't have survived, anyway, but they did themselves no favors. And the huge investments made into Solyndra only encouraged them to be wasteful. Sometimes a budget results in a better product.
Narcotics Anonymous, on the other hand, is an actual treatment program, the name of which $cientologists deliberately mirrored in their scam setup in order to confuse people into thinking narCONon is somehow legitimate.
Which is modeled after AA, which, in turn, has its origins in the Oxford Group, which was based on Christianity. Meetings start with prayers, members are encouraged to accept that only a "higher power" can save them from alcohol, and the meetings are frequently held in churches (sometimes called Christian AA groups).
It has also been found to be ineffective, offering no increase in success over other methods of trying to "quit.":
You can't just change the UI. All the apps depend on the old style ui, so you have to scrap them, too. So you might as well start from scratch at that point.
Coming from someone who used iPaqs, SCH-i760 (love that hardware), and HTC Touch Pro (sprint model). I've tried every addon shell in the book, and IMO, they are all terrible--even while being better than stock WinMo 6.5. Touch-flo is pretty but not a great design.
After using my Droid for a while, I've realized that styluses just suck. Sure, there's the occasional small link that's hard to click on with my finger, but that's better than needed a stylus to navigate a scrollbar because none of the dialogs in WinMo fit in one screen.
And the performance. Oh, the performance. My Touch Pro was supposed to have such amazing hardware. But menus would lag to open, typing a txt message was deplorably slow (type 10 chars, watch 3 show up, then lag, then the other 7 shoot out 2 seconds later), and trying to dial a phone number was very frustrating--the dialer app would not be running "full speed" for a few seconds after opening. I also missed calls when I couldn't get the phone app to respond.
WinMo is arguably the most powerful phone OS out there. The configuration changes you can make are seemingly limitless. But it's still the worst experience. WebOS, Apple, and Android all deliver responsiveness and low "number of clicks to change setting", which I believe is key.
But if Amazon also hoped the Kindle DX would become the next iPhone or iPod on campuses, it failed its first test. At the University of Virginia, as many as 80% of MBA students who participated in Amazon's pilot program said they would not recommend the Kindle DX as a classroom study aid (though more than 90 percent liked it for pleasure reading).
Because the iPhone was recommended as a study aid? Being the "next iPhone" does not mean it has to be recommended for study. Duh.
I was just about to mention this. I'm not sure the title here is warranted, namely that it "causes" weight gain. That's a fairly unqualified conclusion.
Then don't buy the iPhone. It really is that simple. I find it so odd when people find that others are doing what they want they cry censorship. Just don't buy the iPhone. If enough people don't buy it then they will change their policy or go out of business. Post about how outraged you are on Slashdot will do nothing since there is no law that says they can't do it.
What if you already have an iPhone? It's not like you could have known this policy would be implemented.
If you want to change a policy, you don't shut up and just not buy the product. You make noise.
If you don't like people complaining about these policies, then just don't read Slashdot. It really is that simple.
If you read the linked article, you'd see that it claims Theora is already as good as H.264, and links to a comparison to prove it. Hence the response.
Similarly, the web browser should not support rendering of text, but instead pass the text to the appropriate text renderer on the host computer. Instead of using formats like HTML and CSS, content should be handled by plugins such as Word, Flash, and Acrobat.
Just because Sun did the "right" thing to save Java's relevance, does not mean the same thing will happen with a ubiquitous video format. But it probably will. Another example might be the perpetually "free" Internet Explorer that some believed would eventually cost money. It might have, had there not continued to be competitors, of course, but it didn't.
You make a few good points. However, as far as I'm concerned, if you are only looking for 2 possible answers, then white noise eventually gives you what you are looking for (I know, the expected false positives from random noise was ZERO).
If a dead fish can give a false positive, so can a vegetative patient.
Hmm, do you think you could convince whoever works in the phone dept. to please enable bluetooth hands free dialing? Don't even have to implement it, just allow it.
Not doing something is never a signal at all unless someone becomes aware that you actually decided NOT to do it. Consider the HUGE number of people who have elected NOT to buy an Apple laptop. Are they sending a "strong an clear signal"? No, they leave a giant, ambiguous sign that says, "you haven't appealed to 95% of the market for some reason."
Meanwhile, they get a clear signal from the other 5% that yes, their product is desirable and in fact is profitable. This leads them to continue doing what they are doing.
If the corporation is smart, they will listen to their potential customers AND existing customers for ideas to make their product more appealing.
Not getting involved isn't the only signal you can send. You can be vocal about why you aren't buying. In fact, it seems like an excellent idea, now that I think about it!
Yes, that "initial startup" page works great. Unfortunately, if you don't take advantage of it, or just just "default settings," it's not so easy to get back to that page later. That's why the ieaddons.com site is so important. Many times I have used a browser after the user installed it with default settings, and I couldn't believe google wasn't on the front page (on a page that lists the top 12 engines, it's not one of the "most downloaded"? Come on.)
Like I said, it's on the front now, but it used to be about #18 or so (it's still only #6, to Bing's #1 status).
Slashdot Mirror
So what if I go into a store pick up the last copy of the latest release movie. I then wander around the store, carrying the disk, no one else can buy it. After this I get a phone call from my partner saying they've downloaded the film. So I go and put it back on the shelf, don't have to buy that now.
What's the difference? The store has deprived of the ability to sell that last copy of the movie for 90 minutes. So as you suggest I should pay a rental fee right? Everything is awesome right, no one has been deprived of anything that they rightfully deserved.
The difference is, the store permits you to carry around their copy as part of the cost of running a store. They take the (small) chance that items picked up won't actually be purchased. The cost to them of you carrying it around for 90 minutes it minimal (probably zero in most cases, since they have enough stock to "float" the supply while you stupidly carry it around). For the last item, you could potentially cost them a sale, but if it is a sell-out item, then they will probably sell it shortly after.
All of which is irrelevant, because they are willing to lend you the movie while in the store as part of their business cost. That is their choice. That in no way extrapolates to any conclusion that stealing a disc does not result in lost income, or that downloading a digital copy does not deprive anyone of their copy, or that digital piracy is not the equivalent to theft.
My post makes sense, because the point was to show that the calculations were not significant.
> It is 13% thicker, but has 33% more battery.
He lists both percentages side by side as if it means something. It doesn't. More importantly, the thinner the phone is, the less impressive it is to see an improvement for a "percent" increase in width. Significantly, if a phone is wider and taller (both of which the S3 is), the more space it adds by getting thicker.
I'm not saying Samsung didn't do a better job here--rather, that his was not the way to show it. My counter example demonstrates that a seemingly impressive statistic isn't, always, such as getting "100% more battery for a 50% increase in thickness." It sounds impressive at first, but it really isn't.
Your argument that 33% "more" battery was achieved with only 1mm is more useful, but still ignores the rest of the dimensions. Also, I don't know if you/he mean battery capacity or battery life. If it's life, links to studies testing the life would be important (typically, there will be several, and they will all disagree somewhat).
Again--I think the S3 is a fine phone and I'm not knocking it, just the comparison of two non-comparable percentages. Another counter example might have been, "I gained 100 lbs by only eating 5% of my body weight." Impressive, but I didn't mention how much I weighed before.
Oh, and the Windows phone OS design is ALSO an indication that you can build something that isn't anything close to the iOS design.
Well, what's interesting is the Apple phone looks more like Windows (or Windows Mobile/CE) than it does like a Windows Phone. So, maybe we can conclude that Microsoft went out of their way to avoid looking like an iPhone. Perhaps they did it to differentiate themselves in a saturated market, or perhaps they were trying to avoid a lawsuit. Either way, they aren't successful, so it's not really a good example.
Sure, you can make a phone that doesn't use a grid of icons, but why would you want to? After all, grids of icons satisfy the requirement of choosing what to run next, and most of us have years of experience using them.
(I realize grids of icons aren't exactly/only what Samsung was sued over, but Windows Phone's lack of said grid is what makes it look so different, IMO).
err, "increasing the thickness".
> The S3 is 1 mm thicker, not 1.2. It is 13% thicker, but has 33% more battery.
> Samsung engineering win there.
That depends on how much thickness comes from the battery. For example if the battery were 50% of the thickness, then you could get 100% more battery by only increasing the width by 50%. Engineering win?
In other words, they have reduced the memory footprint not by tackling whatever process is hoarding memory like Scrat stacking acorns in his giant hollow tree, but by throwing away items that use memory but are otherwise static (images).
More to the point, they are throwing away data that might actually be useful, apparently in an attempt to cover for data that they can't figure out how to garbage collect.
As a long time Firefox user (since Phoenix 0.2), my frustration got to a boiling point last week and I switched to Chrome, despite 2 or 3 things that I really prefer about Firefox (type ahead find being one). I really don't care how much RAM is being used (I have 12GB)--what drives me crazy is the UI lag that inevitably occurs after using Firefox for a few days.
The electrolysis project being put on hold for the foreseeable future basically confirms we will never see a UI responsive Firefox. I appreciate the attempts to not waste memory (especially for lower mem devices), but if doubling the amount of RAM used would somehow speed things up, I'd gladly accept using 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately, with Firefox, the more RAM, the slower the UI goes.
With Chrome, the more RAM, the more...RAM. Nothing slows down. Chrome may not be a memory saver, but it is a time saver compared to Firefox.
As someone who works near the Solyndra plant (and at a firm that supplied Solyndra with products), and who knows a former employee of Solyndra, I can say there was more of an issue than the Chinese. Yes, the Chinese dumped on the market, and yes, this made it difficult for Solyndra to survive...but, there was a culture of incredible waste at Solyndra. Everything purchased had to be top dollar. As is often the case when a company has too much money, many things were bought that were unnecessary, and problems were usually fixed by throwing more money at it. My friend is an engineer and observed many times designs had to be reworked because of incompetence and lack of attention to detail. But this was accepted, because there was plenty of money. When the money ran out, it was too late to change.
Solyndra probably couldn't have survived, anyway, but they did themselves no favors. And the huge investments made into Solyndra only encouraged them to be wasteful. Sometimes a budget results in a better product.
I had to respond, for the Final Fantasy Adventure sig. Awesome :)
Sigh.
narCONon is a $cientology front group. It has repeatedly been found either ineffective or downright harmful.
Narcotics Anonymous, on the other hand, is an actual treatment program, the name of which $cientologists deliberately mirrored in their scam setup in order to confuse people into thinking narCONon is somehow legitimate.
Which is modeled after AA, which, in turn, has its origins in the Oxford Group, which was based on Christianity. Meetings start with prayers, members are encouraged to accept that only a "higher power" can save them from alcohol, and the meetings are frequently held in churches (sometimes called Christian AA groups).
It has also been found to be ineffective, offering no increase in success over other methods of trying to "quit.":
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16856072?ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
The intentions of AA/NA might be slightly better than narCONon, but they are no more effective.
You can have my i760 for $20 :)
You can't just change the UI. All the apps depend on the old style ui, so you have to scrap them, too. So you might as well start from scratch at that point.
Coming from someone who used iPaqs, SCH-i760 (love that hardware), and HTC Touch Pro (sprint model). I've tried every addon shell in the book, and IMO, they are all terrible--even while being better than stock WinMo 6.5. Touch-flo is pretty but not a great design.
After using my Droid for a while, I've realized that styluses just suck. Sure, there's the occasional small link that's hard to click on with my finger, but that's better than needed a stylus to navigate a scrollbar because none of the dialogs in WinMo fit in one screen.
And the performance. Oh, the performance. My Touch Pro was supposed to have such amazing hardware. But menus would lag to open, typing a txt message was deplorably slow (type 10 chars, watch 3 show up, then lag, then the other 7 shoot out 2 seconds later), and trying to dial a phone number was very frustrating--the dialer app would not be running "full speed" for a few seconds after opening. I also missed calls when I couldn't get the phone app to respond.
WinMo is arguably the most powerful phone OS out there. The configuration changes you can make are seemingly limitless. But it's still the worst experience. WebOS, Apple, and Android all deliver responsiveness and low "number of clicks to change setting", which I believe is key.
But if Amazon also hoped the Kindle DX would become the next iPhone or iPod on campuses, it failed its first test. At the University of Virginia, as many as 80% of MBA students who participated in Amazon's pilot program said they would not recommend the Kindle DX as a classroom study aid (though more than 90 percent liked it for pleasure reading).
Because the iPhone was recommended as a study aid? Being the "next iPhone" does not mean it has to be recommended for study. Duh.
Why is this funny? It's basically an accurate summary. It doesn't even make any conclusion as to wheth
This doesn't give the same output...
I was just about to mention this. I'm not sure the title here is warranted, namely that it "causes" weight gain. That's a fairly unqualified conclusion.
Then don't buy the iPhone. It really is that simple.
I find it so odd when people find that others are doing what they want they cry censorship.
Just don't buy the iPhone. If enough people don't buy it then they will change their policy or go out of business.
Post about how outraged you are on Slashdot will do nothing since there is no law that says they can't do it.
What if you already have an iPhone? It's not like you could have known this policy would be implemented.
If you want to change a policy, you don't shut up and just not buy the product. You make noise.
If you don't like people complaining about these policies, then just don't read Slashdot. It really is that simple.
Oh, it also mentions this in the summary above...
If you read the linked article, you'd see that it claims Theora is already as good as H.264, and links to a comparison to prove it. Hence the response.
Similarly, the web browser should not support rendering of text, but instead pass the text to the appropriate text renderer on the host computer. Instead of using formats like HTML and CSS, content should be handled by plugins such as Word, Flash, and Acrobat.
Right?
Just because Sun did the "right" thing to save Java's relevance, does not mean the same thing will happen with a ubiquitous video format. But it probably will. Another example might be the perpetually "free" Internet Explorer that some believed would eventually cost money. It might have, had there not continued to be competitors, of course, but it didn't.
You make a few good points. However, as far as I'm concerned, if you are only looking for 2 possible answers, then white noise eventually gives you what you are looking for (I know, the expected false positives from random noise was ZERO).
If a dead fish can give a false positive, so can a vegetative patient.
The 5/6 is what disturbs me. If you have a 50/50 chance of answering questions correctly, there is a:
7 / 64 = 11%
chance of getting 5 (or more) right, randomly. Do that with enough patients and you'll find a match.
-Dan
Hmm, do you think you could convince whoever works in the phone dept. to please enable bluetooth hands free dialing? Don't even have to implement it, just allow it.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1181
Thanks.
Not doing something is never a signal at all unless someone becomes aware that you actually decided NOT to do it. Consider the HUGE number of people who have elected NOT to buy an Apple laptop. Are they sending a "strong an clear signal"? No, they leave a giant, ambiguous sign that says, "you haven't appealed to 95% of the market for some reason."
Meanwhile, they get a clear signal from the other 5% that yes, their product is desirable and in fact is profitable. This leads them to continue doing what they are doing.
If the corporation is smart, they will listen to their potential customers AND existing customers for ideas to make their product more appealing.
Not getting involved isn't the only signal you can send. You can be vocal about why you aren't buying. In fact, it seems like an excellent idea, now that I think about it!
-Dan
Yes, that "initial startup" page works great. Unfortunately, if you don't take advantage of it, or just just "default settings," it's not so easy to get back to that page later. That's why the ieaddons.com site is so important. Many times I have used a browser after the user installed it with default settings, and I couldn't believe google wasn't on the front page (on a page that lists the top 12 engines, it's not one of the "most downloaded"? Come on.)
Like I said, it's on the front now, but it used to be about #18 or so (it's still only #6, to Bing's #1 status).
-Dan