- Impressive technical specs translate to capability.
Impressive technical specs sometimes help products have the capability to meet their users' business needs.
However, one thing that Apple figured out early on that many other companies, large and small, continue to struggle with is that meeting most of the business needs with slightly deficient hardware is actually better for most people than meeting fewer over their business needs with gloriously overspecified hardware.
Technical specs are a means to an end. For the vast majority of end-users, they are not an end in and of themselves.
It is when you spend a lot of time telling other people how stamp collectors are idiots and seek out stamp collectors to tell them they should stop.
No, then discussing stamp collectors is your hobby. "Not collecting stamps" is still not your hobby. In any case, describing either of those as "stamp collecting" would be incorrect.
Just because it's not true, don't let that get in the way of your stupid comment:
...
Weekday (Monday–Friday) – $3.10 per week More Details
Home delivery subscribers get free digital access to NYTimes.com ** and the NYTimes smartphone and tablet apps. Plus, home delivery subscribers can share their digital access with a family member at no additional charge.
I pay $15/month for digital access 7 days a week.. I'm no math major, but last time I checked 4 * $5.85 > $15
Yup. However, 4 * $3.10 < $15. But than you for playing.
Keep in mind that every print subscriber gets a free top-of-the-line digital subscription. Its actually cheaper to get the paper edition and recycle it then it is to just get the online, in fact, which is annoyingly stupid.
Water would make an awful currency because it's way to expensive to transport (imagine going to the coffee shop with a gallon jug to pay for a cup of coffee). Not everything that is valuable would be an efficient form of money. And how would you pay a water bill to your utility company? With water?
And yet bitcoins are available in trade for electricity, which has many of the same problems...
Or, for that matter, spend $30 once a whenever and rent something appropriate from your favorite car rental agency. That way you can also drive a smaller, more practical vehicle most of the time and rent a high-capacity one for the occasional road-trip, rather than trying to make sure that your grocery-getter can also serve every conceivable towing/carrying need you might have in the future.
To me, hacking is actually very American. Go out to the garage. Take it apart. Make it better.
Sad then that so many american companies are actively trying to restrict or remove people's abilities to do just that, especially on computers where unlike a car anyone can get into it without the need for specialist tools and there is no potential safety risk etc.
The reason this happens is that there's a large tendency on the part of many people to want to have their cake and eat it too. Your average "hacker" these days is someone who randomly follows vague directions given to them by strangers and, if they screw something up by not understanding what they're doing, expects the original manufacturer of their device to have it replaced at their expense.
This holds true whether you're talking about inompatible software "bricking" a phone, or engine modifications shredding a transmission.
I know people who ride competitively, reliability is key and introducing more components that can break or add weight is not going to get acceptance. Modulation is key and I really doubt you can simulate that with any wireless system.
That's what makes it an interesting exercise. It would be trivial - and non-newsworthy - to try to build a crappy on/of system that didn't work very well. It's far more interesting to try to figure out how to solve the problem and meet your criteria.
While all of these solutions are scalable they have terrible latency; especially when nodes are failing. RIM probably needs very low latency for it applications.
When the endpoint of its applications is either receiving traffic from, or sending traffic to, a small underpowered device typically at the end of a cellular network connection, I'd have to say that the latency of its inter-datacenter connectivity for its redundant backend data storage should be the least of its concerns.
Back when USB and Firewire where new (mid-90s). Apple was trying to push Firewire as the primary connection medium instead of USB and Microsoft was trying to push USB. Sure Firewire lasted for 10 years as a high end device, but I think its developers and supporters intended for it to be the ubiquitous connection that USB is now.
That explains why there was such an outcry when Microsoft forced manufacturers to stop providing PS/2 ports, even though every PC was still being sold with PS/2 mice and keyboards at the time.
Oh no, wait, that was Apple who did that wasn't it? My bad...
Can I daisy chain 2 displays and a little RAID array over USB? Can USB hold an external graphic card (and do a good job of it)? What about a custom accelerator card?
Thunderbolt does things USB can't. They aren't used for the same thing, their uses just overlap some.
When $500 consumer-grade laptops are coming stock with 500gb drives and happily pushing better-than-1080p-HD-graphics, 99.99% of people will never need to hook up anything. Unfortunately for your point, that day is now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Thunderbolt as a high-speed interconnect. Its just that wired interconnects are getting less and less interesting to anyone - but the other interesting point is that USB is going the same way. Many mice and keyboards are bluetooth. Printers are increasingly wi-fi. Displays are still wired, but streaming at least 1080p is not expensive these days and getting cheaper and more common...
Did you actually read that link? The technology mentioned in that very article, HSPA+, is completely supported by the iPhone 4S. Here's another link from the same site that backs up the speed claims.
But since Apple decided after nearly a year and a half to slap their loyal fans in the face and refused to produce and release any significant hardware improvements
So... 2x faster processor, 7x faster GPU, what seems like a 4x better (resolution and image quality) camera, 1080p with really solid image stab. for the video camera, 2x faster downloads, and no reduction in battery life isn't significant?
What, pray tell, were you hoping for exactly? Other than a different case with the number 5 blazoned accross the side? Screen size I see from your post, although its debatable whether that's better or worse (good for some, less so for others) and NFC certainly has a lot of utility to a few folk (I'd like to play with it as well, to be honest). But to dismiss the 4S improvements strikes me as a little unreasonable.
BTW, the iPhone now does support 1080p for video out and mirroring - its right on the "Tech Specs" page.
Scrolling the screen pops new content up from "within" the device. That makes absolutely no sense. It's eye candy that detracts from usability. Not to be a fanboi, but the various animations in iOS serve to provide visual cues to the user on what is happening and how to use the UI. Apple is very up front in their UI guidelines about how animations should serve to inform the user on what is happening. This Android animation completely fails at that.
It looks fine to me. Like you are sliding the top page off of a stack of papers to reveal the one under it, only with a bit more 3D to it.
Ah, so when you swipe in the reverse direction, you'd expect the page to come back from the side and push the previous one back down on the stack?
Except, of course, that isn't what happens at all is it? Its mixing a stack metaphor (which I guess would make sense if you were, say, discarding the top email and reading the next one) with a multiple-panes view, and its doing it poorly.
Oddly enough, the home screens scroll normally left to right as you'd expect.
I too have an HTC Desire, but I still continue to use my HTC TyTN because of all the handy buttons, and the QWERTY keypad. I just don't understand why phone makers these days seem to think buttons are un-necessary.:(
Because with a lot of care, you can make it so. Unfortunately, there's far more to good (ie: usable) design than adding extra shiny things - and highly usable mimimalistic layouts are actually really, really hard to get right (and seem so "obvious" when you do that it fools others into thinking that they can make one too, just a little better).
Why do phones cost more than tablets, anyway? They sell more, and must be far cheaper to produce.
Must they? They have basically exactly the same hardware but in a package approximately 1/10 the volume, thus requiring smaller components, tighter manufacturing tolerances, and a massive amount of design elegance to achieve the same result. Smaller rarely equals cheaper in anything other than bulk product storage.
Yup. The video showed some pretty weird paging as well - moving around from left to right always moved the "current page" off to screen right or screen left, as it should. But on the home screen, the new page came in directly behind the page being abandoned, which seemed to make sense. In other places, even though the old page went off to the side, the new page zoomed up from "underneath" somewhere. Sure it works, but it certainly didn't feel predictible.
Flash now is basically Internet Explorer circa 2000, and we all know how well that turned out (some of us still have the pain of having to support it).
You mean that part when, despite its flaws, it continued to dominate the market for a decade?
Searches on my system (with several 2 TB drives) can take prohibitively long, particularly since I don't store all applications on the C system hard drive
That's a bug in Microsoft's indexing implementation then, not a problem with the approach itself.
FWIW, OSX's spotlight search generally runs 3-4 seconds when looking up something obscure and unreferenced in a similar amount of slow HD space.
4G wireless? You're right about that one point. Maybe the current chipsets are too power-hungry for Apple's taste.
Even with this... really? Downloads are now available at 2X the speed of the iPhone 4, now up to 14mbps... other than downloading HD video to your phone (not streaming it, downloading it in bulk to watch later), isn't a 14mpbs speed still faster than most of the cel networks can reliably deliver? Its certainly faster than a lot of people's internet access over their DSL/cable modems.
And yet, actions by others which fall far deeper on the spectrum of rights violations are not prosecuted. When there's only one recent example of impeachment, and its for such an absolutely reasonable yet relatively trivial reason, its not too much of a stretch to wonder why that particular act deserved to be singled out.
Just so you know, all job-creating activities (investigating business opportunities, hiring people, et cetera) are already tax deductible. Lowering taxes on the money extracted from a business into a personal account decreases the chance that jobs will be created, by reducing the tax advantages of doing so.
And storing ~1TB to "as safe as its reasonably possible to ever be" currently costs about $140/mo. Transfer costs are approximately zero in the real world, and prices keep dropping gently over time.
Stick the actually important 100GB (probably less) into S3, and make sure the rest is on 2-3 computers, and you're fine.
Slashdot Mirror
- Impressive technical specs translate to capability.
Impressive technical specs sometimes help products have the capability to meet their users' business needs.
However, one thing that Apple figured out early on that many other companies, large and small, continue to struggle with is that meeting most of the business needs with slightly deficient hardware is actually better for most people than meeting fewer over their business needs with gloriously overspecified hardware.
Technical specs are a means to an end. For the vast majority of end-users, they are not an end in and of themselves.
Is not collecting stamps a hobby?
It is when you spend a lot of time telling other people how stamp collectors are idiots and seek out stamp collectors to tell them they should stop.
No, then discussing stamp collectors is your hobby. "Not collecting stamps" is still not your hobby. In any case, describing either of those as "stamp collecting" would be incorrect.
Just because it's not true, don't let that get in the way of your stupid comment:
Weekday (Monday–Friday) – $3.10 per week More Details
Home delivery subscribers get free digital access to NYTimes.com **
and the NYTimes smartphone and tablet apps.
Plus, home delivery subscribers can share their digital access with a family member
at no additional charge.
I pay $15/month for digital access 7 days a week.. I'm no math major, but last time I checked 4 * $5.85 > $15
Yup. However, 4 * $3.10 < $15. But than you for playing.
Keep in mind that every print subscriber gets a free top-of-the-line digital subscription. Its actually cheaper to get the paper edition and recycle it then it is to just get the online, in fact, which is annoyingly stupid.
Water would make an awful currency because it's way to expensive to transport (imagine going to the coffee shop with a gallon jug to pay for a cup of coffee). Not everything that is valuable would be an efficient form of money. And how would you pay a water bill to your utility company? With water?
And yet bitcoins are available in trade for electricity, which has many of the same problems...
Or, for that matter, spend $30 once a whenever and rent something appropriate from your favorite car rental agency. That way you can also drive a smaller, more practical vehicle most of the time and rent a high-capacity one for the occasional road-trip, rather than trying to make sure that your grocery-getter can also serve every conceivable towing/carrying need you might have in the future.
To me, hacking is actually very American. Go out to the garage. Take it apart. Make it better.
Sad then that so many american companies are actively trying to restrict or remove people's abilities to do just that, especially on computers where unlike a car anyone can get into it without the need for specialist tools and there is no potential safety risk etc.
The reason this happens is that there's a large tendency on the part of many people to want to have their cake and eat it too. Your average "hacker" these days is someone who randomly follows vague directions given to them by strangers and, if they screw something up by not understanding what they're doing, expects the original manufacturer of their device to have it replaced at their expense.
This holds true whether you're talking about inompatible software "bricking" a phone, or engine modifications shredding a transmission.
I know people who ride competitively, reliability is key and introducing more components that can break or add weight is not going to get acceptance. Modulation is key and I really doubt you can simulate that with any wireless system.
That's what makes it an interesting exercise. It would be trivial - and non-newsworthy - to try to build a crappy on/of system that didn't work very well. It's far more interesting to try to figure out how to solve the problem and meet your criteria.
While all of these solutions are scalable they have terrible latency; especially when nodes are failing. RIM probably needs very low latency for it applications.
When the endpoint of its applications is either receiving traffic from, or sending traffic to, a small underpowered device typically at the end of a cellular network connection, I'd have to say that the latency of its inter-datacenter connectivity for its redundant backend data storage should be the least of its concerns.
Back when USB and Firewire where new (mid-90s). Apple was trying to push Firewire as the primary connection medium instead of USB and Microsoft was trying to push USB. Sure Firewire lasted for 10 years as a high end device, but I think its developers and supporters intended for it to be the ubiquitous connection that USB is now.
That explains why there was such an outcry when Microsoft forced manufacturers to stop providing PS/2 ports, even though every PC was still being sold with PS/2 mice and keyboards at the time.
Oh no, wait, that was Apple who did that wasn't it? My bad...
Can I daisy chain 2 displays and a little RAID array over USB? Can USB hold an external graphic card (and do a good job of it)? What about a custom accelerator card?
Thunderbolt does things USB can't. They aren't used for the same thing, their uses just overlap some.
When $500 consumer-grade laptops are coming stock with 500gb drives and happily pushing better-than-1080p-HD-graphics, 99.99% of people will never need to hook up anything. Unfortunately for your point, that day is now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Thunderbolt as a high-speed interconnect. Its just that wired interconnects are getting less and less interesting to anyone - but the other interesting point is that USB is going the same way. Many mice and keyboards are bluetooth. Printers are increasingly wi-fi. Displays are still wired, but streaming at least 1080p is not expensive these days and getting cheaper and more common...
Did you actually read that link? The technology mentioned in that very article, HSPA+, is completely supported by the iPhone 4S. Here's another link from the same site that backs up the speed claims.
But since Apple decided after nearly a year and a half to slap their loyal fans in the face and refused to produce and release any significant hardware improvements
So... 2x faster processor, 7x faster GPU, what seems like a 4x better (resolution and image quality) camera, 1080p with really solid image stab. for the video camera, 2x faster downloads, and no reduction in battery life isn't significant?
What, pray tell, were you hoping for exactly? Other than a different case with the number 5 blazoned accross the side? Screen size I see from your post, although its debatable whether that's better or worse (good for some, less so for others) and NFC certainly has a lot of utility to a few folk (I'd like to play with it as well, to be honest). But to dismiss the 4S improvements strikes me as a little unreasonable.
BTW, the iPhone now does support 1080p for video out and mirroring - its right on the "Tech Specs" page.
Scrolling the screen pops new content up from "within" the device. That makes absolutely no sense. It's eye candy that detracts from usability.
Not to be a fanboi, but the various animations in iOS serve to provide visual cues to the user on what is happening and how to use the UI. Apple is very up front in their UI guidelines about how animations should serve to inform the user on what is happening. This Android animation completely fails at that.
It looks fine to me. Like you are sliding the top page off of a stack of papers to reveal the one under it, only with a bit more 3D to it.
Ah, so when you swipe in the reverse direction, you'd expect the page to come back from the side and push the previous one back down on the stack?
Except, of course, that isn't what happens at all is it? Its mixing a stack metaphor (which I guess would make sense if you were, say, discarding the top email and reading the next one) with a multiple-panes view, and its doing it poorly.
Oddly enough, the home screens scroll normally left to right as you'd expect.
I too have an HTC Desire, but I still continue to use my HTC TyTN because of all the handy buttons, and the QWERTY keypad. I just don't understand why phone makers these days seem to think buttons are un-necessary. :(
Because with a lot of care, you can make it so. Unfortunately, there's far more to good (ie: usable) design than adding extra shiny things - and highly usable mimimalistic layouts are actually really, really hard to get right (and seem so "obvious" when you do that it fools others into thinking that they can make one too, just a little better).
Why do phones cost more than tablets, anyway? They sell more, and must be far cheaper to produce.
Must they? They have basically exactly the same hardware but in a package approximately 1/10 the volume, thus requiring smaller components, tighter manufacturing tolerances, and a massive amount of design elegance to achieve the same result. Smaller rarely equals cheaper in anything other than bulk product storage.
Nothing about it makes it not open source.
Well, other than that whole you-can't-get-the-source part. But yeah, except for that, nothing at all.
Yup. The video showed some pretty weird paging as well - moving around from left to right always moved the "current page" off to screen right or screen left, as it should. But on the home screen, the new page came in directly behind the page being abandoned, which seemed to make sense. In other places, even though the old page went off to the side, the new page zoomed up from "underneath" somewhere. Sure it works, but it certainly didn't feel predictible.
Flash now is basically Internet Explorer circa 2000, and we all know how well that turned out (some of us still have the pain of having to support it).
You mean that part when, despite its flaws, it continued to dominate the market for a decade?
Searches on my system (with several 2 TB drives) can take prohibitively long, particularly since I don't store all applications on the C system hard drive
That's a bug in Microsoft's indexing implementation then, not a problem with the approach itself.
FWIW, OSX's spotlight search generally runs 3-4 seconds when looking up something obscure and unreferenced in a similar amount of slow HD space.
4G wireless? You're right about that one point. Maybe the current chipsets are too power-hungry for Apple's taste.
Even with this ... really? Downloads are now available at 2X the speed of the iPhone 4, now up to 14mbps... other than downloading HD video to your phone (not streaming it, downloading it in bulk to watch later), isn't a 14mpbs speed still faster than most of the cel networks can reliably deliver? Its certainly faster than a lot of people's internet access over their DSL/cable modems.
And yet, actions by others which fall far deeper on the spectrum of rights violations are not prosecuted. When there's only one recent example of impeachment, and its for such an absolutely reasonable yet relatively trivial reason, its not too much of a stretch to wonder why that particular act deserved to be singled out.
Just so you know, all job-creating activities (investigating business opportunities, hiring people, et cetera) are already tax deductible. Lowering taxes on the money extracted from a business into a personal account decreases the chance that jobs will be created, by reducing the tax advantages of doing so.
In fairness, though, the Kindle really falls short when it comes time to seat 8 people for dinner.
And storing ~1TB to "as safe as its reasonably possible to ever be" currently costs about $140/mo. Transfer costs are approximately zero in the real world, and prices keep dropping gently over time.
Stick the actually important 100GB (probably less) into S3, and make sure the rest is on 2-3 computers, and you're fine.