I bought a MacBook as an upgrade to an old PowerBook in January. I went from a 15" matte screen with a not-so-great backlight to a 13" glossy screen with a much better backlight. I had reservations about the glossiness, but I've been completely won over - I can't say whether it's to do with the glossiness or just the better backlight, but the new screen is just so much clearer.
I also find that it's better in direct sunlight than the old matte screen... not that I'm in direct sunlight much.
The BBC's remit is to inform, educate and entertain. Watch Auntie's War On Smut if you can, it gives a good insight into how the BBC's emphasis was on informing and educating rather than entertaining until relatively recently.
Exactly. First of all, there are most likely lots of dumb rules that say things like, when comparing products, being open source isn't allowed to count as an advantage (it's a government, it almost certainly has stupid and arbitrary rules).
Secondly, the fact that Microsoft products have a huge presence in the Real World, which the EU occasionally has to deal with, means that their products are at a significant advantage from the word go.
To a government, using Microsoft products makes sense if you're thinking short-term, and using open-source products makes sense if you're thinking long-term.
Well I think we're in completely different markets, which is probably why we have different perspectives on it. I know loads of people with HDTVs, but cable is almost non-existent here (let alone on-demand cable). Sky HD is prohibitively expensive, the box alone is between £200 and £250 (so, at least $400). That's with a subscription, which increases by £10 if you want HD channels. So Blu-ray starts to look less of an expensive option. HD channels on Freeview are a few years away, by which time Blu-ray prices will have dropped.
You're also not considering that many people, having already bought an HDTV and having an expired cheap DVD player, might be willing to spend a little more money on their next shiny disc player (assuming prices drop over the next few months).
Just thought I'd mention as well, the digital switchover, which is beginning this year and will be complete by 2012, is driving sales of Freeview-compatible TVs in general, and many people will opt for an HDTV as the future-proofed option, which is why there are possibly more in my market than in yours.
What's more likely is that as old and/or cheap DVD players start to break down, they'll be replaced by Blu-ray players instead of DVD players. That's a trend that will increase as DVD players get older and Blu-ray players get cheaper. The two £20 DVD players that my parents have are on their last legs, although one of them has been replaced by a Mac Mini.
What's also possible is that, bearing the above in mind, those cautious people that sat out the HD DVD/Blu-ray format war will now opt for Blu-ray as the future-proofed option when they're looking for a new shiny disc player (assuming, of course, that some Profile 2 players start to appear on shop shelves).
there's certainly no way to prove that there's not a god
I think that's the entire point, it fails the falsifiability test and therefore lies outside the realm of science. At this point you have to accept that science cannot provide the answers to all the questions a person might ask about the universe. The choice then is to decide whether these questions can be answered by other means (i.e. religion), or if they simply cannot be answered. It's possible for a person to consider science the be-all and end-all of knowledge, but some might also (erroneously IMO) extend that to the be-all and end-all of existence.
I usually consider myself an atheist, and I'm quite aware that this is a belief. I don't believe that it is possible for a true god to exist in our 'plane of existence', if you can call it that. Some say that one could have existed before the Big Bang, but Stephen Hawking has a nice analogy: asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole. So I discount the possibility of a god existing before the Big Bang, because it is a concept invented by human minds.
I am coming round to the simulated reality argument, ever since I read The Algebraist by Iain Banks. It's an idea that I can easily visualise. Of course, making the leap from atheism to agnosticism is only half the battle if anybody wants to convert me to a full-blown religious nutjob, as I still need to be persuaded that any god deserves my worship, or has moral authority over me.
I always laugh when I hear Americans talk about 'liberals' as being left-wing, given that that particular ideology is generally regarded as being at the centre of the political spectrum in Europe.
One of the things I notice on Slashdot is that there's a backlash whenever a government ever tries to legislate, especially when it's the EU trying to improve consumer protection - the general idea being that they should keep their collective noses out of other people's business.
I find it odd that Americans (as Slashdotters predominantly are), whose society prides itself on being democratic, would rather take power away from their democratic institutions and hand it to undemocratic corporations. The free market theoretically exists to control the amount of power that a corporation can accumulate, but I've found that Slashdotters oppose state intervention even in instances where the free market does not operate properly (i.e. monopoly situations).
It could be that this is because the US electoral system doesn't perform as it should. The usual example I use is the US Electoral College, where the presidential election is skewed by the first-past-the-post system used entirely out of context, and is provided for by the constitution. In cases where the electoral system is flawed, why should you trust a government any more than a corporation?
The GP mentions the issue of EU countries' constitutions - I live in the UK where there is no constitution, and ultimate power is invested in parliament, which makes it much easier to dispose of anachronisms in our voting systems.
Of course I might be on the wrong track entirely. It occurs to me that the most common sense I ever hear from politicians comes from two places: the UK House of Lords and the EU Commission - both unelected bodies. It's possible that politicians are more able to act in the public good when they don't have to worry about the next election.
For a while, British Gas were advertising their website as house.co.uk. Now, call me crazy, but if I was looking for the British Gas website I would probably type in britishgas.co.uk (which is what house.co.uk redirects to), or I would type 'British Gas' into Google.
And if I was typing in house.co.uk into my address bar without knowing who owned it, I probably wouldn't be expecting to see the website of a purveyor of piped fossil fuels.
Another point - Apple make it very easy to try out the iPhone before you buy (well, as long as you live near an Apple Store anyway).
In a normal mobile phone shop, you're confronted with dummy phones. All you get is an approximation of what the phone will look like. If you want a demo, you have to ask the assistants, most of whom are there not to help you, but to try and sell you a contract. When I last tried to have a phone demoed to me, the salesman was reluctant to even let me hold it - he wanted to be in control of the demo, to make sure I was aware of all the wonderful features I didn't care about. It wasn't a good experience and I don't really feel that I learned all that much.
In an Apple Store, you walk in, and there are iPhones laid out on tables, switched on, pre-loaded with SIM cards and connected to the unsecured WiFi network that Apple provides. You're free to make calls, send texts and connect to the internet, without being chaperoned by a sales person. You have the opportunity to get to know the phone, for better or for worse, without even talking to a salesperson.
I've never seen a phone that was network-subsidised that didn't come with some form of craplet on it. Maybe I'm just looking at the wrong phones/networks.
Buying an iPhone is part of my dastardly scheme to switch providers, the iPhone being tied by O2. I'm really just sticking with T-Mobile until my current contract reaches its end, and/or a 3G iPhone is released (there are plenty of reasons why I want an iPhone, and plenty of reasons why I don't want one now).
Not only that, but the iPhone is free of all the crap that the networks insist on putting on your phone.
T-Mobile UK have intentionally made my Samsung Z560 more annoying to use. The most infuriating example is the web browser's bookmarks list. At the top of the list are two bookmarks for 'T-Mobile Favourites' and 't-zones'. You can't delete them, or even move them to another position on the list. The worst part is that the phone only shows three bookmarks on the screen at a time, you have to scroll to see more. So when I open my bookmarks menu, I see one of my bookmarks, and two that T-Mobile want me to see.
So basically, I'm buying an iPhone as soon as a 3G model comes out.
-being able to be -EASILY- used as a modem for a portable computer via USB/BlueTooth (especially with the added 3G support)
You'll find that most mobile phone contracts explicitly forbid the use of the data service with a PC. The O2 iPhone contract doesn't, however it does explicitly forbid the use of the SIM card in any device other than your iPhone.
Apple appear to be taking advantage that many people are unaware how almost every phone (even cheap ones) can do Internet access as standard, so they are able to promote it as a new and wonderful thing (even on Slashdot, I see this happening).
I'm sure they're also attracting the people that have tried out the browsers on their phones, and found them so painful to use that they've just given up. I'm one of them - I never use the browser on my Samsung Z560 unless I really have to. In contrast, I'll browse the web on my iPod Touch quite happily - it's not as good as a desktop browser, but it's not that far off.
In fact, I was ranting to my boss just now about the fact that my phone browser forgets cookies when the browser is closed (which happens every time you close the clamshell, annoyingly). It's particularly apparent when using PayPal Mobile, which shows you a regular login page by default. You can opt to log in using your mobile number and a PIN, and if you've got the cookie you'll be automatically redirected. Mine, unfortunately, forgets the cookie.
Suspension isn't really backgrounding, it's just saving the state of the program while you're off doing something else (i.e. making a call). If the iPhone doesn't support some sort of suspension (and I'd be very surprised), I guess programmers will have to be aware that they should save the program's state when they receive a kill signal from the OS.
Nobody's forcing you to install unsigned software. In fact, just about every phone will warn you that you're installing unsigned code at install time. This hasn't been an issue with J2ME phones, I don't see how the iPhone is any different.
The way J2ME operates is far more sensible than a total ban. Every time an unsigned program wants to make use of a 'restricted' API, the user is prompted. This stops anything malicious from happening.
Banning background processes?
If you're doing the above, then this additional step is completely pointless and only serves to limit the usefulness of your platform. It's not like the backgrounding abilities of Symbian phones have brought down the phone networks yet.
Everybody. The iPhone is the only modern phone I can think of that doesn't support J2ME, and most smartphones (Symbian, Blackberry) have their own APIs for creating native apps.
Admittedly, most J2ME-only phones don't support multitasking and, like the iPhone, are incapable of running in the background, so TFA is wrong to say that "That's a limitation nobody's had to contend with for a couple of decades". But this isn't the case for most smartphones. This is a restriction that I can see being restricted relatively soon, once developers start to realise just how limiting this restriction is.
Funny you should say that. Just today my boss was telling us at work how he'd bought a Dell PC for about £170, including VAT and shipping. Pretty damn cheap. The problem is that there are other costs involved if you want to turn that PC into a web-facing development platform, which is what I'm currently using EC2 for - mostly man hours, but also stuff like electricity, backup solutions, a reliable internet connection, and physical space. To a company with five employees, these costs aren't insignificant.
We use virtual servers hosted by Pipex Webfusion at the moment, but their current Linux offering is a version of Fedora Core that's years out of date and quite inadequate. We've also had one major outage with them, where our server was inaccessible for a number of days. Last week I finally snapped, and dived head-first into EC2; fortunately EC2 is one of my boss's 'new toys', so he didn't seem to mind that I'd added several days onto the length of the project.
The advantages to us are that the servers are there when we need them, and costing us absolutely nothing when we don't. They're cheap, and much, much more flexible than our Webfusion service.
If this happens, I think it will be confined to the motorways and dual carriageways. I can't see it being rolled out to single carriageway roads.
Driverless cars will still be owned by private individuals, otherwise they would just be driverless taxis, or maybe analogous to those city car schemes. Their acceptance would therefore be limited, and there wouldn't be an appreciable route to market.
There will also be a transition period, where cars come with the necessary equipment as standard, in anticipation of the systems coming online. This means that instead of moving from a driven vehicle to a driverless vehicle, drivers will be asked to give up control of their existing cars. I can't see that happening without fierce opposition.
But at the same time, to get the most benefit out of a driverless system, you have to exclude human drivers. Imagine the hotshot business executive who's late for a meeting, and sitting in his driverless car on a motorway doing, say, 85mph. He has a £500,000 salary, a large, powerful car, an over-inflated sense of self-importance and thinks he owns the road. So he decides that 85mph just isn't fast enough, and that he can go faster if he initiates the override and puts his foot down. Chaos ensues, as every other car on the road has to compensate.
The logical extension, then is for some roads to enforce computer control, and for others to lack it. The most sensible application for computer control is on the long, straight, boring roads where many drivers are using cruise-control anyway. Other roads, where there is plenty to hold the driver's attention, and where the benefits of computer control are smaller due to less traffic, are left untouched.
I thought it odd that public financing was on the list too. It's been discussed here in the UK, and the prevailing opinion seems to be that nobody wants taxpayers' money to be spent on the campaigns of parties like the BNP. Every system of party campaign finance is going to be flawed, but this seems like a flaw that nobody wants to stomach.
You realise that NASA is a US government agency, don't you? Those 'worthless bureaucratic tax feeders' were responsible for just about every advancement into space that the US has ever made...
...with the exception of SpaceShipOne of course. Well done. Of course, SpaceShipTwo will be a joint venture with Virgin Galactic, a British company.
Ironically, you could say that British manned flight is more skewed towards private enterprise than it has ever been in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a MacBook as an upgrade to an old PowerBook in January. I went from a 15" matte screen with a not-so-great backlight to a 13" glossy screen with a much better backlight. I had reservations about the glossiness, but I've been completely won over - I can't say whether it's to do with the glossiness or just the better backlight, but the new screen is just so much clearer.
I also find that it's better in direct sunlight than the old matte screen... not that I'm in direct sunlight much.
The BBC's remit is to inform, educate and entertain. Watch Auntie's War On Smut if you can, it gives a good insight into how the BBC's emphasis was on informing and educating rather than entertaining until relatively recently.
But I'd love to see them try! That said, I can't see productivity levels dropping far from current EU government levels...
Exactly. First of all, there are most likely lots of dumb rules that say things like, when comparing products, being open source isn't allowed to count as an advantage (it's a government, it almost certainly has stupid and arbitrary rules).
Secondly, the fact that Microsoft products have a huge presence in the Real World, which the EU occasionally has to deal with, means that their products are at a significant advantage from the word go.
To a government, using Microsoft products makes sense if you're thinking short-term, and using open-source products makes sense if you're thinking long-term.
It's possible to a degree, although you still have to wear something on your head and it's one screen per person, so it wouldn't work in a cinema.
Well I think we're in completely different markets, which is probably why we have different perspectives on it. I know loads of people with HDTVs, but cable is almost non-existent here (let alone on-demand cable). Sky HD is prohibitively expensive, the box alone is between £200 and £250 (so, at least $400). That's with a subscription, which increases by £10 if you want HD channels. So Blu-ray starts to look less of an expensive option. HD channels on Freeview are a few years away, by which time Blu-ray prices will have dropped.
You're also not considering that many people, having already bought an HDTV and having an expired cheap DVD player, might be willing to spend a little more money on their next shiny disc player (assuming prices drop over the next few months).
Just thought I'd mention as well, the digital switchover, which is beginning this year and will be complete by 2012, is driving sales of Freeview-compatible TVs in general, and many people will opt for an HDTV as the future-proofed option, which is why there are possibly more in my market than in yours.
What's more likely is that as old and/or cheap DVD players start to break down, they'll be replaced by Blu-ray players instead of DVD players. That's a trend that will increase as DVD players get older and Blu-ray players get cheaper. The two £20 DVD players that my parents have are on their last legs, although one of them has been replaced by a Mac Mini.
What's also possible is that, bearing the above in mind, those cautious people that sat out the HD DVD/Blu-ray format war will now opt for Blu-ray as the future-proofed option when they're looking for a new shiny disc player (assuming, of course, that some Profile 2 players start to appear on shop shelves).
I think that's the entire point, it fails the falsifiability test and therefore lies outside the realm of science. At this point you have to accept that science cannot provide the answers to all the questions a person might ask about the universe. The choice then is to decide whether these questions can be answered by other means (i.e. religion), or if they simply cannot be answered. It's possible for a person to consider science the be-all and end-all of knowledge, but some might also (erroneously IMO) extend that to the be-all and end-all of existence.
I usually consider myself an atheist, and I'm quite aware that this is a belief. I don't believe that it is possible for a true god to exist in our 'plane of existence', if you can call it that. Some say that one could have existed before the Big Bang, but Stephen Hawking has a nice analogy: asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole. So I discount the possibility of a god existing before the Big Bang, because it is a concept invented by human minds.
I am coming round to the simulated reality argument, ever since I read The Algebraist by Iain Banks. It's an idea that I can easily visualise. Of course, making the leap from atheism to agnosticism is only half the battle if anybody wants to convert me to a full-blown religious nutjob, as I still need to be persuaded that any god deserves my worship, or has moral authority over me.
I always laugh when I hear Americans talk about 'liberals' as being left-wing, given that that particular ideology is generally regarded as being at the centre of the political spectrum in Europe.
One of the things I notice on Slashdot is that there's a backlash whenever a government ever tries to legislate, especially when it's the EU trying to improve consumer protection - the general idea being that they should keep their collective noses out of other people's business.
I find it odd that Americans (as Slashdotters predominantly are), whose society prides itself on being democratic, would rather take power away from their democratic institutions and hand it to undemocratic corporations. The free market theoretically exists to control the amount of power that a corporation can accumulate, but I've found that Slashdotters oppose state intervention even in instances where the free market does not operate properly (i.e. monopoly situations).
It could be that this is because the US electoral system doesn't perform as it should. The usual example I use is the US Electoral College, where the presidential election is skewed by the first-past-the-post system used entirely out of context, and is provided for by the constitution. In cases where the electoral system is flawed, why should you trust a government any more than a corporation?
The GP mentions the issue of EU countries' constitutions - I live in the UK where there is no constitution, and ultimate power is invested in parliament, which makes it much easier to dispose of anachronisms in our voting systems.
Of course I might be on the wrong track entirely. It occurs to me that the most common sense I ever hear from politicians comes from two places: the UK House of Lords and the EU Commission - both unelected bodies. It's possible that politicians are more able to act in the public good when they don't have to worry about the next election.
For a while, British Gas were advertising their website as house.co.uk. Now, call me crazy, but if I was looking for the British Gas website I would probably type in britishgas.co.uk (which is what house.co.uk redirects to), or I would type 'British Gas' into Google.
And if I was typing in house.co.uk into my address bar without knowing who owned it, I probably wouldn't be expecting to see the website of a purveyor of piped fossil fuels.
Another point - Apple make it very easy to try out the iPhone before you buy (well, as long as you live near an Apple Store anyway).
In a normal mobile phone shop, you're confronted with dummy phones. All you get is an approximation of what the phone will look like. If you want a demo, you have to ask the assistants, most of whom are there not to help you, but to try and sell you a contract. When I last tried to have a phone demoed to me, the salesman was reluctant to even let me hold it - he wanted to be in control of the demo, to make sure I was aware of all the wonderful features I didn't care about. It wasn't a good experience and I don't really feel that I learned all that much.
In an Apple Store, you walk in, and there are iPhones laid out on tables, switched on, pre-loaded with SIM cards and connected to the unsecured WiFi network that Apple provides. You're free to make calls, send texts and connect to the internet, without being chaperoned by a sales person. You have the opportunity to get to know the phone, for better or for worse, without even talking to a salesperson.
I've never seen a phone that was network-subsidised that didn't come with some form of craplet on it. Maybe I'm just looking at the wrong phones/networks.
Buying an iPhone is part of my dastardly scheme to switch providers, the iPhone being tied by O2. I'm really just sticking with T-Mobile until my current contract reaches its end, and/or a 3G iPhone is released (there are plenty of reasons why I want an iPhone, and plenty of reasons why I don't want one now).
Not only that, but the iPhone is free of all the crap that the networks insist on putting on your phone.
T-Mobile UK have intentionally made my Samsung Z560 more annoying to use. The most infuriating example is the web browser's bookmarks list. At the top of the list are two bookmarks for 'T-Mobile Favourites' and 't-zones'. You can't delete them, or even move them to another position on the list. The worst part is that the phone only shows three bookmarks on the screen at a time, you have to scroll to see more. So when I open my bookmarks menu, I see one of my bookmarks, and two that T-Mobile want me to see.
So basically, I'm buying an iPhone as soon as a 3G model comes out.
You'll find that most mobile phone contracts explicitly forbid the use of the data service with a PC. The O2 iPhone contract doesn't, however it does explicitly forbid the use of the SIM card in any device other than your iPhone.
I'm sure they're also attracting the people that have tried out the browsers on their phones, and found them so painful to use that they've just given up. I'm one of them - I never use the browser on my Samsung Z560 unless I really have to. In contrast, I'll browse the web on my iPod Touch quite happily - it's not as good as a desktop browser, but it's not that far off.
In fact, I was ranting to my boss just now about the fact that my phone browser forgets cookies when the browser is closed (which happens every time you close the clamshell, annoyingly). It's particularly apparent when using PayPal Mobile, which shows you a regular login page by default. You can opt to log in using your mobile number and a PIN, and if you've got the cookie you'll be automatically redirected. Mine, unfortunately, forgets the cookie.
Suspension isn't really backgrounding, it's just saving the state of the program while you're off doing something else (i.e. making a call). If the iPhone doesn't support some sort of suspension (and I'd be very surprised), I guess programmers will have to be aware that they should save the program's state when they receive a kill signal from the OS.
Nobody's forcing you to install unsigned software. In fact, just about every phone will warn you that you're installing unsigned code at install time. This hasn't been an issue with J2ME phones, I don't see how the iPhone is any different.
The way J2ME operates is far more sensible than a total ban. Every time an unsigned program wants to make use of a 'restricted' API, the user is prompted. This stops anything malicious from happening.
If you're doing the above, then this additional step is completely pointless and only serves to limit the usefulness of your platform. It's not like the backgrounding abilities of Symbian phones have brought down the phone networks yet.
Everybody. The iPhone is the only modern phone I can think of that doesn't support J2ME, and most smartphones (Symbian, Blackberry) have their own APIs for creating native apps.
Admittedly, most J2ME-only phones don't support multitasking and, like the iPhone, are incapable of running in the background, so TFA is wrong to say that "That's a limitation nobody's had to contend with for a couple of decades". But this isn't the case for most smartphones. This is a restriction that I can see being restricted relatively soon, once developers start to realise just how limiting this restriction is.
Funny you should say that. Just today my boss was telling us at work how he'd bought a Dell PC for about £170, including VAT and shipping. Pretty damn cheap. The problem is that there are other costs involved if you want to turn that PC into a web-facing development platform, which is what I'm currently using EC2 for - mostly man hours, but also stuff like electricity, backup solutions, a reliable internet connection, and physical space. To a company with five employees, these costs aren't insignificant.
We use virtual servers hosted by Pipex Webfusion at the moment, but their current Linux offering is a version of Fedora Core that's years out of date and quite inadequate. We've also had one major outage with them, where our server was inaccessible for a number of days. Last week I finally snapped, and dived head-first into EC2; fortunately EC2 is one of my boss's 'new toys', so he didn't seem to mind that I'd added several days onto the length of the project.
The advantages to us are that the servers are there when we need them, and costing us absolutely nothing when we don't. They're cheap, and much, much more flexible than our Webfusion service.
If this happens, I think it will be confined to the motorways and dual carriageways. I can't see it being rolled out to single carriageway roads.
Driverless cars will still be owned by private individuals, otherwise they would just be driverless taxis, or maybe analogous to those city car schemes. Their acceptance would therefore be limited, and there wouldn't be an appreciable route to market.
There will also be a transition period, where cars come with the necessary equipment as standard, in anticipation of the systems coming online. This means that instead of moving from a driven vehicle to a driverless vehicle, drivers will be asked to give up control of their existing cars. I can't see that happening without fierce opposition.
But at the same time, to get the most benefit out of a driverless system, you have to exclude human drivers. Imagine the hotshot business executive who's late for a meeting, and sitting in his driverless car on a motorway doing, say, 85mph. He has a £500,000 salary, a large, powerful car, an over-inflated sense of self-importance and thinks he owns the road. So he decides that 85mph just isn't fast enough, and that he can go faster if he initiates the override and puts his foot down. Chaos ensues, as every other car on the road has to compensate.
The logical extension, then is for some roads to enforce computer control, and for others to lack it. The most sensible application for computer control is on the long, straight, boring roads where many drivers are using cruise-control anyway. Other roads, where there is plenty to hold the driver's attention, and where the benefits of computer control are smaller due to less traffic, are left untouched.
I thought it odd that public financing was on the list too. It's been discussed here in the UK, and the prevailing opinion seems to be that nobody wants taxpayers' money to be spent on the campaigns of parties like the BNP. Every system of party campaign finance is going to be flawed, but this seems like a flaw that nobody wants to stomach.
Or perhaps a little gravitas...
You realise that NASA is a US government agency, don't you? Those 'worthless bureaucratic tax feeders' were responsible for just about every advancement into space that the US has ever made...
...with the exception of SpaceShipOne of course. Well done. Of course, SpaceShipTwo will be a joint venture with Virgin Galactic, a British company.
Ironically, you could say that British manned flight is more skewed towards private enterprise than it has ever been in the US.
That's the one! The Wikipedia page also has a fair bit of info on it. And Lovefilm has it on DVD, so I'll be adding that to my rental queue.