The annoying thing though, is that you cannot buy an unlocked iPhone to use with anything but a GSM carrier.
That doesn't have anything to do with phone. Sprint and Verizon just won't activate a CDMA-unlocked phone on their networks. It has to be one of their phones for them to activate it. No technical reason for it, just vendor-enforced lock-in. (I use Sprint BTW.)
See the scrollbar on the right as you browse slashdot? Click above or below it, not on it. Will you look at that, it scrolls up or down a page at a time. You'll find that the aptly-named page-up and page-down keys do the same thing.
A dedicated gesture for this would be handy. But that really belongs in the OS, not the browser. We still need the scroll bar (whether it's visible, or hidden and you can scroll by dragging your finger up/down) so you can position text and pictures just the way you want on a page.
Some of CNN's "live coverage" from Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War was shot in a studio. That's not to say CNN is the only press agency doing this. From what friends and relatives who've worked in journalism tell me, this happens to differing extents pretty much everywhere. The truth is quite often mundane and boring, and needs to be spruced up to make it worthy of airing so people won't change the channel.
Microsoft's technique is more limited in that it only works on camera shake. It cannot correct for mis-focus (which granted, isn't usually a problem with the tiny sensors on most phone cameras).
Calculating the point spread function from the photo can correct for both, and is the more general-purpose and more powerful technique. I can see using Microsoft's technique to augment the general purpose one though. Figuring out the PSF due to camera shake can be really hard when the photo is badly out of focus. And figuring out the PSF due to mis-focus can be difficult if the camera shake loops back on itself (i.e. there's no axis along which blurring is due entirely to mis-focus and not camera shake).
There have been third party programs doing this for nearly a decade. This is also the "trick" behind the light field camera. You simultaneously capture multiple versions of a scene, back out the distance information based on depth of field effects (diameter of the point spread functions at each location in each image), then use all that to reconstruct what the photo would have looked like with the focus at a plane of your choosing.
Very handy for macro photos and microscopy where narrow depth of field frequently makes it impossible to get more than a tiny sliver of the subject in focus. Long-term, I predict this is going to replace the bulky "professional" lenses carried by many DSLR photographers. One of the primary reasons to use these large lenses is to narrow the field of view to isolate the subject (blur the background and foreground). You can accomplish the same thing with a smaller lens, a light field camera, and some number crunching. (The other primary reason is for speed in low-light situations, which is becoming less important over time as CCD and CMOS sensitivity constantly improves).
Yeah, this is standard math. A completely out-of-focus picture actually contains nearly as much information as a sharp photo, it's just smeared with a reversible mathematical transform called a point spread function. Reverse it and you get the in-focus image back. There have been third party programs to do this for about a decade. The main problems have been processing speed (it could take a half hour or more a decade ago), determining the point spread function (you have both focus and camera shake, and the former can make figuring out the latter really hard), lens/sensor defects and image format compression (the PSF you calculate for a local region may not work well for the entire picture), and boundary conditions.
Similar story to ArsDigita. Basically venture capitalists and MBAs were brought in in exchange for a cash infusion. They only had minority control of the company, but used a loophole in the company's bylaws to force out the founders, and seize control of the company. Philip took down his version of the page after the settlement, but it had already been mirrored on the net by then. Best quote: "I related my response to a member of the Harvard faculty who asked me what it was like to watch venture capitalists and professional managers run ArsDigita (I replied "like watching a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off")."
Apparently they never did figure out the right combination of switches to flip. Less than a year after the settlement, they'd driven the company into the dirt and the company's key assets were sold to Red Hat.
The other way they bungled the launch is that they didn't (and still don't) support Google+ for people with Google Apps for Domains. People with Google Apps for Domains are dedicated Google users. They're already beholden to gmail and the other Google apps. If they had access to a Google social networking system, they'd unquestionably use it and stick with it. And yet, Google gave them the finger, seemingly deliberately excluding them from the pool of G+ users.
I even saw a somewhat disturbing piece on one of those Sunday shows asserting that Steve Jobs was indeed the FOUR most important people to influence technology in the past half century, since calling him the single most important person was apparently already too low a tribute. Steve was clearly very influential but to blindly say that he was "The most influential in history" is a huge reach.
I think what we're seeing here is a dichotomy between technophiles like Slashdot users, and laypeople who use computers but don't understand how they work. To the open source technophile, being able to grab the source, fix a bug or add a feature, and compile it is a perk. To the lay person it's the same thing as telling them they have access to all the parts to build a rocket to go to the moon. They couldn't do it in a thousand years even if they tried, and so it's a nonexistent benefit to them - a non-feature.
Apple's allure to regular people, and Jobs' particular influence, is that they make all this complicated technology easy to use. Yeah they severely limit the tech geek in the process, but most regular people simply don't care. To them, the alternative is barely being able to use the technology at all. That's what makes Jobs one of the most important influences on technology in the minds of most laypeople (i.e. the great majority of the population).
I'm an engineer by trade and this is one of the things which confounds me about programmers ("software engineers"). One of the most basic tenets of engineering is KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. Yet programmers, and especially the Linux culture, seem to delight in making things more complicated rather than simpler. They advocate Gentoo, and express shock and dismay that the "dumbed down" Ubuntu distro is the most popular. It's ok to revel in the bits and pieces that make technology work. But for the vast majority of people, the technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself -- a mere tool. Those bits and pieces need to be as invisible as possible so these people can use the tool to get their work done.
With Jobs' passing, end users lost one of their biggest advocates for this simplicity in an industry full of tech geeks who love to tinker with the nuts and bolts. That's why the mainstream media is going ga-ga over this while tech sites like Slashdot are yawning.
Negotiating with studios for streaming rights probably had something to do with it. The DVD rental by mail business was an established business model. It may not have had the greatest margins, but it was cash-flow positive. Streaming OTOH was a new business model. Netflix thought it could support x% of revenue allocated to licensing costs. The studios thought it could support a much higher percentage.
By having both business operating under the same roof, Netflix could offset some of the risk of streaming with its mail-DVD cashflow. If their negotiations with the studios erred too much in the studios' favor, they could stay afloat by cannibalizing profit from mailed DVDs. By (1) separating out the accounting of the two businesses (what they tried when they separated pricing for streaming vs. mailed DVDs), or (2) separating the two businesses entirely, they removed that safety net. They could legitimately argue with the studios that "hey, our numbers just don't work with the amounts you want for streaming licenses - people just aren't willing to pay that much and we will go broke."
I suspect they're trying to prevent the streaming business from becoming like movie theaters, where they do all the distribution work but nearly all the revenue goes to the studios, and they have to sell overpriced popcorn and drinks to stay afloat.
Separate lines for lunch? Who could ever think this was a good idea. Sure, let the students doing well get some perks, just don't go around printing "Dumb" on the lesser achieving kids' foreheads.
It's funny how many people are saying this. You do realize they're the same thing? If you give the students doing well some perks, the ones who didn't get perks are the "dumb" ones. Once social stigma comes into play, rewarding positive achievement becomes the same thing as punishing poor achievement. You either have to coddle the self-esteem of the poor achievers as we've been doing, or bite the bullet and show kids that doing well results in good things while doing poorly results in (relatively) bad things.
IMHO the lesson we need to be teaching kids is to never give up despite failure. Having things work on the first try is exceedingly rare, and it can take dozens if not hundreds of tries before you figure out a way which succeeds. Setting goals, hard work, and persistence are the key. But people who've successfully removed the negative stigma from failure in schools have mutated this into the notion that it's ok to fail. (Note: I'm not entirely blaming schools. The rate at which liars and cheats are rewarded in the real world (e.g. politics, finance) hasn't helped matters either.)
In all fairness, phreaking had negative connotations at the time (once you explained to people what it was). But since it exploited a company (Ma Bell) which was eventually found to be an illegal, controlling, price-fixing monopoly that was forcibly broken up, it has a neutral to positive connotation today. Likewise, once we regain our senses, the security hysteria of the last decade will probably be viewed much as McCarthyism is today. And those who rebelled against it will be viewed in a much more positive light.
I can understand a short-term exclusive deal to kick off a new book or device, but in the long-term this exclusive nonsense has got to end. Otherwise you get the stupidity that's happened on consoles, where if you buy only one console you're forever locked out of certain game titles. If this trend by book publishers continues (e.g. exclusive magazine deals with the iPad), in 20 years you'll need a dozen TVs in your house in order to get all the "exclusive" channels you want.
Hardware should compete against hardware. Software should compete against software (and books/music/TV shows/movies are software). Service should compete against service. Cross-bundling them leads to bad things. I thought we learned that when we originally broke up AT&T.
I find it difficult to believe that people are buying new machines with less than 4 gig of ram. Memory was cheap by the time Win7 came out - cheap enough to load a new machine with 4 gig, anyway. Maybe I'm something of an asshole, but anyone who invests hundreds of dollars in a new machine, and decides to go cheap on the memory deserves to have a shitty running machine.
If you buy a pre-built machine (which 99% of people do), the worst thing you can do is buy it with lots of memory. Desktops and laptops have ridiculously thin margins. The big manufacturers rely on upgrades and add-ons for profit. Consequently, the 4GB which costs them $10 from their supplier and sells for $15 retail, will cost you $50 if you buy it with a new machine. I buy lots of computers for family, friends, and clients. If possible, I'd buy them all with no memory and just buy my own memory modules to add in. The base configurations usually do stupid things like put in two 1GB SODIMMs into a laptop, forcing you to throw them away if you upgrade it to 8 GB.
And so we end up in a situation where laypeople don't get the memory upgrade in the pre-built system because techies like us taught them that it's a rip-off. But they don't know how to buy/add new memory on their own. So they undeservingly end up stuck running low memory systems.
And I explained why GSM alone would have resulted in slower network speeds today than a mix of GSM and CDMA. The mix was crucial to finding which worked better in real-world use.
CDMA wiped the floor with GSM. The original TDMA/GSM is only used for voice today. TDMA/GSM is pathetic because you allocate exclusive bandwidth to a phone even if it's never used. It's still tolerated for voice because voice uses so little bandwidth, but it's completely unsuitable for data. That's why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G years before the GSM carriers. The CDMA carriers just cranked up the bandwidth of their voice hardware (which is why you cannot simultaneously talk and use the web on CDMA 3G - they use the same radio). The GSM carriers had to come up with an entirely new network protocol and hardware based on wideband CDMA, then graft it onto GSM in order to compete (which is why you can simultaneously talk and use the web on GSM 3G - their voice and data use different radios). That's right, GSM was forced to adopt CDMA for data to stay competitive.
If the US had mandated GSM as a standard instead of letting the market decide, the world would probably still be stuck with 128 kbps cellular data network speeds today because it would've been illegal to use the superior technology. CDMA is now being superseded by variants of OFDMA which require a lot more signal processing. CPUs have gotten fast enough and low power enough to make that practical now on a mobile device without killing your battery life.
I do agree though that GSM's SIM card is the way to go.
After the Tienanmen massacre in 1989, the government solicited propaganda from the public in support of the crackdown. One of these was a poem anonymously submitted to the state newspaper, praising the government for its actions ending the protests. It was published, and only then was it discovered that if you read the Chinese characters diagonally, it said Deng Xaioping must pay for his crimes against the people.
Disney is actually one of the few studios who will replace damaged discs for a nominal shipping and handling fee. Probably because so many kids destroy the discs and tapes. In that respect, they are upholding the "you only bought a license" model of buying DVDs. The other studios are cheating by telling you you only bought a license, but if you try to get them to fulfill their obligations as a licensor and request a replacement for damaged media, they'll tell you to buy another one.
I think you're not giving Jobs enough credit even for the first wave of personal computers.
I think you're not giving Woz enough credit.
Although Jobs had his part, it was Woz that designed the first two generations of apple computers himself.
(I am an engineer.) Most engineers who found their first company go bankrupt because they think a product will sell on its technical merits alone. They eschew marketing, considering marketers to be liars who sell through deception. The ones who succeed do so after figuring out that a successful company needs a combination of good engineering and good marketing.
Woz was the engineering genius. Jobs was the marketing genius. Without each other, they both likely would've ended up mere footnotes in history.
Riess, who was still in his 20s when the groundbreaking research was published, said he told his daughter, 7, that winning the Nobel prize was "like getting a great big gold sticker on your homework."
You can't. Because they didn't like the look of the big, floor-to-ceiling look of the old XP system, they shrunk it all down so that it only shows 5-6 items at a time and has a scrollbar.
Right click start menu -> properties -> customize -> (near the bottom) Start menu size: Number of recent programs to display
Increase its value for a taller start menu. But yeah, I agree with you, having to scroll through my list of programs in the start menu is annoying when I have tons of screen space available. Once upon a time, user interface design was all about letting the user accomplish a task with the fewest keystrokes/mouse actions possible. Somewhere along the way, some OCD designer got onto their UI team and appearance took priority. Now they have a start menu which always looks pretty, but forces users to do all sorts of unnecessary scrolling or clicking or (if you make the control panel a pop-up menu) waiting while things slowly auto-scroll to get at something which used to be available immediately.
But American conservatives (and Republicans in particular) are about as far as it gets from "dealing in facts" these days and are more anti-science than the far left.
This is one of the myths created by the left. The actual facts are, the recent Bush administration massively increased Federal funding for science, with the vast majority of the increase being non-defense. It's just that the left blew the SSC cancellation, embryonic stem cell research ban, and some purported fiddling with climate research completely out of proportion, and used them to paint Bush as anti-science. A false stigma which survives to this day because it continues to be parroted by those on the left who don't check facts themselves
The latest version of the graph is in this PDF if you want to see how Obama is doing. He's holding steady with Bush in dollars spent. If you go to the next chart, it shows science R&D funding as percent of GDP since 1976. You'll see it was highest during Carter and Reagan but dipped towards the end, more or less held steady on that low note with Bush Sr., but dropped massively under Clinton, Rose massively under Bush, and is dropping again under Obama. I'll let the reader conclude which party is more friendly to science.
People don't know what is and isn't safe. Different government agencies give different, and more often than not, contradictory reports. People aren't necessarily afraid of the radiation. They're afraid because they don't know what to believe. They don't evac because one report says they're safe, but then they think they should because another one says they're not.
This is a consequence of ethical restrictions on biomedical research. Not saying those are bad to have, just saying that this is one of the consequences of having them. The majority of what we know about long-term exposure of people to low levels of radiation comes, ironically, from survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ethical considerations prevent further systematic scientific research on the topic. Consequently, there are two trains of thought when it comes to radiation exposure:
A) We know a certain amount of radiation is fatal. We know that there is no cellular damage from zero radiation exposure. Draw a line between these two points, and assume that cellular damage is proportional to radiation exposure.
B) Most of the survivors of the atomic bombings lived long, healthy lives. Cancer rates were not excessively higher than the norm. The same holds for cities in areas with higher than average levels of normal background radiation. So the body appears to have some ability to repair small to moderate amounts of damage from radiation.
Depending on which train of thought you subscribe to, either "stay the h*ll away from Fukushima" or "it's safe" are both correct answers. And until we get more data from unintended experiments in widescale radiation contamination like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it'll continue to be debated whether (A) or (B) is correct.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't have anything to do with phone. Sprint and Verizon just won't activate a CDMA-unlocked phone on their networks. It has to be one of their phones for them to activate it. No technical reason for it, just vendor-enforced lock-in. (I use Sprint BTW.)
See the scrollbar on the right as you browse slashdot? Click above or below it, not on it. Will you look at that, it scrolls up or down a page at a time. You'll find that the aptly-named page-up and page-down keys do the same thing.
A dedicated gesture for this would be handy. But that really belongs in the OS, not the browser. We still need the scroll bar (whether it's visible, or hidden and you can scroll by dragging your finger up/down) so you can position text and pictures just the way you want on a page.
Some of CNN's "live coverage" from Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War was shot in a studio. That's not to say CNN is the only press agency doing this. From what friends and relatives who've worked in journalism tell me, this happens to differing extents pretty much everywhere. The truth is quite often mundane and boring, and needs to be spruced up to make it worthy of airing so people won't change the channel.
Perhaps the most famous case of this is the photo of a Viet Cong prisoner being executed.
Microsoft's technique is more limited in that it only works on camera shake. It cannot correct for mis-focus (which granted, isn't usually a problem with the tiny sensors on most phone cameras).
Calculating the point spread function from the photo can correct for both, and is the more general-purpose and more powerful technique. I can see using Microsoft's technique to augment the general purpose one though. Figuring out the PSF due to camera shake can be really hard when the photo is badly out of focus. And figuring out the PSF due to mis-focus can be difficult if the camera shake loops back on itself (i.e. there's no axis along which blurring is due entirely to mis-focus and not camera shake).
There have been third party programs doing this for nearly a decade. This is also the "trick" behind the light field camera. You simultaneously capture multiple versions of a scene, back out the distance information based on depth of field effects (diameter of the point spread functions at each location in each image), then use all that to reconstruct what the photo would have looked like with the focus at a plane of your choosing.
Very handy for macro photos and microscopy where narrow depth of field frequently makes it impossible to get more than a tiny sliver of the subject in focus. Long-term, I predict this is going to replace the bulky "professional" lenses carried by many DSLR photographers. One of the primary reasons to use these large lenses is to narrow the field of view to isolate the subject (blur the background and foreground). You can accomplish the same thing with a smaller lens, a light field camera, and some number crunching. (The other primary reason is for speed in low-light situations, which is becoming less important over time as CCD and CMOS sensitivity constantly improves).
Yeah, this is standard math. A completely out-of-focus picture actually contains nearly as much information as a sharp photo, it's just smeared with a reversible mathematical transform called a point spread function. Reverse it and you get the in-focus image back. There have been third party programs to do this for about a decade. The main problems have been processing speed (it could take a half hour or more a decade ago), determining the point spread function (you have both focus and camera shake, and the former can make figuring out the latter really hard), lens/sensor defects and image format compression (the PSF you calculate for a local region may not work well for the entire picture), and boundary conditions.
Similar story to ArsDigita. Basically venture capitalists and MBAs were brought in in exchange for a cash infusion. They only had minority control of the company, but used a loophole in the company's bylaws to force out the founders, and seize control of the company. Philip took down his version of the page after the settlement, but it had already been mirrored on the net by then. Best quote: "I related my response to a member of the Harvard faculty who asked me what it was like to watch venture capitalists and professional managers run ArsDigita (I replied "like watching a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off")."
Apparently they never did figure out the right combination of switches to flip. Less than a year after the settlement, they'd driven the company into the dirt and the company's key assets were sold to Red Hat.
The other way they bungled the launch is that they didn't (and still don't) support Google+ for people with Google Apps for Domains. People with Google Apps for Domains are dedicated Google users. They're already beholden to gmail and the other Google apps. If they had access to a Google social networking system, they'd unquestionably use it and stick with it. And yet, Google gave them the finger, seemingly deliberately excluding them from the pool of G+ users.
I think what we're seeing here is a dichotomy between technophiles like Slashdot users, and laypeople who use computers but don't understand how they work. To the open source technophile, being able to grab the source, fix a bug or add a feature, and compile it is a perk. To the lay person it's the same thing as telling them they have access to all the parts to build a rocket to go to the moon. They couldn't do it in a thousand years even if they tried, and so it's a nonexistent benefit to them - a non-feature.
Apple's allure to regular people, and Jobs' particular influence, is that they make all this complicated technology easy to use. Yeah they severely limit the tech geek in the process, but most regular people simply don't care. To them, the alternative is barely being able to use the technology at all. That's what makes Jobs one of the most important influences on technology in the minds of most laypeople (i.e. the great majority of the population).
I'm an engineer by trade and this is one of the things which confounds me about programmers ("software engineers"). One of the most basic tenets of engineering is KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. Yet programmers, and especially the Linux culture, seem to delight in making things more complicated rather than simpler. They advocate Gentoo, and express shock and dismay that the "dumbed down" Ubuntu distro is the most popular. It's ok to revel in the bits and pieces that make technology work. But for the vast majority of people, the technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself -- a mere tool. Those bits and pieces need to be as invisible as possible so these people can use the tool to get their work done.
With Jobs' passing, end users lost one of their biggest advocates for this simplicity in an industry full of tech geeks who love to tinker with the nuts and bolts. That's why the mainstream media is going ga-ga over this while tech sites like Slashdot are yawning.
Negotiating with studios for streaming rights probably had something to do with it. The DVD rental by mail business was an established business model. It may not have had the greatest margins, but it was cash-flow positive. Streaming OTOH was a new business model. Netflix thought it could support x% of revenue allocated to licensing costs. The studios thought it could support a much higher percentage.
By having both business operating under the same roof, Netflix could offset some of the risk of streaming with its mail-DVD cashflow. If their negotiations with the studios erred too much in the studios' favor, they could stay afloat by cannibalizing profit from mailed DVDs. By (1) separating out the accounting of the two businesses (what they tried when they separated pricing for streaming vs. mailed DVDs), or (2) separating the two businesses entirely, they removed that safety net. They could legitimately argue with the studios that "hey, our numbers just don't work with the amounts you want for streaming licenses - people just aren't willing to pay that much and we will go broke."
I suspect they're trying to prevent the streaming business from becoming like movie theaters, where they do all the distribution work but nearly all the revenue goes to the studios, and they have to sell overpriced popcorn and drinks to stay afloat.
It's funny how many people are saying this. You do realize they're the same thing? If you give the students doing well some perks, the ones who didn't get perks are the "dumb" ones. Once social stigma comes into play, rewarding positive achievement becomes the same thing as punishing poor achievement. You either have to coddle the self-esteem of the poor achievers as we've been doing, or bite the bullet and show kids that doing well results in good things while doing poorly results in (relatively) bad things.
IMHO the lesson we need to be teaching kids is to never give up despite failure. Having things work on the first try is exceedingly rare, and it can take dozens if not hundreds of tries before you figure out a way which succeeds. Setting goals, hard work, and persistence are the key. But people who've successfully removed the negative stigma from failure in schools have mutated this into the notion that it's ok to fail. (Note: I'm not entirely blaming schools. The rate at which liars and cheats are rewarded in the real world (e.g. politics, finance) hasn't helped matters either.)
In all fairness, phreaking had negative connotations at the time (once you explained to people what it was). But since it exploited a company (Ma Bell) which was eventually found to be an illegal, controlling, price-fixing monopoly that was forcibly broken up, it has a neutral to positive connotation today. Likewise, once we regain our senses, the security hysteria of the last decade will probably be viewed much as McCarthyism is today. And those who rebelled against it will be viewed in a much more positive light.
I can understand a short-term exclusive deal to kick off a new book or device, but in the long-term this exclusive nonsense has got to end. Otherwise you get the stupidity that's happened on consoles, where if you buy only one console you're forever locked out of certain game titles. If this trend by book publishers continues (e.g. exclusive magazine deals with the iPad), in 20 years you'll need a dozen TVs in your house in order to get all the "exclusive" channels you want.
Hardware should compete against hardware. Software should compete against software (and books/music/TV shows/movies are software). Service should compete against service. Cross-bundling them leads to bad things. I thought we learned that when we originally broke up AT&T.
If you buy a pre-built machine (which 99% of people do), the worst thing you can do is buy it with lots of memory. Desktops and laptops have ridiculously thin margins. The big manufacturers rely on upgrades and add-ons for profit. Consequently, the 4GB which costs them $10 from their supplier and sells for $15 retail, will cost you $50 if you buy it with a new machine. I buy lots of computers for family, friends, and clients. If possible, I'd buy them all with no memory and just buy my own memory modules to add in. The base configurations usually do stupid things like put in two 1GB SODIMMs into a laptop, forcing you to throw them away if you upgrade it to 8 GB.
And so we end up in a situation where laypeople don't get the memory upgrade in the pre-built system because techies like us taught them that it's a rip-off. But they don't know how to buy/add new memory on their own. So they undeservingly end up stuck running low memory systems.
Hmm, Ubuntu announces 11.10 will support ARM. Microsoft announces Windows 8 will support ARM...
And I explained why GSM alone would have resulted in slower network speeds today than a mix of GSM and CDMA. The mix was crucial to finding which worked better in real-world use.
CDMA wiped the floor with GSM. The original TDMA/GSM is only used for voice today. TDMA/GSM is pathetic because you allocate exclusive bandwidth to a phone even if it's never used. It's still tolerated for voice because voice uses so little bandwidth, but it's completely unsuitable for data. That's why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G years before the GSM carriers. The CDMA carriers just cranked up the bandwidth of their voice hardware (which is why you cannot simultaneously talk and use the web on CDMA 3G - they use the same radio). The GSM carriers had to come up with an entirely new network protocol and hardware based on wideband CDMA, then graft it onto GSM in order to compete (which is why you can simultaneously talk and use the web on GSM 3G - their voice and data use different radios). That's right, GSM was forced to adopt CDMA for data to stay competitive.
If the US had mandated GSM as a standard instead of letting the market decide, the world would probably still be stuck with 128 kbps cellular data network speeds today because it would've been illegal to use the superior technology. CDMA is now being superseded by variants of OFDMA which require a lot more signal processing. CPUs have gotten fast enough and low power enough to make that practical now on a mobile device without killing your battery life.
I do agree though that GSM's SIM card is the way to go.
After the Tienanmen massacre in 1989, the government solicited propaganda from the public in support of the crackdown. One of these was a poem anonymously submitted to the state newspaper, praising the government for its actions ending the protests. It was published, and only then was it discovered that if you read the Chinese characters diagonally, it said Deng Xaioping must pay for his crimes against the people.
Disney is actually one of the few studios who will replace damaged discs for a nominal shipping and handling fee. Probably because so many kids destroy the discs and tapes. In that respect, they are upholding the "you only bought a license" model of buying DVDs. The other studios are cheating by telling you you only bought a license, but if you try to get them to fulfill their obligations as a licensor and request a replacement for damaged media, they'll tell you to buy another one.
(I am an engineer.) Most engineers who found their first company go bankrupt because they think a product will sell on its technical merits alone. They eschew marketing, considering marketers to be liars who sell through deception. The ones who succeed do so after figuring out that a successful company needs a combination of good engineering and good marketing.
Woz was the engineering genius. Jobs was the marketing genius. Without each other, they both likely would've ended up mere footnotes in history.
Right click start menu -> properties -> customize -> (near the bottom) Start menu size: Number of recent programs to display
Increase its value for a taller start menu. But yeah, I agree with you, having to scroll through my list of programs in the start menu is annoying when I have tons of screen space available. Once upon a time, user interface design was all about letting the user accomplish a task with the fewest keystrokes/mouse actions possible. Somewhere along the way, some OCD designer got onto their UI team and appearance took priority. Now they have a start menu which always looks pretty, but forces users to do all sorts of unnecessary scrolling or clicking or (if you make the control panel a pop-up menu) waiting while things slowly auto-scroll to get at something which used to be available immediately.
This is one of the myths created by the left. The actual facts are, the recent Bush administration massively increased Federal funding for science, with the vast majority of the increase being non-defense. It's just that the left blew the SSC cancellation, embryonic stem cell research ban, and some purported fiddling with climate research completely out of proportion, and used them to paint Bush as anti-science. A false stigma which survives to this day because it continues to be parroted by those on the left who don't check facts themselves
The latest version of the graph is in this PDF if you want to see how Obama is doing. He's holding steady with Bush in dollars spent. If you go to the next chart, it shows science R&D funding as percent of GDP since 1976. You'll see it was highest during Carter and Reagan but dipped towards the end, more or less held steady on that low note with Bush Sr., but dropped massively under Clinton, Rose massively under Bush, and is dropping again under Obama. I'll let the reader conclude which party is more friendly to science.
This is a consequence of ethical restrictions on biomedical research. Not saying those are bad to have, just saying that this is one of the consequences of having them. The majority of what we know about long-term exposure of people to low levels of radiation comes, ironically, from survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ethical considerations prevent further systematic scientific research on the topic. Consequently, there are two trains of thought when it comes to radiation exposure:
A) We know a certain amount of radiation is fatal. We know that there is no cellular damage from zero radiation exposure. Draw a line between these two points, and assume that cellular damage is proportional to radiation exposure.
B) Most of the survivors of the atomic bombings lived long, healthy lives. Cancer rates were not excessively higher than the norm. The same holds for cities in areas with higher than average levels of normal background radiation. So the body appears to have some ability to repair small to moderate amounts of damage from radiation.
Depending on which train of thought you subscribe to, either "stay the h*ll away from Fukushima" or "it's safe" are both correct answers. And until we get more data from unintended experiments in widescale radiation contamination like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it'll continue to be debated whether (A) or (B) is correct.