Actually the review issue will be super simple to fix: if somebody buys a product from Amazon, if they also write a review on the product, there will be a special piece of text that says that the user who left the review bought the product from Amazon. To get rid of most of the bad/fake reviews, all Amazon needs to do is require that all reviews be from people who actually bought the product. This would also eliminate reviews on fake products, since unless the person paid for and bought the paid product, no review for them.
Amazon already marks reviews from actual buyers... look for the "Amazon Verified Purchase" label next to the review. Sometimes a product gets reviewed legitimately on Amazon that isn't a verified purchase. Maybe it was a gift or purchased elsewhere. It's still nice to have these other reviews but I do give more weight to verified reviews.
That's unecessarily confusing. Just say twice as fast. Percentages aren't needed.
In the article the OP complained about, the actual number was 109% faster - I just gave a simplified example with round numbers. Following your advice, I'd have to say "a smidgen more than twice as fast" which really isn't that accurate. Sometimes numbers and percentages are not only useful but required to represent information accurately.
Can we come up with a standard way to convey the concept of speedup people? I have a feeling that they meant twice as fast. 100% faster would mean it finished instantaneously, which might be true if the benchmark was all marked as dead code... Oh, this is about google, not MS. My bad.
The article is correct: 100% faster is twice as fast. 100% less time would be instanenous.
Say I drive from point A to point B and it takes 10 minutes. Now I repeat the route but I drive 100% faster -- the results is it only takes 5 minutes; I have doubled my speed and halved my driving time.
I have a problem with manufacturer model number naming when I'm looking for toys. I'm trying to research graphics for notebooks and Nvidia just released some new notebook chips too including the GT540M.
GT540M should not be named so when it's exactly the same architecture and hardware as GT 435M with a minor 22MHz bump in GPU clock speed and 12% increase in memory clock speed. Maybe name it the GT 440M ? Pushing out an entire new 5XX series number for a tiny incremental change probably due only to better yields of the exact same old hardware is borderline dishonest.
I work in video games and Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have pretty strict control over what you do. There is no vast library of porn games available for these platforms.
And my point on the iPhone being a console rather than a computer is you expect a computer to crash when you install any old software on it. Sometimes repeated. Plus computers get viruses and have all sorts of other problems. You want a Phone to work out of the box and pretty much continue working no matter what you do to it (software-wise). Even if software is buggy and crashes, it should just return you to the main phone screen rather than bricking your phone. If you're allowing native development on the phone, then you need to control the apps a bit to ensure this. Hence, the "console" aspect.
The problem with logically debating a Sarah Palin / Glenn Beck supporter is that by the time they've supported either one of those two crazies, they've already lost all respect for logic and intellectual debate. You might as well get in a screaming match with someone about whether its better to believe in invisible pink unicorns or to have a dragon in your garage.
Actually, you can play un-approved games on the XBOX 360 with the XNA dev kit, no?
You pay a small price for it and you can't publish the app commercially for 360 without going through MS (you could release source for other XNA developers though). It's very similar to becoming an iPhone developer though since you can install on a limited number of devices (i.e. 100) when iPhone developing too.
That's the problem. Phones/PDAs were always considered more like generic computers until the iPhone came along. But once a locked-in phone becomes popular, they're suddenly more like game consoles. WTF?
I had a Sanyo "web phone" before the iPhone and it only allowed me to install paid apps from their webstore and purchased ring tones. It was locked down and it existed for quite a few years before the iPhone.
Windows Phone OS (before Windows Phone 7) allowed users to install apps but that was because it was running on PDA formats with Phone functionality added on -- not on the modern generation of devices which are phone formats + media device with PDA stuff added.
How about a related industry analogy instead of a car analogy?
Like for instance, what if Dell decided that on your Dell computer, you could only install applications that they approved? Trying to install an HP printer driver? No, not approved. Trying to install Microsoft Media Player? No, only Dell's MusicMatch is approved.
How about if you bought a PS, PS2, PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360, GameCube, Wii, DS, PSP, etc. etc. and could only install applications that they approved. How about if you could only play protected music or copy protected DVD's / BluRay's on supported players without using illegal circumvention methods?
Oh wait, that's already the world we live in.
You see, related industry for phone apps isn't generic computer, it's treated more as a "game console" or "media consumption" device.
Not saying that DRM / Copy-Protection / Censorship is right or wrong... just saying you're using the wrong analogy.
Well, still, if they are "calloused to the suffering around them" it's still not a great endorsement of Linux. Either way it seems that most newbs have about as much fun getting Linux to work as they would spending eternity wailing in a lake of fire and asking for help in either case only gets you prodded with a pointed shaft.
Didn't they sue someone over the use of the word "Book" (teachersbook) or something like that? This was a common phrase to apply to a year book. This kind of stuff is just beyond me...nobody should be able to own common words or letters.
Facebook has been embroiled in a spate of trademark-fueled litigation in recent months, most recently a back and forth with parody site Lamebook. The company has also sued Teachbook and Placebook
Ever seen a 50-year-old ER nurse? 90% of the time, they are callused to the suffering around them. It comes with repeated exposure to the environment
So the people who are good at Linux treat the noobs like shit because they calloused from all the pain they've suffered? That's hardly a ringing endorsement for Linux if using it long enough to become a proficient user makes you as shellshocked and numb as someone working in a triage unit.
However I disagree with the conclusion that the patch should therefore be merged into the kernel. First, instead of pasting some lines to bashrc and running some commands, the user now has to recompile to kernel to benefit from the change. That's a lot less user friendly. Secondly, if one really wants to push user friendliness, one should convince distributions to update their init scripts to run those cgroup commands automatically. Since all software users use go through distros anyway it should be the distros' job to ensure user friendliness.
Umm no. It will be in the default kernal eventually and that works out-of-the-box. The idea that user friendliness is "pasting some lines to bashrc and running some commands" and that "user friendliness" should be left up to distros rather than the main line for Linux is pretty much one of the reasons Linux has never really mattered on the desktop and why 95% of computer users prefer Windows or Macs.
I have Windows Vista and Ubuntu at Home. While it's true that some things (like directory opens and file copies) take frustratingly long to execute, in general most of the time Vista feels significantly "snappier" than Ubuntu. I have Windows 7 at work and that's even better than Vista since it eliminates some of the annoying Vista stalls. I like using Linux but I would argue that the current Linux desktop is still clunky and feels slower even when compared to the previous older generation of Windows. If this scheduler is enough to "feel" the difference, then it can help close the user experience gap between Linux and Windows which is good for everyone.
Those tv commercials are so awful, they make no sense. I think they're saying people are too fascinated and in love with their phone, and win7 phones are going to fix that for you.... wait, what?.
Exactly, you're gonna have Win Phone 7 so much you won't want to use your phone.
If a phone actually got you in and out of social apps and done with messages quicker, all it would do is enable the thumb-typing generation to send *MORE* messages in the same amount of time, not spend less time on their phhones. It's possible that they would spend even more time on the phone since it would be more convenient than before.
Exactly. There was no hype at all around Windows Phone 7. None. Nada. Zilch. That explains all those TV commercials, launch parties, paid shills like Paul Thurrott and Co. touting Windows 7 Phone as the second coming of Zeus.
It is the second coming but I believe you misspelled Zune.
Making it smaller should reduce costs in the long run. Less PCB, no packaging, fewer components/packaging, cheaper shipping, etc. I'm sure Apple is seeing a cost savings on them vs standard SSD's and it looks like Toshiba is trying to reduce costs even more with volume increases by offering it directly to non-Apple customers as well.
Remember, the Apple ideology is that people [...] should simply use [their systems], and rely on Apple to take care of technical details. This has been the case for a very long time now, and as long as Steve Jobs is in charge, you can bet that there won't be any change.
And as long as this remains the case for the general public, Apple will remain phenomenally successful.
Most people don't care about Flash, HD video or dual-core phones. People want phones that can do well the basic stuff one wants to do on a smart phone (email, news, maps. weather, calls (!)). And the iPhone is terribly good at that.
"Terribly Good" does describe calls on the iPhone. If I can make and connect on an iPhone, the call quality is good. But I wouldn't use it for long or important calls because I drop calls on AT&T multiple times a day no matter where I am. And I think that the longest call I've had without dropping is about 10-15 minutes. People just get used to you calling them back when a call drops with mobile phones now and AT&T / iPhone 3 are big offenders.
The one thing about calls I wish they'd fix on iPhone vs Android is call volume. All the Android phones out there have really loud volume capability. The iPhone is very difficult to use when it's loud (i.e. bar / train / etc) -- the speaker phone is not very loud either -- at least not loud enough to easily use for handsfree talking in my car -- when I'm driving on the highway, road noises and wind are nearly as loud as the iPhone speaker phone.
You don't have to worry about that. As an avid (and happy) Android user I can tell you: the open market is great, but the operating system is still a bit of a mess. Freezes, crashes and data losses are somewhat endemic. Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability, and all of the non-geek Android users I know plan to buy an iPhone when their contract is up. The geeks are happy and plan to stay.
I have to agree with your sentiments. I'm a geek and I wanted an open-OS phone. I bought the first Android phone the week it came out and it crashed and froze up so much I couldn't use it. Plus it butt-dialed a lot from my pocket. It was clunky and extraordinarily painful to use. I returned it in the 14-day return window. Then I got an iPhone and I am fairly happy with it except where AT&T has spotty coverage:-( Android burned me a couple years ago. I'm sure it's much better now but when I used it, it was clearly not even a stable beta they were willing to push onto consumers. It might not be as "open" but I know that Apple is going to give me a much better working experience right now as far as phones go.
A bad and/or lazy programmer will copy-and-paste code with a bug in it without realizing they duplicated a bug. It's better to fix code or at least verify code you are "borrowing" by copy-and-paste works.
Also, if you are copying-and-pasting code several times, it's almost always better to make a function (or inline function, or macro, or template) so that if there is a bug in the code, then fixing it once fixes it everywhere it's used.
Given those facts, I'd say that it's a combination of bad programmers and overuse of copy-and-paste in a lax method.
Yet another programming language aimed at making it easier for novice programmers to do the right thing by protecting against the mistakes that novices have made in the past.
The problem is that past mistakes are not a predictor of future mistakes.
I know some less gifted programmers who code primarily by copy-and-paste. In that group, past mistakes are a very good predictor of future mistakes.
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Actually the review issue will be super simple to fix: if somebody buys a product from Amazon, if they also write a review on the product, there will be a special piece of text that says that the user who left the review bought the product from Amazon. To get rid of most of the bad/fake reviews, all Amazon needs to do is require that all reviews be from people who actually bought the product. This would also eliminate reviews on fake products, since unless the person paid for and bought the paid product, no review for them.
Amazon already marks reviews from actual buyers... look for the "Amazon Verified Purchase" label next to the review. Sometimes a product gets reviewed legitimately on Amazon that isn't a verified purchase. Maybe it was a gift or purchased elsewhere. It's still nice to have these other reviews but I do give more weight to verified reviews.
100% faster is twice as fast.
That's unecessarily confusing. Just say twice as fast. Percentages aren't needed.
In the article the OP complained about, the actual number was 109% faster - I just gave a simplified example with round numbers. Following your advice, I'd have to say "a smidgen more than twice as fast" which really isn't that accurate. Sometimes numbers and percentages are not only useful but required to represent information accurately.
Can we come up with a standard way to convey the concept of speedup people? I have a feeling that they meant twice as fast. 100% faster would mean it finished instantaneously, which might be true if the benchmark was all marked as dead code... Oh, this is about google, not MS. My bad.
The article is correct: 100% faster is twice as fast. 100% less time would be instanenous.
Say I drive from point A to point B and it takes 10 minutes. Now I repeat the route but I drive 100% faster -- the results is it only takes 5 minutes; I have doubled my speed and halved my driving time.
I have a problem with manufacturer model number naming when I'm looking for toys. I'm trying to research graphics for notebooks and Nvidia just released some new notebook chips too including the GT540M.
GT540M should not be named so when it's exactly the same architecture and hardware as GT 435M with a minor 22MHz bump in GPU clock speed and 12% increase in memory clock speed. Maybe name it the GT 440M ? Pushing out an entire new 5XX series number for a tiny incremental change probably due only to better yields of the exact same old hardware is borderline dishonest.
I work in video games and Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have pretty strict control over what you do. There is no vast library of porn games available for these platforms.
And my point on the iPhone being a console rather than a computer is you expect a computer to crash when you install any old software on it. Sometimes repeated. Plus computers get viruses and have all sorts of other problems. You want a Phone to work out of the box and pretty much continue working no matter what you do to it (software-wise). Even if software is buggy and crashes, it should just return you to the main phone screen rather than bricking your phone. If you're allowing native development on the phone, then you need to control the apps a bit to ensure this. Hence, the "console" aspect.
Plus, she is only a supporter of the Constitution when it's the parts of the Constitution she likes.
Correct for all tea-partiers. I've noticed with many religious folks the same holds true with the Bible.
The problem with logically debating a Sarah Palin / Glenn Beck supporter is that by the time they've supported either one of those two crazies, they've already lost all respect for logic and intellectual debate. You might as well get in a screaming match with someone about whether its better to believe in invisible pink unicorns or to have a dragon in your garage.
Actually, you can play un-approved games on the XBOX 360 with the XNA dev kit, no?
You pay a small price for it and you can't publish the app commercially for 360 without going through MS (you could release source for other XNA developers though). It's very similar to becoming an iPhone developer though since you can install on a limited number of devices (i.e. 100) when iPhone developing too.
http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/deploying-iphone-apps-real-devices
That's the problem. Phones/PDAs were always considered more like generic computers until the iPhone came along. But once a locked-in phone becomes popular, they're suddenly more like game consoles. WTF?
I had a Sanyo "web phone" before the iPhone and it only allowed me to install paid apps from their webstore and purchased ring tones. It was locked down and it existed for quite a few years before the iPhone.
Windows Phone OS (before Windows Phone 7) allowed users to install apps but that was because it was running on PDA formats with Phone functionality added on -- not on the modern generation of devices which are phone formats + media device with PDA stuff added.
How about a related industry analogy instead of a car analogy? Like for instance, what if Dell decided that on your Dell computer, you could only install applications that they approved? Trying to install an HP printer driver? No, not approved. Trying to install Microsoft Media Player? No, only Dell's MusicMatch is approved.
How about if you bought a PS, PS2, PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360, GameCube, Wii, DS, PSP, etc. etc. and could only install applications that they approved. How about if you could only play protected music or copy protected DVD's / BluRay's on supported players without using illegal circumvention methods?
Oh wait, that's already the world we live in.
You see, related industry for phone apps isn't generic computer, it's treated more as a "game console" or "media consumption" device.
Not saying that DRM / Copy-Protection / Censorship is right or wrong... just saying you're using the wrong analogy.
Well, still, if they are "calloused to the suffering around them" it's still not a great endorsement of Linux. Either way it seems that most newbs have about as much fun getting Linux to work as they would spending eternity wailing in a lake of fire and asking for help in either case only gets you prodded with a pointed shaft.
Didn't they sue someone over the use of the word "Book" (teachersbook) or something like that? This was a common phrase to apply to a year book. This kind of stuff is just beyond me...nobody should be able to own common words or letters.
Yes, according to this link:
Facebook has been embroiled in a spate of trademark-fueled litigation in recent months, most recently a back and forth with parody site Lamebook. The company has also sued Teachbook and Placebook
Ever seen a 50-year-old ER nurse? 90% of the time, they are callused to the suffering around them. It comes with repeated exposure to the environment
So the people who are good at Linux treat the noobs like shit because they calloused from all the pain they've suffered? That's hardly a ringing endorsement for Linux if using it long enough to become a proficient user makes you as shellshocked and numb as someone working in a triage unit.
However I disagree with the conclusion that the patch should therefore be merged into the kernel. First, instead of pasting some lines to bashrc and running some commands, the user now has to recompile to kernel to benefit from the change. That's a lot less user friendly. Secondly, if one really wants to push user friendliness, one should convince distributions to update their init scripts to run those cgroup commands automatically. Since all software users use go through distros anyway it should be the distros' job to ensure user friendliness.
Umm no. It will be in the default kernal eventually and that works out-of-the-box. The idea that user friendliness is "pasting some lines to bashrc and running some commands" and that "user friendliness" should be left up to distros rather than the main line for Linux is pretty much one of the reasons Linux has never really mattered on the desktop and why 95% of computer users prefer Windows or Macs.
I have Windows Vista and Ubuntu at Home. While it's true that some things (like directory opens and file copies) take frustratingly long to execute, in general most of the time Vista feels significantly "snappier" than Ubuntu. I have Windows 7 at work and that's even better than Vista since it eliminates some of the annoying Vista stalls. I like using Linux but I would argue that the current Linux desktop is still clunky and feels slower even when compared to the previous older generation of Windows. If this scheduler is enough to "feel" the difference, then it can help close the user experience gap between Linux and Windows which is good for everyone.
Those tv commercials are so awful, they make no sense. I think they're saying people are too fascinated and in love with their phone, and win7 phones are going to fix that for you.... wait, what? .
Exactly, you're gonna have Win Phone 7 so much you won't want to use your phone.
If a phone actually got you in and out of social apps and done with messages quicker, all it would do is enable the thumb-typing generation to send *MORE* messages in the same amount of time, not spend less time on their phhones. It's possible that they would spend even more time on the phone since it would be more convenient than before.
Exactly. There was no hype at all around Windows Phone 7. None. Nada. Zilch. That explains all those TV commercials, launch parties, paid shills like Paul Thurrott and Co. touting Windows 7 Phone as the second coming of Zeus.
It is the second coming but I believe you misspelled Zune.
Making it smaller should reduce costs in the long run. Less PCB, no packaging, fewer components/packaging, cheaper shipping, etc. I'm sure Apple is seeing a cost savings on them vs standard SSD's and it looks like Toshiba is trying to reduce costs even more with volume increases by offering it directly to non-Apple customers as well.
So who are the bad guys?
Everybody.
I think you've not only figured out big business, but politics as well.
That's a carrier issue, not a phone/os issue. And you can switch to T-Mobile (as I did) if you're not happy wit AT&T.
I can't switch to T-Mobile and still have an iPhone. I wasn't happy with the Android phone and I'm not happy with the AT&T service.
Remember, the Apple ideology is that people [...] should simply use [their systems], and rely on Apple to take care of technical details. This has been the case for a very long time now, and as long as Steve Jobs is in charge, you can bet that there won't be any change.
And as long as this remains the case for the general public, Apple will remain phenomenally successful.
Most people don't care about Flash, HD video or dual-core phones. People want phones that can do well the basic stuff one wants to do on a smart phone (email, news, maps. weather, calls (!)). And the iPhone is terribly good at that.
"Terribly Good" does describe calls on the iPhone. If I can make and connect on an iPhone, the call quality is good. But I wouldn't use it for long or important calls because I drop calls on AT&T multiple times a day no matter where I am. And I think that the longest call I've had without dropping is about 10-15 minutes. People just get used to you calling them back when a call drops with mobile phones now and AT&T / iPhone 3 are big offenders.
The one thing about calls I wish they'd fix on iPhone vs Android is call volume. All the Android phones out there have really loud volume capability. The iPhone is very difficult to use when it's loud (i.e. bar / train / etc) -- the speaker phone is not very loud either -- at least not loud enough to easily use for handsfree talking in my car -- when I'm driving on the highway, road noises and wind are nearly as loud as the iPhone speaker phone.
You don't have to worry about that. As an avid (and happy) Android user I can tell you: the open market is great, but the operating system is still a bit of a mess. Freezes, crashes and data losses are somewhat endemic. Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability, and all of the non-geek Android users I know plan to buy an iPhone when their contract is up. The geeks are happy and plan to stay.
I have to agree with your sentiments. I'm a geek and I wanted an open-OS phone. I bought the first Android phone the week it came out and it crashed and froze up so much I couldn't use it. Plus it butt-dialed a lot from my pocket. It was clunky and extraordinarily painful to use. I returned it in the 14-day return window. Then I got an iPhone and I am fairly happy with it except where AT&T has spotty coverage :-( Android burned me a couple years ago. I'm sure it's much better now but when I used it, it was clearly not even a stable beta they were willing to push onto consumers. It might not be as "open" but I know that Apple is going to give me a much better working experience right now as far as phones go.
A bad and/or lazy programmer will copy-and-paste code with a bug in it without realizing they duplicated a bug. It's better to fix code or at least verify code you are "borrowing" by copy-and-paste works.
Also, if you are copying-and-pasting code several times, it's almost always better to make a function (or inline function, or macro, or template) so that if there is a bug in the code, then fixing it once fixes it everywhere it's used.
Given those facts, I'd say that it's a combination of bad programmers and overuse of copy-and-paste in a lax method.
Yet another programming language aimed at making it easier for novice programmers to do the right thing by protecting against the mistakes that novices have made in the past.
The problem is that past mistakes are not a predictor of future mistakes.
I know some less gifted programmers who code primarily by copy-and-paste. In that group, past mistakes are a very good predictor of future mistakes.