Because it's awesome. I was once like you, thinking it was just a gimmick, but then I bought a wireless charger and I'll never look back. There are so many benefits it's not even worth listing a handful since I may or may not hit the ones you care about, but really, the chargers cost about $12 now (you pay the extra $7 because 3-coil is where it's at), so just try it and you'll understand much more completely.
Thanks for the link, I've been looking for data like that. Any idea if any one has made similar comparisons to some of the hydrogen fuel cell concepts?
It's great to see that the electric cars are beating up the gas cars by a nice margin already, but I just have a hard time believing that heavy metal batteries are the best we can do.
Yeah, I was confused as to why they wouldn't just do that, or at least just have a pool of them at each airport. Drop it off when you finish your flight and it will be updated, charged, cleaned, etc.
I guess you're saving even more weight if your pilot isn't also carrying a personal laptop for when he gets to the destination, and people do tend to take better care of devices if they're theirs... maybe that's the logic, or maybe the logic is in the article I didn't read.
The problem is the newer content is hit or miss. I paid for Hulu for a few months until I got sick of "this show isn't available yet unless your a member of a participating cable company", and "web only", and the straw that broke the camel's back for me "this episode expires in X days".
I thought I got all new content, quickly, and the entire season.... but that's not true, it's highly qualified. Everything in hulu is content dependent and it's just not fun to keep track of it, so I stopped and replaced it with more DVR'ing.
Any one else notice that even the billionaire can't figure out a decent place to put his computer speakers? They're jammed in behind his monitor just like mine. I don't know why, but that gave me a lot of enjoyment.
Wish I had mod-points. This is so completely true, and combine it with the fact that they all come with vendor lock in, and it's even worse.
I have a Nook simple touch, and really want to move to a front lit e-ink reader. Problem is the nook glow is the least tempting of the front lit e-readers to me. That said, I feel locked in due to the number of books already in the B&N cloud. Yes I know I can download, strip DRM, side-load, but bleh, I don't consider that a real solution.
Some day maybe we can buy e-books instead of rent them from a couple of disjointed retailers. Then I could buy a new e-reader every year based on whoever built the best one!
Yeah, that's the version I heard when driving home.
It still seems to me to have a big flaw, namely the assumption of causation. Social networks with messages like this are a self selecting group, how do they know that those with friends who voted aren't just in more politically savvy peer groups?
Now if they would have randomly lied to people about whether or not their friends had voted I could see some determination of causation, but as it was done I think the above is at least one potential flaw.
For better or worse (I'd argue better), we're past the days of aristocracy founded artistic endeavours so if you plan to do "interesting work", be it paint, code, write, architect, etc. you better find a way to market it. It doesn't necessarily have to be mass marketed or commercially successful, but doing it as the OP suggested "something wonderful no one ever sees" isn't viable unless it's just your spare time.
And if it is, more power to you, but I'd argue that to push any real envelopes in these worlds you need to dedicate more serious time, which means some one needs to feed you.
It's a nice thought... but the problem is it becomes very difficult to fund future creations with that mindset. Unless you're fortunate enough to be in some funded department who is just doing R&D it's not a great way to go through life. Even if you are that fortunate, chances are there's some very political individual properly extracting enough from your group to make sure the company at large is getting value out of their funding.
Same holds for pretty much any productive endeavor.
you don't realize how much "de briefing" you go through on your drive home
Something big hidden in this part of the comment. You need to have an end to the work day. My biggest challenge when I worked at home was starting and stopping a day. Basically I worked 24 hours a day, but never very hard. It turned into a negative for both my work and social lives.
My solution was twofold. 1) I enforced a strict start time. I'm not a morning person so the start time was my killer, if I started by 9am every day I found it easier to delineate a day than if I opened the laptop on the kitchen table around 8:30 with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. 2) No TV during working hours. Not so much for the lack of distraction while working, but for decompression it allowed me when I did turn the TV on.
I imagine everyone is different, but that was what worked for me.
Also curious - but on patents like this one I'm always struck by the fact that there's nothing interesting except for the "put it on a computer" part. Yes, there was a time when digitizing was non-obvious, but now it seems to me that adding "on a computer" would fit with just about everything. Certainly everything media related.
Margin notes have worked this way for hundreds of years, though they've fallen out of favor recently. Authorization to receive the annotations seems like a pretty weak addition, but I guess you could cite a library card if you wanted to take my analogy too far.
I get this type of comment from some media sources, but confused how someone on Slashdot overlooks the Nook Color. It was $50 more, but it was available about a year ago... hopefully B&N will counter with a price drop/hardware refresh.
That said, I think Amazon did a good job with the launch, and the better streaming media offering of Amazon will make this a huge success over the Nook.
And, to answer the question in the summary. I don't want one. e-reader + full featured tablet is my preference. Hoping the Xoom 2 is what I'm looking for.
I am never going to be able to unthink this post... you may have just ruined this movie for me.
Re:Why support companies that pull crap like this?
on
Droid X Gets Rooted
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· Score: 1
Meh... because on this issue I don't care? I actually kind of like that Verizon and Motorola are managing the OS on my phone because I want it to just work. I am a little bummed that in 2 years when I want to upgrade the OS and they want me to upgrade the handset I'll have to upgrade the handset... but I'll get over it because it's a $200 device that I just want to work.
If I wanted an Android phone I could put custom OS's on, I would've bought a Nexus One. But I don't.
The thing you have to remember is that it's a balance of features, cost, usability, openness, etc. Virtually every purchase you'll have make has pros and cons, you determine what is precisely important to you and then make your choice. For the people who are buying the DroidX, an open bootloader is not one of them.
The portion that makes it tricky is those who don't know what a bootloader is... fact is they're a much larger market force than you or I. That's when regulators step in and decide what should be done for the sake of the consumer. You can argue that regulators should step in here, signed ROMs only circumvent the consumer's right to own their own property or some such, but I personally think you'd be stretching it. But asking why consumers would ever support a company that does this is willfully ignoring that a) most people don't know what you're talking about and b) many of us who do know what you're talking about just don't care.
My car also has a governor that keeps me from going over 120mph. But I still bought it as well, speeds over 120mph aren't something I'm too concerned with.
And you know, the menus on my TV are locked. Sony didn't give me the options to flash the OS on my TV, very upsetting... still bought it, which open TV did you buy?
Yes, irreducible complexity is irreducible. But C++ has plenty of reducible complexity.
Adjusting code for multi-threading or moving from 32 to 64bit are two simple examples. It's reasonable to consider a compiler having the smarts to do that. Garbage collection is another obvious example that many languages have dealt with. Memory protection.
I dunno, that's what comes to mind immediately. C++ let's you handle virtually every registry action and memory copy. That's not a bad thing, but it's probably not necessary for a lot of the programs it's used for. More to the point, it likely costs many of those programs a lot of developer/testing/user time because they're putting a lot of time into resolving the same issues again and again that the compiler is perfectly capable of handling.
I think the article pretty succinctly draws the ends of the spectrum between assembler and non-typed interpreted languages. The real question is where does the best compromise lie on that spectrum. It's going to be different for every product, but the supposition in the article is that C++ is way too far towards assembler.
Unless you were already a t-mobile customer. Then you had to cancel your t-mobile contract, and sign back up because the full discount was only available to new customers.
I called and told them I wasn't happy about that, they said that they understood and the policy was under review but there was nothing they could do. Then they offered me discounts on a 3G Slide instead.
Personally, I think a big part of the problem with the Nexus One pricing was that it wasn't simple enough, depending on how you bought it I believe there were 4 different prices available. Most phones there are two, with contract and without contract.
Then they need a system which is not open to the free market. At this point in time these kinds of tickets are, and quiet simply they're SOL if they're going to stay in that realm.
Switch to non-transferable tickets that require ID to purchase (think air travel) or maybe day of purchase only (then you'll only get the die hard fans who think it's worth the gamble to go to the venue).
I don't like what the scalpers are doing any more than most people here, I'm just saying it shouldn't be a surprise and it's completely within the very common understanding of a free market system.
All in all, this story, and the comments to it, show a good example of why I consider unconstrained free market worship a form of sociopathy.
I don't necessarily disagree with you. But what's the alternative in this case? A tax on each ticket sold which is then used to fund a regulatory body that enforces a no scalping law? Or do you just want good old human nature to change?
My post was simply pointing out that the parent poster misunderstands the free market, not that the free market is something to worship.
A broker looking to make an arbitrage profit is not the antithesis of the free market. They've found a pricing discrepancy in the supply/demand chain, and it's so far out of whack that they can still profit without moving 100% of their goods. That is precisely the free market.
The only system being broken is the one where the venue sets a "fair price". That fair price is turning out to be much lower than the price the consumer is considering worthwhile. The venues are doing a terrible job pricing supply/demand for the more popular concerts. That's great for the consumer, so great that a marketplace has grown up around exploiting the arbitrage.
I also prefer driving manuals, but that's a preference.
All of the information in your post is just out of date. Plenty of race cars have gone automatic, especially double clutch autos. Same with decent sports cars. Some cars are getting better MPG and 0-60 times with their automatic equivalents in ideal conditions. And many more are getting better MPG and 0-60 times with their automatic equivalents when compared to a normal driver rather than one who shifts at all the optimal times.
So, in short, you need to update your information.
That's not just people being stupid. The assumption is the cost to support one is close enough to the cost of supporting the other to disregard any differences.
The obvious issue bandied about for Linux - additional support cost (pricier personnel, fewer contracts/vendors, etc.) vs. the MS licensing cost.
Mind you I'm not agreeing or disagreeing on this particular example, but there is a why.
That's not quite true, while there's backwards compatibility issues, there're also forward compatibility issues.
I need the shim so I can keep running ProgramX 2005 on my new Win7 box, but when ProgramX is upgraded using the latest and greatest, I also want to keep running it.
WINE programs tend to fail here for obvious reasons. I remember this hit me hard with Quickbooks... got it running under WINE, was thrilled, and then QB switched to.NET and wouldn't run under WINE anymore. I'm sure the WINE or Mono folks figured it out in the course of a few weeks or months, but I wasn't going to take my books offline while I waited for them.
And, no, I couldn't switch to LinuxAccountingPackageOfAwesomeness because I have to supply files of a certain format to an accounting professional. For us small guys, he only accepts Quickbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's awesome. I was once like you, thinking it was just a gimmick, but then I bought a wireless charger and I'll never look back. There are so many benefits it's not even worth listing a handful since I may or may not hit the ones you care about, but really, the chargers cost about $12 now (you pay the extra $7 because 3-coil is where it's at), so just try it and you'll understand much more completely.
Thanks for the link, I've been looking for data like that. Any idea if any one has made similar comparisons to some of the hydrogen fuel cell concepts?
It's great to see that the electric cars are beating up the gas cars by a nice margin already, but I just have a hard time believing that heavy metal batteries are the best we can do.
Yeah, I was confused as to why they wouldn't just do that, or at least just have a pool of them at each airport. Drop it off when you finish your flight and it will be updated, charged, cleaned, etc.
I guess you're saving even more weight if your pilot isn't also carrying a personal laptop for when he gets to the destination, and people do tend to take better care of devices if they're theirs... maybe that's the logic, or maybe the logic is in the article I didn't read.
Not what flight critical means...
The problem is the newer content is hit or miss. I paid for Hulu for a few months until I got sick of "this show isn't available yet unless your a member of a participating cable company", and "web only", and the straw that broke the camel's back for me "this episode expires in X days".
I thought I got all new content, quickly, and the entire season.... but that's not true, it's highly qualified. Everything in hulu is content dependent and it's just not fun to keep track of it, so I stopped and replaced it with more DVR'ing.
Any one else notice that even the billionaire can't figure out a decent place to put his computer speakers? They're jammed in behind his monitor just like mine. I don't know why, but that gave me a lot of enjoyment.
Wish I had mod-points. This is so completely true, and combine it with the fact that they all come with vendor lock in, and it's even worse.
I have a Nook simple touch, and really want to move to a front lit e-ink reader. Problem is the nook glow is the least tempting of the front lit e-readers to me. That said, I feel locked in due to the number of books already in the B&N cloud. Yes I know I can download, strip DRM, side-load, but bleh, I don't consider that a real solution.
Some day maybe we can buy e-books instead of rent them from a couple of disjointed retailers. Then I could buy a new e-reader every year based on whoever built the best one!
Yeah, that's the version I heard when driving home.
It still seems to me to have a big flaw, namely the assumption of causation. Social networks with messages like this are a self selecting group, how do they know that those with friends who voted aren't just in more politically savvy peer groups?
Now if they would have randomly lied to people about whether or not their friends had voted I could see some determination of causation, but as it was done I think the above is at least one potential flaw.
I wish it did. But even artists need to eat.
For better or worse (I'd argue better), we're past the days of aristocracy founded artistic endeavours so if you plan to do "interesting work", be it paint, code, write, architect, etc. you better find a way to market it. It doesn't necessarily have to be mass marketed or commercially successful, but doing it as the OP suggested "something wonderful no one ever sees" isn't viable unless it's just your spare time.
And if it is, more power to you, but I'd argue that to push any real envelopes in these worlds you need to dedicate more serious time, which means some one needs to feed you.
Funny, I meant creative. I wonder if that was Freudian.
It's a nice thought... but the problem is it becomes very difficult to fund future creations with that mindset. Unless you're fortunate enough to be in some funded department who is just doing R&D it's not a great way to go through life. Even if you are that fortunate, chances are there's some very political individual properly extracting enough from your group to make sure the company at large is getting value out of their funding.
Same holds for pretty much any productive endeavor.
you don't realize how much "de briefing" you go through on your drive home
Something big hidden in this part of the comment. You need to have an end to the work day. My biggest challenge when I worked at home was starting and stopping a day. Basically I worked 24 hours a day, but never very hard. It turned into a negative for both my work and social lives.
My solution was twofold. 1) I enforced a strict start time. I'm not a morning person so the start time was my killer, if I started by 9am every day I found it easier to delineate a day than if I opened the laptop on the kitchen table around 8:30 with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. 2) No TV during working hours. Not so much for the lack of distraction while working, but for decompression it allowed me when I did turn the TV on.
I imagine everyone is different, but that was what worked for me.
Also curious - but on patents like this one I'm always struck by the fact that there's nothing interesting except for the "put it on a computer" part. Yes, there was a time when digitizing was non-obvious, but now it seems to me that adding "on a computer" would fit with just about everything. Certainly everything media related.
Margin notes have worked this way for hundreds of years, though they've fallen out of favor recently. Authorization to receive the annotations seems like a pretty weak addition, but I guess you could cite a library card if you wanted to take my analogy too far.
I get this type of comment from some media sources, but confused how someone on Slashdot overlooks the Nook Color. It was $50 more, but it was available about a year ago... hopefully B&N will counter with a price drop/hardware refresh.
That said, I think Amazon did a good job with the launch, and the better streaming media offering of Amazon will make this a huge success over the Nook.
And, to answer the question in the summary. I don't want one. e-reader + full featured tablet is my preference. Hoping the Xoom 2 is what I'm looking for.
I am never going to be able to unthink this post... you may have just ruined this movie for me.
Meh... because on this issue I don't care? I actually kind of like that Verizon and Motorola are managing the OS on my phone because I want it to just work. I am a little bummed that in 2 years when I want to upgrade the OS and they want me to upgrade the handset I'll have to upgrade the handset... but I'll get over it because it's a $200 device that I just want to work.
If I wanted an Android phone I could put custom OS's on, I would've bought a Nexus One. But I don't.
The thing you have to remember is that it's a balance of features, cost, usability, openness, etc. Virtually every purchase you'll have make has pros and cons, you determine what is precisely important to you and then make your choice. For the people who are buying the DroidX, an open bootloader is not one of them.
The portion that makes it tricky is those who don't know what a bootloader is... fact is they're a much larger market force than you or I. That's when regulators step in and decide what should be done for the sake of the consumer. You can argue that regulators should step in here, signed ROMs only circumvent the consumer's right to own their own property or some such, but I personally think you'd be stretching it. But asking why consumers would ever support a company that does this is willfully ignoring that a) most people don't know what you're talking about and b) many of us who do know what you're talking about just don't care.
My car also has a governor that keeps me from going over 120mph. But I still bought it as well, speeds over 120mph aren't something I'm too concerned with.
And you know, the menus on my TV are locked. Sony didn't give me the options to flash the OS on my TV, very upsetting... still bought it, which open TV did you buy?
Yes, irreducible complexity is irreducible. But C++ has plenty of reducible complexity.
Adjusting code for multi-threading or moving from 32 to 64bit are two simple examples. It's reasonable to consider a compiler having the smarts to do that. Garbage collection is another obvious example that many languages have dealt with. Memory protection.
I dunno, that's what comes to mind immediately. C++ let's you handle virtually every registry action and memory copy. That's not a bad thing, but it's probably not necessary for a lot of the programs it's used for. More to the point, it likely costs many of those programs a lot of developer/testing/user time because they're putting a lot of time into resolving the same issues again and again that the compiler is perfectly capable of handling.
I think the article pretty succinctly draws the ends of the spectrum between assembler and non-typed interpreted languages. The real question is where does the best compromise lie on that spectrum. It's going to be different for every product, but the supposition in the article is that C++ is way too far towards assembler.
Personally, I can agree with that.
Unless you were already a t-mobile customer. Then you had to cancel your t-mobile contract, and sign back up because the full discount was only available to new customers.
I called and told them I wasn't happy about that, they said that they understood and the policy was under review but there was nothing they could do. Then they offered me discounts on a 3G Slide instead.
Personally, I think a big part of the problem with the Nexus One pricing was that it wasn't simple enough, depending on how you bought it I believe there were 4 different prices available. Most phones there are two, with contract and without contract.
Well then we're in violent agreement!
Then they need a system which is not open to the free market. At this point in time these kinds of tickets are, and quiet simply they're SOL if they're going to stay in that realm.
Switch to non-transferable tickets that require ID to purchase (think air travel) or maybe day of purchase only (then you'll only get the die hard fans who think it's worth the gamble to go to the venue).
I don't like what the scalpers are doing any more than most people here, I'm just saying it shouldn't be a surprise and it's completely within the very common understanding of a free market system.
All in all, this story, and the comments to it, show a good example of why I consider unconstrained free market worship a form of sociopathy.
I don't necessarily disagree with you. But what's the alternative in this case? A tax on each ticket sold which is then used to fund a regulatory body that enforces a no scalping law? Or do you just want good old human nature to change?
My post was simply pointing out that the parent poster misunderstands the free market, not that the free market is something to worship.
A broker looking to make an arbitrage profit is not the antithesis of the free market. They've found a pricing discrepancy in the supply/demand chain, and it's so far out of whack that they can still profit without moving 100% of their goods. That is precisely the free market.
The only system being broken is the one where the venue sets a "fair price". That fair price is turning out to be much lower than the price the consumer is considering worthwhile. The venues are doing a terrible job pricing supply/demand for the more popular concerts. That's great for the consumer, so great that a marketplace has grown up around exploiting the arbitrage.
I also prefer driving manuals, but that's a preference.
All of the information in your post is just out of date. Plenty of race cars have gone automatic, especially double clutch autos. Same with decent sports cars. Some cars are getting better MPG and 0-60 times with their automatic equivalents in ideal conditions. And many more are getting better MPG and 0-60 times with their automatic equivalents when compared to a normal driver rather than one who shifts at all the optimal times.
So, in short, you need to update your information.
That's not just people being stupid. The assumption is the cost to support one is close enough to the cost of supporting the other to disregard any differences.
The obvious issue bandied about for Linux - additional support cost (pricier personnel, fewer contracts/vendors, etc.) vs. the MS licensing cost.
Mind you I'm not agreeing or disagreeing on this particular example, but there is a why.
That's not quite true, while there's backwards compatibility issues, there're also forward compatibility issues.
I need the shim so I can keep running ProgramX 2005 on my new Win7 box, but when ProgramX is upgraded using the latest and greatest, I also want to keep running it.
WINE programs tend to fail here for obvious reasons. I remember this hit me hard with Quickbooks... got it running under WINE, was thrilled, and then QB switched to .NET and wouldn't run under WINE anymore. I'm sure the WINE or Mono folks figured it out in the course of a few weeks or months, but I wasn't going to take my books offline while I waited for them.
And, no, I couldn't switch to LinuxAccountingPackageOfAwesomeness because I have to supply files of a certain format to an accounting professional. For us small guys, he only accepts Quickbooks.