> You're describing an issue that's independent of DST.
Actually, it could be argued that DST is a way for otherwise-powerless employees with institutionally-inflexible employers to use the political process as a weapon against them, and accomplish the change in working hours that their employers would otherwise never allow them to have.
> You don't need Congress to act. Each State decides which timezone it is in and whether or not to participate in DST.
Actually, no. The only thing a state can decide is whether or not to participate in DST, as defined by the federal government. A state can't decide to "participate differently", nor can it redefine or change its own timezones.
Florida, for example, would arguably be better off if we permanently changed the part of the state that's now "Eastern Time" to either year-round "Eastern Daylight Time", or moved ourselves to Atlantic time & abolished DST (both of which would have exactly the same effect). But we aren't allowed to.
> one for east of the Mississippi and one for the west. Simplicity is underrated.
And how, precisely, does leaving most of the midwestern US's largest cities split between two timezones make things any simpler for real people? Look at the Mississippi River, and notice how many big cities straddle it.
Believe it or not, the video compression codec we now know as h.264 had its origins about 20 years ago as a compression scheme to allow the transmission of video good enough to allow sign language over a dialup modem. Its evolution into h.264 (along with some very powerful ASICs that jumpstarted h.264 to allow realtime hardware compression and decompression whose development costs were subsidized by the federal government) perfectly demonstrates an assertion I've long made -- the best way for deaf people to make their lives easier is to find creative ways to commercialize the technology they depend upon and make it useful to NON-deaf people as well, so it goes from being an expensive accommodation to a normal & common business practice. When closed captions first came out, the only shows that had them were shows that few deaf people really wanted to watch. Ten years later, once the decoding hardware was built into new TVs by default and gyms & sports bars realized they were useful for people to watch over the background noise, captions were almost universal... even for things like live newscasts.
Coming soon: a method for you to drive to the drive-through window of a restaurant, launch your 'restaurant-order' app, take a pic of the 2-d barcode (or maybe swipe the phone over a rfid tag) identifying the restaurant, then place your order without having to talk to the person inside over an unintelligible, noisy audio link. Deaf people are an awesome test market for things involving high-end mobile phones, because even elderly deaf people are overwhelmingly likely to have a fairly recent iPhone or best of breed Android phone. There are also quite a few deaf software developers... partly, because it's a career where being deaf is almost inconsequential as long as you can arrange your life to work with others who are also deaf or know sign language.
The FDA could also help matters by being more willing to proceed with the approval process for drugs it now scorns as "me too" drugs. In categories where there are multiple nearly-identical drugs (anti-cholesterol drugs come to mind), prices are relatively affordable even though most of them are still under patent. As it stands, the FDA spends almost as much time acting like a branch of the USPTO as it does safeguarding public health.
For years, the FDA has basically refused to allow drugs embroiled in lawsuits to proceed with approval. Its rationale is that such approvals would be a waste of its time. HOWEVER, that attitude is what allows companies who get a drug approved to drag their feet and wait 10-15 years before releasing improved (or extended-release) versions of the same drug. If some uppity competitor tries to force their hand, they can just throw an infringement lawsuit at them, knowing it will stop the FDA in its tracks.
If the FDA were to proceed with the approval process ANYWAY, and ended up approving a drug that couldn't legally be sold, it would still have a net positive effect upon the state of the art. At that point, the first company might as well either license the improvements from the second company and manufacture the drug itself, or come up with a licensing deal that preserves its own profits while allowing the improved drug to be marketed.
You might have a point, if health insurance were something your parents bought and maintained for you as a child until you became a self-supporting adult, and expensive chronic conditions that emerged during childhood were primarily the responsibility of your childhood insurance company to pay in perpetuity. Kind of like homeowners insurance. If your policy runs from January 1 through December 31, and your house gets destroyed by a hurricane on October 17th, you don't have to embark upon a mad rush to get it rebuilt before the policy expires in 2-1/2 months and your destroyed house becomes uninsurable by virtue of being already destroyed. The policy you had the day the house was destroyed is the one that has to pay, even if it takes you years to get your act together and finish the job, and even if your home is effectively uninsured for 3 of those years.
The upside is that it would be almost impossible to become uninsurable, because if you came down with something chronic and expensive, the policy in effect at the time would have to cover it for the rest of your life. The downside is that insurance premiums would go from increasing with age to a "U" shaped curve. Kids rarely get sick... but if they ended up needing dialysis 3 times a week for the rest of their lives, the policy their parents bought for them prior to their birth would end up costing the company one hell of a lot of money. In contrast, premiums for 30-50 year olds would be fairly cheap, because by the time you're 30, any life-long conditions you're likely to develop before you're 50 or 60 will have probably developed (and vested against some other insurance company), and any NEW conditions you develop will probably either kill you quickly or be curable.
One problem, though... companies go bankrupt. If you had true indemnity health insurance that worked likehomeowners insurance and covered new chronic conditions for the rest of your life, and the company responsible for your past, present, and future asthma/diabetes/whatever treatments went bankrupt... well, let's just say there would be a problem.
As long as credit card processors will do business with you. As far as Mastercard and Visa are concerned, if you're selling eBooks, you're in the same high-risk category as pr0n sites, and treated accordingly. And the treatment isn't pleasant, unless you're into sadomasochism and enjoy arbitrary, random punishment for alleged offenses you haven't even committed.
Booksellers (like Barnes & Noble in the US) don't necessarily make matters better. They don't seem to grasp that one of the big competitive advantages they still have over Amazon is instant gratification. The fact is, for technical books, eBooks SUCK. They shouldn't, they don't necessarily *have* to, and they probably won't suck forever... but right now, they do.
Anyway, the point is, if you need a book about something RIGHT NOW and you live in big city, try going to bn.com and searching for books that are in stock, available for immediate pickup , at a store within 100 miles RIGHT NOW. You can't. You can view them one at a time, and individually see which ones are in or out of stock at which stores, but there's no way to tell bn.com, "don't waste my time showing me books I can't buy right now near my house". It's such a simple use case, yet one that almost no brick & mortar retailer seems capable of getting right. And it's the one area where Amazon can't compete with them, on cost OR on service... at least, not until they decide to start allowing people to order online from their nearest warehouse, then drive there and pick it up. Think about it... someone who wants a book RIGHT NOW, at 8pm on a Tuesday night (or 5pm on Sunday) is going to literally pay full price for the book, and doesn't CARE how much or little it costs from Amazon. You'd think Barnes & Noble would wet themselves trying to cater to instant-gratification book buyers.
Anybody care to guess how long it'll take cities like New York to pass a law making it illegal for driverless empty cars to follow any route besides one leading directly to a parking space somewhere, to avoid having 40,000 driverless cars doing laps around lower Manhattan for hours at a time since it's cheaper to run the car for 2 hours than to actually pay to park for two hours?
I can definitely see driverless cars causing massive collapse in downtown parking rates across America. In a city like Miami, the difference between $2-4/day parking (in a reasonable neighborhood) and $17/hour parking is usually about 3-4 miles, max. I can also see lots of tension as urban residential neighborhoods a mile or two from the skyscrapers that traditionally had adequate curbside parking suddenly find themselves inundated daily with self-driving cars looking for a cheap place to park.
Well, it depends. Big oil-fueled power plants serving a large, sparse area are probably counterproductive. Nuclear plants are pretty much stuck with economy of scale, because it's the only way they can be operated cost-effectively. I have a friend who works in the nuclear power plant industry worldwide, and he did a pretty good job of disillusioning me about pebble bed reactors (which are the usual solution proposed to the scale problem).
The specific problem with pebble bed reactors is that they might not be capable of having a traditional meltdown, but they're NOTORIOUS for producing some of the most toxic radioactive waste ever seen outside Chernobyl's sarcophagus... waste that's not only intensely radioactive, but CHEMICALLY reactive & incredibly corrosive as well. And apparently, nobody has ever come up with a safe way to actually decommission a retired pebble bed reactor, besides burying it under a mountain of concrete for eternity. Once they're built and fired up, they're going to be occupying that site for centuries, because any clean-up and removal effort would be too dangerous (to both the workers and surrounding community) to even contemplate.
The best thing the US could do is just replace our existing reactors with newer, more modern ones. Nuclear fission is nasty, but it's the best thing we *have*, and the best thing we're *going* to have for a really, really long time. Even IF we get fusion to work, fusion is something that needs even larger economies of scale than fission... and making the southeastern United States (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, plus one or two more states) dependent upon a single vast power plant would be utter suicide, because anything from a parade of hurricanes to a terrorist attack on power lines could cause a blackout affecting 50 million people unless the gas-fired regional plants were maintained... and staffed... which would then negate most of the benefits of the fission plant.
And then look at the big power plants you'll need, generally fueled by natural gas or oil, to cleave those dihydrogen monoxide atoms in half, then repackage the molecular hydrogen for high-pressure storage.
That's the harsh truth. Fuel cells burning hydrogen electrolysized from water only makes even *theoretical* sense if the electricity itself comes from nuclear power... or your oil supply is literally cut off for political reasons, shale isn't an option, and you're desperate & burning coal. It's kind of stupid to burn ten gallons of oil to produce the net mobile energy that five gallons of oil would produce at the point of use if you refined it into gasoline.
Fuel cells are an evolutionary dead end. They might have potential someday as emergency phone chargers (and WOULD have probably been a viable battery alternative for laptops on long-distance flights had it not been for 9/11), but cars really aren't one of their golden use cases.
OK, more precisely... 30-40MHz also happens to be the point where the demands imposed by a "proper" design ALSO outstrip what you, as an individual, can build with a home-etched 2-layer circuit board, hand solder, and/or troubleshoot when it doesn't work reliably. It's the point where things like 4-layer circuit boards with ground planes and solder masks become non-negotiable requirements. And it's the line in the sand where getting multiple devices to coexist and share that same high-speed bus becomes a REAL problem.
Witness the clusterfuck failure of 40MHz VL-bus. There's a reason why the industry took a step backwards to 33MHz for PCI, and so many budget motherboards had only 2 or 3 slots... it was just too hard/expensive/unreliable to go faster, and adding more PCI slots required additional active buffering circuitry. 40MHz VL-bus generally worked fine for local-bus video when the chips were soldered to the motherboard, and was generally "OK" if you had exactly one VL-bus slot on a high-quality motherboard with exactly one high-quality video card plugged into it... but was a complete NIGHTMARE of crashes if the board and/or card cut corners, and was almost always -- without exception -- flaky under any conditions if you tried to use TWO VL-bus cards. I know, because I made the mistake of buying a Promise VL-bus caching hard drive controller circa 1993 or 1994, and saw my system's reliability go down the TOILET the moment I connected it.
I can almost guarantee that if Woz's first home computer had been his original Apple I design, but built in China with a hypothetical 50MHz COG 6502 under a glob of epoxy on a credit-card sized circuit board, and the original Apple expansion bus exposed as a block of tiny test points with 25-mil spacing at that same 50MHz bus speed, he probably would have thrown in the towel in frustration and given up on trying to bitbang NTSC color video or make an affordable floppy drive controller for it. Certain things are just beyond the realistic ability of a hobbyist (or even many small companies). The line between 16MHz and 40Mhz isn't necessarily razor-sharp, or even a brick wall, but it's absolutely *there*, and anyone who tries to build something at home that's substantially faster than 16Mhz is eventually going to run into (or trip over) it.
It didn't need 650mb, it just needed to be a lot bigger than the absurdly small buffers HP shipped with.
Think of an assembly line at a cookie factory with a badly-designed packing mechanism that blindly assumes (and depends upon) there being a cookie every 24 inches -- centered on a white dot printed onto the belt -- without fail, and shuts down the entire assembly line if it finds a gap without a cookie.
Now, assume the cookies get placed on the conveyor belt by one person who has a bucket of cookies in hand, seated in front of a 12-inch gap where the conveyor belt emerges from one slot, passes across an open area, and disappears into a second slot. The employee has exactly 5 seconds to grab a cookie from the bucket, and exactly 5 seconds to place the cookie on the dot on the conveyor belt before repeating. Now, suppose the employee is holding the cookie, ready to place it on the conveyor belt, and sneezes. To avoid spreading infection, he or she turns around to sneeze away from both the cookies and conveyor belt. Unfortunately, the sneeze takes 6 seconds to perform and recover from, so the dot disappears into the second slot without a cookie. If we're burning a metaphorical CD with those cookies, that sneeze has just caused a coaster.
THAT was the fundamental problem with HP's small buffer. It depended upon having the undivided attention of Windows for frequent, short intervals of time with ZERO tolerance for distraction.
In contrast, a larger buffer would be like an assembly line that shuffles cookies towards multiple bins. As soon as a bin is full, the flow of cookies into it gets temporarily halted (with enough room to buffer/queue a few cookies in the meantime), a new empty bag falls into place, and the queued-up cookies are allowed to fall into it immediately, then continue until the next bag is full.
In the real world, it's ALWAYS harder to guarantee data at some precise trickle than to allow it to just gush in spurts and be buffered at the same net data rate.A lot of people think "realtime" means "fast". It doesn't. It just means "deterministic" (often, deterministically-constant). A large buffer allows you to deliver a deterministic trickle of data transmitted in a bursty, non-deterministic manner.
Sit closer, so the screen completely fills your field of vision and immerses you in the image. Your opinion will probably change.
If you sit back from the screen, you're using foveal cones to watch it. It's the rods along your vision field's periphery that cause the problems.
The "uncanny valley" problem affects mainly immersive videogames where you're either sitting really close to the screen, or have additional screens off to the side that are viewed mainly with peripheral vision.
This is a problem people involved with immersive virtual reality have known about for a LONG time. If you put somebody into a virtual-reality world feeling like he's wearing a motorcycle helmet that only allows him to look straight ahead, he finds the constraints to be annoying, but describes what he sees as "amazingly lifelike". As you widen his field of vision, the constraints annoy him less, but the experience itself deteriorates and feels increasingly creepy. At its most extreme, you get this overwhelming feeling that there's "something" off to the side, just outside your field of vision, that you can't get a good look at, but nevertheless presents danger to you. I've experienced it, and it really does become scary after a while.
In the most extreme case -- sensitive individual, searingly-white (or green) dot against completely black background near the edge of one's peripheral vision with dark-adapted rods, you have to get the effective flicker rate up above 500-800hz to eliminate it completely. And even then, nobody really knows yet whether that's truly high enough, because displays capable of that kind of refresh rate don't exist yet, and the experiments have all been done with pulsing lasers.
To get to THIS level, we're going to need OLED displays where every row (if not every pixel cluster, or even every subpixel element) requires its own dedicated PWM controller and local sample buffer. And that's why this article is such good news... it's the first step towards GETTING to the point where the individual elements can have their own local driver circuits.
There's an even better reason why nobody wants to sell flash to OCZ -- they've tainted the entire SSD industry so badly with their crap drives, no reputable manufacturer of flash wants to have its good name tarnished by association with them.
A lot of OCZ's problems were self-inflicted, with Sandforce's active complicity.
For example, Sandforce's engineers came up with an ugly, performance-killing hack that allowed the drive to avoid corruption if it were powered-down mid-write so they could officially claim that the ultracapacitor was "optional" in "cost-sensitive applications". OCZ built drives without the ultracap, then had Sandforce furnish them with firmware that DISABLED THAT SAFETY MEASURE to avoid killing their drives' write performance in benchmarks.
Mark my words. If OCZ doesn't go bankrupt on its own accord, they're eventually going to get put out of business by a class-action lawsuit like the one that nailed HP almost 20 years ago. I'm talking about the one where HP's management intentionally ignored their engineers, and sold CD burners that didn't have enough RAM to buffer a complete track & instead depended upon Windows to feed them a steady stream of data with a degree of lockstep precision that Windows could neither promise nor reliably sustain even though their own engineers told them it couldn't work reliably, and was GUARANTEED to turn at least 5-20% of discs burned into coasters (back when a blank CD cost SEVERAL DOLLARS).
HP's engineers DID have a way to allow the drives to be reliably used without the buffer... write the.iso file to a FAT16 volume, then boot directly into DOS from a floppy to do the burning. However, like OCZ's management (who wanted the performance of an ultracap-protected drive, without the cost of the ultracap itself), HP's management wanted a cheap drive that could burn CDs under Windows, even if it meant they had to knowingly LIE about its ability to actually DO it.
Actually, the problem is even bigger. Somewhere around 200fps, you start flying into "uncanny valley" territory. 200fps is faster than your foveal cones can sense motion, but it's still less than half the framerate at which your peripheral rod can discern motion involving high-contrast content. When it comes to frame-based video, Nyquist makes a HUGE mess thanks to all the higher-order information conveyed by things like motion-blur. That's why so many people think 24fps somehow looks "natural", but 120fps looks "fake". Motion-blurred 24fps video has higher-order artifacts that can be discerned by BOTH the rods AND cones equally. It's "fake", but at least it's "consistent". 120fps video looks flawless and smooth to the cones in your fovea, but still has motion artifacts as far as your peripheral rods are concerned. Your brain notices, and screams, "Fake!"
The biggest barrier to doing cool stuff NOW with homebrew hardware is DRM. Or, more precisely, the fact that any SoC infected by HDMI or the ability to do hardware-accelerated h.264 is going to be encumbered by viral licensing terms that make it nearly impossible for anyone smaller than Logitech to get their hands on real sourcecode and unredacted datasheets for the best chips out there... or even the ones that are 17 steps down from the top, and so ghetto, not even $7 media players from China embedded in HelloKitty knock-off dolls use them anymore.
Before anybody mentions the Pi... it's actually one of the PRIME EXAMPLES of this problem. Yes, there are chips out there that can do things like DVI output that aren't licensing-encumbered... and they cost about 20 times more to do 5% as much. Every single cheap-but-powerful chip out there capable of doing hardware-accelerated video is crushed by DRM-infected licensing and cloaked in MPEG-LA-enforced secrecy.
The Atmel AVR chips kind of ushered in the first renaissance of homebrew electronics. Anybody who remembers the late 90s knows what I mean... the dark era when -- almost overnight -- computer bus speeds skyrocketed to levels that were almost hopeless (16-20MHz is roughly the point where you have to start thinking about things like impedance, crosstalk, and RFI... 30-40MHz is the point where stuff that's not properly designed just plain doesn't work). Microsoft's full-on assault on the parallel port -- the last port on a modern PC that was fast enough to do realtime bitbanged i/o, but slow enough to interface directly with homebrew hardware -- was basically our equivalent of the Roman Empire's fall... not with a bang, but more of a whimper (parallel ports still sort of worked post-NT, but GETTING them to work was an act of endless agony, at least whenever you had to do it on a virgin PC).
The Pi is a bittersweet next step. On one hand, TCP/IP was the deathblow for 8-bit MCUs. Yeah, Wiznet gave us a few more years of life support, but with the Pi, we're now in a situation where it costs more to pair up a Wiznet chip with something like an Atmega 2560 than it does to just buy a Pi. And the Pi finally gave us something that historically was always brutally expensive... abundant cheap ram (anybody who's ever felt the sting of implementing XRAM on an AVR knows what I'm talking about here, especially if you were masochistic enough to try doing it with a breadboard). On the other hand, the Pi to the AVR is kind of like a 400MHz Coppermine Pentium III vs a 16Mhz NEC V-20... it's faster and cheaper, but we're right back in "this board is a half step away from being a de-facto IC" territory. For now, we still have I2C and SPI, but I dread the dark day when someone starts selling "hobbyist" boards that only have USB and a HDMI port.
The next renaissance will be FPGAs... probably, right around the time the older patents owned by Xilinx and Altera start to expire. Right now, even moderately advanced FPGAs are breathtakingly expensive for what you're really getting... and god help you if your needs go beyond what their free tools will allow you to do. Software tool costs are particularly tragic in the Atmel arena. They actually have an entire line of AVR chips that hardly anybody knows about, and even fewer hobbyists actually touch, that are fairly cheap & are basically an AVR with an onboard CPLD in lieu of the usual i/o. The problem is, the development tools to program them aren't just non-free... they're so absurdly expensive, you'd almost think they don't *want* anybody to buy or use those chips.
> Should I learn business? It it more important to focus on personal networking?
No, and it doesn't matter. Statistically, if you're good at programming and love it, you'll probably be miserable focusing on business, and even MORE miserable trying to force yourself to personally network. If you're miserable, you'll never succeed. Network enough to find someone who won't fuck you over too badly who genuinely ENJOYS the business end, and stick with programming. Come up with something cool, and let THEM worry about finding a way to make it profitable, so you can buy a cool loft somewhere, take a few decent vacations to places you enjoy, and have enough money in the bank after the IPO to let you spend the rest of your life writing quirky open-source software for your own personal gratification.
Learn enough about business to sense when you're getting screwed over, but don't try to BE the one who actually RUNS the business. Been there, done it, swore to at least 3 major deities I'll never do it again. And fortunately, I was young enough to be mostly judgment-proof. If you're a programmer, having to spend most of your time being a bill-collector, salesperson, or worse will demoralize more than anything you've ever done in your life. If you study ANY area of business, study the basics of IP law so you can turn your hobbies into a personal patent portfolio, then go shopping for someone to finance your future fun.
Maybe, but as a practical matter, in the Android world, there are basically two groups: the supermajority, who have phones with 1280x720 or higher resolution, dualcore 1.5GHz CPU, at least 16 gigs of flash, at least a gig or two of ram, and are running ICS or better... and everyone else, who doesn't particularly matter. Android phones today are kind of like PCs were circa 1992... millions of slow, old, creaky computers running DOS with monochrome displays that were basically irrelevant as far as new software was concerned because they were owned by companies using them as glorified VT-100 terminals or people too poor to upgrade, and a lot of PCs that were 486DX2/66 or better with at least 4 megs, SVGA, a Soundblaster(-Pro) or Ultrasound, a usable hard drive, and a CD-ROM drive. NOBODY writes NEW software for ancient versions of Android anymore, because people using old phones as phones aren't going to buy (or even really use) software on them anyway.
People like to drone on about "framework fragmentation". Pre-ICS, that was a real issue. Pre-Gingerbread, it was downright crippling. If you wanted to interact directly with the dialer or phonebook, you had to use undocumented APIs and hacked JNI to tease a Samsung phone and HTC phone to use the same app that interacted with the phonebook or calendar. Now, it's no big deal. SenseUI and Touchwiz are little more than stock launcher apps and color schemes anymore. There are a few things that are still proprietary to one vendor or another, like S-beam, but few things that genuinely can't be ripped from one rom and grafted onto another by motivated guys at XDA. As a practical matter, the only thing (besides copyright law) really stopping anyone from building a SenseUI ROM for the Galaxy S3, or a Touchwiz ROM for the HTC One, is the fact that they make so many assumptions about the other apps on the phone, even getting them to limp under AOSP on the hardware for which they were originally intended to run is a major project that few care enough to even bother with, and the people with the skills to do it have decided it's more worthwhile to just re-implement new core apps with the look and feel they like than to try endlessly putting band-aids on jigsaw ROMs.
Android's next big leap is coming to terms with multiple separate and non-equal displays on the same device... the main screen and HDMI, a main screen and a smaller display, two displays facing each other, whatever. Flip phones will have 1280x800 displays, everything else will have 1920x1080 or 1920x1200. If manufacturers could be arsed to expose a bus with reasonable power-supplying capabilities and I2C, we could move on to the next stage in cases, and have phones that ship without QWERTY keyboards, but can have the back pulled off and replaced by a slide-out keyboard or gamepad, for a phone that has a small-ish semi-nonswappable battery onboard, but can easily have a bigger battery integrated into the same thirdparty snap-on back modules. Bluetooth is a piss-poor interface for things like keyboards and gamepads due to latency, but I2C (ideally, with an irq line to tell the phone the device has something to say) would work nicely. Hell, even Dallas 1-wire with parasitic power would probably be decent for that purpose (I've always thought Dallas 1-wire was pretty cool, and could never figure out why it's always been the pariah of interfaces).
I don't know about other countries, but from what I remember about the complaints from my grandmother (who was particularly vocal about it), half the problem was the stupid metric cooking utensils they sold here. I still remember the one my grandfather bought my grandmother for Christmas sometime around 1980... it had 1mL and 10mL measuring spoons, and a set of goddamn BEAKERS for measuring things like flour. The "metric industry" was so hellbent on making a clean break, the idea of making things like 1.25mL, 2.5mL, 5mL, and 15mL measuring spoons apparently was just too reactionary for them. And don't get me started on "metric cookbooks" that tried to be cute and tell people to add 3 deciliters of milk.
Apparently, when France went metric a hundred years earlier, even the radicals knew better than to fuck with Parisian chefs, and never subjected them to madness like measuring utensils that weren't the right size for ANYTHING. And when America started going metric, our own companies just went nuts trying to be cute & abstract, and just ended up pissing everybody off.
> HTC has had trouble getting traction against Samsung despite offering compelling hardware.
Interestingly, HTC's plummeting market share coincided almost EXACTLY with their elimination of removable batteries and microSD cards. It's not rocket science. Two years ago, HTC was neck in neck with Samsung. Then, they eliminated microSD and removable batteries, everybody who viewed that as intolerable & used to have a HTC phone bought Samsung phones when it was time for their next upgrade, and HTC went from being "a little behind Samsung" to "WAY behind Samsung".
Suggestion to HTC: give us a new phone like the Evo3D (but with GSM+LTE capabilities compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile as well) that has microSD and a removable battery (or at least a 6,000mAH battery if it MUST be non-removable) and an unlocked (or trivially-unlockable) bootloader, and watch your market share climb again. I know people (like my brother) who literally paid a small fortune to buy a USED Evo 3D long after it was officially EOL'ed because their original one got destroyed and they liked the 3D features so much. My brother STILL resists buying a new phone, because he doesn't want to give up the 3D camera and display.
Actually, we'll be BETTER OFF if our phones can dual-boot Android and Windows. Windows might suck, but Google has shown that they can occasionally fuck up and piss people off as well as anyone else can. Having the ability to turn our backs on Google and (temporarily, at least) jump to Windows will give us all a potent weapon to hold to Google's head and keep them honest, in case they decide to do something completely obnoxious and intolerable, like make Google Plus mandatory if you want to have an Android phone capable of running paid Market apps. Frankly, the existence of a viable same-device alternative to Android is just about the only weapon we HAVE to use against Google and make them behave themselves. Ubuntu doesn't count, because it still requires Android for full functionality, and IOS doesn't count, because the only thing I hate more than Google Plus is Apple.
The sad thing is that VMware Dual Persona mostly does this... but they sold out to Verizon and gave them exclusivity, so Verizon is going to ruin it the same way they squandered and wasted the Galaxy Nexus. VMware DP gives us the ability to have Cyanogen and Corporatemode on one phone, but with our luck, the only phones you'll be able to GET it on will be locked-down Motorola phones on Verizon.
Sadly, it wouldn't be all that hard for Microsoft to make the UI on Windows Phone 'snappier' than the UI on Android, due to some incredibly shortsighted design decisions that were made early in Android's design. They bent over backwards to make sure Android apps written for 320x480 could limp along on a 160x240 display, while completely IGNORING the use case that everybody ended up caring about (the rapid leap to 1280x720/800, and 1920x1080/1200 displays).Simply put, Android's rendering system doesn't scale well to high resolution displays.
"Project Butter" fixed the worst of those problems -- but ONLY for the homescreen. Within individual apps, Android STILL has a more traditional "Linux" problem -- it regards the display and input hardware as being no more or less important than anything else. This is one area where IOS 5 USED to spank Android. Unfortunately, Apple appears to have thrown most of that advantage away, because the iPads I've used running IOS 6, and especially IOS 7 now lag as badly as the best Android hardware... and as far as I'm concerned, they BOTH suck and have too much lag now.
Exactly. Somebody with a US Galaxy S3 should be able to go to qualcomm.com, navigate to Support -> Downloads -> Firmware -> MSM8960. Then, navigate to Radio Modems -> [AT&T | T-Mobile | Sprint | Verizon | US Cellular | Rogers | Telus | Fido | Whomever], download the latest radio modem for our carrier, back up, then navigate to SoC Support -> Android -> {kernel-version}. From there, we'd be able to download individual kernel modules (some with buildable source) as we saw fit. Or, for the Windows-inclined, go to SoC Support -> Windows -> {version}.
This is on top of being able to go to samsungusa.com and download their more user-friendly monolithic installer for Android or Windows Phone. It would be just like buying a laptop... you could download the official drivers from the manufacturer, or if the manufacturer was an asshole, go straight to the chipset vendor and get the raw reference drivers to tweak yourself.
There's absolutely NO technical reason why it can't be this way. There's nothing holy or sacred about ARM that makes it impossible. It's just that we, as consumers, allowed phone manufacturers to get away with a level of locked-down proprietary-ness that would have been considered utterly intolerable in the PC realm. All we can really do is wait for Intel to get its act together, and make it possible for somebody to cobble together an x86-architecture PC with radio modem drivers that work and aren't crippled with respect to LTE (plain GSM isn't good enough), then "help" a manufacturer or two in Shenzhen to mass-produce 2GHz(*) quadcore circuit boards that can do HSPA+ and LTE on international, Canadian, AT&T, and T-Mobile bands(**), then make them available to smaller companies who'll assemble them in various ways into actual phones for sale.
(*) a 2-GHz quadcore Intel-architecture CPU on par with an i3, let alone an i5 or i7, would absolutely SMOKE and DESTROY a 2GHz ARM performance-wise. ARM might be frugal, but comparing an i7 to an ARM Cortex A15 is kind of like comparing a Lexus LFA to a Hyundai Elantra (or a Tesla Roadster to a Chevy Volt). If you want a basic phone, go with ARM. If you want realtime-raytraced translucent-glass eyecandy and glasses-free 3D (like the HTC Evo3D had), i7 (with 6,000+mAH battery) all the way.;-)
(**) Maybe Verizon, if they can be bullied into allowing it. Sprint isn't even worth bothering with.
Slashdot Mirror
> You're describing an issue that's independent of DST.
Actually, it could be argued that DST is a way for otherwise-powerless employees with institutionally-inflexible employers to use the political process as a weapon against them, and accomplish the change in working hours that their employers would otherwise never allow them to have.
> You don't need Congress to act. Each State decides which timezone it is in and whether or not to participate in DST.
Actually, no. The only thing a state can decide is whether or not to participate in DST, as defined by the federal government. A state can't decide to "participate differently", nor can it redefine or change its own timezones.
Florida, for example, would arguably be better off if we permanently changed the part of the state that's now "Eastern Time" to either year-round "Eastern Daylight Time", or moved ourselves to Atlantic time & abolished DST (both of which would have exactly the same effect). But we aren't allowed to.
> one for east of the Mississippi and one for the west. Simplicity is underrated.
And how, precisely, does leaving most of the midwestern US's largest cities split between two timezones make things any simpler for real people? Look at the Mississippi River, and notice how many big cities straddle it.
Believe it or not, the video compression codec we now know as h.264 had its origins about 20 years ago as a compression scheme to allow the transmission of video good enough to allow sign language over a dialup modem. Its evolution into h.264 (along with some very powerful ASICs that jumpstarted h.264 to allow realtime hardware compression and decompression whose development costs were subsidized by the federal government) perfectly demonstrates an assertion I've long made -- the best way for deaf people to make their lives easier is to find creative ways to commercialize the technology they depend upon and make it useful to NON-deaf people as well, so it goes from being an expensive accommodation to a normal & common business practice. When closed captions first came out, the only shows that had them were shows that few deaf people really wanted to watch. Ten years later, once the decoding hardware was built into new TVs by default and gyms & sports bars realized they were useful for people to watch over the background noise, captions were almost universal... even for things like live newscasts.
Coming soon: a method for you to drive to the drive-through window of a restaurant, launch your 'restaurant-order' app, take a pic of the 2-d barcode (or maybe swipe the phone over a rfid tag) identifying the restaurant, then place your order without having to talk to the person inside over an unintelligible, noisy audio link. Deaf people are an awesome test market for things involving high-end mobile phones, because even elderly deaf people are overwhelmingly likely to have a fairly recent iPhone or best of breed Android phone. There are also quite a few deaf software developers... partly, because it's a career where being deaf is almost inconsequential as long as you can arrange your life to work with others who are also deaf or know sign language.
The FDA could also help matters by being more willing to proceed with the approval process for drugs it now scorns as "me too" drugs. In categories where there are multiple nearly-identical drugs (anti-cholesterol drugs come to mind), prices are relatively affordable even though most of them are still under patent. As it stands, the FDA spends almost as much time acting like a branch of the USPTO as it does safeguarding public health.
For years, the FDA has basically refused to allow drugs embroiled in lawsuits to proceed with approval. Its rationale is that such approvals would be a waste of its time. HOWEVER, that attitude is what allows companies who get a drug approved to drag their feet and wait 10-15 years before releasing improved (or extended-release) versions of the same drug. If some uppity competitor tries to force their hand, they can just throw an infringement lawsuit at them, knowing it will stop the FDA in its tracks.
If the FDA were to proceed with the approval process ANYWAY, and ended up approving a drug that couldn't legally be sold, it would still have a net positive effect upon the state of the art. At that point, the first company might as well either license the improvements from the second company and manufacture the drug itself, or come up with a licensing deal that preserves its own profits while allowing the improved drug to be marketed.
You might have a point, if health insurance were something your parents bought and maintained for you as a child until you became a self-supporting adult, and expensive chronic conditions that emerged during childhood were primarily the responsibility of your childhood insurance company to pay in perpetuity. Kind of like homeowners insurance. If your policy runs from January 1 through December 31, and your house gets destroyed by a hurricane on October 17th, you don't have to embark upon a mad rush to get it rebuilt before the policy expires in 2-1/2 months and your destroyed house becomes uninsurable by virtue of being already destroyed. The policy you had the day the house was destroyed is the one that has to pay, even if it takes you years to get your act together and finish the job, and even if your home is effectively uninsured for 3 of those years.
The upside is that it would be almost impossible to become uninsurable, because if you came down with something chronic and expensive, the policy in effect at the time would have to cover it for the rest of your life. The downside is that insurance premiums would go from increasing with age to a "U" shaped curve. Kids rarely get sick... but if they ended up needing dialysis 3 times a week for the rest of their lives, the policy their parents bought for them prior to their birth would end up costing the company one hell of a lot of money. In contrast, premiums for 30-50 year olds would be fairly cheap, because by the time you're 30, any life-long conditions you're likely to develop before you're 50 or 60 will have probably developed (and vested against some other insurance company), and any NEW conditions you develop will probably either kill you quickly or be curable.
One problem, though... companies go bankrupt. If you had true indemnity health insurance that worked likehomeowners insurance and covered new chronic conditions for the rest of your life, and the company responsible for your past, present, and future asthma/diabetes/whatever treatments went bankrupt... well, let's just say there would be a problem.
As long as credit card processors will do business with you. As far as Mastercard and Visa are concerned, if you're selling eBooks, you're in the same high-risk category as pr0n sites, and treated accordingly. And the treatment isn't pleasant, unless you're into sadomasochism and enjoy arbitrary, random punishment for alleged offenses you haven't even committed.
Booksellers (like Barnes & Noble in the US) don't necessarily make matters better. They don't seem to grasp that one of the big competitive advantages they still have over Amazon is instant gratification. The fact is, for technical books, eBooks SUCK. They shouldn't, they don't necessarily *have* to, and they probably won't suck forever... but right now, they do.
Anyway, the point is, if you need a book about something RIGHT NOW and you live in big city, try going to bn.com and searching for books that are in stock, available for immediate pickup , at a store within 100 miles RIGHT NOW. You can't. You can view them one at a time, and individually see which ones are in or out of stock at which stores, but there's no way to tell bn.com, "don't waste my time showing me books I can't buy right now near my house". It's such a simple use case, yet one that almost no brick & mortar retailer seems capable of getting right. And it's the one area where Amazon can't compete with them, on cost OR on service... at least, not until they decide to start allowing people to order online from their nearest warehouse, then drive there and pick it up. Think about it... someone who wants a book RIGHT NOW, at 8pm on a Tuesday night (or 5pm on Sunday) is going to literally pay full price for the book, and doesn't CARE how much or little it costs from Amazon. You'd think Barnes & Noble would wet themselves trying to cater to instant-gratification book buyers.
Anybody care to guess how long it'll take cities like New York to pass a law making it illegal for driverless empty cars to follow any route besides one leading directly to a parking space somewhere, to avoid having 40,000 driverless cars doing laps around lower Manhattan for hours at a time since it's cheaper to run the car for 2 hours than to actually pay to park for two hours?
I can definitely see driverless cars causing massive collapse in downtown parking rates across America. In a city like Miami, the difference between $2-4/day parking (in a reasonable neighborhood) and $17/hour parking is usually about 3-4 miles, max. I can also see lots of tension as urban residential neighborhoods a mile or two from the skyscrapers that traditionally had adequate curbside parking suddenly find themselves inundated daily with self-driving cars looking for a cheap place to park.
Well, it depends. Big oil-fueled power plants serving a large, sparse area are probably counterproductive. Nuclear plants are pretty much stuck with economy of scale, because it's the only way they can be operated cost-effectively. I have a friend who works in the nuclear power plant industry worldwide, and he did a pretty good job of disillusioning me about pebble bed reactors (which are the usual solution proposed to the scale problem).
The specific problem with pebble bed reactors is that they might not be capable of having a traditional meltdown, but they're NOTORIOUS for producing some of the most toxic radioactive waste ever seen outside Chernobyl's sarcophagus... waste that's not only intensely radioactive, but CHEMICALLY reactive & incredibly corrosive as well. And apparently, nobody has ever come up with a safe way to actually decommission a retired pebble bed reactor, besides burying it under a mountain of concrete for eternity. Once they're built and fired up, they're going to be occupying that site for centuries, because any clean-up and removal effort would be too dangerous (to both the workers and surrounding community) to even contemplate.
The best thing the US could do is just replace our existing reactors with newer, more modern ones. Nuclear fission is nasty, but it's the best thing we *have*, and the best thing we're *going* to have for a really, really long time. Even IF we get fusion to work, fusion is something that needs even larger economies of scale than fission... and making the southeastern United States (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, plus one or two more states) dependent upon a single vast power plant would be utter suicide, because anything from a parade of hurricanes to a terrorist attack on power lines could cause a blackout affecting 50 million people unless the gas-fired regional plants were maintained... and staffed... which would then negate most of the benefits of the fission plant.
And then look at the big power plants you'll need, generally fueled by natural gas or oil, to cleave those dihydrogen monoxide atoms in half, then repackage the molecular hydrogen for high-pressure storage.
That's the harsh truth. Fuel cells burning hydrogen electrolysized from water only makes even *theoretical* sense if the electricity itself comes from nuclear power... or your oil supply is literally cut off for political reasons, shale isn't an option, and you're desperate & burning coal. It's kind of stupid to burn ten gallons of oil to produce the net mobile energy that five gallons of oil would produce at the point of use if you refined it into gasoline.
Fuel cells are an evolutionary dead end. They might have potential someday as emergency phone chargers (and WOULD have probably been a viable battery alternative for laptops on long-distance flights had it not been for 9/11), but cars really aren't one of their golden use cases.
OK, more precisely... 30-40MHz also happens to be the point where the demands imposed by a "proper" design ALSO outstrip what you, as an individual, can build with a home-etched 2-layer circuit board, hand solder, and/or troubleshoot when it doesn't work reliably. It's the point where things like 4-layer circuit boards with ground planes and solder masks become non-negotiable requirements. And it's the line in the sand where getting multiple devices to coexist and share that same high-speed bus becomes a REAL problem.
Witness the clusterfuck failure of 40MHz VL-bus. There's a reason why the industry took a step backwards to 33MHz for PCI, and so many budget motherboards had only 2 or 3 slots... it was just too hard/expensive/unreliable to go faster, and adding more PCI slots required additional active buffering circuitry. 40MHz VL-bus generally worked fine for local-bus video when the chips were soldered to the motherboard, and was generally "OK" if you had exactly one VL-bus slot on a high-quality motherboard with exactly one high-quality video card plugged into it... but was a complete NIGHTMARE of crashes if the board and/or card cut corners, and was almost always -- without exception -- flaky under any conditions if you tried to use TWO VL-bus cards. I know, because I made the mistake of buying a Promise VL-bus caching hard drive controller circa 1993 or 1994, and saw my system's reliability go down the TOILET the moment I connected it.
I can almost guarantee that if Woz's first home computer had been his original Apple I design, but built in China with a hypothetical 50MHz COG 6502 under a glob of epoxy on a credit-card sized circuit board, and the original Apple expansion bus exposed as a block of tiny test points with 25-mil spacing at that same 50MHz bus speed, he probably would have thrown in the towel in frustration and given up on trying to bitbang NTSC color video or make an affordable floppy drive controller for it. Certain things are just beyond the realistic ability of a hobbyist (or even many small companies). The line between 16MHz and 40Mhz isn't necessarily razor-sharp, or even a brick wall, but it's absolutely *there*, and anyone who tries to build something at home that's substantially faster than 16Mhz is eventually going to run into (or trip over) it.
It didn't need 650mb, it just needed to be a lot bigger than the absurdly small buffers HP shipped with.
Think of an assembly line at a cookie factory with a badly-designed packing mechanism that blindly assumes (and depends upon) there being a cookie every 24 inches -- centered on a white dot printed onto the belt -- without fail, and shuts down the entire assembly line if it finds a gap without a cookie.
Now, assume the cookies get placed on the conveyor belt by one person who has a bucket of cookies in hand, seated in front of a 12-inch gap where the conveyor belt emerges from one slot, passes across an open area, and disappears into a second slot. The employee has exactly 5 seconds to grab a cookie from the bucket, and exactly 5 seconds to place the cookie on the dot on the conveyor belt before repeating. Now, suppose the employee is holding the cookie, ready to place it on the conveyor belt, and sneezes. To avoid spreading infection, he or she turns around to sneeze away from both the cookies and conveyor belt. Unfortunately, the sneeze takes 6 seconds to perform and recover from, so the dot disappears into the second slot without a cookie. If we're burning a metaphorical CD with those cookies, that sneeze has just caused a coaster.
THAT was the fundamental problem with HP's small buffer. It depended upon having the undivided attention of Windows for frequent, short intervals of time with ZERO tolerance for distraction.
In contrast, a larger buffer would be like an assembly line that shuffles cookies towards multiple bins. As soon as a bin is full, the flow of cookies into it gets temporarily halted (with enough room to buffer/queue a few cookies in the meantime), a new empty bag falls into place, and the queued-up cookies are allowed to fall into it immediately, then continue until the next bag is full.
In the real world, it's ALWAYS harder to guarantee data at some precise trickle than to allow it to just gush in spurts and be buffered at the same net data rate.A lot of people think "realtime" means "fast". It doesn't. It just means "deterministic" (often, deterministically-constant). A large buffer allows you to deliver a deterministic trickle of data transmitted in a bursty, non-deterministic manner.
Sit closer, so the screen completely fills your field of vision and immerses you in the image. Your opinion will probably change.
If you sit back from the screen, you're using foveal cones to watch it. It's the rods along your vision field's periphery that cause the problems.
The "uncanny valley" problem affects mainly immersive videogames where you're either sitting really close to the screen, or have additional screens off to the side that are viewed mainly with peripheral vision.
This is a problem people involved with immersive virtual reality have known about for a LONG time. If you put somebody into a virtual-reality world feeling like he's wearing a motorcycle helmet that only allows him to look straight ahead, he finds the constraints to be annoying, but describes what he sees as "amazingly lifelike". As you widen his field of vision, the constraints annoy him less, but the experience itself deteriorates and feels increasingly creepy. At its most extreme, you get this overwhelming feeling that there's "something" off to the side, just outside your field of vision, that you can't get a good look at, but nevertheless presents danger to you. I've experienced it, and it really does become scary after a while.
In the most extreme case -- sensitive individual, searingly-white (or green) dot against completely black background near the edge of one's peripheral vision with dark-adapted rods, you have to get the effective flicker rate up above 500-800hz to eliminate it completely. And even then, nobody really knows yet whether that's truly high enough, because displays capable of that kind of refresh rate don't exist yet, and the experiments have all been done with pulsing lasers.
To get to THIS level, we're going to need OLED displays where every row (if not every pixel cluster, or even every subpixel element) requires its own dedicated PWM controller and local sample buffer. And that's why this article is such good news... it's the first step towards GETTING to the point where the individual elements can have their own local driver circuits.
There's an even better reason why nobody wants to sell flash to OCZ -- they've tainted the entire SSD industry so badly with their crap drives, no reputable manufacturer of flash wants to have its good name tarnished by association with them.
A lot of OCZ's problems were self-inflicted, with Sandforce's active complicity.
For example, Sandforce's engineers came up with an ugly, performance-killing hack that allowed the drive to avoid corruption if it were powered-down mid-write so they could officially claim that the ultracapacitor was "optional" in "cost-sensitive applications". OCZ built drives without the ultracap, then had Sandforce furnish them with firmware that DISABLED THAT SAFETY MEASURE to avoid killing their drives' write performance in benchmarks.
Mark my words. If OCZ doesn't go bankrupt on its own accord, they're eventually going to get put out of business by a class-action lawsuit like the one that nailed HP almost 20 years ago. I'm talking about the one where HP's management intentionally ignored their engineers, and sold CD burners that didn't have enough RAM to buffer a complete track & instead depended upon Windows to feed them a steady stream of data with a degree of lockstep precision that Windows could neither promise nor reliably sustain even though their own engineers told them it couldn't work reliably, and was GUARANTEED to turn at least 5-20% of discs burned into coasters (back when a blank CD cost SEVERAL DOLLARS).
HP's engineers DID have a way to allow the drives to be reliably used without the buffer... write the .iso file to a FAT16 volume, then boot directly into DOS from a floppy to do the burning. However, like OCZ's management (who wanted the performance of an ultracap-protected drive, without the cost of the ultracap itself), HP's management wanted a cheap drive that could burn CDs under Windows, even if it meant they had to knowingly LIE about its ability to actually DO it.
Actually, the problem is even bigger. Somewhere around 200fps, you start flying into "uncanny valley" territory. 200fps is faster than your foveal cones can sense motion, but it's still less than half the framerate at which your peripheral rod can discern motion involving high-contrast content. When it comes to frame-based video, Nyquist makes a HUGE mess thanks to all the higher-order information conveyed by things like motion-blur. That's why so many people think 24fps somehow looks "natural", but 120fps looks "fake". Motion-blurred 24fps video has higher-order artifacts that can be discerned by BOTH the rods AND cones equally. It's "fake", but at least it's "consistent". 120fps video looks flawless and smooth to the cones in your fovea, but still has motion artifacts as far as your peripheral rods are concerned. Your brain notices, and screams, "Fake!"
The biggest barrier to doing cool stuff NOW with homebrew hardware is DRM. Or, more precisely, the fact that any SoC infected by HDMI or the ability to do hardware-accelerated h.264 is going to be encumbered by viral licensing terms that make it nearly impossible for anyone smaller than Logitech to get their hands on real sourcecode and unredacted datasheets for the best chips out there... or even the ones that are 17 steps down from the top, and so ghetto, not even $7 media players from China embedded in HelloKitty knock-off dolls use them anymore.
Before anybody mentions the Pi... it's actually one of the PRIME EXAMPLES of this problem. Yes, there are chips out there that can do things like DVI output that aren't licensing-encumbered... and they cost about 20 times more to do 5% as much. Every single cheap-but-powerful chip out there capable of doing hardware-accelerated video is crushed by DRM-infected licensing and cloaked in MPEG-LA-enforced secrecy.
The Atmel AVR chips kind of ushered in the first renaissance of homebrew electronics. Anybody who remembers the late 90s knows what I mean... the dark era when -- almost overnight -- computer bus speeds skyrocketed to levels that were almost hopeless (16-20MHz is roughly the point where you have to start thinking about things like impedance, crosstalk, and RFI... 30-40MHz is the point where stuff that's not properly designed just plain doesn't work). Microsoft's full-on assault on the parallel port -- the last port on a modern PC that was fast enough to do realtime bitbanged i/o, but slow enough to interface directly with homebrew hardware -- was basically our equivalent of the Roman Empire's fall... not with a bang, but more of a whimper (parallel ports still sort of worked post-NT, but GETTING them to work was an act of endless agony, at least whenever you had to do it on a virgin PC).
The Pi is a bittersweet next step. On one hand, TCP/IP was the deathblow for 8-bit MCUs. Yeah, Wiznet gave us a few more years of life support, but with the Pi, we're now in a situation where it costs more to pair up a Wiznet chip with something like an Atmega 2560 than it does to just buy a Pi. And the Pi finally gave us something that historically was always brutally expensive... abundant cheap ram (anybody who's ever felt the sting of implementing XRAM on an AVR knows what I'm talking about here, especially if you were masochistic enough to try doing it with a breadboard). On the other hand, the Pi to the AVR is kind of like a 400MHz Coppermine Pentium III vs a 16Mhz NEC V-20... it's faster and cheaper, but we're right back in "this board is a half step away from being a de-facto IC" territory. For now, we still have I2C and SPI, but I dread the dark day when someone starts selling "hobbyist" boards that only have USB and a HDMI port.
The next renaissance will be FPGAs... probably, right around the time the older patents owned by Xilinx and Altera start to expire. Right now, even moderately advanced FPGAs are breathtakingly expensive for what you're really getting... and god help you if your needs go beyond what their free tools will allow you to do. Software tool costs are particularly tragic in the Atmel arena. They actually have an entire line of AVR chips that hardly anybody knows about, and even fewer hobbyists actually touch, that are fairly cheap & are basically an AVR with an onboard CPLD in lieu of the usual i/o. The problem is, the development tools to program them aren't just non-free... they're so absurdly expensive, you'd almost think they don't *want* anybody to buy or use those chips.
> Should I learn business? It it more important to focus on personal networking?
No, and it doesn't matter. Statistically, if you're good at programming and love it, you'll probably be miserable focusing on business, and even MORE miserable trying to force yourself to personally network. If you're miserable, you'll never succeed. Network enough to find someone who won't fuck you over too badly who genuinely ENJOYS the business end, and stick with programming. Come up with something cool, and let THEM worry about finding a way to make it profitable, so you can buy a cool loft somewhere, take a few decent vacations to places you enjoy, and have enough money in the bank after the IPO to let you spend the rest of your life writing quirky open-source software for your own personal gratification.
Learn enough about business to sense when you're getting screwed over, but don't try to BE the one who actually RUNS the business. Been there, done it, swore to at least 3 major deities I'll never do it again. And fortunately, I was young enough to be mostly judgment-proof. If you're a programmer, having to spend most of your time being a bill-collector, salesperson, or worse will demoralize more than anything you've ever done in your life. If you study ANY area of business, study the basics of IP law so you can turn your hobbies into a personal patent portfolio, then go shopping for someone to finance your future fun.
Maybe, but as a practical matter, in the Android world, there are basically two groups: the supermajority, who have phones with 1280x720 or higher resolution, dualcore 1.5GHz CPU, at least 16 gigs of flash, at least a gig or two of ram, and are running ICS or better... and everyone else, who doesn't particularly matter. Android phones today are kind of like PCs were circa 1992... millions of slow, old, creaky computers running DOS with monochrome displays that were basically irrelevant as far as new software was concerned because they were owned by companies using them as glorified VT-100 terminals or people too poor to upgrade, and a lot of PCs that were 486DX2/66 or better with at least 4 megs, SVGA, a Soundblaster(-Pro) or Ultrasound, a usable hard drive, and a CD-ROM drive. NOBODY writes NEW software for ancient versions of Android anymore, because people using old phones as phones aren't going to buy (or even really use) software on them anyway.
People like to drone on about "framework fragmentation". Pre-ICS, that was a real issue. Pre-Gingerbread, it was downright crippling. If you wanted to interact directly with the dialer or phonebook, you had to use undocumented APIs and hacked JNI to tease a Samsung phone and HTC phone to use the same app that interacted with the phonebook or calendar. Now, it's no big deal. SenseUI and Touchwiz are little more than stock launcher apps and color schemes anymore. There are a few things that are still proprietary to one vendor or another, like S-beam, but few things that genuinely can't be ripped from one rom and grafted onto another by motivated guys at XDA. As a practical matter, the only thing (besides copyright law) really stopping anyone from building a SenseUI ROM for the Galaxy S3, or a Touchwiz ROM for the HTC One, is the fact that they make so many assumptions about the other apps on the phone, even getting them to limp under AOSP on the hardware for which they were originally intended to run is a major project that few care enough to even bother with, and the people with the skills to do it have decided it's more worthwhile to just re-implement new core apps with the look and feel they like than to try endlessly putting band-aids on jigsaw ROMs.
Android's next big leap is coming to terms with multiple separate and non-equal displays on the same device... the main screen and HDMI, a main screen and a smaller display, two displays facing each other, whatever. Flip phones will have 1280x800 displays, everything else will have 1920x1080 or 1920x1200. If manufacturers could be arsed to expose a bus with reasonable power-supplying capabilities and I2C, we could move on to the next stage in cases, and have phones that ship without QWERTY keyboards, but can have the back pulled off and replaced by a slide-out keyboard or gamepad, for a phone that has a small-ish semi-nonswappable battery onboard, but can easily have a bigger battery integrated into the same thirdparty snap-on back modules. Bluetooth is a piss-poor interface for things like keyboards and gamepads due to latency, but I2C (ideally, with an irq line to tell the phone the device has something to say) would work nicely. Hell, even Dallas 1-wire with parasitic power would probably be decent for that purpose (I've always thought Dallas 1-wire was pretty cool, and could never figure out why it's always been the pariah of interfaces).
I don't know about other countries, but from what I remember about the complaints from my grandmother (who was particularly vocal about it), half the problem was the stupid metric cooking utensils they sold here. I still remember the one my grandfather bought my grandmother for Christmas sometime around 1980... it had 1mL and 10mL measuring spoons, and a set of goddamn BEAKERS for measuring things like flour. The "metric industry" was so hellbent on making a clean break, the idea of making things like 1.25mL, 2.5mL, 5mL, and 15mL measuring spoons apparently was just too reactionary for them. And don't get me started on "metric cookbooks" that tried to be cute and tell people to add 3 deciliters of milk.
Apparently, when France went metric a hundred years earlier, even the radicals knew better than to fuck with Parisian chefs, and never subjected them to madness like measuring utensils that weren't the right size for ANYTHING. And when America started going metric, our own companies just went nuts trying to be cute & abstract, and just ended up pissing everybody off.
> HTC has had trouble getting traction against Samsung despite offering compelling hardware.
Interestingly, HTC's plummeting market share coincided almost EXACTLY with their elimination of removable batteries and microSD cards. It's not rocket science. Two years ago, HTC was neck in neck with Samsung. Then, they eliminated microSD and removable batteries, everybody who viewed that as intolerable & used to have a HTC phone bought Samsung phones when it was time for their next upgrade, and HTC went from being "a little behind Samsung" to "WAY behind Samsung".
Suggestion to HTC: give us a new phone like the Evo3D (but with GSM+LTE capabilities compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile as well) that has microSD and a removable battery (or at least a 6,000mAH battery if it MUST be non-removable) and an unlocked (or trivially-unlockable) bootloader, and watch your market share climb again. I know people (like my brother) who literally paid a small fortune to buy a USED Evo 3D long after it was officially EOL'ed because their original one got destroyed and they liked the 3D features so much. My brother STILL resists buying a new phone, because he doesn't want to give up the 3D camera and display.
Actually, we'll be BETTER OFF if our phones can dual-boot Android and Windows. Windows might suck, but Google has shown that they can occasionally fuck up and piss people off as well as anyone else can. Having the ability to turn our backs on Google and (temporarily, at least) jump to Windows will give us all a potent weapon to hold to Google's head and keep them honest, in case they decide to do something completely obnoxious and intolerable, like make Google Plus mandatory if you want to have an Android phone capable of running paid Market apps. Frankly, the existence of a viable same-device alternative to Android is just about the only weapon we HAVE to use against Google and make them behave themselves. Ubuntu doesn't count, because it still requires Android for full functionality, and IOS doesn't count, because the only thing I hate more than Google Plus is Apple.
The sad thing is that VMware Dual Persona mostly does this... but they sold out to Verizon and gave them exclusivity, so Verizon is going to ruin it the same way they squandered and wasted the Galaxy Nexus. VMware DP gives us the ability to have Cyanogen and Corporatemode on one phone, but with our luck, the only phones you'll be able to GET it on will be locked-down Motorola phones on Verizon.
Sadly, it wouldn't be all that hard for Microsoft to make the UI on Windows Phone 'snappier' than the UI on Android, due to some incredibly shortsighted design decisions that were made early in Android's design. They bent over backwards to make sure Android apps written for 320x480 could limp along on a 160x240 display, while completely IGNORING the use case that everybody ended up caring about (the rapid leap to 1280x720/800, and 1920x1080/1200 displays).Simply put, Android's rendering system doesn't scale well to high resolution displays.
"Project Butter" fixed the worst of those problems -- but ONLY for the homescreen. Within individual apps, Android STILL has a more traditional "Linux" problem -- it regards the display and input hardware as being no more or less important than anything else. This is one area where IOS 5 USED to spank Android. Unfortunately, Apple appears to have thrown most of that advantage away, because the iPads I've used running IOS 6, and especially IOS 7 now lag as badly as the best Android hardware... and as far as I'm concerned, they BOTH suck and have too much lag now.
Exactly. Somebody with a US Galaxy S3 should be able to go to qualcomm.com, navigate to Support -> Downloads -> Firmware -> MSM8960. Then, navigate to Radio Modems -> [AT&T | T-Mobile | Sprint | Verizon | US Cellular | Rogers | Telus | Fido | Whomever], download the latest radio modem for our carrier, back up, then navigate to SoC Support -> Android -> {kernel-version}. From there, we'd be able to download individual kernel modules (some with buildable source) as we saw fit. Or, for the Windows-inclined, go to SoC Support -> Windows -> {version}.
This is on top of being able to go to samsungusa.com and download their more user-friendly monolithic installer for Android or Windows Phone. It would be just like buying a laptop... you could download the official drivers from the manufacturer, or if the manufacturer was an asshole, go straight to the chipset vendor and get the raw reference drivers to tweak yourself.
There's absolutely NO technical reason why it can't be this way. There's nothing holy or sacred about ARM that makes it impossible. It's just that we, as consumers, allowed phone manufacturers to get away with a level of locked-down proprietary-ness that would have been considered utterly intolerable in the PC realm. All we can really do is wait for Intel to get its act together, and make it possible for somebody to cobble together an x86-architecture PC with radio modem drivers that work and aren't crippled with respect to LTE (plain GSM isn't good enough), then "help" a manufacturer or two in Shenzhen to mass-produce 2GHz(*) quadcore circuit boards that can do HSPA+ and LTE on international, Canadian, AT&T, and T-Mobile bands(**), then make them available to smaller companies who'll assemble them in various ways into actual phones for sale.
(*) a 2-GHz quadcore Intel-architecture CPU on par with an i3, let alone an i5 or i7, would absolutely SMOKE and DESTROY a 2GHz ARM performance-wise. ARM might be frugal, but comparing an i7 to an ARM Cortex A15 is kind of like comparing a Lexus LFA to a Hyundai Elantra (or a Tesla Roadster to a Chevy Volt). If you want a basic phone, go with ARM. If you want realtime-raytraced translucent-glass eyecandy and glasses-free 3D (like the HTC Evo3D had), i7 (with 6,000+mAH battery) all the way. ;-)
(**) Maybe Verizon, if they can be bullied into allowing it. Sprint isn't even worth bothering with.